Critiques of Zionism by Jews

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“You murder thousands of Palestinians“

Anti-Zionist Rabbis in New York are confronted by Zionists as they protest for Palestine and to draw attention to the situation in Jabalia, Gaza.

Zachary Foster has a Ph.D in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He is a Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights. He runs a digital archive called Palestine Nexus and writes a newsletter called Palestine, in Your Inbox.

Zach Foster is a fascinating guest: he hails from a strongly Zionist background, but it was through his scholarly research of Palestine that his perspective changed. We discuss the long history of Palestinians being dehumanised, why he thinks Israel makes Jewish people less safe, the history of Gaza and Hamas that's airbrushed, Israel's history of using hunger as a weapon of war, genocidal sentiments in Israel - and so much more

Antony Lerman went from living on a kibbutz in Israel and serving with the IDF to becoming a formidable critic of the Zionist movement. He has unique insight into anti-Zionism, which he believes is often falsely conflated with anti-Semitism --- a move that allows Israel to suppress Palestinians and critics of Netanyahu's assault on Gaza.

Read Antony's latest article on our website: Weaponising antisemitism: The gift that keeps on giving: "Apologists for Israel’s brutality against Palestinians in Gaza are continuing to use the past persecution of Jews to neutralise criticism of Israel," 14 February 2024

You can buy his books from Pluto Press: Antony Lerman

Antony Lerman is Senior Fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna and Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at Southampton University. He is the author of The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist: A Personal and Political Journey (Pluto, 2012) and editor of Do I Belong? (Pluto, 2017).

In today’s Washington, which seethes with partisan acrimony, Democrats and Republicans at least agree on this: Israel has a right to exist. This right has been affirmed by the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and his Democratic antagonist, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries; by the Biden administration’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and his Republican successor, Marco Rubio; by Donald Trump’s new secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, and by the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer. In 2023, the House affirmed Israel’s right to exist by a vote of 412-1.

This is not the way Washington politicians generally talk about other countries. They usually start with the rights of individuals, and then ask how well a given state represents the people under its control. If America’s leaders prioritized the lives of all those who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, it would become clear that asking if Israel has a right to exist is the wrong question. The better question is: Does Israel, as a Jewish state, adequately protect the rights of all the individuals under its dominion?

The answer is no.

Consider this scenario: If Scotland legally seceded, or Britons abolished the monarchy, the United Kingdom would no longer be united nor a kingdom. Britain as we know it would cease to exist. A different state would replace it. Mr. Rubio, Mr. Schumer and their colleagues would accept this transformation as legitimate because they believe that states should be based on the consent of the governed.

America’s leaders make this point most emphatically when discussing America’s foes. They often call for replacing oppressive regimes with states that better meet liberal democratic norms. In 2017, John Bolton, who later became a national security adviser in the first Trump administration, argued that “the declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.” In 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the People’s Republic of China a “Marxist-Leninist regime” with a “bankrupt totalitarian ideology.”These U.S. officials were urging these countries not just to replace one particular leader but to change their political system — thus, in essence, reconstituting the state.

In 2020, Secretary Pompeo declared in a speech that America’s founders believed that “government exists not to diminish or cancel the individual’s rights at the whims of those in power, but to secure them.” Do states that deny individual rights have a “right to exist” in their current form? The implication of Mr. Pompeo’s words is that they do not.

What if we talked about Israel that way? Roughly half the people under Israeli control are Palestinian. Most of those — the residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — cannot become citizens of the state that wields life-or-death power over them. Israel wielded this power in Gaza even before Hamas invaded on Oct. 7, 2023, since it controlled the Strip’s airspace, coastline, population registry and most of its land crossings, thus turning Gaza into what Human Rights Watch called “an open-air prison.”

Even the minority of Palestinians under Israeli control who hold Israeli citizenship — sometimes called “Israeli Arabs” — lack legal equality.

Last month, Mr. Blinken promised that the United States would help Syrians build an “inclusive, nonsectarian” state. The Israel that exists today manifestly fails that test.

