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Mona Pereth
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21 Jan 2024, 10:38 pm

Max Blumenthal & Miko Peled : Where is the War in Gaza Going?



From the description on YouTube:

Quote:
Jan 17, 2024

Armed with unique first-hand knowledge of the history of Zionism, Palestine, Israeli politics, Gaza, Hamas, the Israeli lobby, and congressional cravenness, Max Blumenthal and Miko Peled will explore the ongoing post-October 7th war in Gaza: Hamas, genocide, war crimes, the probable end game, the successes or failures of the IDF, the fate of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a one-state solution, a two-state solution, or indeterminate upheaval, the role and co-belligerency of the United States in the Israeli government’s freely confessed eagerness to exterminate Palestinians, the responsibility of American citizens for Israel’s war crimes, and the likely spread of the war to the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran risking nuclear exchanges. Max and Miko will unveil the massive de facto censorship that has rendered Palestinian viewpoints virtually inaudible in the establishment media amidst the daily thunder of Israeli propaganda.

The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath: Life & Loathing in Greater Israel, The Fifty-One-Day War, and The Management of Savagery.

A third-generation Israeli and an American citizen, Miko Peled is an author, writer, speaker, and human rights activist living in the United States. He is considered by many to be one of the clearest voices calling for justice in Palestine, support of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and the creation of a single democracy with equal rights in all of historic Palestine. In his memoir, The General’s Son, Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, Miko writes powerfully about how his human rights activism led him to reject Zionism.


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21 Jan 2024, 10:54 pm

More from Miko Peled:

Does Israel Have a Right to EXIST? (w/ Miko Peled)



Quote:
Oct 19, 2023

The son of an Israeli general raised inculcated with the value of Zionism, Miko Peled's perspective shifted after the tragic loss of his niece to a terrorist attack. Driven by that tragedy to figure out what why a Palestinian suicide bomber would take his own life, along with the life of innocents, he began questioning Zionism. On today's episode, the author and activist engages important and provocative questions like does Israel have a right to exist, and should we refer to Hamas as a terrorist group? -- questions that someone with his life experiences is most qualified to answer. A truly fascinating episode.

Advocates a single state with equal rights for all.


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26 Jan 2024, 11:08 pm

Two recent articles on the Religion Dispatches website:

- Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism is More Kosher Than You Think by Seth Sanders, January 14, 2024. About the long history of Jewish rejection of the idea of anyone, other than the Messiah, re-creating Israel as a state.
- ‘Anti-Zionism = Antisemitism’ isn’t Just Wrong, It’s the Problem by Shaul Magid, December 13, 2023. About the importance of context and making distinctions. (This article contains a link to the following article on the Jewish news site Forward: The university presidents were right and American Jews’ moral panic is wrong: "Joining a right-wing war on higher education will not make us any safer," by Jay Michaelson, December 11, 2023. About the Forward article, see the separate thread University Presidents, antisemitism, and moral panic.)


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27 Jan 2024, 6:56 am

Anti-Zionism isn’t the same as antisemitism. Here’s the history.

Quote:
In December, amid catastrophic bloodshed in Gaza, the House of Representatives resolved that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” The vote was 311 to 14, with 92 members voting present, reflecting a consensus among American political elites that opposition to Zionism is equivalent to the conspiratorial hatred of Jews.

When learning of this vote, many people familiar with Jewish history might have suppressed a sardonic laugh. Anti-Zionism, after all, was a creation of Jews, not their enemies.

Before World War II, Zionism was the most divisive and heatedly debated issue in the Jewish world. Anti-Zionism had left-wing variants and right-wing variants — religious variants and secular variants — as well as variants in every country where Jews resided. For anyone who knows this history, it is astonishing that, as the resolution would have it, opposition to Zionism has been equated with opposition to Judaism — and not only to Judaism, but to hatred of Jews themselves. But this conflation has nothing to do with history. Instead, it is political, and its purpose has been to discredit Israel’s opponents as racists.

Race has always been at the heart of the debate. Many anti-Zionists believed the Jews were, in their parlance, “a church.” This meant that, although they shared certain beliefs, traditions and affinities with coreligionists in other nations, they nonetheless belonged as fully to their own national communities as anyone else. For them, an American Jew was a Jewish American, just as an Episcopalian American or a Catholic American was an American first of all. They were unwilling to subscribe to any idea suggesting that the Jews were a race, separate and, as the antisemites would have it, unassimilable. These people did not consider themselves to be in exile, as the Zionists would have it. They considered themselves to be at home. They feared that the insistence on ethnicity or race could open them to the old accusations of double loyalty, undermining attempts to achieve equality.

Rather than awaiting a personal messiah — one who would bring about the bodily resurrection of the dead — they hoped instead for a messianic age of peace and brotherhood. This was not conditioned on the mystical hope of a return to Zion. Instead, Jews should work in the here and now of the real world. Along with this idea came the precept that the Jews are, in the words of one rabbi, “citizens and faithful sons of the lands of their birth or adoption. They are a religious community, not a nation.” Though considered radical at first, this precept would eventually be embraced by the majority of Western Jews.

This view would ultimately find its most enthusiastic adherence in the United States. “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our Temple,” said Rabbi Gustavus Poznanski of Charleston, S.C., in 1841. A century later, during the Holocaust and World War II, Rabbi Samuel Schulman of Temple Emanu-El in New York stated that “the essence of Reform Judaism for me is the rejection of Jewish Nationalism, not necessarily the eating of ham.” Many Jews noted that talk of a “diaspora,” even of a “Jewish people,” resembled the calumnies of antisemites, which held that the Jews were an unassimilable foreign imperium in imperio. They noticed, as they could hardly have failed to notice, that many antisemites were fervently pro-Zionist: the better to get rid of the Jews. After the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising a Jewish homeland to the tiny minority of Jews then living in Palestine, Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British cabinet, observed: “The policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result and will prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world.”


Personal Note:
I have no idea what my grandparents, great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles who arrived here via Ellis Island thought of Zionism in the 1930s. I can say their priority was assimilation. This did not mean they stopped practicing customs or did not look askance at intermarriage but they fully participated in the American way of life. That is basically how I feel to this day and why I find "identity politics" off-putting.


