This is a lightly edited version of a talk I gave at Anti-Zionism and the Jewish Left: A Day of Communal Political Education on May 18th 2025.
I think we need to first understand that anti-Zionism can mean multiple things. Jewish anti-Zionists have been motivated by Orthodox Judaism, Progressive Judaism, Communism, British patriotism, concern over antisemitism and of course solidarity with Palestinians, though that probably influenced the fewest people. So if we choose to use the term, we need to clarify what motivations we are talking about. In the final analysis I’m not convinced that the language of anti-Zionism is ideal, and I’ll try and suggest some alternatives at the end.
I want to briefly say something about the history of Zionism in the UK –it very much began as a Christian movement in the 1830s and 1840 against the background of an Ottoman empire that was seen to be weak and that the European powers all had designs on. The idea of a Jewish return to Palestine was a means for Britain to get a foothold in the Ottoman middle east – with the idea that Jews could become Britain’s protected minority there – just as France had Catholics and Russia had Orthodox. When various proto-Zionist movements were founded, like Chovevei Zion in 1881, they were following an existing template created by British Christians. So it’s a mistake to treat Zionism as a primarily Jewish movement.
The earliest Jewish anti-Zionism was religious – both Orthodox and Progressive Rabbis saw in Zionism a secular nationalist movement, at odds with their conception of Judaism as a religion. This attitude was seen in the Chief Rabbis Nathan and Herman Adler, David Woolf Marks of the West London Synagogue and leaders of the early Liberal Judaism movement like Lily Montagu. There was sometimes an ethical critique here, but it was more a claim that Zionism was base and materialistic rather than spiritual. This form of anti-Zionism existed alongside a patriotic Anglo-Jewish form, which was keen to stress Jewish loyalty to Britain and feared that Zionism would create antisemitism by claiming that Jews were ultimately loyal to the global Jewish people and that their home was actually in Palestine. Edwin Montagu, a cabinet minister who opposed the Balfour Declaration was a prime example. The ethical critique here was on how Zionism would damage the position of Jews in Britain by implying that their presence in the country was only a temporary one. A compromise position was sometimes made that Palestine could be a refuge for oppressed Jews in eastern Europe and the middle east, but not emancipated and wealthy ones in Britain. These religious and patriotic forms of anti-Zionism were really the majority positions of Jewish leaders before the second world war – Zionism was the fringe position. It was only when the Zionist Federation was able to take control over the Board of Deputies – through quite underhand means – in 1939 that things began to change
Then there was communist Jewish anti-Zionism, sometimes described as read assimilationism, which held the loyalty of large number of working-class Jews, to the extent that in the one area which was not a stronghold for the Zionist movement in the 1930s was the east end of London. This form was straightforwardly opposed to any form of nationalism, seeing it as a colossal distraction from revolutionary agitation. Jewish communists also had an alternative account of antisemitism, seeing it as stemming from capitalism rather than from eternal hatred of Jews. Think of the Jewish Council for East London, and Phil Piratin, Communist MP for Whitechapel from 1945 to 1950.
All these forms continued through the war and immediate postwar years, and the position that a Jewish state should not be created in Palestine was very mainstream in 1945-1948 period with new groups formed like the Jewish Fellowship, designed to reassert Jewish loyalty to Britain and not to Palestine.
One figure I’d like to mention here is Victor Gollancz, famous socialist publisher. He first publicised the dire position of German Jews in the early Nazi years, then was one of the first to talk about the mass murder that was beginning in Eastern Europe in 1941 and calling for a refuge scheme for Jews from those countries. After the war he continued to advocate for unpopular causes; for ethnic Germans who were expelled from their homes in Eastern Europe and in 1948 founded the Jewish Society for Human Service, dedicated to helping both Jews and Arabs in the middle east. Whilst other members of the group wanted to help both sides equally, Gollancz only wanted to aid Palestinian Arabs and used the society to further a firmly anti-Zionist agenda. Gollancz’s work for Palestinians has been largely forgotten and provides an interesting model for us to draw upon.
