The Painful Tragedy of Jews Who Reject Zionism

Why on earth should we abandon the only collective project that has ever guaranteed our survival?

photo: Nikolas Gannon/Unsplash

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay by Samuel J. Hyde, a Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

Jewish anti-Zionism should not be mistaken, in historical terms, for the anti-Zionist movement that fills the streets today.

It is true that anti-Zionist Jews now labor within this formation, drawn by what they take to be a fundamental alignment of principles, above all the rejection of a Jewish state. Yet for the purposes of this work, we must hold to the origins of this distinction and turn instead to the two strands that shaped Jewish anti-Zionist thought in its earlier and more solitary form.

There are moments in history when a people stands before its own reflection and discovers that the face staring back is both familiar and strange. The Jews of the modern age have lived through such moments more than once. They have known the torment of exile and the promises of emancipation, the seductions of universal salvation and the severe demands of God. They have carried these burdens without any guarantee, in a world that rarely remembers the debts it owes them.

It is from this long and unsettled encounter between a people and its fate that Jewish anti-Zionism takes shape. It does not arise from outsiders but from those who bear the same wounds, who breathe the same memory of wandering, and yet draw contrary conclusions from a shared past.

To oppose Zionism from within the Jewish world, before the establishment of the state, could still be regarded as a position with a measure of reason behind it. But once the state became reality, to persist in that refusal is to suggest that the 20th century has taught nothing, that history offers no lesson except loyalty to doctrines or dreams that cannot provide shelter when darkness returns.

The first current of Jewish anti-Zionism speaks in the language of centuries. It teaches that sovereignty over the Land of Israel belongs not to this world, but to the one that will come. It invokes ancient oaths, whispered in exile, insisting that Jews must not ascend too quickly, must not rebel too boldly, and must not claim for themselves what only God may bestow.

Within this tradition, the Jewish People must wait. They must live inside the rhythm of divine time. They must shoulder the burdens of the present world without attempting to alter their conditions. Redemption will arrive, but only when heaven declares it so.

At first glance, this seems like a position of humility. Yet difficulty arises when such a view is forced to confront the simple, stubborn fact of existence. The State of Israel is not a prophecy or a symbol; it is a country. It has roads and graves and children who wake each morning to the sounds of their own language. It has judges who deliberate, farmers who plant trees in soil prepared by their grandparents, and soldiers who bleed.

To deny such a state because the messiah has not come is to deny the world as it is. It is to declare that reality itself has erred. One may protest injustice or misfortune, but one cannot quarrel with the existence of what already stands before him. If a tree grows, it has roots. If a state exists, it has a history. The religious anti-Zionist rejects this. He demands that the tree be uprooted because it sprouted before the appointed hour.

There is something almost absurd in this refusal. It is the familiar contradiction that appears whenever doctrine confronts life. The world has turned, yet theology remains fixed, unwilling to reconsider the terms it once set. And so, one may ask whether this position truly rests in the ancient foundations of the faith? It does not. It is a post-exilic inheritance. It is not biblical, and emerges strongly in medieval/early modern rabbinic literature.

For centuries, Jews survived by adapting to powerlessness. They transformed necessity into virtue, spiritualizing their condition and elevating exile into a kind of moral stance: humility before God and distance from the corruptions of nations.

But powerlessness is not a virtue; it is a condition that history exploits. This, the religious anti-Zionist cannot accept. For him, Jewish power disrupts the cosmic order he believes to be eternal. Yet that order has already been shattered by the very history that brought the Jewish People to the edge of annihilation.

There is a quieter contradiction living alongside this. There are those who denounce the state’s legitimacy and yet reside within its borders, sheltered by its protections. They rely on its hospitals, its ambulances, its roads, and the unseen vigilance of its soldiers. These soldiers are their own peoples sons, defending those who call them “rebels against God.”

The irony cannot be missed: The religious anti-Zionist lives inside a reality he rejects and benefits from a sovereignty he condemns, accepting its gifts while refusing its premise. This is not fidelity to Judaism; it is a way of avoiding responsibility.

The argument against this form of anti-Zionism is therefore simple and tragic: It rejects the world that exists in the name of a world imagined, it refuses the responsibility demanded by the present, while clinging to the comfort of divine timing, indifferent to the centuries of suffering endured while waiting for God to intervene. If God exists, and if He is all-knowing and all-powerful, then to deny this reality is not to honor Him, but to flee from the world He has allowed to unfold.

