About the author ESSaY

Anthony
Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled,
Julius Part Two: Questioning Antisemitism
Anthony Julius is a solicitor-advocate at
the London law firm, Mishcon de Reya, By Anthony Julius April 2008
and a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck
College, London University. He is the
author, among other works, of T.S.
Eliot, anti-Semitism and literary form,
and is completing a history of English
antisemitism, to be published by Oxford
University Press in Autumn 2009.

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anti-Zionism, antisemitism and related
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The first part of this essay ended with a distinction between the Israeli and
Diaspora Jewish anti-Zionist perspectives. The writings of Akiva Orr and Uri
Davis may be read as representative of the former perspective, and the writ-
ings of Jacqueline Rose as representative of the latter perspective. There are, of
course, others who could have been chosen, both Israeli and Diaspora Jews.
The Inadmissibility of Israel
Akiva Orr argues that to be Jewish is to be religious; there is no such thing as a
secular Jewish identity. Only those who keep the mitzvoth, or “commandments”,
remain “indisputably Jews;” the tenets of Judaism cannot be secularized.
Zionism, which is predicated on such a project of secularization, has failed. The
secular Jewish State has been unable to provide its Jewish citizens with a new,
secular Jewish identity. The failure was inevitable: “Zionism” is no more than
a heresy of Judaism and the ethnocentrism of Jewish Israelis. The “dominant
criterion of personal and political behaviour” should instead be the “wellbeing”
of “humanity as a whole and not one’s self, nation, or God.” The anthropocentric
should take the place of the theocentric, the ethnocentric and the egocentric.1
Orr’s fellow Israeli, Uri Davis, has adopted a somewhat more legalistic stance
in his writings. He has three objections to Israel. First,
political Zionists founded it, and political Zionism is an
objectionable political ideology. Second, the circumstances
of its founding caused great hardship to Palestinians.
Third, its character as a “Jewish State” puts its non-
Jewish citizens at a substantial juridical disadvantage.
“Messianism colours Zionism, including
secular Zionism, at every turn. This is
‘chilling,’ Rose says”
Each of Davis’s objections is to what he regards as an
aspect of racism. Zionist ideology is racist; Israeli conduct
towards the Palestinians in 1948 was racist; Israel’s laws,
especially as reflected in its treatment of the Arab citizens
of Israel and its status as an occupier of Palestinian terri-
tories, are racist. It is this last aspect that for Davis justifies
the term “apartheid.” Apartheid is racism regulated in
law, he says. In consequence, Israel does not deserve to
exist; it should be “dismantled” and replaced by a “con-
federal, federal or unitary state for all of its citizens and
Palestinian refugees,” that is, a “democratic Palestine.”
Davis describes political Zionism as an “abomina-
tion” and a “crime.”2 He is also a committed practitioner
of the incriminating quotation.3 He engages in relent-
less, quarrelsome score settling with other Jewish op-
positionists. 4 And he works hard to keep at bay those
acknowledgments of complexity and nuance that
from time to time surface in his work; at some level,
he may intuit that his harsh, unnuanced condemna-
tions lack sophistication, balance, and even justice.
The British author Jacqueline Rose has written three
books with an anti-Zionist perspective: States of Fantasy
(1996), The Question of Zion (2005), dedicated to the
memory of Edward Said, and The Last Resistance (2007).
She seeks, she says, to “revive the story of internal Jewish
dissent.”5 In the 1996 book, in which she describes herself
as “a Jewish woman,” and as a “Jewish critic who wishes
to address Israel as an outsider,” she writes that Israel
“desires its potential citizens – exiled, diaspora Jewry – to
come home, with as much fervour as it banishes the former
occupants of its land from their own dream of statehood.”6
In the 2005 book, she describes herself as a “Jewish
writer.”7 Israel, she writes, is one of the most powerful
military nations in the world, yet it presents itself as vulner-
able and on the defensive. It suppresses dissent.8 Though
Zionism emerged out of the legitimate desire of a persecut-
ed people for a homeland, the creation of Israel in 1948 led
to a historic injustice against the Palestinians still awaiting
redress. A straight line may be drawn from the 17 th century
heretic, Shabtai Zvi – proto-Zionist, mystic and false mes-
siah – to the Zionism of the late 19th century and the 20th
century. Jewish Messianism is material and carnal as well
as spiritual, fully embodied in political time. It is a notion of
redemption as bound up with ruin, dread and catastrophe.
With the birth of Israel, nationalism became the new
Messianism. Messianism colours Zionism, including secu-
lar Zionism, at every turn. This is “chilling,” Rose says.9 We
cannot relegate Messianism, she continues, to the religious
Zionists and the Orthodox anti-Zionists. The compulsion
to fight the Arab people is entirely self-authored.10 Arab
aggression is either a response to Jewish settlement of the
land or dispossession. The Palestinians are the inadvert-
ent objects of a struggle that, while in one sense is all to
do with land, in another sense, has nothing to do with
the Palestinians themselves at all.11 The remedy? Rose is
committed, she writes, to Palestinian self-determination
or to full political and civic equality.12 But though she
does not quite know her own mind on these alternatives,
she is certain that absent one or other of them, there will
be catastrophe—Israel cannot secure its own future.
