
New Jewish Agenda history
Zionism is dying, before our very eyes. With every murder of every mother and child in Gaza, the flint chips off another piece of the stone.
I am a Jew, not a Zionist. The two are not synonymous. Judaism–its tradition, rituals, sacred texts–are crucial to my identity. Once, part of my Jewish identity was liberal Zionism: I believed in the vision of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state. But over the last two decades, I have come to understand the two cannot coexist; and that Israel is neither a democratic, nor a Jewish state (more on this below).
If Judaism as practiced in Israel represented the prophetic tradition of universalism and social justice, then perhaps it could be democratic as well. But it has never adhered to such values. Its national Original Sin was the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of 1-million indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. Now it perpetrates a genocide in Gaza. These can never be Jewish values. Any nation dedicated to the annihilation of another can never be “democratic.” Genocide is the antithesis of democracy.
My passion for our tradition derives from its life-affirming, uncompromising calls for social justice. As Isaiah cries: “loose the chains of evil, undo the bands of the yoke, let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke.” Today, it is Israel that Isaiah would denounce for oppressing the Palestinians and tying them with the evil chains of Occupation and ethnic cleansing.
Vivien Gornick’s Romance of American Communism explored the embrace by 1930s American radicals–in large part Jewish intellectuals and workers–of Marxism. A decade later, a different subset of American Jews commenced a decades-long romance with Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust,. For them, Zionism was the life-blood, the savior of the Jewish people. Israel became the beating heart of their Jewish identity.
But now, Jews must face the crimes that Israel is committing in our name. It is tragic when something you love becomes something you hate because it betrays the values you believed you shared. That is what has happened to Israel and we must face it–not deny it.
I grew up in a Conservative Jewish suburban home. Camp Ramah played a major role in developing my Jewish identity. The Jewish college students at the camp who taught us subjects like Buber’s I and Thou and Tanach (Bible), were also engaged in the anti-war movement at their universities. They were seeking to integrate their own Jewish identities with the social justice activism on their campuses. A number of them founded Boston’s Havurat Shalom, the forerunner of Havurah movement. Its tefilot included rapturous singing of Hasidic nigunim, study of sacred texts, with engagement with the local community through social justice projects. I went on the earn degrees at the Jewish Theological Seminary and UCLA; then studied Judaica at the Hebrew University for two years and became fluent in Hebrew.
While I lived in Israel I considered a life path that several of my fellow American students chose: to make aliyah. I could have enrolled in a PhD program at the University and completed my degree there. But two major factors influenced my decision: I knew I would have to serve in the army. As someone who was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and continued to have strong anti-war beliefs, I knew I could not do this. I also understood that while Israel (at that time in my life) held an attraction as the homeland of the Jewish people, personally it would be a very difficult transition: without family, without a circle of friends, and living through a foreign language, all would present barriers to fulfillment and happiness.
Later, I began working for the radical Jewish group, New Jewish Agenda (NJA). It played a formative role in the development of my political identity as a Jew. NJA was the first American Jewish organization to advocate for gay rights and a two-state solution. Both issues elicited ferocious resistance from the mainstream Jewish community. When chapters requested affiliation with local Jewish federations, they were rejected. Orthodox rabbis excommunicated them. Agenda offered us a home where we could live our values as Jews. It lessened the sense of alienation and offered comfort in the face of ostracism and hostility from the organized Jewish community.
In 2003, I launched Tikun Olam: blogging seemed a remarkable tool to democratize the media world. There were no gatekeepers. No need to prove the value of one’s writing or ideas to editors. Self-publishing was a revolution in media. It permitted unfettered expression of one’s ideas and direct access to an audience. It offered a means to transcend the loneliness of being a dissident, a stranger in a strange land.
Then, I began a career as an independent journalist. There are few publications that publish the mix of radical Jewish politics I offer. This was even more true of Jewish media outlets, who largely adopted either a liberal Zionist or far–right editorial line. It’s ironic that while the latter exclude radical Jewish voices, the Arab and left media world welcome my work.
Every time I learn of yet another dissenting Jew excluded or silenced, I invite yet another fellow dissident to join the ‘club’ I founded for radical Jews, the Spinoza Society, which welcomes all those those excommunicated from the community for their heterodox beliefs.
