Jewish anti-Zionism is really about rejection and vulnerability.

The most revealing part of Jewish anti-Zionism is not what it opposes, but what it is trying to escape.

You cannot be an “occupier” in your ancestral homeland. (photo by Nikolas Gannon/Unsplash)

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There is a peculiar kind of Jewish anti-Zionism that has always fascinated me.

I do not mean the person who criticizes an Israeli government, objects to a war, opposes settlements, dislikes a particular politician, or believes Israel has made catastrophic mistakes. None of those things require rejecting Zionism. Israelis themselves spend an extraordinary amount of time doing all of the above.

I mean something more intimate. I mean the Jew who seems to need Israel to become emotionally distant from Judaism itself.

The Jew who insists that Jewishness is a religion but not a peoplehood; an ethical tradition but not a civilization; a collection of texts but not a history tied to a particular land. The Jew who is comfortable inheriting the prophetic tradition but uncomfortable inheriting Jerusalem. Who will accept thousands of years of Jewish suffering as part of the Jewish story, but becomes uneasy when that suffering produces Jewish sovereignty.

There is something psychologically recognizable in this posture even if we never give it a psychological name. It is the instinct to protect yourself from something important by convincing yourself that it was never important in the first place.

We do this in relationships all the time. When attachment becomes dangerous, distance becomes attractive. If loving someone gives that person the power to hurt you, one solution is to love carefully.

Another is to begin constructing an argument for why you never needed them. You notice every flaw. You magnify every disappointment. You reinterpret intimacy as dependence. You take what once felt precious and begin treating it as embarrassing.

Eventually, if you are successful enough at this process, you can convince yourself that separation is not loss. It is liberation.

Something similar can happen with Jews and Israel — because Israel is not an easy thing to love. It is noisy, exhausting, complicated, and permanently exposed to judgment.

It makes decisions Jews around the world seemingly have to defend, explain, condemn, or simply live with. Its wars become conversations at Western dinner tables. Its politicians become arguments between Jewish friends. Its existence places Jews inside history in a way that the comfortable abstraction of “Jewish values” does not.

Israel can embarrass you. Israel can frighten you. Israel can make you unpopular. Israel can force you to answer questions you never volunteered to answer. And perhaps most painfully, Israel can remind you that the Jewish story is not entirely under your control.

For some Jews, the safest response is distance. Not merely criticism, but disidentification. If Israel is just another foreign country, then what happens there does not implicate me. If Zionism was merely a 19th-century political ideology, then I have no inherited relationship to it. If Jews are only a faith community, then Jerusalem becomes spiritually interesting but nationally irrelevant. If Jewish history in the land can be turned into mythology, colonialism or ancient trivia, then I am free from the emotional burden of belonging to it.

The distance feels like independence, but sometimes what looks like independence is simply a sophisticated way of making sure nothing has enough claim on you to hurt you.

That is why the most revealing sentence in Jewish anti-Zionist discourse is often some variation of: “Israel does not represent me.” Taken literally, of course, this is unobjectionable. No country represents every member of a global people. But emotionally, the sentence sometimes seems to mean something else: Do not hold me responsible for those people. Do not associate me with them. Do not make their fate part of mine.

It is less a political argument than a declaration of separation — and separation has advantages.

The Jew who distances himself from Israel can sometimes obtain something the Zionist Jew cannot: conditional admission into certain social worlds. You may remain Jewish, provided your Judaism asks nothing politically inconvenient of anyone else. Bring the food. Bring the humor. Bring the Holocaust memory. Bring the poetry of exile. Bring “tikkun olam.” Bring your grandmother’s recipes. Just leave sovereignty at the door.

You may commemorate Jewish vulnerability. You simply may not insist upon Jewish power.

There is an irony here worth noticing: For 2,000 years, Jews were frequently told that they were foreigners wherever they lived. Then Zionism emerged and said: Jews are not merely a religious minority wandering among other nations. We are also a people with a language, a history, a civilization and an ancestral homeland.

Some Jews today have responded by running in the opposite direction. We are not a nation. We are not a people in the political sense. The land is not ours. Israel is not us. Nothing binds me to those Jews beyond whatever universal ethics I independently choose to endorse.

And the reward for this renunciation can be powerful: approval, belonging, relief.

You no longer have to defend an imperfect country. You no longer have to explain Israeli fear. You no longer have to wrestle with Jewish power. Most importantly, perhaps, you no longer have to experience Israel as something whose destruction would constitute a personal loss.

