https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/anti-zionism-and-anti-semi
Anti-Zionism is a flourishing politics today on many university campuses and on parts of the left, and the standard response from many Jewish organizations and from most of the Jews I know is to call it the newest version of anti-Semitism. But anti-Zionism is a subject in itself; it comes in many varieties, and which ones are anti-Semitic—that’s the question I want to address here. I take “Zionism” to mean a belief in the rightful existence of a Jewish state, nothing more. Anti-Zionism denies the rightfulness. My concern here is with left-wing anti-Zionism in the United States and Europe.
Most versions of anti-Zionism first appeared among the Jews. The first, and probably the oldest, takes Zionism to be a Jewish heresy. According to Orthodox doctrine, the return of the Jews to Zion and the establishment of a state will be the work of the Messiah in the days to come. Until then, Jews are required to accept their exile, defer to gentile rulers, and wait for divine deliverance. Political action is a usurpation of God’s prerogative. Zionist writers hated the passivity that this doctrine produced with such passion that they were called anti-Semites by orthodox Jews, who would never have given that name to their own rejection of the Zionist project.
“Waiting for the Messiah” has a left version, which might be called “waiting for the revolution.” Jews (and other minorities) were often told that all their problems would be solved, and could only be solved, by the triumph of the proletariat. Many Jews took this to be an expression of hostility, a refusal to recognize the urgencies of their situation. But I don’t see anti-Semitism here, only ideological rigidity and moral insensitivity.
The second Jewish version of anti-Zionism was first proclaimed by the founders of Reform Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany. There is no Jewish people, they insisted, only a community of faith—men and women of the Mosaic persuasion. Jews could be good Germans (or good citizens of any state) since they were not a nation like the other nations and did not aspire to a state of their own. Zionism was perceived as a threat to these good Germans, since it suggested that they had an allegiance elsewhere.
Many leftists have adopted this denial of Jewish peoplehood, and then they go on to claim that a Jewish state must be a religious state, something like a Catholic or Lutheran or Muslim state—political formations that no leftist could support. But Reform Jews adopted this position knowing that most of their fellow Jews didn’t share it. If the nation is a daily referendum, as Ernest Renan said, the Jews of Eastern Europe, the great majority, were voting every day for peoplehood. They weren’t all looking for a homeland in the land of Israel, but even the Bundists, who hoped for autonomy in the Tsarist empire, were Jewish nationalists.