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28 Jan 2024, 9:09 am

Some organizations I learned about just now:

1) In Israel: Standing Together: Wikipedia | main website

2) In Canada: United Jewish People's Order: Wikipedia | Connexipedia | Winnipeg chapter | Morris Winchevsky School / Camp Naivelt | page on Canadian Jewish Heritage Network

3) In the U.S.A.: United Jewish People's Fraternal Order: main website

The above organizations were mentioned in the video posted here, as Jewish organizations critical of Zionism.


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25 Feb 2024, 10:29 am

Everybody’s talking about anti-Zionism - Jewish Telegraph Agency

Quote:
On Thursday afternoon, hundreds of marchers gathered on New York’s East Side, waving signs reading “Dump AIPAC” and carrying posters with the names and faces of lawmakers who had accepted donations from the pro-Israel lobbying group.

The protest, which passed the Manhattan offices of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was organized by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, which says AIPAC is obstructing an Israel-Hamas ceasefire resolution in Congress.

“On top of buying our senators’ and congressmen’s silence, AIPAC has also been silencing the only brave politicians who have been standing up for Gaza and have been standing and calling for a ceasefire,” declared one of the speakers, a young woman wearing a “Not in My Name” sweatshirt.

Since the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas and the deadly war in Gaza that followed, JVP has led protests against the war at Grand Central Terminal, the Statue of Liberty, the U.S. Capitol and the Manhattan Bridge, earning the group headlines and follwers. But none of those protests captured the generational and ideological divisions within the Jewish community quite like Thursday’s rally. It was a clash between the premier representative of the mainstream pro-Israel consensus among Jews and an upstart group representing Jews who have lost, or never had, faith not just in Israel’s government but in the very idea of a Jewish nation-state.

It’s not exactly an even split: While JVP’s visibility and membership have grown since Oct. 7, surveys, philanthropy and anecdotal evidence suggest most American Jews remain supportive of Israel and the war on an enemy sworn to its destruction.

But according to a spate of new books that were in the works before the war, JVP and other anti-Zionist and non-Zionist groups reflect trends that have been building for several years among the Jewish majority that considers itself liberal: discontent among younger Jews who have no memories of Israel’s founding, no hope for a resolution to the conflict and no faith in an Israeli government that has only shifted further to the right in recent years. The Oct. 7 debacle and the grinding war in Gaza, following a year of protests over the course of the country’s’ democracy, have added oxygen to their criticism.

“Today, progressive American Jews increasingly find it difficult to see Israel as a genuine liberal democracy, mostly because some three million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli authority with no realistic prospect of liberal rights,” writes Noah Feldman, the Harvard University law professor and first amendment scholar, in his new book, “To Be a Jew Today.”

A guide to Judaism in the tradition of Herman Wouk’s “This Is My God” and Anita Diament’s “Living a Jewish Life,” Feldman’s book convincingly explains why anti-Zionists get under the skin of of the Zionist majority, for whom “three-quarters of a century after the state’s creation, Israel has become a defining component of Jewishness itself.” (The italics are his.)

That explains, he writes, why anti-Zionism feels like antisemitism to many Jews. “If you feel that Jewishness is or should be fundamentally linked to Israel, then when someone says Israel should not exist, the criticism impugns the core of your Jewish identity and belief. It rejects who you are as a Jew. It rejects the content of your Jewish commitment and identity you have based on it,” he writes.

These emotional components of Zionism are often overlooked in the never-ending debate about Israel’s founding and perceived sins, writes Derek Penslar, a professor of Jewish history at Harvard, in his book “Zionism: An Emotional State.”

Penslar’s book came out last year but got back in the news after he was appointed co-chair of a Harvard task force on antisemitism. Critics cherry-picked a passage from the book to suggest that he thinks Zionism draws on a hateful strain within Judaism.

In fact, the book is about all of the emotions that animate Zionism, which he defines as “the belief that Jews constitute a nation that has a right and need to pursue collective self-determination within historic Palestine.” Those emotions include pride, solidarity, religious piety, fear, self-preservation and, yes, occasional hatred for the “other” who made Jews miserable for centuries.

Like Feldman, Penslar describes why American Jews became so emotionally attached to Israel, even if they had no intention of moving there: “It was a place where Jews need never apologize for their identity, where Hebrew was literally shouted in the street, where a Jew would almost inevitably marry another Jew, and where assimilation in the Western sense was impossible. In these respects, the love of Israel was an aspiration of self-preservation.”

It follows, then, that “if in your view the only legitimate expression of Zionism is Jewish sovereignty and hegemony within the Land of Israel, then someone who opposes Israel as a Jewish state is ipso facto an antisemite.”

The new Jewish anti-Zionists deny this, with many saying they want an alternative state in Israel-Palestine that preserves the security and dignity of both Jews and Palestinians. (The word “safety” comes up a lot in their writing.)

Shaul Magid, a professor of modern Jewish studies at Dartmouth College who this year is a visiting professor at Harvard, has given up on the idea that Israel as a Jewish nation-state can be a true liberal democracy. “In my view the Zionist narrative, even in its more liberal forms, cultivates an exclusivity and proprietary ethos that too easily slides into ethnonational chauvinism,“ he writes in his book of essays, “The Necessity of Exile.”

He is not against a State of Israel, but writes, “I am not in favor of it functioning as an exclusively ‘Jewish’ state.” He imagines an “alternative scenario” in which Jews and Palestinians, including those currently living in Gaza and the West Bank, have equal rights in a bi-national homeland.

For many Zionists, this sounds a bit like the Woody Allen joke: “And the lion will lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.” Magid acknowledges his vision is utopian and leaves the details to others, but says his project is the opposite of antisemitism: He wants to recover the idea that Diaspora, or exile, has been good for the Jews and may in fact be their truest, most humanistic expression, while assuring that Israel will be “a more liberal and more democratic place for the next phase of its existence.”

Magid, 65, came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, and he describes an evolution from Conservative Jewish suburban kid to countercultural seeker who for a time embraced haredi Orthodox Judaism before becoming a scholar of religion and Judaism. The books that crossed my desk tend to be written by Jews 40 and older. (Geoffrey Levin, the author of the new book “Our Palestine Question,” is 32, but his book is about American Jewish criticism of Israel from the 1940s through the 1970s, not the experience of today’s activists.)

In his forthcoming book “Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine,” Oren Kroll-Zeldin, 43, interviews younger activists from four main pro-Palestinian Jewish groups — IfNotNow, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, All That’s Left and JVP.

