Бенжамин Мозер: Сионизмын эсрэг үзэл нь еврейчүүдийн түүхэн дэх нуугдмал уламжлал юм

In 1987, the Israeli human rights attorney Felicia Langer was paying a visit to the Neve Tirza women’s prison when a client named Siham shared some disturbing news: the prisoners held there had recently been sprayed with a chemical agent that left them writhing on the floor. Langer grabbed a tissue that had been exposed to the substance – a piece of evidence, perhaps, in a future legal case. Then, on impulse, she lifted it to her face and inhaled deeply. Her hope, she wrote later, was that doing so might enable a doctor to identify the toxin.

This anecdote appears in Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, by Benjamin Moser. In it, the Pulitzer prize-winning author profiles a dozen Jews who actively opposed Zionism, before and after the establishment of Israel – from Aaron Samuel Tamares, a Polish rabbi who began inveighing against Jewish nationalism in the late 19th century; to British diplomat Edwin Montagu, who sought to derail the 1917 Balfour declaration promising a Jewish state in Palestine; to Israeli “new historian” Avi Shlaim – figures he sees as part of “a hidden tradition … of people who, though long dismissed and despised, were ultimately proven right”. Along the way, he seeks to dismantle the Zionist “fairytale,” as he puts it, piece by piece.

Langer’s heedless act made her ill but failed to provide the evidence she’d hoped for. It serves as a haunting analogy, however, for Moser’s own work of historical inquiry-slash-self-purification. Having been raised on what he considers a false narrative of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and therefore at risk of moral complicity in an apparent genocide, Moser now proposes to expose himself and his readers to a counter-narrative, however uncomfortable – Siham’s tissue as written history.

Of course, Zionism is a complex and multilayered subject, more hotly contested today than ever before. Where some see a movement of liberation and self-preservation, a principled, heroic response to centuries of oppression and near annihilation, others see a ruthless campaign of land theft, violent dispossession and genocide. Moser, having been raised with the former analysis, now embraces the latter with the defiant fervor of a new convert.

When asked during a recent interview in Brooklyn what had changed his mind, the author replied with characteristic brashness: “I didn’t understand the settler-colonialist element – that a group of foreigners sponsored by imperialist powers with bayonets had come into this country that was 95% to 97% non-Jewish and just said: ‘Everybody, fuck off.’”

This is not, to be clear, the consensus view (early Zionist immigrants to Palestine were mostly unarmed refugees fleeing pogroms). And anti-Zionism occasionally indulges in a similarly essentializing style. While the book is, as its subtitle has it, a work of history, it is also an impassioned act of soul-searching and, in places, a blunt polemic. This makes for an awkward combination, one that sometimes sacrifices objectivity on the altar of moral catharsis. Asked by Piers Morgan to respond to a critic who’d faulted his book for being overly simplistic, Moser cheerfully embraced the assessment: “I do think it’s black and white!” he declared of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Anti-Zionism appears at a difficult juncture for the pro-Palestine movement, in which polarizing rhetoric and recrimination have become increasingly commonplace as Israel’s killing in Gaza continues. (See, for example, the UK Green Party’s declaration that Zionism is racism, the jeering of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani for attending a 7 October vigil and an increasing willingness to defend the massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel as a legitimate response to oppression.) For some, even to suggest that not all Zionists favor ethnic cleansing, Jewish supremacy and the obstruction of Palestinian self-determination smacks of equivocation in the face of mass murder.

Moser’s book has given rise to considerable pushback for embodying that vehemence. Critics in the New Yorker, the New York Times and other influential outlets have taken issue with his portrayal of Zionism as fundamentally malevolent – and Palestinians as essentially blameless – and some have made note of factual inaccuracies.

The author seems unfazed, chalking up the critical reviews to politics. “A lot of the people who are coming for me now, who are they? They’re liberal Zionists,” he insisted. “Because what I say is: the whole thing from the very beginning was rubbish. It was a terrible idea. Israel is not something with problems. It is a problem.”

The grandson of Holocaust survivors, Moser, a lanky 50-year-old, was raised in the Reform tradition in Houston, Texas, and rarely questioned the basic tenets of liberal Zionism: that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was a meritorious answer to centuries of victimization, that Israel represented a stronghold of democracy surrounded by hostile neighbors and that Arab recalcitrance was the primary obstacle to a peaceful two-state solution. “The idea of rebuilding a persecuted people in the land from which, millennia before, they had been exiled,” he writes in Anti-Zionism, “appealed to my sense of romance, and of justice … And so, though I was dis’appointed by Israel, Zionism remained, in my mind, something pure.”