In the early days of Tikun Olam, I was one of the few progressive Jewish bloggers. I was then a liberal Zionist, who conceived of Israel as a liberal, humanist state. A light unto the nations. A representative of the best of Judaism. Over the years I realized, like someone in an abusive relationship, that what I wanted and what Israel wanted could never be reconciled. It became critical at that point, over the past decade, to renounce Zionism and become an anti-Zionist. Instead of a state of, by and for Jews, I came to understand Israel must become a state for all its citizens.

Jewish tradition–blemishes and all
Jews cannot shrink from the sins of our ancestors: Jacob cheating his older brother, Esau of his birthright or Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery, etc. The Bible even recounts God’s own cruelty, when ordering Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac; Abraham’s banishment of Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness. Also, God’s death sentence against King Saul, because he disobeyed His command, and spared Amalek.
The Book of Esther recounts a troubling story in which the Jews of Persia join in a frenzy of revenge that is essentially an act of genocide, wiping out Haman, all his sons, family and supporters: 75,000 in all according to the Biblical text. Another story portrays King David lusting after the wife of another man. In order to take her for his own, he sends her husband, Uzziah, into battle and certain death. Afterward, he is punished for his misdeeds.
These stories reveal the moral failures of our ancestors. They are not spared. Portrayals of these miscarriages are brutally candid. All of this–the good, righteous, and flawed–are part of who we are as Jews. In our quest for validation, Jews often dismiss these failings, instead of staring them in the face and learning lessons from them. In such cases, we are self-righteous instead of reflective.
Judaism has its heroes and villains, as does every other religious tradition. This is what makes us human. For every Einstein, Spinoza, Moses or Freud, there was a Kahane, Jabotinsky, Kissinger or Epstein. It is our responsibility as Jews to grapple with the whole tradition and forge a path toward righteousness.
Every nation and every religious tradition offers similar stories. Some even are odious, cruel or troubling. They test our faith, test our moral compass. Force us to question the inherent cruelty. To be troubled by it. Even to reject it. That is a tension and moral discomfort inherent in all of them.
Rather than attack the entire religion as anti-Semites do, it is important to critique our history and its heroes: to forge a path toward righteousness, acknowledging the flaws and turning away from them.
That is at the heart of the Jewish critique of Zionism as well.

Zionism: birth of a nation
D.W. Griffith’s classic film, The Birth of a Nation, depicted the Civil War as the birth of the American nation. In it, the heroes are the Ku Klux Klan. White supremacy, race hate, and lynching are lionized. Similarly, Zionism has led to the birth of a nation steeped in the same set of hatreds.
It was founded 125 years ago as a Jewish nationalist movement. It took hold first in central Europe, spurred by massive waves of anti-Semitic violence in Russia, and prevailing anti-Semitic attitudes among the continent’s ruling classes. Its founder was Theodor Herzl, a journalist and secular Hungarian Jew, who was shocked by the pogroms.
Nevertheless, he harbored anti-Semitic views towards his Eastern European brethren similar to those of non-Jews of the era: they recoiled at the poor, pious, bearded, ill-clothed Jew, backward or alien to polite society, These are similar hateful attitudes to those shared by Herzl, which fueled the violence.
Zionism, for Herzl, was an judgment that the primitive superstitions of Polish and Russian Jews were insurmountable obstacles to assimilation into European society. He believed their very existence in “civilized” Europe would further incite anti-Semitism throughout the continent. Herzl’s ambivalence, even distaste for them–while trying to save them–was an inherent contradiction.
Western European Jews, on the other hand, had successfully navigated this acculturation process since the Englightenment (Haskalah). Herzl believed that if Zionism could eliminate the stigma and presence of oppressed eastern European Jews, that his type of secular Jew could be fully assimilated into mainstream (non-Jewish) society.
Zionists disdained Diaspora Jews and rejected what it called “exile (shlilat ha’golah), declaring it a dead-end for Jewish existence. Zionism declared there was no safe or secure place for Jews in the world, except for their own state. Jews must depend on no one for their fate but themselves. Dependency on the non-Jew, could only lead to further victimization.