Still, for most of the leaders of the organized American Jewish community, a nonsectarian and inclusive country on this land is unthinkable. Jews are rightly outraged when Iranian leaders call for wiping Israel off the map. But there is a crucial difference between a state ceasing to exist because it is invaded by its neighbors and a state ceasing to exist because it adopts a more representative form of government.
American Jewish leaders don’t just insist on Israel’s right to exist. They insist on its right to exist as a Jewish state. They cling to the idea that it can be both Jewish and democratic despite the basic contradiction between legal supremacy for one ethno-religious group and the democratic principle of equality under the law.

The belief that a Jewish state has unconditional value — irrespective of its impact on the people who live within it — isn’t contrary just to the way America’s leaders talk about other countries. It’s also contrary to Jewish tradition. Jewish tradition does not view states as possessing rights, but views them with deep suspicion. In the Bible, the Israelite elders ask the Prophet Samuel to appoint a king to rule over them. God tells Samuel to grant the elders’ wish but also warn that their ruler will commit terrible abuses. “The day will come,” Samuel tells them, “when you cry out because of the king whom you yourselves have chosen.”

The implication is clear: Kingdoms — or, in modern parlance, states — are not sacrosanct. They are mere instruments, which can either protect life or destroy it. “I emphatically deny that a state might have any intrinsic value at all,” wrote the Orthodox Israeli social critic Yeshayahu Leibowitz in 1975. Mr. Leibowitz was not an anarchist. But, though he considered himself a Zionist, he insisted that states — including the Jewish one — be judged on their treatment of the human beings under their control. States don’t have a right to exist. People do.

Some of the Bible’s greatest heroes — Moses and Mordechai among others — risk their lives by refusing to treat despotic rulers as divine. In refusing to worship state power, they reject idolatry, a prohibition so central to Judaism that, in the Talmud, Rabbi Yochanan called it the very definition of being a Jew.

Today, however, this form of idolatry — worship of the state — seems to suffuse mainstream American Jewish life. It is dangerous to venerate any political entity. But it’s especially dangerous to venerate one that classifies people as legal superiors or inferiors based on their tribe. When America’s most influential Jewish groups, like American leaders, insist again and again that Israel has a right to exist, they are effectively saying there is nothing Israel can do — no amount of harm it can inflict upon the people within its domain — that would require rethinking the character of the state.
They have done so even as Israel’s human-rights abuses have grown ever more blatant. For almost 16 years, since Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, Israel has been ruled by leaders who boast about preventing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from establishing their own country, thus consigning them to live as permanent noncitizens, without basic rights, under Israeli rule. In 2021, Israel’s own leading human rights organization, B’Tselem, charged Israel with practicing apartheid. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported more attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2024 than in any year since it began keeping track almost 20 years ago.

Yet American Jewish leaders — and American politicians — continue to insist it is illegitimate, even antisemitic, to question the validity of a Jewish state. We have made Israel our altar. Mr. Leibowitz’s fear has come true: “When nation, country and state are presented as absolute values, anything goes.”

American Jewish leaders often say a Jewish state is essential to protecting Jewish lives. Jews cannot be safe unless Jews rule. I understand why many American Jews, who as a general rule believe that states should not discriminate based on religion, ethnicity or race, make an exception for Israel. It’s a response to our traumatic history as a people. But global antisemitism notwithstanding, diaspora Jews — who stake our safety on the principle of legal equality — are far safer than Jews in Israel.

This is not a coincidence. Countries in which everyone has a voice in government tend to be safer for everyone. A 2010 study of 146 instances of ethnic conflict around the world since World War II found that ethnic groups that were excluded from state power were three times more likely to take up arms as those that enjoyed representation in government.

You can see this dynamic even in Israel itself. Every day, Israeli Jews place themselves in Palestinian hands when they’re at their most vulnerable: on the operating table. Palestinian citizens of Israel make up about 20 percent of its doctors, 30 percent of its nurses and 60 percent of its pharmacists.
Why do Israeli Jews find Palestinian citizens so much less threatening than Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? In large measure, because Palestinian citizens can vote in Israeli elections. So, although they face severe discrimination, they at least have some peaceful and lawful methods for making their voices heard. Compare that with Palestinians in Gaza, or the West Bank, who have no legal way to influence the state that bombs and imprisons them.

When you deny people basic rights, you subject them to tremendous violence. And, sooner or later, that violence endangers everyone. In 1956, a 3-year-old named Ziyad al-Nakhalah saw Israeli soldiers murder his father in the Gazan city of Khan Younis. Almost 70 years later, he heads Hamas’s smaller but equally militant rival, Islamic Jihad.