The question of antisemitism
Jewish anti-Zionists tend to misrepresent the nature of the
prophetic tradition, which celebrates Jewish self-govern-
ment and preaches the link between righteousness and the
holding of the land;13 they wrongly assume that group loyalty
is inconsistent with the ethical life, and that universalist
moral foundations cannot sustain a version of national-
ism;14 they fall into contradiction when they hold that while
dispersion is good for the Jews, it is bad for the Palestinians,
and when they demand of the Jews that they disavow
“nationalism,”15 while valuing the Palestinians’ “continu-
ing struggle for justice;”16 and though there is indeed a
Messianic aspect to one version of religious Zionism, they
mistakenly hold it to be a necessary feature of all religious
Zionisms,17 and indeed of Zionism in its secular versions
Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled, Part Two: Questioning Antisemitism 2
too.18 What is more, they are also mistaken in thinking that
Jewish Messianism in any event implies a claim to Jewish
political hegemony 19 – indeed, to some Jewish thinkers it
meant the positive disavowal of sovereignty.20 Yet none of
these objections imply a judgment on Jewish anti-Zionists
that they are antisemitic. Is such a judgment tenable, ever?
“[Trotsky] could smell antisemitism in
others. Contemporary Jewish anti-Zionists,
however, have lost the sense for it”
Struggling with the nakedly antisemitic character
of Stalin’s defamatory attacks on him, and the threat of
the physical extermination of the Jews, Leon Trotsky
acknowledged that he had lived his “whole life outside
Jewish circles”; he then circled the Jewish question, re-
jecting all solutions other than “revolutionary struggle”,
which, in 1937-8, was a hopeless, even contentless option. 21
Many Jewish anti-Zionists hold back from making such an
acknowledgment, though they could (and perhaps should)
do so, before they too circle today’s “Jewish question.”
Trotsky maintained that his disconnectedness from Jews
“did not mean that he had the right to be blind to the Jewish
problem.”22 He did not, however, assert that he had any
special insight into it, merely because he was a Jew by birth.
He most certainly did not assert that he spoke on behalf of
the Jews or of Judaism when he offered his views. Indeed,
he rarely spoke or wrote on any issue as a Jew. “I am a Social
Democrat,” he once declared, “and that’s all.”23 He would
have acknowledged that he was not only without that
quality known among Jews as ahavat Zion (yearning for, or
love of, Zion), 24 but also the fundamental quality of ahavat
Israel (love of the Jewish people). He was not, however,
an antisemite. What is more, he could smell antisemitism
in others. Contemporary Jewish anti-Zionists, however,
have lost the sense for it. They struggle incompetently to
understand it;25 they struggle incompetently against it;
they are themselves susceptible to its tropes and turns
of phrase. Their perspectives on antisemitism are defec-
tive; their contributions to antisemitism are significant.
Jewish anti-Zionist perspectives on antisemitism
tend to be derived from one or more of the following
propositions: (a) antisemitism is caused by Israel (b)
antisemitism should not preoccupy Jews (c) contem-
porary antisemitism is trivial, and need not be taken
seriously (d) many ostensibly antisemitic acts and / or
language are not in reality Jew-hating (e) the antisemites
happen to be right about the “Israel Lobby.”
Antisemitism is caused by Israel For most anti-Zionists,
such antisemitism as now afflicts Jews is largely en-
gendered by Israel. Tony Judt, an English academic
who teaches at New York University and, relevantly, a
Jew, has written, “today, non-Israeli Jews feel them-
selves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable
to attack for things they didn’t do, but this time it is a
Jewish state, not a Christian one, which is holding them
hostage for its own actions.” If Israel behaved better,
Jews would fare better; Israel is bad for the Jews.26
Insofar as the Israeli leadership claims to speak for all
Jews, and the majority unfortunately accept the claim,
anti-Zionism tends to appear as antisemitism. Only
when a majority of Jews speak out against Israel will that
“antisemitism” be defeated.27 According to Jacqueline
Rose, while antisemitism is not caused by Israel’s policies,
without a clear critique of Israel today, there is no chance
of defeating it. Antisemitism is thereafter not examined in
her 2005 book, save for Zionism’s complicity with it. When
opportunities for such an examination arise—for example,
in relation to Tom Paulin28—she tends to avoid them. She is
certain, however, that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. 29
Antisemitism should not preoccupy Jews There has always
been within Judaism, and therefore within Jewish poli-
tics, a certain tension between the “universal” and the
“particular.” In response to any public call made by a Jew
on behalf of other Jews, another Jew is likely to comment
that the call should not be restricted to Jews and should
extend more widely. This is the small change of intra-Jewish
controversy.30 Jewish critics of Zionism have always argued
that it neglects the universal in favour of the particular.
Contemporary antisemitism is trivial, and need not
be taken seriously It is no longer a serious problem for
Jews; antisemitism is now a marginal, insignificant
phenomenon. It is asylum seekers, Muslims and black
people who bear the brunt of today’s racism.31 Many of
the attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere, Tony Judt
says, are “misdirected efforts” by young Muslims to get
back at Israel. Uri Davis writes approvingly of the UN
1975 resolution and the WCAR 2001 conference.32
Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled, Part Two: Questioning Antisemitism 3
 Many ostensibly antisemitic acts and / or language are not like plot or collaboration to prevent public policy mov-
in reality Jew-hating Attacks on Israel, or even upon Jews, ing in a certain way or to push it in a certain way—and
by Palestinians or those sympathetic to the Palestinian that sounds an awful lot like, you know, the Protocols
cause, are rarely to be construed as antisemitic. When Israel of the Elders of Zion and the conspiratorial theory of
claims that it acts in the name of all Jews, there are some the Zionist Occupational Government and so on—well
among its enemies ready to take the claim at face value, if it sounds like it it’s unfortunate, but that’s just how it
and strike at Jewish targets outside Israel. They cannot is. We cannot calibrate the truths that we’re willing to
be criticized for doing so. These attacks are motivated by speak, if we think they’re true, according to the idiocies
political outrage, not bigotry.33 Antisemitism in the Arab of people who happen to agree with us for their reasons.37
countries must be distinguished from its western European
counterpart. Suicide bombing is the reaction to Israeli Judt’s odd, misconceived remarks bring me to the
action; “the roots of the problem [are] the human rights Jewish anti-Zionist contributions to antisemitism.