The necessity of political agency was a direct response to the slaughter of thousands of eastern European Jews in Russian and Ukrainian pogroms. Without political power to control its own destiny, the Jewish people–especially those in the Diaspora–were doomed. The Holocaust, which followed by half a century, was proof of this prophecy.
Spiritual Zionism and Brit Shalom: Alternatives to Statist Zionism
Almost from the beginning, there were two major Zionist strains, the nationalist and spiritual (or cultural) Zionists. Both centered the return of Jews to Zion . But the cultural Zionists, whose founder was Ahad Ha’Am (a pseudonym for Asher Ginsberg), envisioned Zion as a cultural-spiritual homeland. He didn’t necessarily view nationhood as a prerequisite.
Herzl and Ginsberg battled over their competing visions, each denouncing the other in long-running published fusillades. Ginsberg believed that a state could only derive from a return to, and embrace of Jewish spiritual and prophetic values. A state, in his view, was a not an end in itself. Rather, a state followed only from an ethical-spiritual Jewish renewal. Cultural Zionism suggested that Israel serve as a moral exemplar, a “light unto the nations.” He wrote: “Zionism, therefore, begins its work with political propaganda; Chibat Zion [“love of Zion”] begins with national culture…” His approach to the Zion-Diaspora dichotomy was not the either-or approach of Zionism. They both could co-exist and enrich each other.
A successor to Ginsberg’s cultural Zionism was Brit Shalom, founded in the 1925. It arose in opposition to Jabotinskyian Revisionism and its Iron Wall approach to the “Arab Question.” It suggested compromise and co-existence with the Palestinian majority; and supported a bi-national state: two peoples with equal rights within one land.
This contradicted Ben Gurion’s political Zionist agenda of a state by and for Jews alone. It also opposed the Zionist will to power: the notion that sovereignty and pursuit of national interests by force, were the sole means of ensuring Jewish existence.
In today’s headlines from Gaza, we see the consequence. A nation committing genocide in the misguided notion that eradicating another people is the only way to establish a secure Jewish state. The only legitimate response to an alleged existential threat. Just as Nietzsche was a precursor to Nazism, Zionism is a precursor to Gaza genocide.
Unfortunately, without a clear political agenda, and in the face of the Nazi genocide, Brit Shalom’s vision of tolerance and co-existence foundered against the rock of political Zionism. It disbanded formally in 1948.
Zionism’s fatal flaw

Political Zionism confronted an insurmountable obstacle. Palestine was already inhabited by another people. The centrality of sovereignty to Zionist ideology meant indigenous Palestinian Arabs were an alien force. They could not be absorbed as equals in this state. From the beginning, the founders of Zionist settlement understood this dilemma. They began preparing for what they euphemistically called “transfer.”
In 1948, Ben Gurion executed this policy in ethnically cleansing nearly 1-million indigenous Palestinians. As with Hitler’s plan to exterminate European Jewry, the Israeli leader left no definitive written record ordering what became know as the Nakba. After the Nuremberg trials, he saw what the world did to those committing crimes against humanity. Though there is other documentary evidence of Plan Dalet, Ben Gurion was careful not to leave his own fingerprints.
Nevertheless, 250,000 inidgenous Palestinians remained and their population has grown to 2.1-million today. The ethnic cleansing of 1948 was repeated in 1967, when 300,000 West Bank Palestinians were expelled to Jordan. The Nakba mentality is alive and well in today’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza, where Israel’s leaders have advocated expulsion of its 2.5-million inhabitants.
Donald Trump has now embraced the eliminationist rhetoric, advocating a Palestinerein Gaza. A people without a land, for a land empty of its people. In its place, a fairy tale playland for the wealthy; with sunny beaches and a brisk Mediterranean climate. A real estate moguls dream.
Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians and oppression of those who remain exposes a fatal flaw of Zionism. Israel, as Lincoln said, is a house divided against itself that ultimately cannot stand: privileged Jews vs. subordinated Palestinians. Many similar multi-ethnic states have collapsed into conflict and civil wars (Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Myanmar, etc.) in modern and ancient times. Ethnic conflict in many of these states has taken generations to reach the point of endangering their existence.
Israel is less than a century old. It has had a relatively short period of time to confront such demons. During that time, conflict (internal and external) has festered and transformed into multiple wars with multiple neighboring states (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, 2009, 2023). Israel is a perpetual-war, garrison state. Such political entities do not have long lives, due to instability and the necessity of perpetual violence to maintain cohesion.

