Anti-Zionism is not a thing, like antimatter or an antibiotic. Nor is at a feeling like antipathy. It’s a cluster of ideas whose only common element is opposition to Zionism. Anti-Zionism is also a relatively new concept. The word “Zionism” has been around since the 1890s, but “anti-Zionism” was used only sporadically until the 1960s, and only in the past fifteen years or so has the word become common in the English-speaking world.

The novelty and ambiguity of the term have not stopped activists and intellectuals from claiming a heritage of anti-Zionism dating back to the Zionist movement’s early years or even to antiquity. This approach is particularly common among Jews who seek to justify their questioning of Israel’s centrality in contemporary Jewish life with reference to the Jewish textual tradition. This questioning has been building for some time but has gained particular visibility in the aftermath of 7 October 2023.

Since Jewish anti-Zionists are routinely accused by other Jews of betraying the Jewish people, their best defense is to say that they, rather than the Zionists, embody the most authentic and noble aspects of Jewish civilization. Yet regardless of the current political situation, cobbling together a motley assortment of people and causes under a common rubric of “anti-Zionism” distorts history and confuses what people fear and desire today with how they felt in times past.

An Idea and its Opponents

“Zionism” takes numerous and varied forms. It can be religious or secular, romantic or pragmatic, militarist or pacific, welcoming of co-existence with Palestinians or keen to eject them from the land. The idea and history of Zionism are by no means reducible to the form the Israeli state has come to assume, and still less to the specific policies of its current government.

Anti-Zionism is equally capacious. Before 1948, many Christians and Muslims opposed the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine out of a combination of doctrinal grounds, logistical considerations, and sympathy with the Arabs of Palestine (as they were usually referred to at the time). Among Jews, opposition to Zionism usually came from three unrelated directions. Many Orthodox Jews adhered to traditional religious beliefs that the return to the land of Israel would happen only in the days of the Messiah. Jewish socialists saw Zionism as a distraction from the revolutionary struggle for a classless world free from oppression and inter-group hatreds. Assimilated bourgeois Jews in the Western world rejected the concept of Jewish nationality altogether and strove to consolidate their place within the societies in which they lived.