Anti-Zionism has an important Jewish history
JVL Introduction
Moser’s new book is not a meticulous history of the anti-Zionist movement but rather stories of twelve people who opposed, sometimes came to oppose, the Zionism with which they were confronted – and the price many paid for that. Some of the stories are from before but most from after the Nazi Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel.
Moser read Herzl’s writings that had belonged to his father and found humself shocked by the levels of antisemitism and megalomania and for whom the “Palestinians simply did not occur”.
In the book’s introduction, Moser is clear about its limits, saying: “Though this book is necessarily about Jews, it exists only because of Palestinians.” At the close of the introduction, he expresses the hope that those who encounter this tradition will “shed the solipsism that has ever been a fault of the Jews” and place “the real victims of Zionism, the Palestinian people, at the heart of all they do.”
From De Haan murdered on a Jerusalem street in 1925, to the determined misrepresentation of what Hannah Arendt was writing in Eichman in Jeruslam, there is much to learn even from this review.
This article was originally published by +972 Magazine on Tue 22 Sep 2026. Read the original here.
A restored history of Jewish anti-Zionism — and the loss it cannot repair
Benjamin Moser’s new book recovers a tradition of dissenters who paid a price for opposing Palestinian dispossession, even as they could not prevent it.
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Thank you so much for this. I’m listening to it right now on Spotify, read by the author. Compelling indeed. I have already recommended it to someone on another group who, after I posted the date for a showing of Naza, warned others that ‘the creators of this film are zionists. Don’t support their whitewashing’!
Anti-Zionism is longstanding; it is justified by events; it is not anti-semitism.
Coincidentally contrived Labour and Conservative outrage altogether stinks.
Informative and thoughtful review
As a historical reference to the seemingly excellent writing of Benjamin Moser’s new book I suggest reading Tony Greensteins ‘Zionism During The Holocaust’
While Moser’s material is anecdotal by nature, Greenstein’s is an analysis of voluminous original source documents on the persecution of integrated European Jewry by the Zionist elite and their cozy relationship with upper echelons of the Third Reich.
It is probably the most disturbing book I have ever read in that it totally demolishes any last doubt about the nature and intent of current day Zionism in Israel.
The JVL review is interesting in itself: https://jewishvoiceforliberation.org.uk/article/andrew-hornung-reviews-tony-greensteins-book/
Interesting topic. I have the following questions;
First, did the Arabs have the right to resist the settling of Jews in Palestine on any terms? While Palestine was not a land without a people, it was a land that could accommodate that fraction of the Jewish people who wanted to settle there. There was more than enough room for both Arabs and Jews.
Second, given that Palestinians seems to specifically say no to a Jewish state, are we really to believe that they are anti-colonial, or just plan old antisemitic ?