On Oct. 7, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters killed about 1,200 people in Israel and abducted about 240 others. Israel has responded to that massacre with an assault on Gaza that the British medical journal The Lancet estimates has killed more than 60,000 people, and destroyed most of the Strip’s hospitals, schools and agriculture. Gaza’s destruction serves as a horrifying illustration of Israel’s failure to protect the lives and dignity of all the people who fall under its authority.

The failure to protect the lives of Palestinians in Gaza ultimately endangers Jews. In this war, Israel has already killed more than one hundred times as many Palestinians in Gaza as it did in the massacre that took the life of Mr. al-Nakhalah’s father. How many 3-year-olds will still be seeking revenge seven decades from now?

As Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, warned even before the current war in Gaza, “If we continue to dish out humiliation and despair, the popularity of Hamas will grow. And if we manage to push Hamas from power, we’ll get Al Qaeda. And after Al Qaeda, ISIS, and after ISIS, God only knows.”

Yet in the name of Jewish safety, American Jewish organizations appear to countenance virtually anything Israel does to Palestinians, even a war that both Amnesty International and the eminent Israeli-born Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov now consider genocide. What Jewish leaders and American politicians can’t countenance is equality between Palestinians and Jews — because that would violate Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

In 1936, the leftist magazine The New Masses published a scathing profile of the militant Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, blasting his visions of empire in Palestine and calling him a “Jewish Hitler.” The writer, an aspiring filmmaker named Robert Gessner, condemned Jabotinsky’s collaboration with Polish antisemites, denounced his nationalist ambitions, and even mocked him for being short.

Gessner also predicted failure for Jabotinsky’s plans to raise money in the United States. “In America,” he wrote, “Jews are about one percent Zionist.”

The young leftist was exaggerating, but not by much. Early- and mid-20th century Jews were statistically more likely to be members of the Communist Party than of institutions like the ADL or the AJC, and the party itself dismissed Zionism as an imperialist, bourgeois project of the wealthy, rather than a promise of liberation for the working class. Gessner was not an outlier but a voice of the Jewish mainstream of his time.

Almost 90 years later, a recent Pew Research poll finds that 74% of American Jews have favorable feelings about Israel. A poll of Israelis finds the majority aligned with Jabotinsky’s insistence on violent expulsion of Palestinians from the land. And the current Israeli government is a direct ideological descendant of the Irgun. Jabotinsky and his vision would seem to have the upper hand.

Gessner, meanwhile, doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

But over the past decade — and especially over the past 20 months — we’ve seen a resurgence of Gessner’s critique, voiced collectively by Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and similar organizations, as well as individually by writers like Peter Beinart, Judith Butler, Shaul Magid and Naomi Klein. In his new book Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left, Benjamin Balthaser argues that these voices are channeling at least a century of Jewish revolutionary thought — thought that he maintains has been marginalized, misrepresented, and at times intentionally suppressed, but never fully erased.

As a cultural studies scholar and avowed leftist, Balthaser shuns top-down narratives, turning instead to close readings of writers, poets, pamphleteers, filmmakers, artists and cultural critics working outside of mainstream institutions. He also draws from in-depth — and often very funny — interviews with veteran activists who personally experienced and contributed to Jewish leftist movements over the past decades. 320 pages long and nine years in the writing, Citizens of the Whole World acts as both archive and intervention — a rigorously argued and timely assertion that the Jewish radical imagination has always blazed bright as an alternative and a response to fascism.

Balthaser spoke with me from his office at Indiana University, where he is an associate professor of multiethnic U.S. literature, about the inspiration for the book, the fantasy of Jewish consensus, and why Project Esther is a new Red Scare.

How did you first come to this project?
My mom’s side were members of the communist party, as were a number of my great aunts and uncles. And my mom was kind of a ’60s New leftist and committed activist for my entire life. My grandpa was a fairly blunt and plainspoken person — an intellectual, but one with a less than eighth grade education — and he would always say that the land already belonged to somebody else, and that no matter what, Israel was going to end up a theocracy.

So I grew up with this secular Jewish anti-Zionist memory. It’s something I’ve been thinking about since my 20s.

