Review
Anti-Zionism:
A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser review – the deep roots of a contemporary
movement
A
biographer’s affecting account of prominent critics of Zionism, from Hannah
Arendt to Nan Goldin
Tom
Sperlinger
Mon 19
Oct 2026 13.00 BST
“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.
The sheer
scale of the devastation wreaked on the Palestinians disturbs each of Moser’s
subjects
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.
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