It seems to me that Jewish anti-Zionism in Britain went very quiet in the 1950s and 1960s, I can’t find much archival evidence at all. Zionism became hegemonic, not least through some clever institution building by the ZF, such as opening Zionist schools, a strategy the left might usefully imitate. There was a particular wave of Zionism around 1967, when fear of Israel being wiped out turned swiftly into messianic elation in the wake of the Six-Day War. There is one interesting text, Percy Cohen’s book Jewish Radicals and Radical Jews, which discusses Jewish student new left groups that popped up after 1968, and fought the Jewish establishment, and it would be great to try and research these further, but so far I’ve not found much in the archives. In this period too some Israeli radicals from Matzpen start settling in the UK – like Moshe Machover, Akiva Orr and Haim Hanegbi. They spoke at many student and radical events and became very influential in new left circles. This was a new kind of anti-Zionism – much more rooted in the specificities of Israel/Palestine – and it had a particular ideology, that Hebrew speaking Israeli Jews constituted a new nation that should be accorded rights in any future arrangement. Matzpen’s vision was of de-Zionization – dismantling oppressive structures whilst seeking a place for Israeli Jews in a decolonised Israel/Palestine.
An interesting figure who came onto the scene in this period was George Steiner, a literary scholar. He was an avowedly anti-Zionist Jew, but his concern was not primarily with Palestinians. Rather Steiner believed that Judaism was intrinsically exilic and text based, and Zionism was a form of heresy in the mould of Sabbateanism. He espoused a kind of orthodox anti-Zionism without being Orthodox. His classic essay: Our Homeland the Text, is well worth engaging with.
The Jewish Socialist Group was founded in 1974 but didn’t define itself as anti-Zionist – rather Bundist from around 1981. There was a small student group called British Anti-Zionist Organisation in the early 1980s – which I think was mostly Tony Greenstein. Roland Rance, a prominent Jewish Anti-Zionist wrote about his journey from Zionism to anti-Zionism in this period. There was a wave of activism on all sides around the Lebanon war, leading some Jews to take anti-Zionist stances and others to refuse to do so in the face of demands from non-Jews, even while opposing the war. There are some comments from this era where people said that the only time people only the left felt they could mention their Jewishness was if they were doing it to disavow Zionism. While this moment led some individual Jews to identify as anti-Zionist, no Jewish anti-Zionist groups were created.
It would take until the early 2000s for Jewish groups dedicated to campaigning for Palestinians to emerge – most notably Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JFJFP) in 2002, but this never defined itself as anti-Zionist, and many Zionists opponents of the occupation signed. When we created Jewdas in 2005 it was never formally anything, containing non, anti and even some liberal Zionists. The same was true of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), founded in 2007. The exception was the Internation Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), founded in 2008, which was explicitly anti-Zionist, but it has always been a very small group. I can’t tell you when Neturei Karta became active in the UK, but it has its roots in Orthodox Jerusalem in the 1940s. It’s always been a very small group, distinct from the Satmar community which people often confuse it with, and it is primarily concerned with what it sees as Zionism’s heretical nature, rather than with Palestinian rights per se.
As we’ve seen from this brief overview – Jewish anti-Zionism has meant very different things to different people. Given that I would suggest that each person using it needs to clarify what they mean by it – is your motivation Orthodox, Progressive, patriotic, or, as suspect is the case for most people here, purely about solidarity with the Palestinian cause?I also wonder if it’s wise to define ourselves by a negative – I would much prefer to identify positively, so socialist rather than anti-capitalist, a supporter of racial equality rather than an anti-racist. In this case I think identifying as a supporter of Palestinian liberation, of a free Palestine, would be a helpful reframing. Personally, I believe in a single multicultural democracy between the river and the sea with equal rights for all. Jewishly I am a diasporist – I believe that Judaism can be fully lived wherever we are and that the task of building Jerusalem is an ethical and political, something to be done everywhere. I seek open borders across the world and states where all cultures can flourish and express themselves, whether they happen to be in the majority or in the minority.
In conclusion I would urge us to know our history, to say what we mean, and more importantly, to say what we are for.