Describing himself as “an embedded participant in the movement,” he calls his own process of disillusionment with Israel “unlearning Zionism.” Raised in a Reform Jewish family in Los Angeles — his grandfather, Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin, founded L.A.’s Stephen S. Wise Temple; his mother, Rabbi Leah Kroll, was among the first group of women rabbis ordained by the Reform movement — Kroll-Zeldin attended Jewish day school and summer camps and visited Israel as both a participant and staff on free Birthright trips. As a young adult he came to the conclusion that “Jewish liberation in Israel was predicated on the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”

“Jews who unlearn Zionism not only contest widely held narratives about the ‘righteous’ nature of Israel’s national project but also reject a monolithic pro-Israel identity,” writes Kroll-Zeldin, assistant director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco.

He also challenges criticism from some mainstream groups that the young non- and anti-Zionists lack a sense of Jewish “peoplehood” or solidarity. “This new generation of Israel engagement through Palestinian solidarity activism is based on a love for and a commitment to the Jewish people,” he writes.

“Critics of anti-Zionism dismiss them as naive, as misguided, as self-hating Jews, perhaps as antisemitic themselves. And that couldn’t be more divorced from reality,” Kroll-Zeldin told me in an interview. He said groups like JVP and IfNotNow are “creating Jewish organizations and Jewish spaces” and using Jewish language and ritual in their activism.

The activists he studied, he continued, approach their activism from a standpoint of Jewish “safety,” telling him that “our safety cannot happen on the backs of other people. If other people are being oppressed, that does not guarantee our safety. Quite the opposite.”

Kroll-Zeldin also rejects what he calls a “Zionist consensus” among American Jews that says Jewish safety is guaranteed by a “supremacist state with a strong military.”

“What we actually see is that that has not protected Jews,” he said. “In fact, the worst calamity to happen to the Jewish people [since the Holocaust] happened [on Oct. 7], ironically, in the very place that was created to prevent that type of catastrophic attack on Jewish life.”

Jewish anti-Zionists regularly remind critics that there have always been Jews opposed to Zionism, including haredi Orthodox Jews who opposed a secular Jewish state in the Holy Land on religious grounds, and Bundist Jews — East European revolutionaries influenced by Marxism — who wanted to be part of a global socialist society. Before 1948, establishment groups like the American Jewish Committee and the Reform movement worried that a Jewish state would raise the specter of “dual loyalty,” and resented the claim by many Zionists that a Jewish state represented the “negation of the Diaspora” (in Hebrew, “shlilat hagalut”) and that authentic Jewishness could only be lived in Israel.

Much of that opposition faded or was sidelined after the Holocaust and Israel’s founding in 1948, when even Jews with a universalist bent saw the dire need for a country that would take in the remnants of Europe’s decimated Jewish community and, shortly thereafter, the Mizrahi Jews tossed out of Muslim countries. Following the Six-Day War of 1967 especially, American Jews tended to fully embrace Israel, variously as an expression of religious fulfillment, a source of cultural possibility, a just-in-case haven or as an embattled sibling demanding their protection and support.

In his forthcoming book “Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine,” Oren Kroll-Zeldin, 43, interviews younger activists from four main pro-Palestinian Jewish groups — IfNotNow, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, All That’s Left and JVP.

Describing himself as “an embedded participant in the movement,” he calls his own process of disillusionment with Israel “unlearning Zionism.” Raised in a Reform Jewish family in Los Angeles — his grandfather, Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin, founded L.A.’s Stephen S. Wise Temple; his mother, Rabbi Leah Kroll, was among the first group of women rabbis ordained by the Reform movement — Kroll-Zeldin attended Jewish day school and summer camps and visited Israel as both a participant and staff on free Birthright trips. As a young adult he came to the conclusion that “Jewish liberation in Israel was predicated on the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”

“Jews who unlearn Zionism not only contest widely held narratives about the ‘righteous’ nature of Israel’s national project but also reject a monolithic pro-Israel identity,” writes Kroll-Zeldin, assistant director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco.

He also challenges criticism from some mainstream groups that the young non- and anti-Zionists lack a sense of Jewish “peoplehood” or solidarity. “This new generation of Israel engagement through Palestinian solidarity activism is based on a love for and a commitment to the Jewish people,” he writes.

“Critics of anti-Zionism dismiss them as naive, as misguided, as self-hating Jews, perhaps as antisemitic themselves. And that couldn’t be more divorced from reality,” Kroll-Zeldin told me in an interview. He said groups like JVP and IfNotNow are “creating Jewish organizations and Jewish spaces” and using Jewish language and ritual in their activism.

The activists he studied, he continued, approach their activism from a standpoint of Jewish “safety,” telling him that “our safety cannot happen on the backs of other people. If other people are being oppressed, that does not guarantee our safety. Quite the opposite.”

Kroll-Zeldin also rejects what he calls a “Zionist consensus” among American Jews that says Jewish safety is guaranteed by a “supremacist state with a strong military.”

“What we actually see is that that has not protected Jews,” he said. “In fact, the worst calamity to happen to the Jewish people [since the Holocaust] happened [on Oct. 7], ironically, in the very place that was created to prevent that type of catastrophic attack on Jewish life.”

Jewish anti-Zionists regularly remind critics that there have always been Jews opposed to Zionism, including haredi Orthodox Jews who opposed a secular Jewish state in the Holy Land on religious grounds, and Bundist Jews — East European revolutionaries influenced by Marxism — who wanted to be part of a global socialist society. Before 1948, establishment groups like the American Jewish Committee and the Reform movement worried that a Jewish state would raise the specter of “dual loyalty,” and resented the claim by many Zionists that a Jewish state represented the “negation of the Diaspora” (in Hebrew, “shlilat hagalut”) and that authentic Jewishness could only be lived in Israel.

Much of that opposition faded or was sidelined after the Holocaust and Israel’s founding in 1948, when even Jews with a universalist bent saw the dire need for a country that would take in the remnants of Europe’s decimated Jewish community and, shortly thereafter, the Mizrahi Jews tossed out of Muslim countries. Following the Six-Day War of 1967 especially, American Jews tended to fully embrace Israel, variously as an expression of religious fulfillment, a source of cultural possibility, a just-in-case haven or as an embattled sibling demanding their protection and support.


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02 Mar 2024, 6:51 am

Hunter College Hillel claims ‘hateful slogans’ after Jewish protesters demand Jews on campus ‘pick a side'

Quote:
Hunter College’s Hillel condemned the targeting of Jewish students, and the school has conducted an investigation, after demonstrators demanded Jews “pick a side” at a protest on campus.