abuses, daily humiliations and overwhelming frustra- Independently of the mere endorsement of the truth of
tions … in the occupied territories.”34 The bombing of a antisemitic positions, there are two distinct contribu-
synagogue in Paris, for example, is reprisal for an incursion tions. The first is to provide “cover” for antisemites;
into the West Bank. “Racism” legitimises the powerful’s the second is to offer what they represent as akin to
oppression of the weak; the “weak” Palestinians by defini- “expert evidence” on Judaism to its discredit.
tion cannot be racist towards the powerful Israelis.35 False Jewish anti-Zionist contributions to antise-
accusations of antisemitism have led a few of the falsely ac- mitically inflected positions taken by non-Jewish
cused to embrace some antisemitic tropes. The occasional anti-Zionists consist of the following: (a) to give cover
antisemitic remark can be dealt with swiftly. For example, to the holders of such positions by endorsing them “as
British parliamentarian Tam Dalyell’s
���������������������������
“antisemitic out- Jews” (b) to endorse those positions as true, with
burst,” said one Jewish anti-Zionist, would be “decisively the all the authority of an “insider” or “expert.”
reject[ed]” by “the anti-war movement and the left.” Cover “Nothing infuriates Zionists more than the
(Dalyell spoke of a “Jewish cabal” with undue influence)36 arguments of anti-Zionist Jews,” wrote the late Socialist
Workers Party activist and journalist Paul Foot, “who have
such a courageous and principled history. The essence of
the intellectual case for Zionism is that its opponents are
“[Jewish anti-Zionists] provide “cover” for
antisemitic. But when Jews … speak out against Zionism,
antisemites; they…offer what they represent and especially if they denounce Israeli imperialism and
as akin to “expert evidence” on Judaism to its defend the victims of it, how can they be accused of an-
discredit” tisemitism?”38 It was noted in the context of the boycott
agitations, not least because the boycotters themselves
loudly insisted upon it, that the boycott cause had Jewish
supporters. Though not advancing fresh arguments in
The antisemites happen to be right about the favour of a boycott, these Jews made two distinctive con-
“Israel Lobby” In a speech at Chicago University, tributions to the boycott campaign. First, they maintained
given in October 2007, Tony Judt said: that as Jews they were under a moral duty to campaign for
a boycott. Their Jewish conscience required them, they
If you stand up here and say, as I am saying and someone claimed, to side with Israel’s enemies. Second, they gave
else will probably say as well, that there is an Israel lobby, cover to non-Jewish boycotters accused of antisemitism.39
that there is... there are a set of Jewish organizations, How could these non-Jews be antisemitic, when Jews
who do work, both in front of the scenes and behind took their line too? Antisemitism, they intimated, ceases
the scenes, to prevent certain kinds of conversations, to be antisemitic when adopted by a Jew. These absurd,
certain kinds of criticism and so on, you are coming very ignominious positions attracted only a few Jews, though
close to saying that there is a de facto conspiracy or if you they were much exploited by the boycott movement.

Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled, Part Two: Questioning Antisemitism 4

 Endorsement To the feminist writer Lynne Segal,
Palestinians are the new Jews, and their suffering evokes
Jewish suffering in the worst periods of antisemitism
in Europe. 40 But Jacqueline Rose goes further. She can-
not resist the Israel / Nazi analogy; she cannot leave it
alone. “The suffering of a woman on the edge of the pit
with her child during the Nazi era,” she writes, “and a
Palestinian woman refused access to a hospital through
a checkpoint and whose unborn baby dies as a result, is
the same ” (italics added). 41 How, she asks, did one of the
most persecuted peoples of the world come to embody
some of the worst cruelties of the modern nation-state?42
“What should one make of the use by self-
identifying Jews of the Jew/Nazi trope? It is
always shameful”
Israel inscribes at its heart the very version of nation-
hood from which the Jewish people had had to flee. 43
What should one make of the use by self-identifying Jews
of the Jew/Nazi trope? It is always shameful. In certain
usages, it derives from a specifically Jewish conviction
that Jews should have nothing to do with power, and that
Nazism is merely the most realized form of power. Every
exercise of power is latently Nazi. Separately, it is also
an aspect of that over-heated, intemperate intra- and
inter-communal polemicising that characterises Israeli
public life. Whatever one opposes, one describes as Nazi.
And why not characterise one’s opponents as utterly
iniquitous, without saving quality or merit – it has been
the Jewish way in polemic for centuries. Nazi iniquities
now comprise a fund for the polemically incontinent to
draw upon in the abuse of enemies and adversaries. 44
In Israel, it tends to be the Zionist Right that draws on
this language; in Europe, it is the anti-Zionist Left. 45 Last,
it has a distant relation to that tendency in foundational
Jewish texts to collapse the ostensibly inconsequential
into the grievously consequential, condemning both with
a similar ferocity. One finds in the Talmud, for example,
the following formulation: anyone who does x (something
ostensibly minor), it is as if he has done y (something
indisputably major), and thus has forfeited or merited
z (the punishment for the most major of offences).