Does that memory differ from Jewish anti-Zionism today?
Today, we often hear a lot of arguments based on Jewish values, or the ethical presumptions of Jewish religion. These are very important arguments, but I was also interested in other articulations around Israel and Zionism. Many Jewish social movements of the 20th century were very much framed within an understanding of America as an empire, and so they had a class analysis of Zionism: They saw it as bourgeois, ethnic fascism, and they had analyzed fascism itself as a class project. And I think it’s useful to embrace the historically Jewish left, because it can help us articulate a sense of politics today.

In your research, you read and spoke with people who were a part of those traditions, but also engaged with how memories of the Jewish left show up in more mainstream figures like the Coen brothers and Neil Simon — sometimes unexpectedly. You describe it as both here and not here, calling it a “citational presence.”

The way that disavowed memories work in culture is that they are articulated and buried at the same time, right? So when you watch popular “Jewish” television, you’re often going to see the Left surface in a way that it doesn’t with other ethnic groups: Woody Allen jokes about the magazine Dissent in Annie Hall, the Coen brothers’ films reference Trotskyites, Larry David shows up as the neighborhood communist in Brighton Beach Memoirs.

You also reference the “Palestinian Chicken” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry David insists, “This is America; you can build a restaurant wherever you want.” Whether citing David or someone like Seth Rogen saying, “I’m not going to go live in Israel,” you gesture towards a diasporic indifference to the idea of Israel as the Jewish homeland. Is this connected to our fairly successful assimilation in America?
Yes. Larry David’s a liberal. Rogen’s a liberal. Philip Roth’s a liberal. To them, Israel is basically just the Florida suburbs or something.

You describe Roth as the “liberal version of diasporism’s most articulate champion, satirizing West Bank settlers, Sabra kibbutzim, and neo-fascist Israeli politicians as either humorless automatons or messianic if violent fools.”

I think Roth’s critique of Zionism is also embedded with his notion of being a white male American, and, again, a liberal: What would I want to have to do with that country of crazies and wackos? Why would I want to go back to the Jewish ghetto, when I have a really nice life in America?

And Roth also writes sympathetically about the Communist Party. For example, I Married a Communist may be more interested in the characters’ affairs than their politics, but it’s still a sympathetic portrait of a working class Jewish communist in the 1940s.

In the book you refer to Bernard Lazare, and his assertion that Jewish history tends to be told “by the bourgeoisie for the bourgeoisie.” How does that impact the ways in which Jews remember and understand our own history in the United States?
I kept thinking as I was writing — and I don’t want to sound either overly humble or overly arrogant — that this book should have already been written. There should already be a popular history of American Jewish progressive anti-Zionism.

I was trained to tell cultural history that starts from the bottom and moves up. If you think about Jewish history from that context, it can help make sense of what’s happening today. For example, the official bourgeois Jewish institutions are all Zionist, and yet Mamdani wins the Jewish vote in New York City.

So who do these institutions represent? Not the working class students, or Jews who are social workers or teachers. They’re representing the interests of their own wealthy donors.

So these fissures are not new?
If you read Commentary i n the 1950s, you’ll see screeds against communists and against the Jewish left. And they wrote the Rosenbergs out of the Jewish world, metaphorically excommunicating them from the community. You could even say metaphorically rendering them stateless, in the same way that Nazis would render someone stateless before they killed them. It was very deliberate, very chilling.

There has always been a Jewish bourgeoisie, and it has never been nice. It’s just much more reactionary than it used to be, and has a lot more power than it used to, and it is much more open about it. And if there’s any value to what history can provide, it’s that it can help us to not be confused at this moment. This is anti-communism, pure and simple, and Project Esther is a new Red Scare. It’s targeting internationalism, targeting the left, and, ultimately, also targeting Jews.

I’m not against the idea of Jewish peoplehood, but a lot of us have bought this kumbaya version of it, where we’re all somehow in the tikkun olam training together. And we aren’t.

Can we even say that there is something specifically Jewish about this current incarnation of the Jewish left?
Diasporism is about being both here and not here, both belonging and not belonging. It’s particularly Jewish, but also universalist. It kind of erases itself in its own making. It’s a contradiction.

In the book you mention this contradiction in the context of Jewish Voice for Peace. They condemned the Oct. 7 attacks, which got them a lot of flack from some pro-Palestinian groups, but then on the other hand, they work in coalition with groups who do not condemn those attacks, and this lays them open to criticism from the other side.