The Hillel at Hunter, which is part of the City University of New York, said that protesters at a Wednesday rally at an entrance to campus chanted a series of “deeply hateful slogans,” charging the Jewish campus group with complicity in war crimes. The Hillel statement added that the charge “plays on age-old antisemitic tropes.”

“These protests reached a new level of aggression by targeting Hillel as a Jewish on campus organization,” Hillel said in a statement posted on Instagram on Thursday.

A group calling itself Not In Our Name CUNY Jewish Antizionist Collective had invited Jewish activists to a protest at the location. A social media post advertising the protest called on “NYC Jewish students, alumni, staff, and faculty” to “raise your voices.”

The flier also said, “Zionist donors and financiers out of Jewish campus life,” echoing previous protests that have charged that pro-Israel donors wield power over educational institutions. Critics of those claims say they echo age-old antisemitic stereotypes about money and control.

The post advertising the protest targeted Hillel, saying the Jewish campus group “has played a critical role in indoctrinating Jewish youths into Zionism and distorting values of Jewish community.” Without citing evidence, it said Hillel recruited students to “act as surveillance agents.”

A video circulating on social media of a demonstration at Hunter on Wednesday shows a protest leader chanting, “We say no to genocide, Jews on campus pick a side.” The protest appeared to be the one advertised on social media.

Hunter College condemned the protest and the video of it on social media.
Hunter College is committed to a campus environment that encourages dialogue that is grounded in civility,” the college said in a statement to the New York Jewish Week. “This week, a student group exercising their right to protest engaged in speech that was neither constructive nor civil and directly targeted members of Hunter’s Jewish community. Hunter condemns this type of language, which has no place in an educational setting. We investigated the incident immediately and will take appropriate action promptly.”

The rally was co-sponsored by other anti-Zionist groups from other New York City universities, including Columbia University’s Jewish Voice for Peace, which is banned from organizing on its own campus, and the CUNY Law Jewish Law Students Association, which endorsed Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel days after the incursion.

The rally’s organizers did not respond to a request for comment, but in the advertisement for the event, said they targeted Hillel due to a trip led by the Hillel of another CUNY college to Israel last month. In posts earlier this month, Hillel at Baruch said on social media that students had packed food for Israeli soldiers serving in Gaza. It wasn’t clear if Hunter College’s Hillel had participated in the program. The two Hillel branches did not respond to requests for comment.

The protest’s organizers mocked Hillel for calling the protest antisemitic, claiming that the protesters themselves were Jewish and posting a pro-Zionist statement from Hillel International alongside clown emojis.

Baruch and Hunter are both part of the massive CUNY public university system that has been mired in accusations of antisemitism in recent years. Last year, Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed a former chief judge of New York, Jonathan Lippman, to conduct an independent review of antisemitism at CUNY.

In response to the alleged antisemitism, last year CUNY set up an Advisory Council on Jewish Life that includes Jewish community leaders and CUNY administrators. Two members have told the New York Jewish Week that the council has been holding meetings every four to five weeks since Oct. 7, including a discussion on Monday, and that the administration was attentive to community concerns.

A CUNY spokesperson told the New York Jewish Week earlier this month that CUNY has distributed $1.3 million in funding from the state and City Council to colleges for training, events and activities to combat bigotry.

This protest can not be equated to a lot of others such as the recent one in Berkeley. It was not violent, I have not read anything about speech being shut down, or even people getting in peoples faces with this particular protest.

Similar to the campus “wokes”, campus and other zionists need to learn how to deal better with speech that makes them uncomfortable. This does not mean accepting actual antisemitism or attempts to shut down pro zionist speech.

Of course like ableist autistics Jews can be antisemitic or self hating Jews. Whether these protesters and anti zionist Jews in general are self hating Jews is beyond my ability to figure out.

The actual “Pick a side” question reflects our binary political era. It is implied that a yes or no answer to the “Are you a Zionist?” question is expected. I highly suspect a person answering the question like “Jews have a right to a state but Israel is committing genocide and needs to be sanctioned” would be be assumed to be Netanyahu enablers and held in as much contempt if not more then rioting West Bank settlers. I opine that because most of the Jewish antizionism that has emerged recently seems to be an offshoot of “wokeism”.

As of now in general Zionism is baked into the Jewish religion. Israel is prominent in Jewish prayer. While public relations enhances the association Jews have with Israel it is a major oversimplification to say that money/lobbying is the reason most American Jews are zionists. This is also a major reason why the rise in prominence of anti zionist Jews is perplexing to pro zionist Jews. As of now anti zionist Jews seem to be ignoring this particular “elephant in the room”. I am curious how anti zionist Jews plan to deal with this. Coming from “wokeism” I would assume they would try to erase Israel from the prayers or try and rebrand “Israel” as something that is not a nation state. Or maybe they decide Judaism has been hijacked beyond repair and disown the religion. But they are only assumptions.

FYI “As a Jew” has very recently emerged as pejorative from leading zionist Jews aimed at anti zionist Jews.


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18 May 2024, 8:26 pm

As American Jews speak out on Israel, some see rifts in their communities by Leah Donnella, Gene Demby, Xavier Lopez, Dalia Mortada, Jess Kung, Christina Cala, B.A. Parker, Lori Lizarraga, and Veralyn Williams, NPR, April 24, 2024. A podcast introduced as follows:

Quote:
In the wake of October 7, and the bombardment of Gaza by the Israeli government, many American Jews have found themselves questioning something that had long felt like a consensus: that Jewish safety requires unconditionally supporting the Israeli government and military. But in recent months it's become clear that that consensus does not exist — and probably hasn't for a long time. And as more and more Jews speak out against the actions of the Israeli government and military, it's exposing deep rifts within Jewish communities – including ones that are threatening to break friendships, families, and institutions apart.


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19 May 2024, 4:57 am

the dilemma is that a large percentage of Israeli citizens are not zionists. But they live in Israel so choose to benefit from the privilege of being Jews in a Jewish state found by an alliance of Jewish zionists and their British benafactors. these people came as refugees (tired and hungry masses) may want peace and want to eject Netanyahu, but that does not mean they can expect to be left unmolested by the Palestinian population while they live in Israel. Oct 7th illustrated that.