Settlement movement and messianic triumphalism
After the 1967 War, Israel began a settlement enterprise based on territorial expansion and occupation. They are direct violations of international law (which Israel ignored). The Greater Israel movement combined both a nationalist and messianic religious vision. With the Ingathering of Exiles (kibutz galuyot), rebuilding of the Temple, and expulsion of non-Jews from the Land of Israel, its followers believed the coming of the messiah would be at hand. The particular strength of this movement was its integration of the political power of secular Zionism with the fervor of religious messianism. It ignored the dangerous history of combining religion and politics.
The settlement movement grew from a few impromptu settlements into a political juggernaut. Today, it controls all major levers of state power. As a result, Israel has become a state based on Judeo-supremacy: an ideology that has led almost directly to the current genocide in Gaza.
It has also inspired Israel’s militarization of the entire Middle East. The nation’s interest lies in permanent instability and conflict, which it exploits in pursuit of national interest. It needs a massive military force and an arsenal of nuclear weapons in order to enforce its will. Having such an army–ranked among the top 20 in the world–permits it to shun compromise with its neighbors. Why bargain when you can force your adversary to obey? Israel prefers coercion to diplomacy, which only adds to regional instability.
Diaspora is dying
In one sense, Zionism was right. The future of world Jewry is threatened. But its fate is endangered not by existing outside Zion, but by refusal to embrace its own Diasporic identity. Jewish communities have danced around the Golden Calf of Zionism, rather than develop a Judaism authentic to their own native lands (doykeit, or “hereness” in Yiddish).

It was not always thus. Until the Holocaust, Zionism was a minority movement within world Judaism. Before then, most European and American Jews lived fairly secure, stable lives in their homelands. They were proud of them and their integration into society. As a result, Jews were either neutral or actively opposed to Zionism. In addition, working class Jews in the European and American diasporas affiliated with the Bund and other socialist groups, rejected Zionism. It even divided some of the wealthiest European Jewish families such as the Montefiores and Rothschilds. Here Claude Montefiore explains his opposition:
Dr. Montefiore stated that…he will continue to be an anti-Zionist, because he refuses to share in a movement [Zionism] which fosters and stimulates ideals which he regards as dangerous and as a step backwards from the point of view of Jewish religious universalism…
Among the most vehement opponents of the Balfour Declaration in the British cabinet was a powerful Jewish minister, Edwin Montagu:
His greatest fear…was that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would lead to Jews being driven from their home countries.
In Poland and Russia, of course, circumstances were much more dire. Anti-Semitism was deeply rooted in many sectors of society. Pogroms and other forms of discrimination severely constricted Jewish life. Zionism was a response to this existential crisis.
Dangers of Israelism
In the American-Jewish diaspora, communal groups are largely allied with the Israel Lobby. Their major donors are older, white male pro-Israel billionaires: Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Bernard Marcus, Paul Singer, Arthur Danzig, Bill Ackman, Ronald Lauder, etc. The Jewish institutions they fund have become exclusionary rather than inclusive. They divide Jews into categories based on ideological convictions. They bar Jews who stray outside the narrow confines of pro-Israel consensus.
For example, in the 1980s as a graduate student, I participated in, taught and organized programming at Hillels at UC Berkeley and UCLA. Then, they were open welcoming places: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Zionist, anti-Zionist–all were welcome. Program activities were eclectic and diverse. There was no policing of speech. They were gathering places for anyone on campus who sought to participate in Jewish life. Everyone had a home and it made for a rich experience.
Today, Hillel has circled the wagons. It imposes a litmus test. You can only participate if you accept pro-Israel orthodoxy. You cannot support BDS. Programs must endorse a two-state solution. Anti-Zionism is forbidden. Today, Hillel and most other Jewish communal groups represent the closing of the American Jewish mind.
This approach endangers the long-term survival of Diaspora Jewry. The next generation will shun our synagogues. Hillels and Jewish community centers will be populated only with true believers. Students will lose interest in university Jewish studies programs, which will be rigidly pro-Israel, instead of filled with independent thinking and rigorous, contentious debate. It represents a sclerotic hardening of the Jewish arteries. A demand for conformity, and the constriction of thought.
