Anti-Zionist Author Rejects Zionist Conflation in Jewish Life
An anti-Zionist Jewish author says zionist ideas have been fused with Jewish life itself, turning Judaism into what the author calls a creed of bigotry, insularity and belligerence. The writer argues that anti-Zionist Jews must call out Israel’s crimes against humanity and reject the dissolution of Judaism into Zionism.
The piece is rooted in the author’s own childhood lessons: Israel, the author says, was presented as a sanctuary, while Arabs were described as a threat to Jewish survival. That memory frames the argument now being made against the conflation of Jewish identity with Zionism.
Birmingham and the early lesson
The author recalls being taught in youth that Zionism was “both a citadel of mind and of landscape,” and that Israel was the true place of sanctuary for Jews. The author also says they were taught that Arabs were partly responsible for homicidal intent against Jews.
Those lessons were reinforced by family memory. The author says the Holocaust was still a fresh memory because their mother was a Kindertransport escapee, and they remember pennies being thrown against the windows of their step-grandfather’s small men’s clothing store in Birmingham, Alabama. The author says their father gathered up the coinage and used the proceeds to buy bubble gum and penny candy for the author and their sister.
Synagogue warnings and political rupture
At synagogue, Hebrew school and Jewish summer camp, the author says, children were warned that Arabs were a more dangerous menace than Klansmen and Nazis. The author says they were also told that if Israel’s vigilance and will faltered, Israeli Jews would be driven into the sea by blood-lusting Arabs.
That framing is now rejected in the piece. The author says anti-Zionist Jews who compare Israelis to Third Reich-era Germans are dismissed as kapos, but the writer argues that anti-Zionist Jews must still speak against what the author describes as Israel’s crimes against humanity and against the Zionist state itself.
Israel, the West Bank and Gaza
The author extends that criticism to current Israeli conduct, saying Israeli settlers, with the full complicity of the IDF, perpetrate Kristallnacht on an hourly basis in the West Bank. The author also says the separation wall is necessary for survival, the IDF soldier’s boot must remain upon every Palestinian neck, and the grass must be mowed in Gaza and every structure leveled.
The friction in the piece is stark: the same identity the author says was once taught as refuge is now described as bound up with violence and moral collapse. The author says those actions make them wonder whether others conclude there is an inherent rot at the heart of Judaism, a charge the essay presents as part of the dispute over whether criticism of Israel is treated as antisemitism or as a defense of Jewish ethics.
The argument ends where it began: with a demand that anti-Zionist Jews name what they oppose. In the author’s telling, the next step is not accommodation but a clearer break between Judaism and Zionism, and between Jewish identity and the state the author says has been made to stand for both.
