What the American Jewish Community Can and Must Do about Jewish Anti-Zionism

A Jewish Voice for Peace anti-Zionist facebook post on May 15, 2021. Source: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10160920042479992&id=186525784991&set=a.10150125586109992

Jewish Voice for Peace, the most prominent Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the US, held its national conference in my hometown of Baltimore earlier this month. This caused quite a stir in the local Jewish community, with the Baltimore Jewish Council (where I was in the past a board member) organizing a community sign-on letter condemning JVP as “a token organization that exists to sell the public a false narrative that Jews oppose Israel’s existence.” A local rabbi published an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun that detailed many specific examples of how JVP is problematic. But both the letter and op-ed stopped well short of addressing the real root of the problem and the only truly effective way to defeat the worrisome trend of growing support for anti-Zionism within the America Jewish community, especially among the younger generation.

First, some history: A hundred years ago, anti-Zionism was a fairly commonly-held view in the American Jewish community. In the early decades of the 20^th century, before the Holocaust and the creation of Israel, many prominent American Jews felt that Zionism contradicted their commitment to Jewish prosperity and integration in the diaspora. But the Holocaust changed everything, and American Jewish anti-Zionism mostly disappeared with the 1948 creation of Israel and especially following the 1967 Six Day War that saw Israel not only survive a near-death experience but emerge as a seemingly invincible source of worldwide Jewish pride.

Following nearly three decades of uninterrupted leadership by the Zionist left under the Labor Party of David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, Israel’s conservatives led by Menachem Begin’s Likud party took power in 1977. Pursuing their right-wing vision of Zionism, they expanded West Bank settlements and got Israel embroiled in the Lebanon quagmire in the 1980s, which turned into Israel’s equivalent of Vietnam, causing considerable controversy among Jewish Americans. But still the term “anti-Zionism” was nearly unheard of. That’s because even the Israeli right in those days sought peace with Israel’s neighbors. It was Prime Minister Begin who negotiated the complete Israeli withdrawal from Sinai and carried out the forced evacuation of the Israeli settlers there in exchange for peace with Egypt.

In the 1990s Likud lost power to Labor, who signed a mutual recognition agreement with the PLO and began the Oslo peace process that many hoped would lead to a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel continued the Oslo process through the decade, even under Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 1996 to 1998, who handed over additional territory to the nascent PLO-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Continuing the tradition of bipartisan support for peace in the first decade of the current century, it was Likud Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who, following Israel’s victory over the 2^nd Intifada, completely evacuated 8,500 Israeli settlers and the IDF from Gaza in 2005. Continuing that policy after Sharon’s stroke, it was Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, another Likudnik (though former by this time, since Sharon and Olmert had by then transformed the pragmatic wing of Likud into Kadima, leaving Netanyahu in charge of the increasingly rightist Likud remnant), came close in 2008 to a two-state peace settlement (before having to resign over a corruption scandal from his time as Likud mayor of Jerusalem).

But in 2009 everything changed, and Israel has not been the same since, and anti-Zionism has taken off here in the US as a result.

It was in 2009 that Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the prime ministership, and he’s held on to it ever since (other than an 18-month break in 2021-2022) with increasingly right-wing governments that have abandoned even a pretense of seeking peace and a two-state solution with the Palestinians. Instead, Netanyahu’s governments have expanded West Bank settlements relentlessly, increasing the number of settlers from under 300,000 to over half a million today in nearly 150 settlements and over 200 unauthorized-but-allowed “outposts.” Fifty-nine new outposts were established in 2024 alone, the result of Netanyahu appointing Bezalel Smotrich as “Minister in the Ministry of Defense in charge of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) and the Civil Administration” – effectively, minister in charge of West Bank settlement expansion. The goal of Smotrich and the other mostly Orthodox extremists leading the “sovereignty” movement, as they call it, is to make a future peace deal with the Palestinians both physically and politically impossible and instead to annex the West Bank to Israel and expel the Palestinian population of 3 million from lands they see as promised to the Jewish people by G-d.