Most Jewish anti-Zionists reach antisemitism by the
thoughtless deployment of the new anti-Zionism’s vul-
garities. A few reach antisemitism, however, by reviving
rather older libels on Judaism. In The unJewish State (1983),
Akiva Orr characterises Judaism as subordinating moral-
ity, society and justice to God, and characterises God as
demanding of Jews that they carry out immoral, anti-social
and unjust acts, like sacrificing their own children to him,
merely to test the strength of their conviction. 46 Israel
Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion (1997) sought to trace
the most discreditable aspects of Zionism in Jewish reli-
gious laws concerning the treatment of non-Jews. The book
is published by Pluto Press, which was founded in London
in 1969 as a publishing arm of International Socialism, the
forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party in the UK. In
1979, however, it broke with the party, “and became truly
independent.”47 It publishes, according to its website, “the
very best in progressive, critical thinking,” and it describes
Shahak as a “voice of conscience.” Shahak composed
tracts worthy of Johann Eisenmenger, the 18th Century
author of the defamatory “Judaism Unmasked”, and
August Rohling, Eisenmenger’s 20th Century imitator,
only to be praised for his scholarship by people who knew
nothing either of his sources or his way with them. 48
The distinction between a perspective
and a contribution is not absolute. A perspec-
tive can of course also be a contribution.
Beyond the everyday Jewish anti-Zionists lurk a
few maverick figures, Gilad Atzmon chief among them.
Atzmon is a London-based, ex-Israeli and ex-Jewish jazz
musician, much lionized by the British Socialist Workers
Party (SWP). 49 “Zionists have imposed a blindness on
the world,” he says. “It’s time to hit back with literature,
prose, music, cinema. Everything goes.” “It’s time to
establish a clear association between colonialism and
the Zionist lobby. It’s my duty to make that associa-
tion widely known.”50 Speaking at London University’s
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Atzmon
declared: “I’m not going to say whether it is right or not
to burn down a synagogue, I can see that it is a rational
act.”51 And then, as if inciting himself to go still further:
To regard Hitler as the ultimate evil is nothing but
surrendering to the Zio-centric discourse. To regard Hitler
as the wickedest man and the Third Reich as the embodi-
ment of evilness is to let Israel off the hook. … Israel and
Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled, Part Two: Questioning Antisemitism 5
Zionism are the ultimate Evil with no comparison. … The
current Israeli brutality is nothing but evilness for the
sake of evilness. Retribution that knows no mercy. Israel
is a devastating collective resurrection of the Biblical
Samson. It is a modern representation of the man who kills
women, children and the elderly, the Hebraic victorious
master of blind indiscriminate retaliation. … Israeli can-
nibalism … If we want to save this world, if we want to live
in a humane planet, we must focus on the gravest enemy
of peace, those who are wicked for the sake of evilness:
the Israeli State and world Zionism. … We all have to
de-Zionise ourselves before it is too late. We have to admit
that Israel is the ultimate evil rather than Nazi Germany.52
This incontinent, malicious verbalising, which
has no connection to real thought, is of signifi-
cance only because Atzmon nonetheless continues
to be admired in anti-Zionist circles.53
Representativeness
Jewish anti-Zionists find nothing appealing about the
principle of Jewish self-government; they find little of value
in the project of maintaining the existence and integrity
of the Jewish state. While most Jewish anti-Zionists are
realists about Israel, they tend to be idealists about the
Palestinians. Many acknowledge that Israel is still too
substantial a presence, too fixed, to be dislodged; all are
engaged by the Palestinian “struggle,” which excites their
imagination and engages their sympathies. In the Israeli,
they see nothing of the state-building pioneer, they see
only the predatory land-grabber and people-expeller; in
the Palestinian, they see nothing of the defeated aggressor,
they see only the victim. Indeed, the Palestinians are mostly
represented as somewhat spectral vessels of pure suffering.
In these respects, they are with the zeitgeist. Jacqueline
Rose, for example, happily acknowledges, “I am with the
zeitgeist.”54 She has the sense that Zionism – understood
to be ethnicist, separatist, particularist, “Messianist,” a
reactionary nationalism – is out of step with the times.
Tony Judt has most recently made just this case. Israel, Judt
argues, denominates and ranks its citizens according to
ethno-religious criteria, which makes it an oddity among
“modern nations,” or alternatively among “democratic
states.” It has imported a typically late-19th century sepa-
ratist project into a world that has moved on, a world of
individual rights, open frontiers and international law. The
very idea of a “Jewish state” is from another time and place,
the twilight of the continental empires, when Europe’s
subject peoples dreamed of forming “nation-states.” In the
contemporary world, where nations and peoples increas-
ingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural
and national impediments to communication have all but
collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective
identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to
answer to just one of them, Israel is an anachronism.
“…if this is now the zeitgeist, it is not—or not
yet, at least—the Jewish zeitgeist”
Alternatively, if this does not characterise the world as
a whole, but only the world of open, pluralist democra-
cies, engaged in a “clash of cultures” with belligerently
intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel risks falling
into the wrong camp.55 A binational state is the solution.56
Zionism is a dead-end; the Jewish State must cease to
define itself as Jewish.57 She must, that is, dissolve herself.
