“Everyone in America – at least as far as I knew – was a Zionist,” recalls Benjamin Moser, “especially but not only if you were Jewish.” A Pulitzer-winning biographer of Susan Sontag, he remembers being brought up short in his 20s, when a friend described Israel as “a bunch of foreigners who had no business in the Middle East” and Zionism as a “terrible mistake”. Moser, who recently turned 50, admits: “I was not even aware that Zionism was controversial.” The shift in perspective culminated in a visit to the occupied territories in 2016, during which he found “the reality of the occupation of Palestine … deranging”.
His new book includes 12 portraits of Jewish figures who have opposed Zionism, a movement formed in the late 19th century to advocate for the creation of a homeland for Jewish people in Palestine. It is contentious to oppose Zionism today, but Moser wants contemporary Jewish activists to “feel less alone” by showing that debates about Zionism were once mainstream in Jewish communal life. While around 90% of American Jews now support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state (although fewer identify as Zionists), fewer than 1% belonged to the largest American Zionist organisation in 1914. The first character study is of Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares, who thought that Judaism offered a vision of a world beyond the devastating nationalism of the first world war. The book closes with a moving account of the photographer Nan Goldin, who spoke out, at considerable cost, as the assault on Gaza began in 2023 following the October 7th attacks.
Many of the protagonists, like Moser, were once committed Zionists. When he was 10, Ronnie Kasrils set up a stall in front of his home in South Africa to sell toys and raise funds for Israel. He was later an anti-apartheid leader who became an ardent anti-Zionist during 27 years living abroad in exile: “Ronnie drives them crazy,” a friend of his tells Moser. “And a lot of it is because he’s so Jewish.”
Jacob Israël de Haan, an influential Dutch poet, wrote in 1912: “We want our own Land, our own Language, our own Art.” He was horrified after he relocated to Mandatory Palestine: “Zionism is a beautiful ideal,” he lamented, but it had “fallen into the hands of hustlers”. He was murdered in 1924 by Avraham Tehomi, a 21-year-old member of the Haganah paramilitary organisation, after his increasingly outspoken opposition to the Zionist leadership.
Hannah Arendt worked for Youth Aliyah in Paris, supporting refugee children to immigrate to Palestine, after fleeing from Germany herself in 1933. Her orientation changed after the Biltmore Conference in 1942, when some 600 delegates from Zionist organisations gathered in New York. Before Biltmore, some in the movement still imagined a single state rooted in the historically strong relations between Jews, Muslims and Christians in Palestine. The Holocaust sharpened the urgency of the argument for a Jewish state instead, but Arendt warned that this would leave the Arabs with “the choice between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship”. She foresaw, Moser writes, that “a victory [in the fight for a state] would bring the Jews of Palestine neither peace nor security”.
Moser’s study includes many instances of despair. The scale of the devastation wreaked on the Palestinians disturbs each of Moser’s subjects, many of whom are demonised or accused of antisemitism “so promiscuously that the word would eventually become meaningless”. After the Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank began in 1967, the lawyer Felicia Langer dedicated her life to representing Palestinians. Her first clients, Sheikh Musa al-Bukhari and his wife, knew their son was in prison: “Nobody would tell them why, but when he had picked up his son’s clothes to wash them, he had found a shirt covered with blood.” Langer came to see “the State of Israel as a criminal enterprise” and emigrated in 1990 because she no longer believed it could be reformed.
The Arab-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who was born in Iraq, was at the forefront of revising the established Israeli histories of 1948 and describes being “radicalised in the [Israeli State] archives … I didn’t have any revisionist ideas. It was the material I was reading which completely, flatly contradicted the official line.” Shlaim describes the situation today as “utterly bleak”. In 2023 he argued: “For all its sins, Israel has not engaged in genocide.” In 2025 he published a book called Genocide in Gaza.
Moser’s focus on individual lives is affecting. He makes no claims to be writing a definitive history and is aware of the Palestinian lives that shadow those of his protagonists but fall outside the scope of this study. There are nonetheless gaps. For example, there is no mention of the Satmar Hasidic movement, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group that believes it is forbidden to establish a Jewish state before the Messiah’s arrival, showing that anti-Zionism can also be theological and conservative.
Early in Anti-Zionism, Moser reads his grandfather’s copy of Theodor Herzl’s founding Zionist text, Der Judenstaat, and finds it “disquieting”, at best a fairytale and at worst a profoundly disturbing vision. Moser wonders how his own life might have been different “if I had grown up with the Palestinian story” instead. This beautifully written cri de coeur is inspired by an “exilic vision” of equality, an alternative Jewish tradition, resistant to nationalism and rooted in solidarity with others.
• Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser is published by 4th Estate. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