Netanyahu’s diplomacy has echoed and reinforced this disastrous strategy. Instead of continuing the efforts by his five predecessors (Prime Ministers Olmert, Sharon, Barak, Peres, and Rabin) to strengthen Palestinian moderates and weaken Palestinian extremists in the internal Palestinian political competition, Netanyahu has done the opposite. He has weakened the moderates in the PLO/Palestinian Authority who accept Israel and seek a two-state solution, and he has strengthened the extremists in Hamas, for example by transferring hundreds of millions of dollars of Qatari cash to them in Gaza. When questioned about this at a Likud meeting in 2019, he said the goal of the policy was to divide the Palestinians so as to prevent a Palestinian state. This is the diplomatic strategy that blew up in Israel’s face with the barbaric Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023.

But even well before the Hamas attack, we could see the detrimental impact of Israel’s sharp right turn here in the US Jewish community: the rise of anti-Zionism to new heights of support, especially among the younger generation. This is arguably the most tragic and preventable result of Netanyahu’s reign: Hundreds of thousands of American Jews have turned not just against his terrible policies but against Zionism itself.

It was in 2019 that Jewish Voice for Peace adopted anti-Zionism as its official policy.

This erosion of American Jewish support for Israel is terribly dangerous and will only get worse the longer we in the American Jewish community allow and even help Israel to continue on its current self-destructive path. Sign-on letters and public statements condemning groups like JVP will do nothing to address the real root of the problem.

If we want to take effective action to maintain support in our community and on the part of the US government for Israel’s ability to respond to the very real security threats from Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas, then we need to do more to get Israel off its current extremist path (exemplified further by last month’s Likud Party violence against a Reform synagogue in Ra’anana) and back to its previous moderation and pragmatism.

There are many ways to do this.

First and foremost, the major institutions of American Jewish life must publicly reaffirm their support for compromise with the Palestinians once conditions are ripe and their opposition to the ongoing West Bank (and Gaza) settlement-annexation-expulsion program of the Israeli right.

But words alone will not suffice. The reality is that the most effective way to ensure the long-term support of the US government for Israel’s real security needs will be to support ending the current US policy of blank-check aid that ignores even the minimal requirements that apply to all other US foreign assistance, supports right-wing policies counter to Israel’s own long-term interests, and undermines the Zionist vision of Israel’s founders that the first Jewish state in nearly 2,000 years would also be a democracy “based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel,” in the words of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

Certainly our intentions were good in supporting unconditional aid, because American military aid to Israel has been and continues to be vital for Israel’s security and long-term survival. But, just as we’ve failed to notice the detrimental impact that Netanyahu’s right-wing policies have had on liberal American Jews, we’ve also failed to pay attention to how our unquestioning support for unconditional aid has benefitted the Israeli right wing, helping Netanyahu make the case to Israeli voters that he is in “another league,” as his election campaign slogan puts it. And he’s right – he is the first Israeli leader able to thumb his nose at US demands to stop expanding settlements (not under Trump, of course, who actually supports the settlement-annexation-expulsion movement, but under all other US presidents) without giving up a dime or a dollar in US aid. Contrast this with what happened in the 1990s under a previous Likud prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, whose determination to expand West Bank settlements cost Israel US aid and cost him the 1992 election, which he lost to Yitzhak Rabin because Israeli voters saw that he had lost US support. Contrast it to the 1980s, when President Reagan withheld aid to stop Israel from shelling Beirut.

It’s time to go back to the days of robust US leadership in support of an Israel that meets its security needs but avoids extremist policies that the hundreds of retired generals in Commanders for Israel’s Security repeatedly warn threaten Israel’s democracy and security.

Such American leadership can only happen with similarly robust Jewish community support, including by national organizations, local federations, and the Reform and Conservative movements and their congregations. Most of these already understand that Israel’s right-wing direction is bad for the Jews both in Israel and here in the US. But they have under appreciated the seriousness of the threat.

We must hope that the rapid growth of Jewish Voice for Peace will serve as the wake-up call that they need to take action to change Israel’s direction and save the Zionist dream of Theodor Herzl and Israel’s founders before it’s too late.