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There is a peculiar assumption embedded in the way some people discuss Jews who reject, under-appreciate, or disapprove of Israel — that these Jews’ feelings tell us something devastating about Israel or Zionism.
A Jewish person announces that they are “anti-Zionist,” and the announcement is presented as evidence against the legitimacy of Zionism and our Jewish state. Here, supposedly, is the witness whose testimony settles the argument.
But before accepting that conclusion, we should ask why the scrutiny travels in only one direction. Why does the Jewish person disavowing Israel get to interrogate an entire country while their understanding of Judaism escapes interrogation altogether?
Being Jewish does not automatically make someone’s arguments about Israel correct, historically informed, or morally serious. It does not turn the rejection of Jewish sovereignty into an expression of Jewish wisdom. And it certainly does not resolve the question that should be at the center of this conversation: What understanding of Judaism allows someone to regard the continued existence of a Jewish state as an offense against Judaism?
These questions came to mind when I read about the University of Michigan Hillel’s recent decision to end formal affiliations with Israel advocacy organizations. A student leader separately expressed concern about Hillel’s willingness to embrace Zionism.1
The move raises a question much larger than any affiliation agreement. What should it mean for a Jewish institution to concentrate on Jewish life and learning?
An institution can certainly operate without partnering with a particular advocacy organization. But if concentrating on Jewish life becomes a rationale for retreating from Israel and Zionism, something fundamental has gone wrong. For Jews, Israel and Zionism cannot be treated as an embarrassing interruption of the Jewish conversation when they are two of the reasons that conversation exists in the first place.
Open a traditional Jewish prayer book and try removing Jerusalem. Follow the instruction to turn toward the land of Israel in prayer, then explain why that direction is incidental. Read the prayers for Jerusalem’s restoration and ask whether the people who preserved them across generations were simply searching for an attractive metaphor. The Jewish relationship with that land was carried through worship, mourning, memory, and hope long before anyone had an Israeli government to defend or oppose.
None of this makes the inner day-to-day workings of a state sacred. Ancient attachment does not settle every moral, social, and political argument. It does, however, demolish the suggestion that Israel is something foreign which activists recently inserted into an otherwise unrelated religion. The connection precedes the controversy. Anyone proposing to remove it, in essence, is not Jewish.
We should also be precise about the accusation we make. A Jew does not stop being Jewish because they adopt a political position, and declaring otherwise lets the argument collapse into a fight over identity credentials.
The harder question concerns what they are doing with that identity. A person cannot remain Jewish while advancing an understanding of Judaism that strips away central obligations, attachments, and expressions of collective life. Their supposed Jewishness makes the criticism an urgent conversation within our own people.
Jewish opposition to Zionism has also taken different forms. Some ultra-Orthodox opposition rests on theological arguments about redemption and the timing of sovereignty, rather than a denial of the Jewish relationship with the land. That distinction matters because it exposes how inadequate the slogan “Judaism has nothing to do with Israel” really is. Even a religious argument against the modern state can be saturated with attachment to Zion. Flattening these differences into a fashionable declaration of separation does justice to neither Judaism nor history.
The conversation I want to have is with those who invoke their Jewishness to argue that Jewish sovereignty itself must end. I want to make a straightforward argument: It is impossible to be an “anti-Zionist Jew.” The two terms — “anti-Zionist” and “Jew” — are mutually exclusive. They have to pick a lane. If they want to be anti-Zionist, fine, I suppose, but then they are no longer Jewish. And if they want to be Jewish, then by definition they are also Zionist.
We should stop pretending that the disagreement is about Israel’s government or elected officials. No election can satisfy someone whose objection survives every possible electoral outcome. No policy concession can settle an argument in which the continued existence of Jewish sovereignty is itself the unacceptable policy. At that point, the demand is that Israel cease to be Israel, and the people making it should have the intellectual honesty to say so.
There is an enormous difference between wanting Israel to change and requiring Israel to disappear as the nation-state of the Jewish People. Demanding that Israelis surrender a foundational achievement of our collective existence is nonsense. Calling this “criticism of Israel” conceals the most consequential distinction in the entire discussion.
There is also something intellectually lazy about being “anti-Zionist” — as though Zionism has only ever meant one thing. Modern Zionism developed beginning in the 1800s through competing schools of thought. Advocates argued fiercely about what Jewish national renewal should accomplish.
