Redefining Zionism

How "anti-Zionism" became like "anti-Communism"

In March 2025, the Jewish Federation of North America asked American Jews their opinion of Zionism. Only 37 percent said they identified as “Zionist,” and 8 percent identified as “non-Zionist” and 7 percent as “anti-Zionist.” Among 18-to-34-year-olds, 14 percent identified as anti-Zionist and 18 percent as non-Zionist. My guess is that if the survey were taken today, the percentages who were “non” or “anti” would be even higher, and among young non-Jews much higher still.

A decade ago, you would have had a hard time finding a debate between Zionists and anti-Zionists, but they now proliferate on the web. On April 8, for instance, J Street’s “Word on the Street” held a debate featuring Arielle Angel, the editor of the anti-Zionist Jewish Currents, which boasts a million online readers. The Zionist Organization of America, the oldest Zionist group, claims 25,000 dues-paying members. By contrast, the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which played a leading role in the Gaza protests, boasts 32,000 dues-payers.

The rise of anti-Zionism is a reaction to the failure of the peace process and the two-state solution, Israel’s brutal expansion into the West Bank, the death and destruction it visited upon civilians in Gaza, and Israel’s repeated, and finally successful attempt to draw the United States into a war against Iran. In the course of these events, what Zionism means -- and what supporting or opposing it entails -- has subtly changed. And for supporters of Israel, it is not a change for the better.

I

The term “Zionism” was coined by Viennese writer Nathan Birnbaum in 1890 to describe an Odessa-based group, the Lovers of Zion, who advocated Jewish emigration to Palestine, but it was popularized by Thedor Herzl in his 1895 book, The Jewish State, which originated as a plea to the Rothschild family to fund a Jewish colony. The next year Herzl founded the World Zionist Congress, which after some deliberation, became devoted to establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. To be a Zionist was to advocate for such a state. Among European Jews, it meant to favor emigration. Among Americans, it came to mean supporting European emigration to Palestine. An American Zionist, the saying went, was someone who gave someone else five dollars to send a European Jew to Palestine.

Many of the early Zionists, including David Ben-Gurion, were social democrats, and Ben-Gurion’s Labour party would dominate Jewish politics in Palestine and the Israeli government for Israel’s first 29 years. It envisioned Zionism as a movement for a Jewish state that would be democratic. Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 committed the new state to “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” There was a Revisionist faction some of whose leaders in the 1930s looked favorably upon Italian fascism, but the parties that descended from Revisionism wouldn’t gain power until 1977.

In the years between Herzl’s Jewish State and Israel’s founding, most Arabs in Palestine and many Arab intellectuals in the United States and Europe opposed Zionism outright as a colonial landgrab under the auspices of British imperialism. So did many American foreign policy officials who feared a backlash from Arab states. But most important in this case, many Jewish intellectuals in Europe and the United States also opposed Herzl’s Zionism. That opposition took three very different forms.

First, there was cultural, but not political Zionism, espoused by Ahad Ha’am of the Lovers of Zion and later by Hebrew University founder Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and other well-known Jewish intellectuals. They advocated for Palestine as a center of Jewish cultural revival, but they opposed a Jewish state. Magnes, Buber and Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold created Ihud (Unity) to promote a binational Arab-Jewish state.

Secondly, some Jewish political and religious groups opposed cultural and political Zionism. Among religious groups, these included many Reform Rabbis who insisted that Judaism was a religion not a suppressed nationality and Orthodox Rabbis who believed that Jews would only return to Palestine upon the arrival of a Messiah. Among political groups, the socialist Jewish Bund, recently portrayed in Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live is Our Country, dismissed Zionism as an evasion of Jewish responsibility to build socialism in Europe. Until the Nazis took power in Europe, that belief was common among European Jewish socialists and communists. Together, the rabbis and the left could accurately be called “anti-Zionist.”

Third, there were prominent American Jews who styled themselves as “non-Zionists.” The American Jewish Committee, which before World War II was an invitation-only organization of upper class central European Jews, opposed the formation of a Jewish state, which it saw as a threat to their Jewish identity as Americans, but AJC members supported financially the emigration to Palestine of European Jews suffering from antisemitism. Many Reform and Conservative Rabbis, who early had strenuously opposed a Jewish state, adopted this non-Zionist outlook.