A turning point occurred in the summer of 2016, when Moser accepted an invitation to speak about his acclaimed biography of the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector at the Palestine festival of literature. PalFest, as it’s known, is not simply a literary event; attendees tour the West Bank, meet Palestinian counterparts and absorb the grim brutality of the occupation up close. While walking down an eerily quiet street in Hebron, a West Bank city where Palestinians must contend with severe restrictions on their movement and constant settler abuse, Moser found himself overwhelmed by what seemed to him a terrible injustice. (The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his recent book The Message, described a similar awakening in Hebron.) “I’m from Houston,” Moser said, but “I could walk down the street in this city where people whose families have lived there for thousands or hundreds of years were literally not allowed.”

Aside from detailing the experience in a 2021 Substack post, Moser largely kept his growing misgivings about Israel to himself until last year, when he published a fiery personal essay in the inaugural issue of Equator magazine, a bracing attempt to reconcile the Zionism of his youth with the grotesque civilian suffering imposed on Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October assault. The piece prompted “a huge reaction, probably more than anything I’ve ever written, all positive”, Moser said. It will be anthologized in the forthcoming edition of The Best American Essays.

“I thought, we have to write about how Jews are not on board with this,” he told me. In the essay Moser reserves special vitriol for American Jewish leaders, who as he puts it, “were happy to sacrifice our civil liberties, our free press, our judiciary, our foreign relations, to sustain the killing” in Gaza.

To tell the stories of these 12 apostates, and do so with such obvious affection – he calls such figures “the moral aristocracy of Jewish people” – is in some fundamental sense to join their circle, and to thereby knowingly invite the same calumny that rained upon each one in turn.

Moser has a lot to lose. He achieved wunderkind status in his early 30s with his Lispector biography, and was then offered the career-making opportunity to become the authorized biographer of intellectual titan Susan Sontag, a project he pursued with great zeal, conducting hundreds of interviews and nabbing the Pulitzer for the resulting 800-plus page monolith. More recently he published The Upside Down World, a collection of essays on Rembrandt, Vermeer and other Dutch masters. He has, to all appearances, won the literary lottery: when not traveling the world to research his books, he lives in the Netherlands and with his partner, Dutch novelist Arthur Japin, occasionally decamping to a charming tumbledown country house in southwestern France.

Why then take the risk of swatting at the most polarizing of geopolitical hornets nests?

“I think that at a time of genocide, you can either sit on the sidelines and exempt yourself from criticism and think that makes you feel safe,” he said, “or you can, as they say in Brazil, give your face to be beaten.”

The first blow came from the New Yorker, to which Moser has contributed a handful of pieces. Isaac Chotiner, who plainly shares Moser’s queasiness around Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza, wrote a review of the book that was blistering, to say the least, deeming Moser’s “approach to facts … slovenly to the point of reckless”.

Chotiner focuses his critique on the book’s treatment of what Moser calls the “third rail” of Holocaust studies – the ways in which Zionist leaders found ways to cooperate with the Third Reich. “Did the Zionist movement benefit from the Holocaust?” Moser asked during our interview. “A lot of historians disagree, and a lot agree. I have my viewpoint, which I make very clear.”

Moser introduces this idea by outlining the shockingly anti-Jewish views of several prominent Zionists, including the movement’s founder, Theodor Herzl, who predicted that “The antisemites will become our most dependable friends,” and himself showed a penchant for classic antisemitic tropes, deploying a 17th-century antisemitic slur, “Mauschel,” to describe Jewish anti-Zionists. “We are a nation of hagglers and crooks,” Herzl wrote, “because Mauschel proliferates and plays stock market tricks.”

But Chotiner makes a compelling case that Moser’s attachment to this theme leads him to misrepresent several important facts. In particular, Moser’s book points to several articles in the Zionist press that appear to whitewash Nazi atrocities or advocate Jewish compliance, which Chotiner demonstrates do no such thing when presented with more context.

One can grant the validity of such objections, however, while also acknowledging the virtue of Moser’s larger project: a searching, vivid frontal assault on an ideology that is now fueling one of the greatest atrocities of our time. “It’s just like, people are getting killed every day,” Moser said with a long sigh. “And they want to fight with you about your footnotes. Then they want to attack you personally and try to destroy your career. But I 100% stand by my book. People can criticize me for whatever they want, but they can’t criticize me for not making myself clear.”

A few months ago, Moser visited Berlin to attend his niece’s batmitzvah. There, he visited the former home of his grandparents and paused to contemplate the Stolpersteine, the commemorative brass “stumbling stones”, dedicated to their memory. Before immigrating to the US, his grandfather, Franz Egon Moses, had spent time in Mandatory Palestine. Moses’s volume of Herzl’s Zionist Writings is now in Moser’s library. Had he lived, Moses might well reject his grandson’s turn toward anti-Zionism. But maybe not.

“I hope they’d be proud of me,” Moser said of his ancestors, growing somber. “People didn’t stand up for them. People shut up. They took their kids to school and went shopping, just like all these people are doing now. I don’t want to be that kind of person.” Briefly removing his glasses, Moser gave his eyes a quick wipe. “Those aren’t the people I respect.”