Political Zionism, associated with Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century, emphasized securing an internationally recognized political home for the Jewish people. Cultural Zionism, associated with Ahad Ha’am, emphasized building a center of Hebrew culture, education, and intellectual life that could revitalize Jewish communities everywhere. Their disagreement concerned the foundations of a Jewish future: political security, cultural renewal, and how one could sustain the other.
Labor Zionism, which became a powerful force in the early 20th century, sought to build that future through physically demanding work, agriculture, collective settlement, and socialist institutions. Religious Zionism brought Torah and Jewish national restoration into conversation, but even within that tradition there were important differences.
Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines, who founded the Mizrachi movement in 1902, distinguished practical Zionist activity from messianic redemption; Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook gave the return to the land a profound redemptive significance. Revisionist Zionism, organized by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s, challenged the movement’s prevailing leadership and emphasized Jewish statehood, mass immigration, and the capacity for self-defense.
Zionism contained arguments about economics, religion, diplomacy, culture, and power long before today’s activists reduced it to an accusation.
These differences expose the poverty of an argument that treats “Zionist” as a complete description of someone’s politics or morality. A secular cultural Zionist and a religious Zionist may disagree profoundly about what makes Jewish life meaningful. A socialist Zionist and a Revisionist Zionist may disagree about how society should be organized.
You can enter those arguments, challenge their assumptions, and favor one tradition over another. But you cannot honestly collapse them into a single sinister doctrine and call that a sophisticated stance.
The “anti-Zionist Jews” who use Zionism as an all-purpose condemnation offer none of this nuance. Whatever distinctions they may recognize disappear when every expression of Jewish national attachment is treated as the same offense.
That is why the automatic deference to the phrase “as a Jew” needs to end. An account of Judaism that invokes some Jewish commitments while treating Israel and Zionism as morally suspect is profoundly non-Jewish. Concern for other issues or causes does not require negation or deletion of core tenets.
And so, the Jewish world should have no interest in coddling so-called “anti-Zionist Jews.” We should not acknowledge their beliefs or feelings. We should not indulge them or try to persuade them. Let them, first and foremost, demonstrate a commitment to Judaism and Jewishness, which inherently means a commitment to Israel and Zionism.
Jewish organizations and spaces should have clear principles as such. They should promote Jewish education that teaches Judaism and Israel as one and the same. They should want members, participants, and attendees to understand that Zionism is a prerequisite to being Jewish, just as Jewishness is a prerequisite to Zionism.
A Jewish institution should be able to welcome unengaged or confused Jews, challenge angry ones, and listen to a dissenting individual without becoming confused about its own commitments. Hospitality does not require institutional emptiness. There can be room for complex conversations alongside a clear conviction that there is no Judaism without Israel and vice versa.
But anyone who identifies as Jewish should unequivocally know: Judaism and Israel do not rise and fall with the approval of any one Jew. A Jew’s rejection of Israel tells us nothing about Israel, but it certainly tells us much about these people, the Jewish education they have (or have not) received, or the brainwashing they have suffered.
No individual Jew gets to define or redefine Judaism for whatever their rationale may be. Attempting to do so misses the entire point and purpose. Judaism is not Play-Doh. It is an inheritance, and with it comes an unmistakable bond with the Land of Israel.
If someone is Jewish, by default they are a Zionist. But if someone decides to identify as “anti-Zionist,” then they are not Jewish — and we should not be afraid to draw that line.
“Michigan Hillel’s break with Israel advocacy groups raises questions about where it stands.” Jewish Insider.
Thank you. This needed to be said.
I disagree with you, Josh. We should not be so worried about As-a-Jew AntiZionists being used by AntiSemite non-Jewish AntiZionists, that we excommunicate Jews who are AntiZionists, for this does the divisive work of the Jew-baiters for the Jew-baiters. Apart from this they are just wrong. Further, It has been said many times on this site that the connection of most Jews (but not all) with the land of Israel is through indigenous genetics. I was AntiZionist once. Then I proved the whole and current plot of today’s Nazis in the State against us, and I became a Zionist. As-a-Jews just need to be shown these facts. They will soon return, as I did.