After the revelations about the Holocaust, the Jewish victory in the 1947-48 war with the Arabs, and the formation of the state of Israel, much of the Jewish opposition to Zionism melted away. The non-Zionist American Jewish Committee would become an enthusiastic supporter of the new state. The most prominent organs of the American left, The Nation and New Republic, would lead the charge for the new state. Anti-Cold War presidential candidate Henry Wallace would criticize Harry Truman for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the new state. The anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, which was founded in 1942, and which included New York Times Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Rabbi Elmer Berger, gradually disintegrated into a letter-head organization after 1948.

II

In the decades after Israel’s founding, the flame of anti-Zionism was kept alive by Israel’s Arab neighbors and Arab intellectuals like Edward Said and by a few American and European Jewish intellectuals, some of whom Susie Linfield profiled critically in The Lion’s Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. But after the Six-Day War and Israel’s seizure and occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, the debate over Zionism changed. A new debate broke out among self-identified Jewish Zionists.

Most American Jewish organizations and most Jewish politicians adopted the position of the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which began as the Israel-funded American Zionist Council, but under pressure to register as an Israeli foreign agent, rebranded itself as an American-funded AIPAC in 1963. AIPAC, along with the AJC, the Anti-Discrimination League (ADL), the Conference of Presidents of Jewish Organizations, and other leading political and religious organization promoted a “special relationship” between the United States and Israel. They backed whatever Israeli government was in power. They harshly criticized politicians, intellectuals, or political groups that were critical of Israeli policies.

They criticized the intellectuals who came to be called “liberal Zionists.” In the 1970s, as the Israel occupation of the West Bank began, some Jewish intellectuals on the left took issue with Israel’s refusal to negotiate with the PLO. In 1974, over a hundred rabbis and noted intellectuals including Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, formed a short-lived group called Breira, which advocated negotiating with the PLO. In 1981, American Jews formed Americans for Peace Now as a branch of the Israeli group Peace Now. In 1992, Partners for a Progressive Israel was founded as an American wing of the leftwing Israeli party, Meretz. These groups vigorously opposed the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and they advocated what came to be called the “two-state solution.” They argued that Israel could not be Jewish and democratic -- it could not fulfill what they saw as the promise of Zionism -- as long as the occupation endured.

In 2008, Jeremy Ben-Ami, whose father had been a Revisionist in Palestine, but then emigrated to New York, formed J Street, a group dedicated to liberal Zionism. AIPAC and other leading organizations greeted it with hostility. In 2014, the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations rejected its application for membership. AIPAC called it “one of the greatest threats to America’s support for Israel’s security” and “anti-Israel.” But J Street, which now boasts over 200,000 donor-members, has survived and has grown in numbers and influence, particularly among Democratic politicians. Until recently, the main contest in U.S.-Israel politics among Jews has been between the unconditional Zionism of AIPAC and the liberal Zionism of J St.

III

During the last 25 years, however, the opposition to political Zionism among American Jews, which expired with Israel’s founding, has returned with a vengeance and threatens to overshadow the conflict between unconditional Zionism and liberal Zionism. The opening salvo among Jewish intellectuals was fired by historian Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books in 2003. Judt argued that Israel’s expansion into the West Bank had already made a viable Palestinian state impossible. “The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years,” he wrote, “will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.” Judt, following in the footsteps of Ihud, advocated the latter.

Liberal Zionists as well as the more traditional Zionists denounced Judt’s essay. The New York Review of Books received over a thousand letters protesting its publication of the essay. At The New Republic, where Judt was a contributing editor, the owner Martin Peretz, a liberal Zionist, removed Judt from the magazine’s masthead. Commentary termed his views “hateful.”