You could look at this as a lack of coherence — and some do — but I would argue that this state of unresolved contradiction, of being two things at once, is perhaps the non-identity of actual politics, actual struggle. And it may be part of what the Jewish left can offer the world.

Which brings us back to your title, “Citizens of the Whole World,” from a book by Robert Gessner. Why did you choose it?
What’s fascinating to me is that Gessner wrote this book in 1948, so it’s also an immanent critique of the Israeli state. The story is about a volunteer who goes to fight the war, as did a number of idealistic young American Jews, and who very quickly becomes disillusioned with what she sees there. The racism, the violence of the state building, the whole thing. Another volunteer tells her, “You’re an alien in Israel because you are a citizen of the whole damn world.”

And then he gets gunned down! He dies, and she leaves. An internationalist who flees, and a nationalist who essentially commits suicide. If that’s not a metaphor for the national suicide of the ethnic state, what is?

A partial quote from an unpublished novel by a forgotten writer. Which seems appropriate for a book that is so concerned with memory and erasure.
It’s like in the movies. You try to bury the body, and it’s always resurfacing. They tried to bury Jewish anti-Zionist thinking, but what’s that line from the Eliot poem? The corpses have begun to sprout.

Neturei Karta (Aramaic: נָטוֹרֵי קַרְתָּא, romanized: Nāṭōrē Qartāʾ, lit. 'Guardians of the City') is a Jewish anti-Zionist organization that was founded in Jerusalem in 1938 and is primarily active in parts of Israel and the Western world. It was established by Haredi Jews originally affiliated with World Agudath Israel, which represented the most devout members of the Haredi community of the Old Yishuv. The organization's members, who adhere to stringent interpretations of Jewish religious law, are known for their religious conservatism and insular lifestyles. Neturei Karta's international political activism is rooted in its opposition to Israel's existence, which, in turn, is rooted in its members' core religious belief that the Jewish exile is to be maintained until the coming of the Messiah.

Initially, World Agudath Israel largely disagreed with the secular orientation of political Zionism, believing that it did not place enough importance on Judaism and thus constituted a threat to Haredi communities globally. However, it eventually reneged to reach an understanding with Zionist aspirations in light of World War II and the Holocaust. The founders of Neturei Karta, Amram Blau and Aharon Katzenelbogen, disagreed with the Aguda's accommodationist stance and broke off from the movement.

Members of Neturei Karta believe that Israel's founding was an affront to God because it provided the means for an effectively secular undoing of the Jewish exile, while also being a Jewish state that does not absolutely govern by religious law. The organization believes that the Jewish people may only be restored to the Land of Israel by the Messiah, who will bring about the resurrection of the dead, the ingathering of the exiles, and a complete return to Torah law. As such, it does not recognize Israel and has pursued relationships with entities seeking to destroy Israel. With regard to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Neturei Karta endorses a form of the one-state solution in which the Palestinian people control the combined territory of Israel and the State of Palestine.

The views of Neturei Karta's members are considered fringe, even within Haredi Jewish circles. On numerous occasions, a number of anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish movements have denounced Neturei Karta for its pursuit of relationships with the Iranian government, neo-Nazis, and Holocaust deniers, particularly after Neturei Karta members attended the 2006 International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, which was condemned by the United Nations and much of the international community

In a lawsuit filed this month against Northwestern University in Illinois, pro-Palestinian activists sought to halt the school’s required antisemitism training.

The training requires students to watch a video that outlines historical Jewish connections to Israel, says that most forms of anti-Zionism are antisemitic, and states that those views are “representative of the majority of Jewish people.”

The pro-Palestinian activists allege the video is discriminatory, including against anti-Zionist Jews, who, the lawsuit states, “are also a cognizable ethnic group” covered by federal civil rights protections.

But are anti-Zionist Jews a significant bloc of the American Jewish community, or insignificant outliers?

There is no clear answer, largely due to differing understandings of Zionism, a lack of data, and difficulties surveying US Jews, although the proportion of anti-Zionist Jews is likely marginal, Jewish community pollsters said.

Zionism, in the US today, is generally defined as support for Jewish self-determination in Israel, but not necessarily support for Israel’s government.