Because caring creates vulnerability. If Israel is part of the Jewish story, then October 7th is not merely foreign news. If Israelis are part of your people, then their terror enters your emotional household. If the Jewish homeland matters to you, then the possibility of its disappearance is unbearable.

Distance solves this problem beautifully. Nothing can be taken from you once you have declared that it was never yours.

There is another recognizable pattern in human relationships: Sometimes the person who fears being rejected tries to reject first. If I leave you before you leave me, I retain control over the ending. If I announce that I never needed you, I never have to discover whether you would have stayed. There are moments when Jewish anti-Zionism seems to contain a civilizational version of this instinct.

For centuries Jews were told: You do not belong here. Your people are suspect. Your loyalties are divided. Your traditions are primitive. Your existence is inconvenient.

Modern Jewish history offered one response: We will stop asking permission to exist. But another response remains available: I will prove that I am different from those Jews you dislike. I will condemn them before you ask me to. I will demonstrate that my Jewishness threatens nothing. I will sever myself from the part of Jewish identity you find objectionable. I will reject them before you reject me.

This is why some forms of anti-Zionist Jewish performance can feel strangely theatrical. The condemnation is rarely sufficient; it must be conspicuous. The speaker does not merely criticize Israel; he emphasizes his Jewishness while doing so — “as a Jew.”

The phrase becomes a kind of social credential. It tells the audience: I have standing to condemn these people. But it sometimes communicates something more poignant: Please understand that I am not one of those Jews.

And history should make Jews especially cautious about bargains built upon that sentence. None of this means every anti-Zionist Jew secretly loves Israel. Human beings are more complicated than metaphors, and political convictions can be sincerely held, but metaphors become useful when they illuminate patterns arguments alone do not explain.

And one pattern is difficult to miss: A person can distance himself from something because he does not care about it, but he can also distance himself because he cares about it too much, because it demands too much, because belonging to it exposes him to too much uncertainty, conflict, and pain.

Israel is an extraordinarily demanding object of Jewish attachment. It asks Jews to live with contradiction: ancient homeland and modern state, refuge and military power, victimhood and responsibility, religious meaning and secular politics, Jewish particularism and universal democracy, triumph and trauma. There is no emotionally tidy way to hold all of that.

Zionism does not offer Jews purity. It offers Jews responsibility. And responsibility is much harder.

The easiest relationship with Israel is therefore neither love nor hatred. It is detachment. Israel becomes something other Jews care about, something Israelis can deal with, something the world can judge, something from which I remain safely outside.

But Jewish history keeps intruding upon that neat separation. The Hebrew language keeps pointing east. The prayers keep mentioning Jerusalem. The holidays keep following an agricultural calendar born in the Land of Israel. Passover ends with Jerusalem. Jewish weddings break a glass in memory of Jerusalem. Jews face Jerusalem when they pray. The Bible stubbornly refuses to take place in Brooklyn.

Even the word “diaspora” becomes incoherent without somewhere from which a people was dispersed.

Israel is difficult to remove from Judaism because Israel was not merely stapled onto Judaism in 1948. Long before there was a modern Israeli government to criticize, Jews were carrying the land around in their liturgy, memory, and imagination — which means the attempt to completely separate Jewishness from Israel requires more than rejecting a state. It requires editing a civilization.

And perhaps that is why the argument becomes so intense. Because beneath the politics is a question much older and more personal: What am I allowed to belong to? Belonging is dangerous. It limits us. It embarrasses us. It implicates us in people we did not choose. To belong to a family is to inherit relatives you would not have selected. To belong to a people is to inherit history you did not author.

And to belong to the Jewish People is to inherit Israel as a central fact of Jewish civilization.

You do not have to approve of your family to recognize that it is your family. You do not have to romanticize your inheritance to admit that you inherited it. Maturity does not require pretending the people we love are flawless. It requires remaining capable of relationship after discovering that they are not.

That may ultimately be the difference between criticism and repudiation. Criticism says: “You are mine, and therefore what you do matters to me.” Repudiation says: “You must stop being mine so that what you do can no longer wound me.”

One is the language of a difficult relationship. The other is the language of escape.

And perhaps the deepest challenge facing Jews who struggle with Israel is whether Jewish belonging can survive disappointment; whether we can remain attached without becoming uncritical; whether we can condemn without abandoning; whether we can acknowledge imperfection without turning imperfection into proof that the relationship itself was a mistake.

There is something deeply human about wanting to escape anything capable of breaking our hearts, but the things capable of breaking our hearts are often the things to which we belong most deeply.

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