In 2008, journalist Philip Weiss founded the website Mondoweiss devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2009, Weiss declared himself an anti-Zionist in the tradition of the American Council for Judaism. “Zionism privileges Jews and justifies oppression, and this appalls me,” he wrote. “Saying I’m anti-Zionist is a sincere expression of my pluralist, minority-respecting worldview.” Like Judt, Weiss was vilified. Mondoweiss was called a “hate site” in the Washington Post. (In New York Jewish circles, the hatred of Weiss was personal. One prominent liberal Zionist told me that she wouldn’t come to dinner with me if Weiss were to join us.)

Jewish Voice for Peace was founded by University of California students in 1996 after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. It became a national organization in 2003 and has steadily gained membership. It was at the forefront of the demand for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) to pressure Israel to leave the occupied territories. In 2019, it formally declared itself to be “anti-Zionist.” “We have come to see that Zionism was a false and failed answer to the desperately real question many of our ancestors faced of how to protect Jewish lives from murderous antisemitism in Europe,” the group wrote. “While it had many strains historically, the Zionism that took hold and stands today is a settler-colonial movement, establishing an apartheid state where Jews have more rights than others.”

Perhaps, the most telling rejection of political Zionism came from Peter Beinart, the former editor of The New Republic and a staunch proponent of liberal Zionism. In an essay in 2020 in Jewish Currents, Beinart didn’t reject Zionism as such, but reaffirmed the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha’am against the political Zionism of Herzl. “The essence of Zionism is not a Jewish state in the land of Israel; it is a Jewish home in the land of Israel, a thriving Jewish society that both offers Jews refuge and enriches the entire Jewish world,” Beinart wrote. “It’s time to explore other ways to achieve that goal—from confederation to a democratic binational state—that don’t require subjugating another people. It’s time to envision a Jewish home that is a Palestinian home, too.”

In the wake of the Israel’s brutal war on Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, the few prominent Jewish voices rejecting political Zionism have become a chorus. Among the latest is Holocaust scholar Omar Bartov, the author of Israel: What Went Wrong? Like Beinart, Bartov doesn’t identify as “anti-Zionist,” but he rejects political Zionism. Bartov told Ha’aretz:

I’m not anti-Zionist. I grew up in a Zionist home... But Zionism as an ideology didn’t just run its course...It became the ideology of the state. And it became not only militaristic and expansionist but also racist, extremely violent and ultimately an ideology that deeply harms both the individual and the collective. Such an ideology has no place.

Some liberal Zionists share with the critics of Zionism opposition to the Netanyahu government and to occupation. They are harshly critical of Israel’s conduct of the war (although less likely to brand it as “genocide”) and of the government’s tolerance of settler violence on the West Bank. But what distinguishes the critics, above all, is their belief that the two-state solution, which has been the goal of the “peace process” and the demand of Israel’s Arab neighbors, has been rendered moot by Israeli expansion and by the trajectory of Israel’s politics and public opinion.

That perception is grounded in facts. Settlement expansion has increased inexorably even under the few Labour governments. In Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s first five months in office in 1999, he approved more new West Bank housing units than Netanyahu’s government had approved the prior year. The current Netanyahu government has accelerated settlements in the West Bank, including on a corridor that would separate the North and South and make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. In the coming election, the main opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is a new merged party, Beyahad, that if successful, will install religious nationalist and settler movement leader Naftali Bennett as prime minister. Bennett is committed, he wrote on X, to “not ceding our land and preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Public support for a two-state solution has also cratered. The only Jewish party that backed a two-state solution, Meretz, failed to win a single seat in the last Israeli election. In a 2025 Gallup Poll last year, only 27 percent of Israelis (and probably a lower percentage of Israeli Jews) supported a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Among the young, the percentages are even lower. According to a 2023 poll, 73 percent of Israeli youth between the age 18 and 24 consider themselves “right-wing” -- a position that would reject a Palestinian state. The October 7 assault has, if anything, locked in the opposition to a two-state solution for the foreseeable future. Judt’s assessment in 2003 -- that the choice, if anything, is not between two states but between an ethnically cleansed greater Israel and a binational state -- looks to have been prophetic.