Like the Diaspora, Israel too faces insurmountable obstacles. It may have what the Diaspora lacks–a sense of national and religious identity–but it rejects any long-term vision of its place within the region. It bases its existence on cowing its neighbors, rather than resolving conflict and reaching accommodation. Human history is replete with scores of states which refused to temper their ambitions and collapsed amid their internal contradictions. Israel promises to be one such example.
While diplomacy and compromise in pursuit of national interest are the tools of successful states, Israel uses them only when it suits its purpose, and only until it may resort to force to attain them. Its decline may not be immediate, but the handwriting is on the wall. Zionism has commenced a long terminal process with only one ultimate outcome, unless Israel transforms itself into a democratic state of all its citizens. At this point, that seems unlikely.
Judaism is not the problem
Judaism is the antidote to Zionism. Diaspora is the antidote to the land of Zion. From the inception of the Zionist movement, adherents declared that exile was an unnatural state. In order to exist within history, Jews must create their own sovereign state, where they control their own destiny. Diaspora meant pogroms, anti-Semitism, assimilation. Zionism meant power, ownership, mastery.
The early Zionists were almost entirely secular. They disdained Judaism as a fossil of exile, just as they rejected Yiddish as a bastardized language or “jargon.” But after the 1967 War, Zionism gradually turned away from secularism and toward a fundamentalist religious nationalism. The combination of political ideology and faith is an especially heady brew because it joins militarism and nationalism, with divine faith.
Settlerism now dominates the state, with the explicit support of the electorate. Triumphalism in Israel has become not just a Jewish value, but Judaism itself. These settlers are not merely Jews, but THE Jews: the ones, the divinely sanctioned ones who can bring the messiah. All others are either impostors or heretics. Anti-Zionist Jews should turn the tables and argue that it is the Judeo-Nazis and their genocidal ethnostate which are the Jewish impostors–the pagan worshippers of the idols of violence, oppression and mass murder.
Settler colonists have no room for non-Jews. Palestinians, even Israeli Palestinians citizens, have no place in this state. Israeli leaders call this “Nakba 2.0.” The eradication of an alien entity by any means necessary, in order to form a pure Jewish nation. This apes the racial purity obsession of the Nazis.
Israel is pursuing the annexation of all Palestinian lands into “Eretz Israel” to form a greater Israeli state. This unites expansionist nationalism with a divinely-mandated possession of all of Biblical Israel. As a historical example, Ben Gurion, on the eve of the 1948 War, cheered his generals on with visions of conquest of Syria, Lebanon and Egypt up to the Nile. Today’s expansionists claim its borders should reach as far as Damascus and Lebanon’s Litani River; that the beaches of Gaza today teeming with refugees, should be filled with gleaming villas and Israeli colonies (aka settlements). They have established new settlements on Lebanese territory. Theirs is a maximalist vision of the Israeli future.
It is the equivalent of Richard Spencer’s white nationalist state, which he proudly compared to Israel. He even calls himself a “white Zionist.” It is also reminiscent of Hitler’s lebensraum, which envisioned a greater Aryan empire, including Sudentenland, western Poland and Austria.
Dueling Judaisms
It’s critical to recognize two Judaisms. Two different religious conceptions. I call the first, “stones-and-bones.” The worship of land, sovereignty, religious shrines, and the bones of the martyrs. It is the Judaism of territorial conquest, religious supremacy and exceptionalism: Zionism as religious nationalism. It erases not only the Palestinians, but as the Zionist phrase shlilat ha-golah (“negation of Exile”) indicates–the Diaspora itself.
Then, there is Diaspora Judaism: a religion of accommodation, co-existence, compromise, and prophetic values. Instead of sacred land, soil or sites, it needs no specific place. For millennia, its followers have taken their heritage–like the ark carried on the Israelites’ journey through the desert–with them wherever they may live. They build synagogues wherever there are Jews. It is a democratized, decentralized concept of Jewish existence. There are no high priests, no holy Temple, no animal sacrifices. Instead, they offer prayers, not blood rituals; cries for justice instead of bowning down to High Priests and kings. Similarly, Zion becomes as much an allegory of redemption, as a physical place.