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23 May 2024, 5:20 pm

Quote:
Ben-Gurion, the George Washington of Israel. He said in the book “The Jewish Paradox” by Nahum Goldmann he said, “If I was an Arab leader, I would not sign an agreement with Israel. It’s natural we took their land. I mean yes, god promised it to us, but our god is not their god. Why would they accept? Why would that mean anything? Yes, there was antisemitism, Nazis, the Jews, Auschwitz, but why would they pay for it? We are coming here to take their land and they should not accept it. This is another quote from him. “Let us be truth among ourselves politically, we are the oppressors and they defend themselves. We come here to inhabit, and they are already here.”


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17 Jul 2024, 9:53 am

Anti-Zionism among Jews - Jewish Virtual Library

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Introduction
In the late 19th and early 20th century, not all Jews supported the idea of creating a Jewish state, and some were outspoken opponents of Zionism. Naomi Wiener Cohen explained:

The Zionist movement, which can properly be regarded as an outgrowth of the traditional Jewish aspiration for a return to Palestine, meant, nevertheless, the secularization of this ideal with emphasis placed primarily on the national rather than the religious character of Judaism. It was this secular and areligious bent of the Zionists at the inception of their movement that aroused the opposition of various Orthodox and Conservative segments in American Jewry.
American Jewish Committee (AJC)

The oldest American Jewish organization, the AJC, was initially conflicted as some of its members from the Reform movement objected to Zionism. The leaders of the AJC, however, still maintained the belief in the restoration of Palestine, which was an inherently traditional Jewish religious belief, and endorsed the Balfour Declaration. They rejected the broader notion of Jewish nationalism, which they saw as a threat to American Jewry.

Morris Waldman wrote in a 1940 internal memo: “A very sharp distinction must be drawn between Zionism, defined as a movement to secure in Palestine the right for Jews to settle and establish a Jewish commonwealth or perhaps eventually even a state, and on the other hand, Jewish nationalism, which is the view that all Jews, wherever they may be, belong to the Jewish nation and have a right to establish the counterpart of a national government with branches in the various countries in which Jews live.”

A decade later, AJC leader Jacob Blaustein amplified the theme, “The ‘Zion’ in Zionism we have always favored, always striven to aid; it is the special ‘ism’ in Zionism that we do not accept. That ‘ism’ has no faith in Emancipation; it preaches the inevitability of a murderous anti-Semitism, almost as much a fact of nature as the law of gravity. This we reject totally.”

Historian James Loeffler noted, “What they truly dreaded was the underlying message of Jewish nationalism: that all Jews belonged to a global ethnic nation. Eventually, precisely this distinction would form the basis for the American Jewish Committee’s quick rapprochement with Zionism after 1948.”

Reform Judaism
Before the inception of Herzl’s Political Zionism, the Reform movement opposed Zionism on theological grounds. Wiener Cohen explains:

According to Reform theology, Judaism was a religion with a universal message. The mission of the Jews, the bearers of this message, was to propagate the universal religion of the prophets throughout the world. Dispersion was, therefore, a vital condition in Reform thinking, and even the Messianic era, which was envisioned as the realization of the prophetic ethics as taught by the Jews, precluded the traditional belief of a mass return to Palestine.
In 1845, the Frankfurt Conference eliminated references to a return to Palestine and a Jewish state from prayers. American Reform Jews adopted the European attitudes; hence, the movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, organized in 1889 and led by Isaac M. Wise, opposed Zionism. At its 1885 conference in Pittsburgh, the organization declared, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”

In 1917, after Political Zionism had taken root, the Conference issued a resolution saying, “We look with disfavor upon the new doctrine of political Jewish nationalism, which finds the criterion of Jewish loyalty in anything other than loyalty to Israel’s God and Israel’s religious mission.”

Sounding much like the American Council for Judaism today, early Reform leaders worried that “Zionism would endanger their position as loyal Americans,” according to Wiener Cohen.

In response to the San Remo Declaration reaffirming the Balfour Declaration, Hebrew Union College, the American Reform movement’s rabbinical seminary, issued a statement that said:

We declare that no one land, Palestine or any other, can be called “the national home for the Jews,” as has been done by the Supreme Council. Each land, whereof Jews are loyal citizens, is the national home for those Jews. Palestine is not our national home, since we are not now and never expect to be citizens of that land.
A minority of Reform Jews, including several influential ones, were early advocates of Zionism. Gradually, they became the majority, and in 1935, they succeeded in reversing the movement’s opposition to Zionism. Some disaffected members would not abandon their position and created the American Council for Judaism.

American Council for Judaism (ACJ)
The ACJ, founded in 1942, was the first American Jewish organization created to fight Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish state. From the outset, it was a marginal group. ACJ still exists but has little visibility. It continues to assert that Judaism is a “universal religious faith rather than an ethnic or nationalist identity.” The group now accepts Israel’s significance “as a refuge for many Jews who have suffered persecution and oppression in other places” but clarifies “that relationship is a spiritual, historical, and humanitarian one ­– it is not a political tie.” Apparently fearing the anti-Semitic charge that Jews have dual loyalties, ACJ insists “that although Israel is the birthplace of our faith, it is not the place of our national affiliation” and emphasizes that their “nationality is American.”

Religious Anti-Zionists
Jews who criticize or oppose Zionism are usually from fringe Orthodox sects and maintain that Israel can only be regained miraculously. They view the present state as a blasphemous human attempt to usurp God’s role and a minority advocate dismantling the secular State of Israel. However, unlike many non-Jewish anti-Zionists, Jewish anti-Zionists usually believe in the Jewish right to the Land of Israel, but only at the time of redemption in the future.

Two common religious grounds are typically given for anti-Zionism. One is that Zionism is a secular movement packed with non-Jewish influences and lacking key features like Mashiach and the rebuilt Temple. Adherents to this position are more on the non-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist side.

A second explanation, given by some religious anti-Zionists, is derived from the Talmud (Meseches Kesuvos, 111a), which states that when Israel went into the second exile, there were three vows between Heaven and Earth:

Israel would not “go up like a wall” [conquer Eretz Yisrael by massive force].
God made Israel swear that they would not rebel against the nations of the world [would obey the governments in exile].
God made the non-Jews swear not to oppress Israel “too much” [translation of phrase yoter midai].
These oaths are only mentioned as a side point in one place in a discussion in the Gemara and as the viewpoint of an individual. Many Jews feel that they do not apply to the issue of Jewish statehood.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews
The best-known of the Jewish religious anti-Zionists is the Neturei Karta. This group is so extreme its members have met with enemies of Israel, such as the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah.