The second strand of Jewish anti-Zionism is likewise older than the state and carries a more tragic weight. It rests on the belief that Jewish particularism is nothing more than a burden, and that acceptance in the wider world requires the erasure of peoplehood itself. If antisemitism is thought to arise from what makes the Jew distinct, then let that distinction be dissolved. Let the Jew fade into humanity at large, indistinguishable, unthreatening, and therefore safe.

This dream was born in the Enlightenment, in an age that promised reason, equality, and universal belonging. It told Jews that if they released their ancient hope of returning to Zion, if they loosened the ties of memory and peoplehood, they would at last be welcomed as full participants in human progress. It was a noble dream. Yet noble dreams often falter when they meet the limits of human behavior.

The Jews embraced the promises of universalism with unmatched devotion. They threw themselves into the republic, socialism, liberalism, and internationalism. They believed that reason could dissolve prejudice and that a brotherhood of humanity was within reach. But each promise collapsed at the precise point where it mattered most.

History offers many examples of Jews who placed their trust in universal salvation:

• German Reform Jews, who believed Berlin was their Jerusalem and learned instead that they were strangers in the heart of the fatherland

• Bundists, who believed socialism would dissolve antisemitism and were murdered in the very streets where they preached international fraternity

• Soviet Jewish revolutionaries, who trusted the revolution and were purged by the revolution

• Post-colonial Jewish radicals, who believed anti-imperialism would bring justice but found instead new accusations, new erasures, and new hatreds

The universalist fears Jewish nationalism. He believes and perhaps even sees it provokes resentment, and he concludes that Jews must earn tolerance through disappearance rather than presence. But this belief contains its own heartbreak, since it asked the Jew to abandon himself in order to be loved. And love purchased at such a price is never love at all; it is prostitution.

To demand the undoing of a state in the name of abstract universalism is to forget what generations paid to keep their memory alive. It is to believe that justice is automatic, that history bends toward kindness, that human beings will honor principles even when those principles contradict their interests or their hatreds. It is a faith more naïve than the theological strand.

Jewish anti-Zionism, in both its theological and universalist forms, represents a refusal to bear the weight of existence. The religious anti-Zionist cannot accept a world in which Jews shape their own destiny; the universalist cannot accept a world in which difference requires protection rather than dissolution. Both imagine a world simpler than the one that exists. Both cling to ideas that collapse upon contact.

But the central case against Jewish anti-Zionism is this: The anti-Zionist Jew demands that Zionists justify themselves. They insist that the existence of a Jewish state requires an elaborate defense, that sovereignty itself must stand before the tribunal of history and seek permission to go on living. And yet, the more one looks at this demand, the more it becomes clear that the burden of proof lies elsewhere.

Zionism did something unmistakable: It built.

It built institutions, schools, a civil society, a press, a labor movement, political parties, a language resurrected from ancient pages into the speech of children. It built a refuge at the one moment in history when refuge meant the difference between life and death. It built a democratic state in a region where democracy was not the prevailing fashion. It built a home for a people who had been told for centuries that no home was theirs.

And so the question cannot be, “Can Zionism justify itself?” The historical record already offers its justification in concrete, steel, and human breath. The question must be turned around: What has Jewish anti-Zionism built? What institutions has it forged? What safety has it secured? What future has it offered to Jews anywhere on Earth? It has built nothing! Nothing except an argument, a negation, sometimes a moral vanity dressed up as prophetic anguish. It has offered no shelter and no means by which a people might survive the next storm.

The burden of proof then falls, inevitably and heavily, on the anti-Zionists. They must explain why the Jews should abandon the only collective project that has ever guaranteed their survival, and place their hopes once again in the hands of a world that has never earned such trust.

In the end, the case against Jewish anti-Zionism is not ideological; it rests on a clarity that comes only after one has looked steadily at suffering and refused to be consoled by abstractions. To contemplate the long record of Jewish existence is to see that faith without action has never been enough to protect the living. Life has to be more than the purity of principle.

This is the ground on which the argument rests: not an assertion of ideology over ideology, but a refusal to ignore experience. It is the recognition that genuine responsibility begins with lucidity, with the acceptance of limits, and with the willingness to meet reality as it is rather than as one wishes it to be.

---