The Israeli religious conception is materialist, based on ownership of natural resources and political power. The Diaspora conception is spiritual. Religion conveyed through language, universalism and spirituality; inspired by the Biblical phrase: “not by power and not by might, but by My spirit.”
Diasporism was trampled by the Zionist juggernaut. Where once the Diaspora renounced Jewish nationalism, after the Holocaust most Jews embraced it. Zionism, in many quarters, replaced Judaism as the central defining quality of Jewishness. It became the new Jewish religion, as exemplified by one of the wealthiest American Zionists of his generation: Sheldon Adelson. Judaism meant nothing to him. Zionism was everything.
Genocide and disenchantment
If Diaspora Jews weren’t disenchanted with Zionism before 10/7, they have been afterward. Israelis too have voted with their feet: there was a 35% increase in the number of Israelis leaving Israel in 2024, compared to the prior year. For many of the emigrants personal, professional and family considerations superseded any commitment to their homeland and its founding ideology.
Gaza has disabused many that Israel can represent anything other than a criminal state: in religious terms, a chilul Ha’Shem, (“desecration of God’s name”). It has irrevocably sundered a connection, a sense of solidarity. Even those who retain a nostalgic bond must, at some point, reckon with what has been done in their name.
Israel does speak in our names, without our granting it permission to do so. This presumption renders us culpable, implicitly, for its crimes. That is why over the past few decades I abandoned liberal Zionism and become an anti-Zionist. To repurpose Irving Kristol’s quip: “a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality;” I am a liberal Zionist who has been mugged by Israeli reality.
The Gaza genocide, and Israel’s prior crimes (eg. Nakba, land and resource theft, illegal settlements) have increasingly alienated Diaspora from Israel. Israeli genocide and the world’s revulsion will sweep up world Jewry, which cannot be immune.
Zionism and anti-Semitism
Some Palestinians and their allies have judged Judaism itself as the source of these crimes. This premise endangers the lives of Jews everywhere. Those who blame the Jewish religion, unfortunately do not distinguish between Israel and Diaspora, nor between Zionism and Judaism. This phenomenon plays out on social media platforms, where some declare that Zionism represents “Jewish superiority.”
They further argue that the mainstream community overwhelmingly endorses Zionism. That it supports, implicitly or explicitly, Israel and its crimes. Additionally, the leading Israeli Lobby groups and other communal institutions exert maximum influence in Amerian society with their enormous wealth and conotrol of levers of political power. Thus, those on the anti-Zionist left argue they are correct in associating Judaism with Zionism.
As I wrote above, there is not one form of Judaism. There are many anti-Zionist Jews who reject the narrative of the mainstream. But who can blame those who conflate the two, when our co-religionists declare their allegiance to Israel and defend its genocide? And when Israel presumes to speak on behalf of all Jews.
Unfortunately, Israel and its apologists have created this conundrum: they conflate Judaism and Zionism, Jew and Israeli, religion and state, spirituality and power. For example, the IHRA “working definition” of anti-Semitism, adopted by numerous US states and foreign countries, exploits this. Instead of defining anti-Semitism as the hatred of Jews for being Jewish, it mistakenly defines criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism. It coyly offers a caveat that not all such criticism is anti-Semitic, without defining what is and what is not. This is a sly political trick which cows legitimate critics.
If we do not distinguish between religion and nationalism it leaves Jews, even anti-Zionist Jews, with no place in the Palestine solidarity movement. Denying us that place, only further weakens the intersectional power of the cause. If Jews are excluded for being Jewish, Israel apologists can tarnish such activism. Finally, it entraps some in a web of violent anti-Semitic rhetoric devised by white supremacists, who opportunistically embrace the Palestinian cause. That, in turn, leads to demonization of Jews and physical attacks against them.
Palestinians have suffered grievously over the past century under the yoke of Zionism. The pain is immense. The outrage is intense. Victims need to identify the perpetrators and hold them responsible: Zionism and Israel. Not Jews and Judaism.