Another group is the Satmar, an ultra-conservative anti-Zionist Hasidic sect of Judaism. It was founded by Yoel Teitelbaum in 1928 in Szatmár, Hungary. He survived the Holocaust by escaping from Bergen-Belsen on a Zionist-planned rescue train to Switzerland in 1944. After spending two and a half years in Palestine, he arrived in the United States in 1947 and reestablished the Satmar Hasidic Court in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, New York. Teitelbaum was appointed president of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox community, the Edah Ḥaredit 1953, a group primarily influenced by Neturei Karta. Over his 32-year leadership in the United States, Yoel garnered a sizable following from a diverse range of ultra-Orthodox Jewry.

Today, Satmar is the largest Hasidic sect globally, boasting approximately 100,000 followers. Its central community remains in Williamsburg, and it has established significant branches in Kiryas Yo’el, Los Angeles, Montreal, Antwerp, London, Buenos Aires, and Jerusalem.

Satmar advocates using Yiddish in everyday affairs rather than English or Hebrew, surpassing other Haredim in their dedication to the language. As a result, they are responsible for most Haredi Yiddish-language publications circulated in and around New York City.

The Satmar are anti-Zionist and do not recognize the state of Israel. They believe that Jews are required to wait for the Messiah before they return to the Holy Land. Satmar Hasidism views Zionism and the formation of the State of Israel as a blasphemous act against messianic prophecy. They reject the legitimacy of a political return to the Holy Land and Jewish sovereignty.

In 2017, the head of the Satmar Hasidic sect, Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, urged his followers to uphold the group’s staunch anti-Zionist stance. “We have no part in Zionism. We have no part in their wars. We have no part in the State of Israel,” he said. “We’ll continue to fight God’s war against Zionism and all its aspects.”

The Religious Zionist Response
Other Orthodox Jews counter that secular Zionism is a preliminary stage of religious Zionism and that the vows expressed in the Talmud no longer apply since non-Jews violated their obligations (by such actions as Roman persecutions, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Nazi Holocaust). The Balfour Declaration and the United Nations partition vote of 1947 are also regarded as having authorized the Jews to reestablish the state. Once this permission was granted, it could not be revoked.

Some Religious Zionist Jews see Israel’s creation as miraculous. They believe the formation of the secular state accelerates the process of redemption, and that they are playing a significant role in doing God’s will by serving the state.

Two religious Zionist parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, serve in the Knesset. In 2021, the Religious Zionism Party was created to focus on “uniting religious Zionism” and serve as its ideological right-wing voice in the Knesset.

Some “non-Zionist” Jews are pleased that Israel exists from a practical standpoint as a haven for oppressed Jews and as a land imbued with holiness well suited for Torah study. However, they do not generally assign religious significance to the formation of the modern state and often decry aspects of its secular culture.

In addition to anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews, there are also “post-Zionists” who question Israel’s legitimacy and are primarily academics.

Today, the most prominent non-religious Jewish anti-Zionist groups are Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), IfNotNow (INN), and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN).

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)
JVP is one of the largest and most influential Jewish anti-Zionist groups in the United States. JVP was established in 1996 in the San Francisco Bay Area by three undergraduate students from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2002, its members decided to expand into a larger movement to influence U.S. Middle East policy.

JVP operates as a grassroots membership organization, with dues-paying members electing a national board responsible for the organization’s overall stewardship. The organization claims to be funded by thousands of donors supporting its vision (2022 contributions totaled $3.9 million).

Jewish Voice for Peace opposes Zionism because they claim that it counters the ideals of “justice, equality, and freedom for all people.” They argue that Zionism is a “settler-colonial movement” and believe it has established an “apartheid state” in which Jews have more rights than others. They claim that the Zionist ideology is to blame for Palestinian occupation, displacement, and massacre.

The organization also claims that Zionism harms the Jewish people by encouraging them to be suspicious of their non-Jewish peers and neighbors. Further, they insist that Zionism erases the existence of Jewish people of color, because it creates a “racist hierarchy with European Jews at the top.”

One of JVP’s core values involves building and maintaining relationships with Palestinian leadership and organizations. JVP sponsors anti-Israel demonstrations in response to Israeli military actions and to commemorate key events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These occasions are typically overtly anti-Israel and sometimes anti-Semitic. Some have featured support for terrorist groups and anti-Semitic depictions of Israel’s supporters.

There are around 12 active JVP chapters on college campuses. These chapters frequently work with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to promote anti-Israel initiatives, messages, and events. JVP supports the BDS movement and is involved in anti-Israel conferences held on college campuses nationwide. As proponents of intersectionality, JVP has conflated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with domestic American issues such as racial injustice. JVP sponsors a “Deadly Exchange” campaign to end U.S. law enforcement Israel. “It compares U.S. police actions against Black Americas with the Israel Defense Force’s treatment of Palestinians” and claim the programs “promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing practices that already exist in both countries.”

In June 2024, the Anti-Defamation League filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission, accusing JVP’s political fundraising arm of multiple violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act and FEC regulations. The complaint highlights financial irregularities in the political action committee’s income and expense reports, accusing it of illegally accepting prohibited corporate contributions and donations exceeding federal limits.

IfNotNow (INN)
INN is a movement of American Jews that advocates ending U.S. support for Israel and equality for all Palestinians and Israelis. The movement began during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, when young Jews, angered by the response of American Jewish institutions, organized Mourner’s Kaddish recitations to honor the loss of both Israeli and Palestinian life. They demanded an end to the war on Gaza and freedom and dignity for all without acknowledging the terror threat to Israel. INN subsequently developed a long-term strategy to demand that American Jews stop supporting Israel and to change the Jewish political status quo.

INN claims to be a nonviolent movement that calls for the opposition of any policies that lead to the privilege of one group over another, specifically in Israel/Palestine. Their activism includes demonstrations against politicians, U.S. policies, and institutions perceived as supporting the “Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” Members engage in civil disobedience, sit-ins, and other forms of nonviolent resistance to raise awareness about the situation in Israel and Palestinian territories. They also often confront politicians, institutions, and organizations that support policies they deem harmful. INN engages in lobbying and advocacy to influence U.S. policy toward Israel by calling for conditioning military aid to Israel on adherence to human rights standards.

INN critiques establishment Jewish institutions for “using Jewish fear” to justify policies that they claim maintain power over Palestinians. The organization calls for a future where Israelis and Palestinians are both safe and have equal rights and opportunities.

