Signaled Virtue

Anti-Zionism – the position that Jews do not have any right to return to or have any control over their indigenous homeland – doesn’t have very many Jewish adherents. It would seem contradictory for a Jew to renounce the right to return home, or for a Jew to negate the thousands of years of persecution which made it not just good but necessary to return home and establish a Jewish state there. Yet this makes the existence of any anti-Zionist Jews all the more intriguing. What makes them anti-Zionist?

Jews generally hold anti-Zionist beliefs because of three factors:

1. They want to gain/keep access to social spaces where Jews are not generally accepted.
2. They are Ashkenazi Jews who identify more strongly with the European community than the Jewish community.
3. They are autoantisemites.

1. Gaining/Keeping Access to Social Spaces: Jews are widely discriminated against in the United States. A survey found that 1 out of every 4 hiring managers discriminates against Jewish people openly – that is, they're comfortable enough about it to select antisemitic options on a survey. Much has been made of the institutionalized antisemitism of DEI departments across the country, which proliferate workplaces, schools, and other social circles. Protests in every major city include calls for the murder of Jews. In response to these threats, some Jews choose to renounce parts of their identity in order to be more palatable to the outside world. In Jews who wish to remain deeply involved with social circles that have institutionalized antisemitism, this can manifest as the overt rejection of their Jewish identity: specifically, the history of the Jewish people, which must be rejected for anti-Zionism to make sense.

2. Colorism: When the Jews were expelled from Israel by the Romans around 100 A.D., and the region renamed Syria Palaestina, the Jewish community fragmented into multiple subdivisions. These subdivisions steadily migrated all over the world, and one of those subdivisions, the Ashkenazi Jews, formed in the Holy Roman Empire and spread throughout Europe. These Jews comprise the majority of Jews in the United States, such that the vast majority of Jews in the U.S. have not met any Jews besides other Ashkenazis. For that reason, some Jews are more attached to the European community than the Jewish community, and may perceive their fellow Jews as being the Jewish community. As such, Ashkenazi Jews in the West can become detached from Israel and the rest of the Jewish community, embracing ideas like Jewish “colonialism” and “imperialism” in Israel, which is an example of colorism since it embraces “white” Jews as the Jewish people (negating the fact that most Israeli Jews are not only non-“white” but also cannot trace any ancestry to Europe – not to mention that all Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel). If a Jewish person claims that their family died in the Holocaust in order to justify their anti-Zionist beliefs, they probably fall into this category of colorist anti-Zionism.

3. Autoantisemitism: While all anti-Zionist Jews are technically “self-hating” for denying their own ancestry, history, and equal rights for various reasons, autoantisemites are anti-Zionist because they despise their own Jewish identity, not the other way around. They may resent the hatred directed at them by other ethnic groups; internalize the antisemitism of the society in which they live; or believe that they should not have to bear the consequences of being Jewish just because they were born Jewish. For example: Karl Marx (yes, he was Jewish) was openly antisemitic and had antisemitic influences in life. Before recognizing the error of his ways, Theodor Herzl advocated the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity because he thought Jewish culture was inferior, and that assimilation was the only thing that could save the Jews (his seminal work Der Judenstaat contained a full throated denunciation of his earlier beliefs, and kickstarted Zionism as a movement). There are even anecdotes of Jews joining neo-Nazi movements.

Side note: While some anti-Zionist Jews base their position on their interpretations of Judaism, those fringe sects of Judaism are not mainstream, nor do they have many adherents.

TLDR: Jews choose anti-Zionism in order to gain or keep their social status; because they are detached from the Jewish community, or believe their/their family's story represents the Jewish story; or they are autoantisemites (Jews who are actively antisemitic). Rarely, they may adhere to a religious strain that denies Jewish presence in Israel on religious grounds; those strands of faith are not considered Judaism by the vast majority of Jews.