Some liberal Zionists will also insist that Israel, for its faults, remains a “safe haven” from antisemitism for the world’s Jews, and must be preserved as a Jewish-ruled enclave. Indeed, that was an initial promise of Zionism. Growing antisemitic sentiment and attacks in the United States and Europe, they argue, only make the existence of a Jewish Israel more essential. The critics of Zionism take the opposite view. They argue that Israel’s conduct has fueled attacks against Jews outside Europe and even encouraged a new antisemitism, based on the assumption that Israel is pulling the strings in American policy.

Bartov writes in his new book, “Having claimed to be the definitive answer to antisemitism, Israel is now the best excuse for antisemites everywhere, a nation whose addiction to violence and oppression, reliance on great powers and financial clout, and constant harping on the horrors of the Holocaust as an excuse for untethered violence against Palestinians are making even some of its erstwhile supporters shrink from it in discomfort, or horror and disgust.”

There are, of course, still many Jews who support an unconditional political Zionism. Their ranks have been bolstered by Republicans and particularly by white Protestant evangelicals who, organized in groups like Christians United for Israel, back a greater Israel. But the growing implausibility of a two-state solution -- combined with Israel’s conduct of the war and occupation -- has begun to undermine the liberal Zionist case for a two-state solution. Within the Jewish intelligentsia, the parameters of the debate over Zionism increasingly resemble those before the establishment of the state of Israel.

IV

When a third of 18 to 34-year-old American Jews say they are “anti-Zionist” or “non-Zionist,” they are not, however, replicating the pre-World War II arguments about Zionism. The anti-Zionists don’t necessarily favor a binational state; the non-Zionists don’t necessarily favor funding Jewish emigration to the Holy Land. What these labels designate are degrees of disenchantment with Israel as a model society. The current conduct of Israel along with the receding memory of the Holocaust has blotted out the original meaning of Zionism; instead, many young Jews and non-Jews think Zionism refers to the current conduct of Israel -- the brutal occupation, war crimes or genocide in Gaza, settler violence, and most recently the involvement of the United States with Israel in a disastrous war in Iran.

In her analysis of the Jewish Federation poll, federation official Mimi Kravetz acknowledged that that the term “Zionism” has been subject to “definition creep.” When the respondents who said they were “anti-Zionist” or “non-Zionist” were asked what Zionist meant, they responded that it meant that “Israel has a right to the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” “supporting whatever action Israel takes,” and “believing Jews are superior to Palestinians.” In other words, it means what Israel has become.

This is not an unusual linguistic development. Consider what “communism” meant to Marx and Engels in the mid-19th century. It was the fulfillment of democracy, an end to “the exploitation of man by man.” The goal of Communists, Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, was “to win the battle of democracy.” But a century later, in the wake of the Stalin’s Soviet Union, and the beginnings of the Cold War, communism became identified with Soviet totalitarianism and later with the Chinese variety. It was an anti-democratic faith. Something very similar is happening to Zionism, although it is in the early stages.

Leon Trotsky and his followers attempted to invoke the older meaning of communism to distinguish what they advocated from what the Soviet Union had become. They called the Soviet Union a “degenerated workers’ state.” But it was to no avail. The reality superseded the older ideal. Liberal Zionists find themselves in the same linguistic pickle. Jeremy Ben-Ami defines Zionism as “a commitment to a democratic national home for the Jewish people and to the equal right of the Palestinian people to their own state in that same land.” He acknowledges that Israel’s “current leadership is increasingly militaristic and undemocratic, pursuing policies and expressing views that violate core Jewish ethical values.” But he calls those policies a “distortion” of the “Zionist vision,” just as the communist dissidents called the Soviet Union a “betrayal of the revolution.”

Kravetz of the Jewish Federation takes comfort in the fact that a large majority of the respondents to their poll still back Israel’s existence. She believes that “the overwhelming majority of American Jews can stand together in support of Israel and Israelis even as they wrestle with serious concerns that matter enormously to them and that Israelis themselves wrestle with as well.” But that would be a misreading of the growing opposition or indifference to Zionism. Young Jews and non-Jews don’t necessarily want to eliminate the state of Israel -- neither do most of Zionism’s critics -- but they are profoundly troubled by what it has become and less likely than ever before to “stand together in support of Israel.”

*For more of the historical background, see my book Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.