“Today, if you’re anti-Zionist, to me, it would mean that you’re against the existence of a Jewish state somewhere in the Holy Land,” said Ira Sheskin, a geographer at the University of Miami and the director of the Jewish Demography Project. “The percentage of Jews who fall in that category is very tiny.”

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the leading anti-Zionist Jewish group in the US, said last year that it had 32,000 dues-paying members — a minuscule percentage of the more than 7.5 million American Jews. It’s also unclear how many JVP members identify as Jewish because the group says it does not ask.

Surveys of US Jews have not specifically asked about anti-Zionist identity. The Jewish People Policy Institute has posed the question on its surveys, but the group notes that its respondents tend to have a relatively strong connection to Jewish institutions or Israel, and are not wholly representative of the US Jewish population. In a June poll, the group found that 2 percent of respondents identified as anti-Zionist.

Sheskin surmised that some Jewish groups are reluctant to ask about anti-Zionism “because if it’s a significant percentage, they’re not going to want to advertise it.” He also said the use of the term “anti-Zionist Jews” was relatively rare until recently.

Part of the problem is that survey responses are sensitive to the particular time that a question is asked. Sheskin said that during a recent survey, he polled a Jewish community about local antisemitism. During the survey, a major antisemitic incident took place in the community, skewing the data between those who responded before the incident and after.

“The answers that you would get to a question about anti-Zionism during the Gaza war, it’s going to be different than it would have been before the Gaza war, and it’s going to be different than it’ll be two years from now,” he said.

‘No simple definition’
Even identifying Jews in polling can be difficult.

Jonathan Schulman, the head of The Jewish Majority advocacy organization, said that when his group conducts surveys, the pollsters first ask respondents if they are Jewish. If they say they are, the pollsters then ask if they believe in Jesus.

“You would be shocked at the large number of people who say, ‘Yes, I believe Jesus is the Messiah, I just identify as Jewish,'” Schulman said. “We don’t count that. There has to be some normative understanding here.”

There is also confusion about the term “Zionism.” The label has been distorted by anti-Israel activism, becoming a derogatory term for many Americans.

A poll last year of Jews aged 18-40 found that 42% did not know what the word “Zionist” means, while 90% said they care about Israel.

Some Jews, such as the Satmar Hasidic movement, are also theologically non-Zionist, but are not affiliated with the political anti-Zionism espoused by activist groups like JVP.

Simply asking Jews if they are Zionists would likely not gauge actual beliefs about the existence of Israel, Sheskin said.

“I wouldn’t want to say, ‘Are you anti-Zionist? Because they’re liable to say ‘yes’ when they’re just anti-Netanyahu,'” and not opposed to Israel’s existence, he said.

“I would present them with, ‘Do you believe that Jews are entitled to a state anywhere over at least part of the historic area of Palestine?'” he said. “That’s a question that might make it in some surveys that are coming up, but nobody so far has asked that question.”

The liberal group J Street found in a poll last year that 90% of US Jews believed that someone can criticize Israeli government policies and still be pro-Israel.

Schulman, whose group aims to push back against organizations like JVP with data, said he would frame the question as, “Do you believe that Israel should exist?'”

“I think the biggest issue is that there’s no simple definition,” he said. “People don’t understand the definition of anti-Zionism. Many people think that anti-Zionism is pushing back on specific Israeli policies. It’s not. Anti-Zionism is the demand that Israel cease to exist as a Jewish state.

Some of the existing data indicate that American Jews overwhelmingly feel an affinity for Israel, even if the numbers do not line up exactly with Zionist beliefs.

In a poll released in February, The Jewish Majority found that 70% of US Jews believe that anti-Zionist movements are antisemitic by definition. Many of the remainder likely believe that anti-Zionism is not always antisemitic, but do not identify as anti-Zionist, Schulman said.

A major 2020 survey of Jewish Americans by the Pew Research Center found that 82% of US Jews said that caring about Israel is important or essential to what being Jewish means to them. There could be Jews who do not care about Israel, but also do not back the anti-Zionist position that Israel should be dismantled, though.

Non-attachment to Israel was highest among “Jews of no religion,” at 31%.

A February survey of American Jewish communal leaders found that 93% identified as pro-Israel and 91% as Zionist.