Judt does not entertain the question of whether this
proposal would be welcomed by the majority of Israel’s
citizens.58 Nor does he seem to be aware that he is rehears-
ing an argument within Jewish politics that is at least
140 years old – since the very emergence of the modern
Jewish politics, there has always been a position that
finds in the modern the very negation of the national.59
But if this is now the zeitgeist, it is not—or not yet,
at least—the Jewish zeitgeist. Anti-Zionism remains a
minority position within the Jewish community.60
Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled, Part Two: Questioning Antisemitism 6
1 The unJewish State (London, 1983), pp. 5-6, 237-238.
2 This language comes from Apartheid Israel (London, 2003), but note also the following, from his contribution to a July 2006 conference organised by
the IHRC, “[I hope] that within the next decade or fifteen years the UN General Assembly will endorse a long overdue covenant, the covenant for the
suppression of political Zionism as a crime against humanity.” See http://www.ihrc.org.uk/060702/.
3 For example, a statement attributed to a Jewish settler, “We are Judeo-Nazis, and why not? Even today I am willing to do the dirty work for Israel, kill as
many Arabs as necessary …,” is said to “accurately capture the Zeitgeist of Israeli apartheid.” Apartheid Israel (London, 2003), p. 84.
4 See Apartheid Israel (London, 2003), pp. 146-148, for an attack on Uri Avnery. For a general review of this quarrelsome milieu, see “Mikey” “Jews and Jew
Haters: The Anti-Zionist Jewish Squabble,” Harry’s Place, 21 November 2007. http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2007/11/21/jews_and_jew_
haters_the_antizionist_jewish_squabble.php
5 “Nation as trauma, Zionism as question: Jacqueline Rose interviewed,” openDemocracy, 18 August 2005.
6 States of Fantasy (Oxford, 1996), pp. 2, 13.
7 The Question of Zion (Princeton, 2005), p. xviii. Two pages earlier, Rose describes herself as a “Jewish woman.”
8 Not always consistently, though. Jacqueline Rose, for example, has maintained both that “Israel silences dissent” and “inside Israel [the Zionist dissenters’]
voices have been mostly silenced” and that “the voices of dissent and opposition are very strong inside Israel.” See The Question of Zion (Princeton, 2005),
pp. 53, 69, and contrast John Sutherland “The ideas interview: Jacqueline Rose,” Guardian, 28 November 2005. Rose also argues that the voices of the
dissenting Zionist intellectuals (Buber, Scholem, Kohn, Arendt) “inside Israel have been mostly silenced,” though their vision has also “returned to the
centre of debate inside Israel.” The Question of Zion (Princeton, 2005), pp. 69, 86-87.
9 The Question of Zion (Princeton, 2005), p. 43.
10 “Arab rights can be dismissed; the Arab people – only too visible – can or rather must be defeated, because any concession is repetition. Weakness always
excites hate.” The Question of Zion (Princeton, 2005), p. 131.
11 The Question of Zion (Princeton, 2005), p. 133. Later, as if as an afterthought, Rose concedes, “That the Arabs played their part in rendering … coexistence
impossible is not in dispute …” it is a thought that she cannot sustain, even for the length of a sentence. And so she concludes, “although their opposition
to the settlement of their land needs, still today, to be understood” (op. cit., p. 147). That Palestinian enmity played a part in pushing Zionism towards the
kind of nation she deplores is barely considered. Responding to Judah Magnes’s proposals for limited Jewish autonomy, and no independent state, one of
the leaders of the Arab Istiqlal (independence) Party wrote: “In your opinions and proposals I can see nothing but a blatant provocation against the Arabs,
who will allow nobody to share with them their natural rights … as to the Jews, they have no rights whatsoever except spiritual memories replete with
catastrophes and woeful tales … It is, therefore, impossible to have a meeting between the leaders of the two peoples – the Arab and the Jewish” (see Amnon
Rubinstein From Herzl to Rabin (New York, 2000), p. 68). Rose expresses great sympathy for the stance taken by Magnes and his circle, but no understanding
of the strength of the Arab opposition to it. “Magnes proceeded to offer his hand, but found no one willing to take it.” Michael B. Oren Power, Faith and
Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York, 2007), p. 437.
12 The Question of Zion (Princeton, 2005), p. 11.
13 Brian Klug tellingly omits the final clauses of the verse he quotes from Deuteronomy, which is as follows: “That which is altogether just shalt thou follow,
that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee ” (italics added).
14 See Richard W. Miller “Nationalist Morality and Crimes against Humanity,” in Aleksander Joki, ed., War Crimes and Collective Wrongdoing (Oxford, 2001), p.
144 et seq..
15 “Europeans who expend such vast quantities of energy lecturing Israel on its supposed hypernationalist instincts give no thought whatsoever to ridding the
Arabs of their own, rather more vivid, forms of nationalist sentiment. But for those European Jews who embrace the modish conviction that nationalism
is not just a sin but the root of all modern evil, the fantasy of Israel’s de-nationalization serves another purpose. It ensures their own conformity with
the latest European thinking on the best way for human beings to organize themselves in society—namely, as good Europeans.” Emanuele Ottolenghi
“Europe’s ‘Good Jews,’” Commentary December 2005.
16 Jacqueline Rose Guardian, 2 January 2006.
17 See David Hartman Israelis and the Jewish Tradition (New Haven, 2000), which argues for a religious Zionism “grounded in a normative covenantal
framework that is independent of messianism” (p. xi).