Zionism presumes we are all believers. Given the Gaza tragedy, this conception is undergoing radical transformation. Tens of thousands of American Jews who once considered themselves Zionist, are not prepared to be accessories to mass murder. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and Jewish students on campuses like Columbia, UCLA, etc. participated proudly as Jews in the anti-war movement. For them, genocide is not, and cannot be a Jewish value. Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah would look with revulsion on what their homeland has become. We must be on the side of the Prophets, the better angels of our nature. Not on the side of the fundamentalists, who lead Israel to a historical dead end.
Zionism and its discontents

Israel has become a nation of death. It spills rivers of Palestinian, Lebanese and Iranian blood. In Isaiah, God urges Israel to be “a light unto the nations and My salvation to the ends of the earth.” Those sparks of light have been extinguished. Rather, Israel casts a veil of darkness to the ends of the earth. Jews owe no allegiance to it. In fact, we must divorce ourselves from it.
Anti-Zionism is a legitimate Jewish response to the crimes of Zionism. It divorces itself from Israel as a Judeo-supremacist state. It originates in a deep engagement with those suffering the same victimization as our Holocaust-era ancestors. It offers empathy for Palestinians. It expresses a Jewish obligation to fight against such oppression, and free Palestinians from the yoke of their oppressor; to restore their humanity, dignity and rights. It is reparation for crimes committed in Judaism’s name by those who desecrate it. While this is a human obligation, it is equally a Jewish one.
Diaspora Judaism must sever any connection with Israeli messianic fundamentalism. It must develop traditions and rituals authentic to lived experience in the Diaspora, and separate from Israel. These include art, language, ritual, liturgy, prayer and education. Jewish organizations must offer, for example, programming and summer camp experiences which inculcate these values. Undergirding that, should be a spirit of joy and creativity, an appreciation for traditions representing the best and most life-affirming Jewish values.
Diasporism must shun the violence and hatred inherent in Israel and Zionism. If Judaism is to survive, the Diaspora must supersede them.
I just want to express my appreciation for your work and your commitment to integrity in this moment (and past ones). Thank you, Richard. I hope this piece helps many fence-sitting Jews to awaken to the urgent need for anti-Zionism.
@Patrick: Thanks so much for your kinds words & support!
Thank you Richard … very much appreciated.
Darkest clouds are yet gathering over Washington DC …. Manifest Destiny and another genocide.
Kol ha’kovod – ( a phrase I haven’t uttered or writ in 33 years- since my first marriage ended – she was Israeli- anyway it certainly has been a journey and I’m greatly embarrassed that it has taken me so long to face facts (& myself)- Perhaps someone can organize a ZA- Zionists Anonymous- everytime I get an urge to rethink the two-state solution I can make a call..)
@steven wise:
Thanks for the laugh.
Thanks Richard.
You are exactly correct that we must choose between Israel representing repression and the Jewish diaspora representing humanity. You said it well in one sentence, “Diasporism must shun the violence and hatred inherent in Israel and Zionism.”
Is there no hope of a revival of cultural Zionism?
Besides the hatred, meanness and violence amongst the Zionists, an almost complete lack of empathy ( mainly for the other ) is prevelant amongst them. An attitude of us or them prevails.
This is an outstanding piece, Richard. I am going to share it far and wide.
In universal solidarity,
Sid Shniad
Founding member
Independent Jewish Voices Canada
http://www.ijvcanada.org
@Sid: thank you. Love IJV.
Excellent piece. Thank you so much for being nuanced, reflective, and honest at this very dark time in our world. My sincere hope is that Zionism is finally unveiled for all of us now and rejected outright by a swelling wave of compassionate humans who want better for ALL human beings.
‘a Jewish Journey to Anti-Zionism’
If you could speed up the journey, it would save quite a few lives.
I’m a secular Christian who grew up in a welcoming community with a significant Jewish population. It causes me great pain to see the expansive view of Judaism supplanted by a narrow view of a Zionist Israeli state,
”I’ve got a bright idea 💡.” — Trump 2.0
Forced displacement to ensure an end to genocide of Palestinians.
Denmark to Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
Launches campaign to add legislation under constitutional law ..
UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese gives a press conference at the UN City in Copenhagen, Denmark February 5. — Reuters
Trump’s ‘immoral’ Gaza plan includes ‘international crime’: UN’s Albanese.
Albanese added: “Don’t call Gazans “refugees” … they are Nakba survivors. “ 💪🏽