Unlike other anti-Israel Jewish groups, the movement engages in internal debates about Zionism, anti-Zionism, and the future of Israel. Some members believe in a one-state solution, while others support a two-state solution.

INN, alongside several other Jewish organizations, played a role in organizing anti-Israel demonstrations in the aftermath of the October 7, 2024, Hamas massacre of Israelis. In contrast to certain groups endorsing violent Palestinian resistance, IfNotNow has primarily focused on highlighting human rights violations they believe Israel is committing in Gaza and campaigning for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. They were among the organizers of the October 18 protest against Israel in Washington, D.C., during which hundreds of demonstrators were arrested.

International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN)
IJAN is a group of Jews who are committed to opposing Zionism and the State of Israel. They view Zionism as a “racist movement” and Israel as an “apartheid state,” and promote the liberation of the Palestinian people and their land as well as the right of return for Palestinian refugees. IJAN has organized events, conferences, and protests in various countries all over the world, including the United States, Argentina, the UK, Spain, Canada, and France, challenging Israel’s policies and promoting Palestinian rights.

The network emphasizes the parallels between the Zionist “conquest” in Palestine and historical imperial conquests in other parts of the world. IJAN is an integral part of the international movement against Zionism, organizing events, conferences, and protests worldwide to challenge Israel’s policies and promote Palestinian rights. IJAN supports Palestinian self-determination and the right to “resist occupation.” The network, which has 10,000 Facebook followers, looks to Palestinian-led organizations and grassroots movements as primary reference points in this effort.


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08 Sep 2024, 10:44 pm

Leaving the Cult of Zion!sm



Brief interviews with various Jewish people who were brought up to believe in Zionism but eventually renounced it, on the YouTube channel of Indie Nile, a "Drag artist, film director & theater maker. Palestinian/Lebanese. Living in Amsterdam."


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19 Sep 2024, 6:50 pm

Anti-Zionism Sweeping Across Jewish Communities, a video by The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder:



Thanks to funeralxempire for bringing this to our attention here.

But see also ASPartOfMe's comments here.


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29 Sep 2024, 10:54 am

US college in spotlight after Jewish prof. claims she was fired over pro-Palestinian posts

Quote:
A major organizing body for university faculty is pressuring Muhlenberg College to explain its firing of a tenured Jewish anti-Zionist professor for “bias-related conduct” over an Instagram post that encouraged “shaming Zionists.”

The Pennsylvania liberal arts college’s decision to fire Maura Finkelstein, which it has not acknowledged publicly, came after months of scrutiny surrounding her anti-Zionist activism, and complaints from Jewish students and faculty on campus. The complaints resulted in the opening of a federal Title VI investigation against the school.

The Association for American University Professors (AAUP) told the college in a letter dated Tuesday that it was pressing Finkelstein’s case. It posted the letter on its website on Thursday, the same day that The Intercept, a news site that is heavily critical of Israel, published a story alleging that Finkelstein had become the first tenured professor to be fired over anti-Israel activism.

“The dismissal raises serious concerns about academic freedom at Muhlenberg,” the AAUP said in the letter. The organization further accused the college of not following due process in firing a tenured professor.

According to the AAUP’s letter, an investigation at Muhlenberg recommended in early May that Finkelstein be fired “for just cause.” The school told her that her employment would end May 31 and her appeal was recently rejected, according to the letter.

If I can be fired for criticizing a foreign government, calling attention to a genocide and using my academic expertise as an anthropologist to draw attention to how power operates, then no one is safe,” Finkelstein told the news site Inside Higher Ed in an emailed statement on Friday. “I wasn’t fired for anything I said in the classroom. I was fired because of a charge brought by a student I had never met, let alone taught, who had been surveying my social media account for months.”

She added, “This isn’t about student safety, this is about silencing dissent. We are witnessing a new McCarthyism and we should all be terrified of its implications.”

According to Inside Higher Ed, Finkelstein is pursuing an additional appeal and is still drawing a salary from Muhlenberg.

Finkelstein first drew public attention in late October, shortly after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, when pro-Israel Muhlenberg graduates launched an online petition calling for her to be fired. The petition, which now has more than 8,000 signatures, cited her social media posts from shortly after Hamas’s October 7 attack in which the terrorist organization infiltrated southern Israel, killing 1,200 and abducting 251 hostages to the Gaza Strip. Muhlenberg’s post criticized student fundraising for Israel, stating, “Students raising money for genocide.”

An anthropology professor at Muhlenberg with a PhD from Stanford University who earned tenure in 2021, Finkelstein does not study the Middle East but has been a vocal pro-Palestinian activist since shortly after the October 7 Hamas onslaught. Her research focuses on urban and medical anthropology, according to her now-deleted faculty page.

In November she authored an essay titled “Reframing Hamas,” in which she cast doubt on whether the group constituted a terrorist organization; claimed that Israel, and not Hamas, was “the original terrorist organization at play”; denied evidenced-based reports that Hamas militants raped women on October 7, as well as reports of Hamas using hospitals in Gaza as military bases; and claimed — contrary to a litany of evidence — that “eyewitness accounts from Israeli survivors show that, instead, Israel’s indiscriminate attacks were likely responsible for a majority of these casualties.”

Muhlenberg’s decision to terminate Finkelstein rested on her social media activity, specifically a post she shared that called for “shaming Zionists, not welcoming them into your spaces, making them feel uncomfortable, not normalizing Zionists, calling them racists, and not allowing Zionists to take up space.” In the online petition, Muhlenberg alumni also alleged that Finkelstein has harassed pro-Israel students and alums online.

According to the AAUP letter, a Muhlenberg panel determined in May that her posts had violated the school’s code of conduct and recommended that she be fired.

The decision to terminate her raised concerns with the AAUP, which recently relaxed its longstanding stance against academic boycotts as calls for universities to boycott Israel have proliferated

Also on Thursday, the editor of American Anthropologist, the journal for the American Anthropological Association, announced that Finkelstein had joined the staff as an associate editor. The masthead lists her as an independent scholar — the only one among more than a dozen to lack an institutional affiliation.


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06 Oct 2024, 4:02 pm

I came across the following article in Forward:

A Lot More Jews Are Anti-Zionists Than You Think by Joel Swanson, August 30, 2019.

Some excerpts:

Quote:
Nineteen out of twenty American Jews are Zionists.