18 Shlomo Avineri gets closer to the truth: “Zionism is not a linear continuation of the Jewish religious messianic quest. It is a modern and revolutionary
ideology, signifying a clear break with the quietism of the religious belief in messianic redemption that should occur only through divine intercession in
the mundane cycles of world history.” “Zionism and the Jewish Religious Tradition,” in Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira, eds., Zionism
and Religion (Hanover, NH, 1998), p. 3. But Avineri then goes on both to examine the views of those early Zionists who did interpret Zionism in messianic
terms and to demonstrate that many emancipationist Jews and Reform Jews – quite different in their respective political stances to the Zionists – likewise
used messianic language when characterising what they most valued in the political emancipation of the Jews or in Reform Judaism. All the modern Jewish
political ideologies were inflected, in one way or another, by aspects of Jewish messianism. In a sense, how could this have been otherwise? See also Yosef
Salmon “Zionism and anti-Zionism in Traditional Judaism in Eastern Europe,” in Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira, eds., Zionism and
Religion (Hanover, NH, 1998), p. 25.
19 Maimonides, for whom belief in the Messiah was one of the articles of faith, had this to say about the messianic era: “The Sages and Prophets did not long
for the days of the Messiah that Israel might exercise dominion over the world, or rule over the heathens, or be exalted by the nations, or that it might eat
and drink and rejoice. Their aspiration was that Israel be free to devote itself to the Law and its wisdom, with no one to oppress or disturb it, and thus be
worthy of life in the world to come. In that era there will be neither famine nor war, neither jealousy nor strife. Blessings will be abundant, comforts within
the reach of all. The one preoccupation of the whole world will be to know the Lord.” See David Hartman Israelis and the Jewish Tradition (New Haven, 2000),
p. 82. (My friend Menachem Kellner comments that the better translation of the 2nd sentence is “Their aspiration was that all would be free to devote
Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled, Part Two: Questioning Antisemitism 7
 themselves...”). Nothing in the law will be changed when the Messiah arrives. Maimonides’ argument, asserts David Hartman, is thus to be read not just
as a polemic against Christian Messianism, but also as an expression of his conviction that the constancy of the law acts as a corrective to utopian politics.
Hartman’s object is to call a certain kind of religious Zionist back to this Maimonidean perspective.
20 To Herman Cohen, for example, “isolation in a separate state would be in contradiction to the messianic task of the Jews. Consequently, a Jewish nation is
in contradiction to the messianic ideal.” See Mark Lilla The Stillborn God (New York, 2007), pp. 241-242.
21 See “Thermidor and Antisemitism” (1937), and “Appeal to American Jews menaced by Fascism and antisemitism” (1938), On the Jewish Question (London,
1970), pp. 28-30.
22 “Thermidor and Antisemitism” (1937), On the Jewish Question (London, 1970), p. 28.
23 See Baruch Knei-Paz The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford, 1979), pp. 533-539.
24 Colin Shindler What do Zionists Believe? (London, 2007), p. 15.
25 Writing in the Socialist Worker, the poet and children’s author Michael Rosen proposed this test: “… in my experience, if people both hate Jews and the
state of Israel then they say so. One of the classic forms of antisemitism is to say that “the Jews” are in a “conspiracy” to take over the world, or that they
are running the world. Sometimes, they may say there’s a “Zionist” conspiracy to run the world—but that’s hardly a cunning disguise for a hatred of Jews.
Within this bit of conspiracy theory is the antisemitic idea that “the Jews” or “Israel” or “Zionists” run the US. Again, the people who believe this say so.
It’s a nonsense because the people who run US capitalism and the people who defend what it calls “America’s strategic interests” (often just a euphemism
for “raw materials and markets we want to get our hands on”) are simply US capitalists, their officials, allies and armies.” “Antisemitism accusations—an
attempt to smear anti-Zionists into silence,” Socialist Worker, 16 September 2006 http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=9667.
26 “Israel: the alternative,” The New York Review of Books, 23 October 2003.
27 Sabby Sagall “The Jewish Question,” Socialist Review, July/August 2002. Sagall concludes: “In western Europe, however, there is a resurgence of the genuine
article, associated with the rise of fascist parties across Europe. The Russian Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg, a Communist and atheist, said, ‘As long as there
is a single antisemite in the world, I remain a Jew.’”
28 “’Look,’ insisted distinguished poet and critic Tom Paulin, ‘you’re either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist, there’s no middle way. Everyone who supports the
state of Israel is a Zionist.’ Everything hangs, of course, on that word ‘support.’ …” The Question of Zion (Princeton, 2005), p. 11.
29 The Question of Zion (Princeton, 2005), pp. 134-135.
30 “Shortly after I arrived I Israel, I was invited to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Shlomo Hillel, then speaker of the Knesset, greeted me warmly, pledging
that the fight to free Soviet Jewry would continue. What I thought was a perfectly innocent statement treated a heated confrontation. ‘Why don’t we
work to free non-Jews as well?’ shouted one Knesset member. To which another shouted back: ‘Why are you always interested in non-Jews? Are Jews not
interesting enough?’” Natan Sharansky, with Ron Dermer, The Case for Democracy (New York, 2006), p. xxix.
31 Tony Greenstein “The seamy side of solidarity,” Guardian CiF, 17 February 2007.
32 Apartheid Israel (London, 2003), pp. 3-4, 150, 176-177.
33 See Brian Klug “The Myth of the New Antisemitism,” Nation, 2 February 2004.
34 Irene Bruegel, JFJP, letter to the Guardian, in support of Jenny Tonge, 24 January 2004.
35 Certainly, some Palestinians talk about “Yehuds” in a derogatory fashion, cite libellous texts without forethought and make foolish statements about the
Holocaust. But that’s what happens to language when you step on someone’s throat. Black victims of segregation in the Deep South talked about “honkies”
and Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam preached that an evil scientist called Yaqub created white people in a test tube experiment that went wrong. This did
not make them racists, because racism usually describes a concrete set of power relations, more than it does an abstract collection of prejudices.” Arthur
Neslen “When an antisemite is not an antisemite,” Guardian, CiF, 5 April 2007. Neslen describes himself as a “Jewish anti-Zionist.”