A poll of Jewish voters by the Jewish Electorate Institute last year found that 87% of respondents identified as pro-Israel.

The J Street poll last year found that 87% of American Jews thought it was antisemitic to oppose Israel’s right to exist

A survey showing that only around one-third of American Jews identify as Zionists set off shockwaves in the Jewish world last week, triggering speculation about what could have caused so many Jews to spurn a label once thought as nearly synonymous with Jewish identity.

From his home in Israel, Robbie Gringras had a different reaction.

“I wasn’t surprised,” he said about the survey, conducted by Jewish Federations of North America. “I have a feeling many more of these pieces are now going to come out.”

Together with Abi Dauber Sterne, Gringras runs For The Sake of Argument, an organization that consults on how to hold “healthy arguments” focusing on Judaism and Israel. A few months ago the two embarked on a project few other Jewish groups would attempt: interviewing dozens of Jewish American anti-Zionists directly about what turned them away from Israel.

Avowed anti-Zionists make up a relatively small portion of American Jews, according to the JFNA study: 7% overall, and 14% among Jews ages 18-35. But they shared a consistent story, according to Gringras and Sterne’s findings, which they are releasing on Thursday.

“Throughout all the answers to this question we heard an unmistakable theme: These people report that they reached their rejection of Israel in response to the behavior of Jewish Israelis and Jewish Americans,” Gringras and Sterne write.

Gringras said he understands that the takeaways might be disconcerting to Jewish leaders, who might be drawn to the theory that Jewish anti-Zionists have taken that stance as a result of ignorance, or because of the influence of non-Jewish progressives with no attachment to Israel. But he said he believes the findings can have a positive impact on those who encounter them.

Brandeis University researcher Matt Boxer said he felt “vindicated” by JFNA’s survey. He’s embarked on his own, very similar, multi-year survey project asking American Jews to define Zionism, supported in part by the Anti-Defamation League, where Boxer is a former fellow.

When Boxer first distributed his own survey in 2022 with open-ended responses, he received negative feedback from all corners, even death threats, in a sign of just how sensitive even raising the subject can be.

“I’ve had people tell me I’m an antisemite just by asking the questions, by having people tell me what these things mean,” he said. “And I’ve had people telling me I’m committing genocide against Palestinians.”

Even so, turnout was strong. More than 1,800 American Jews, from all over the world, submitted usable responses on whether they describe themselves as a Zionist or anti-Zionist, and what they thought the terms meant. Some synagogues and similar Jewish spaces circulated the survey within their communities. The results, which Boxer first presented in 2024, largely mirrored JFNA’s own findings this week.

“It’s so much deeper than we’ve left room for in our discourse,” Boxer said. He described what he called “the ‘Rashomon’ effect,” a reference to the classic 1950 Japanese film in which the same event is retold from drastically different points of view. The same thing has happened with Zionism, he said: Every Jew has their own definition.

“We’ve made this out to be a binary: If you’re Zionist you’re good, if you’re anti-Zionist you’re bad,” he said. “But it’s so much more complicated than that.”

Boxer is currently polishing off a new paper based on the data, exploring the Jews — including many self-declared Zionists — who described Israel as an apartheid state.

In 2024 Boxer’s senior colleague, the social researcher Janet Aronson, surveyed 800 Jewish anti-Zionists. “It’s not a group that we just want to dismiss out of hand,” said Aronson, who heads Brandeis’ Jewish Studies center and has conducted population studies for local Jewish federations for years.

Referring to the combined number of declared anti- and non-Zionists found in the JFNA survey, she added, “I think 15% is a lot of people.”

Those who do engage with Jewish anti-Zionists, these researchers say, will likely encounter a group of people who are very knowledgeable about Judaism and often grew up in Zionist spaces. That stands in contrast to what they say is a common misconception of the population: that Jewish anti-Zionists don’t know or don’t care about Judaism and other Jews.

For example, the Movement Against Antizionism, a new advocacy group founded by the McGill University doctoral student Adam Louis Klein, defines Jewish anti-Zionists as “those who seek safety or acceptance by echoing the accusations leveled against their own people.” The group draws a historic line connecting the Hellenistic Jews of the Maccabee era, through Jewish Soviet Bundists, to the modern-day anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace — all Jews that it says identify not with their own people but with antisemites in their broader society.