At least, that’s the perception you would get if you read the breathless coverage of a recent Gallup poll about American Jewish political attitudes. The fact that the poll found that 95% of American Jews “have favorable views of Israel” was cited by a variety of commentators as evidence that Jews skeptical of Zionism as a political ideology are confined to a noisy but small fringe in our community

[...]

Not so fast.

Firstly, asking about favorable views of Israel in some abstract sense is not especially instructive, as the term “Israel” can be adopted to refer to a wide range of meanings depending on how one chooses to use it. “Israel” can mean everything from the physical land and territory of Israel, separate from the political institutions currently governing it, to the creation of a new Israeli culture and the revival of Hebrew as a national spoken language, to the people Israel (Klal Yisrael) ourselves.

These distinctions are not academic, as whole communities of Orthodox Jews who live within the physical land of Israel reject the institutions of the modern-nation state that bears the same name, seeing in them violations of Jewish law and going so far as to refuse to vote in Israeli elections.

Would such Orthodox Jews answer that they hold a favorable view of “Israel,” in an abstract sense? Most assuredly yes, as they revere the land as divinely promised to Klal Yisrael by God, even as they reject the state institutions and all attempts to establish Jewish sovereignty in the land.

This question has even divided West Bank settler groups. One founder of right-wing Israeli settler group Gush Emunim, Rabbi Menachem Froman, later broke with the settler group over the question of the relationship between land and state of Israel, arguing that the priority of the land ought to supersede that of the state of Israel for West Bank settlers. Froman claimed that he was so committed to the Jewish people living in the land of Israel that he would gladly live under Palestinian political sovereignty in order to do so.

Did Rabbi Froman have a positive view of Israel? Most assuredly. A positive view of Zionism? It’s complicated.

All this is to say that “Israel” has such a wide range of semantic meanings in Jewish history and culture that asking American Jews if they have a favorable view of Israel tells us essentially nothing. Indeed, the question is almost tautological; having a favorable view of some definition of Israel is an essential part of what defines someone as Jewish.

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the Gallup poll did find that 95% of American Jews have favorable views of the modern political nation-state of Israel. Would that mean that non-Zionists comprise only one in twenty American Jews? The answer is still no.

The reason why cuts to the question of how the ideology of Zionism itself has been redefined in recent years. According to the controversial Jewish nation-state law passed by the Knesset last year, Israel is “the nation-state of the Jewish people,” which means that “the fulfillment of the right of national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” In practice, this interpretation of Zionism has come to mean that Zionism requires the maintenance of a strong Jewish voting majority. Thus, former Israeli Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked has said that maintaining a Jewish majority should trump even preserving democracy itself, declaring, “There is place to maintain a Jewish majority even at the price of violation of rights.”

This definition of Zionism, which requires that Israeli Jews maintain a majority of the state’s voting base, has been internalized even by Zionists who would be horrified by Shaked’s statement. In fact, liberal Zionist groups such as J Street, which advocate for the creation of a Palestinian state, explicitly make the case that Israel “can only remain both Jewish and democratic by giving up the land on which a Palestinian state can be built in exchange for peace.”

The message is clear: A Jewish state is a state where Jews hold the majority of the votes, and a democratic state is a state where every citizen may vote, so Israel cannot remain both a Jewish and democratic state if it were to grant voting rights to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Though both J Street and Ayelet Shaked would no doubt be horrified by the comparison, both hold the same idea of what Zionism entails: A Jewish state means a state where Jews make up a clear majority of the voting base.

This is a definition of Zionism which many early Zionist luminaries would struggle to accept. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Zionism encompassed a wide range of conceptions of what “Jewish statehood” entailed, many of which did not presume a Jewish voting majority.

[...]

Today, if you advocate for a single state in which everyone has equal voting rights, they call you anti-Zionist, but that is not a definition of Zionism which many early Zionists would have accepted. (Meanwhile, if you advocate for a one-state solution in which Jews still maintain a voting majority, by denying votes to Palestinians in perpetuity, you’re still welcome in American synagogues.)

That’s right: The definition of Zionism adopted by today’s Zionists means that no less than the founder of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, would no longer be ideologically recognizable as a Zionist.

[...]

So what does Zionism mean today, and how many American Jews reject Zionism? It isn’t an easy question to answer, since Zionism itself is such contested territory. But if we accept the current definition advanced by the state of Israel itself, that Zionism demands a state in which Jews hold a voting majority, then fully twenty percent of American Jews are not Zionists.

We know this because we know that one in five American Jews think it is more important for Israel to be a democracy than for it to remain a Jewish state, thanks to an AJC poll of American Jews are not Zionists). When asked if Israel can be both a Jewish state and a democracy, and if not, which should it be, fully 20% of American Jews answered “No, it should be a democracy.” In other words, if Zionism requires maintaining a Jewish voting majority, so that granting equal voting rights to everyone in Gaza and the West Bank and thereby making Jews a voting minority in the state is seen as anti-Zionist, then one in five American Jews are not Zionists.

To be sure, one in five American Jews is still a minority. But it’s a lot more than one in twenty. Moreover, one in five American Jews is higher than the 16% of American Jews who identify as Republicans, or one in six. There are more non-Zionist Jews in the US than there are Jewish Republicans, and yet we read article after article on how President Trump’s alliance with Israel’s hard-right government is supposedly leading to a huge rise in American Jewish support for Republicans. (Note: It isn’t.) Based on the actual numbers, we should be hearing more about Jewish opposition to Zionism than about Jewish support for Republicans.

Of course, many members of this twenty percent of American Jews would no doubt still report holding a favorable opinion of Israel, in the broad sense of the word. They might travel to Israel and enjoy meeting the people and seeing the incredible landscape and historical sites. They might like the food, the music, the literature. And some of them might not even identify as anti-Zionist at all, since they might have a broader view of what Zionism entails than today’s Israeli government or mainstream American Jewish organizations would accept. (Hadassah today would probably reject Henrietta Szold.) But that is why the Gallup poll itself tells us essentially nothing about American Jewish views on Zionism. Not without considerably more context.


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06 Oct 2024, 8:29 pm

As I have said the polling of Jews is inadequate. While pro zionists constantly cite that 95 percent poll that is just one poll. This article is from 2019. I would not cite any article or poll prior to both 10/7 and anti zionism becoming very public to both claim that 95 percent of Jews are zionists or that there are more anti zionist Jews then you think.


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