36 Guardian, 5 May 2003. The article prompted this letter from Shalom Lappin: “Mike Marqusee … is in denial of the facts in suggesting that [Dalyell’s]
‘outburst’ is unusual within large swathes of what passes for the left these days. Anti-war political commentators frequently invoke a conspiratorial
Jewish/Zionist lobby in American and Britain to account for US and British foreign policy …” (6 May). Marqusee’s prediction was wrong. For example:
“The charge of antisemitism has been seized on as a convenient stick with which to beat Dalyell in order to discredit and silence him. […] To accuse Dalyell
of antisemitism is absurd. […] … one could criticise Dalyell for a serious error in referring to a cabal of Jewish rather than pro-Zionist advisers. But such a
mistake is far from uncommon. Those he criticises use the terms Zionism and Jewish interchangeably … […] Generally, the thrust of Dalyell’s statements
cannot be refuted […] … the accusations against him are slanderous. He is no racist or antisemite […] … all attempts to prevent a genuine discussion of the
perfidious role played by Zionism in world affairs serve to disarm the working class internationally …”Chris Marsden “Britain: Labour extends antiwar
witch-hunt to Tam Dalyell,” 22 May 2003, www.wsws.org.
37 The speech is available by following the link on this web page, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/freedom161007.html. It is also discussed by David Hirsh
on http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1488. Compare this New Left perspective, taken from an article written in 1969: “…we have to use
expressions which, taken by themselves, appear to resemble certain lines from Mein Kampf. As a result we shall feel the burden of being labelled antisemites
and will be obliged to live ‘with’ this insult, in the same way that the incurably ill live ‘with’ their ‘ailment.’” See Seymour Martin Lipset “The Return of
Antisemitism as a Political Force,” in Irving Howe and Carl Gershman, eds., Israel, the Arabs & the Middle East (New York, 1972), p. 393.
38 “Palestine’s partisans,” Guardian, 21 August 2002.
39 For example: “the imputation of antisemitism is a red herring, as so often is the case when Israel is criticized, and its aim, as always, is to deflect criticism.
In the case of the British boycott committee, it is particularly inapt, since most of the members are Jewish” Ghada Karmi “Weapon of the weak,” Ha’aretz,
14 July 2007. Cf.: “For archbishop Desmond Tutu, as for the Jewish former ANC military commander now South African minister of security, Ronnie Kasrils, the
situation of the Palestinians is worse than that of black South Africans under apartheid” (italics added). John Berger letter calling for cultural boycott,
Guardian, 15 December 2006.
40 Lynne Segal Making Trouble (London, 2007), p. 244.
41 “Nation as trauma, Zionism as question: Jacqueline Rose interviewed,” openDemocracy, 18 August 2005.

Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled, Part Two: Questioning Antisemitism 8

42 The Question of Zion (Princeton, 2005), p. 116. See also pp. 145-146.
43 The Question of Zion (Princeton, 2005), p. 83. And see also: Hannah Arendt’s “account [in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)] of the Jewish Councils’ complicity
with the Nazi genocide has frequently been dismissed or disbelieved.” Introduction, Marcel Liebman Born Jewish (London, 2005), p. xii.
44 “The imagery of the Holocaust has become part of Israel’s political language, not just in conflict with Arabs, but as a rhetorical means of abusing opponents
internal political squabbles.” Anton La Guardia Holy Land, Unholy War (London, 2002), p. 172 – which contains several unedifying examples of this kind of
abuse. See also Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land (New York, 2007), pp. 74-75, 135, 152, 215, 298.
45 In the alternative, the Right often accuses Israeli governments of political capitulations comparable to pre-World War II capitulations to Hitler. See Ehud
Sprinzak The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right (Oxford, 1991), p. 75.
46 The unJewish State (London, 1983), p. 184.
47 See http://www.plutobooks.com/shtml/aboutpluto.shtml.
48 The Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin, whose anti-Zionist credentials are beyond dispute, has said of Shahak’s work, “the book is a scandal, it’s a slander,
it’s the sort of thing that the worst antisemites could write. If I had the time, I could take the trouble to contextualise every one of his claims. Now my
point is not to whitewash anything. Judaism, like every other tradition, has much that is ugly in it, but I think no more and probably no less than any other
tradition.” Seth Farber Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers (Monroe, ME, 2005), p. 183. See also Gabriel Schoenfeld The Return of Antisemitism (San Francisco,
2004), p. 134. Shahak’s project, in its scope and impact, is to be distinguished from frivolous misrepresentations by Jews on Jewish law, such as the
following: “The Biblical injunction of “an eye for an eye” is grisly enough, but Israel goes even farther by its habitual practice of exacting an eye for an
eyelash!” Avi Shlaim “Israel, Free Speech and the Oxford Union,” openDemocracy 13 November 2007, http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/conflicts/
israel_palestine/free_speech_oxford_union. “An eye for an eye” expresses the principle of proportionate compensation, and is not meant to be taken
literally.