The researchers studying Jewish anti-Zionism don’t see things quite the same way. While none of the studies claims to be representative of the Jewish anti-Zionist population, 40% of Aronson’s respondents either worked, or had previously worked, in Jewish organizations — echoing the profile of the day school and camp alums who founded the activist group IfNotNow a decade ago. Many of them became involved in anti-Zionist minyans or similar upstart Jewish spaces that reject Zionism — a growing rallying cry among left-wing Jews.

“Those are people who we would expect to be current and incoming leaders of the Jewish community,” Aronson said. “What does it mean for the Jewish community when they say, ‘We’re not going to be part of these Jewish institutions, we need to start our own’?

Most of Gringras and Stern’s interviewees, likewise, “talked of a childhood and Jewish education that embraced the centrality of Israel,” the report states. “Their Israel journeys did not begin with an ideological rejection of Zionism. Yet nearly all of them underwent a paradigm shift, and now see Israel through primarily anti-Zionist eyes.”

First-person accounts from the report describe painful breaks with the Jewish community. They shared stories of being cut off by family members for asking their opinions about Israel’s human rights record, or of being rebuked by rabbis for suggesting that post-Oct. 7 donations should be directed to Israeli healthcare services rather than the military.

It is far, far easier to come out as gay than to come out as anti-Zionist,” one subject said.

Another interviewee, who grew up in a religious Zionist family that lived for a time in a settlement in the West Bank, stated, “I know that my parents are terribly sad that I am no longer a Zionist. I think they don’t realize how sad I am, too, that I am no longer a Zionist.”

“We weren’t meeting people who didn’t care,” Gringras summarized, describing their subjects as “sad, if not brokenhearted, about the way in which they not only find no expression for their Judaism, but also find the Judaism that they’re meeting very challenging.”

Gringras and Sterne are far from anti-Zionists themselves. Both are Jewish emigres to Israel; Sterne has held senior roles with the Jewish Agency and Hillel International, while Gringras is a former leader of the Jewish Agency’s Israel Education Laboratory. They founded For the Sake of Argument in 2022, with support from funders such as the Jim Joseph Foundation and the Natan Fund — realizing, in Gringras’s estimation, that “the way to learn about Israel, to be engaged in Israel, is to be engaged in its arguments.”

Talking to anti-Zionists wasn’t the project’s initial plan. At first, For The Sake of Argument sought out to explore what they’d theorized was a purely generational divide in Jewish views on Israel. But, the report’s authors say, they soon realized that age wasn’t the appropriate framing for the divide. Some younger subjects “expressed deep support for Israel,” the found, and some older ones “were deeply critical.”

The real divide, they determined, “is over Israel itself, between Zionists and anti-Zionists.” So they pivoted to interviewing anti-Zionists directly — with connections made via intermediaries, mostly on the East Coast, and the wording of questions carefully constructed in advance with “the assumption that no one is born Zionist or anti-Zionist.”

In fact some interview subjects said that, far from being born anti-Zionist, they only made the leap in the aftermath of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza, out of distress over Israel’s behavior during the war. Some made asks of their Jewish leaders, such as to remove the Israeli flag from the bimah, that they had not previously considered.

All of it, the paper said, came from a place of deep identification with and concern for the Jewish community amid the anti-Zionists’ beliefs that it was aligning itself with an immoral cause.

The researchers all say Jewish leaders should conduct similar interviews within their own communities, to understand the real contours of sentiment about Israel.

For the Sake of Argument plans to offer programming to help facilitate such dialogue. Aronson emphasized that those conversations would ideally come from a place of mutual respect and vulnerability.

Aronson noted that Zionist Jewish leaders, following one of JFNA’s own conclusions from its report, may see it as their job to try to convince their counterparts why Zionism matters. That approach could easily backfire, she said.

“For these highly engaged anti-Zionists who have gone through serious Jewish education and involvement, they actually have already heard all of the arguments that mainstream Judaism has to present,” she said. “I think that’s one of the reasons why they say, ‘We don’t need to hear your side.’ Because they’ll say, ‘We have learned it. You’ve taught it to us and we reject it.’”

All the researchers agreed on something else: The divide between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews is deep, and concerning.

“We don’t know what to do,” Gringras and Sterne admit in the report. Aronson concurred.