49 See, for example, http://www.swappeal.org.uk/events/gilad.html. It would appear that at one such event some SWP members criticized his antisemitism,
and gave him a “rough ride” (“Anti-fascist and anti-antisemitic,” Lenin’s Tomb, 25 July 2004). But he continues to be invited back. For a different account of
the “rough ride,” see “Gilad Atzmon: The ‘Anti-Fascists’ give their response,” Drink-soaked Popinjays for War, 14 July 2005 http://drinksoakedtrotsforwar.
blogspot.com/2005/07/gilad-atzmon-anti-fascists-give-their.html.
50 “Gilad Atzmon: ‘Zionism is my enemy,’” Socialist Worker, 5 June 2004 http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=809.
51 Jamie Doward and Nico Hines “Boycott threat to Israeli colleges,” Observer, 17 April 2005.
52 “Beyond comparison,” Al-Jazeerah, August 12, 2006 http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2006%20Opinion%20Editorials/August/12%20o/
Beyond%20Comparison%20By%20Gilad%20Atzmon.htm.
53 From an interview in the online “paper of the working class:” “For an Israeli to humanise himself, he must de-zionise himself. In this way, self-hating can
become a very productive power. It’s the same sense of self-hating I find, too, in Jews who have given the most to humanity, like Christ, Spinoza or Marx.
They bravely confronted their beast and, in doing so, they made sense to many millions.” The admiring interviewer writes: “I ask Atzmon about his hopes
for a liberated Palestine and how the ecumenical vision of his own music, taking from Hebraic, Arabic and Turkish traditions within a jazz framework,
could find its true home there. And what would be the first tune he would play in a free Jerusalem? Etc.” Chris Searles “Interview,” Morning Star, 12
November 2007.
54 “Nation as trauma, Zionism as question: Jacqueline Rose interviewed,” openDemocracy, 18 August 2005.
55 Judt does not understand himself to be presenting alternative cases; but this is what he is doing. He argues both, that Israel is an anachronism in a world
becoming transnational, and that Israel is typical of that part of the world that resists the transnational. The first argument is simply untrue. He has not
learned the lesson that he himself has taught in Postwar (London, 2005), which notices the birth or resuscitation of no less than fourteen separate countries
in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Yugoslav wars that followed thereafter (in which “ethnic cleansing” was practised by all sides).
The second argument is self-contradictory, because on the one hand it proposes that we all have multiple identities, and on the other, that those people with
multiple identities will clash with people with but one. Judt argues that from its inception, Zionism was opposed by Jews. It has only been since “the post-
Sixties,” however, that this anti-Zionism has come to be characterised as antisemitic. In this account, anti-Zionism is the constant, the description of it, the
variable (see Gaby Wood “The New Jewish Question,” Observer, 11 February 2007). But times have changed. There is now a state. Judt’s failure to get to grips
with this is registered in his failure to consider the wishes of Israelis. He is still shuffling blueprints, as if a luftmensch in pre-World War II Warsaw.
56 “Israel: An Alternative Future,” New York Review of Books, 23 October 2003, anthologized in Adam Shatz, ed., Prophets Outcast (New York, 2004), pp. 396-404.
See also the correspondence in the NYRB 4 December 2003. Judt writes: “After all that has happened, a binational state with an Arab majority could, as
Amos Elon ruefully reminds us, very well look more like Zimbabwe than South Africa. But it doesn’t have to be so.” “After all that has happened” suggests
that at some earlier moment, a binational state stood a somewhat better chance of success.
57 “The issue is not whether Israel has a right to exist,’ Judt says plainly, ‘Israel does exist. It exists just like Belgium or Kuwait or any other country which
was invented at some point in the past and is now a fact. The question is what kind of a state Israel should be. That’s all.’” Gaby Wood “The New Jewish
Question,” Observer, 11 February 2007. Cf. Sartre, in remarks made shortly after the War of Independence: “I have always hoped, and I still hope, that the
Jewish problem will be solved within the context of human community unrestricted by national boundaries, but since no developing society can skip the
stage of national independence, we must be glad that an Israeli state has come to justify the hopes and battles of Jews all over the world.” See Jonathan
Judaken Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question (Nebraska, 2006), p. 188.
58 “Every opinion poll shows that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians want the two- state solution. The US government is formally committed to it; so are
the Europeans. There is still time to enforce it. And afterward, when the French, Germans, Swedes, Bulgarians, and Japanese begin to worry about their
anachronistic politics, Jews and Palestinians will be able to join them.” Michael Walzer, contribution to “An Alternative Future: An Exchange,” NYRB 4
December 2003.
59 Cf.: “On the nationality issue, the survival of the Jewish people, Lieberman took if anything an even stronger stand. He placed himself in total opposition to
those who (again since the 1830s) had seen the modern as the negation of the national.” Jonathan Frankel Prophecy and Politics (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 30-31.

Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled, Part Two: Questioning Antisemitism 9

60 In a survey of Anglo-Jewish opinion conducted in 2004, 47% of those questioned agreed with the statement “I am a Zionist,” and 78% agreed with the
statement “I care deeply about Israel.” The gap between the final two figures is attributable to the commonly held conviction that one can only describe
oneself as a Zionist if one intends to emigrate to Israel. See The UJIA Study of Jewish Identity in the UK: A Survey of Jewish Parents (London, 2004). This would
appear to represent a modest strengthening of Zionist sentiment over the previous decade. In 1995, of Jews surveyed, 43% felt a strong attachment, and 38%
felt a moderate attachment, to Israel. Thus while over 80% of respondents expressed special feelings of attachment to Israel, only 3% expressed negative
feelings.” Barry Kosmin, Anthony Lerman, and Jacqueline Goldberg, The Attachment of British Jews to Israel, JPR Report, No. 5, 1997.

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