About Jewishness

Anti-Zionism

Zionism may be defined as, "An international movement originally for the establishment of a Jewish national or religious community in Palestine and later for the support of modern Israel." Zionism is also "a political movement among Jews which holds that the Jews are a nation, and as such are entitled to a national homeland", and as "a movement to support the development and defense of the State of Israel, and to encourage Jews to settle there." Therefore, anti-Zionism is opposition to these objectives, and people, organizations or governments that oppose these objectives can in some sense be described as anti-Zionist

Jews and Zionism
Prior to the Second World War many Jews regarded Zionism as a fanciful and unrealistic movement. Many during the European Enlightenment had argued that Jews should enjoy full equality only on the condition that they pledge their singular loyalty to their nation-state and entirely assimilate to the local national culture; they called for the "regeneration" of the Jewish people in exchange for rights.
Those liberal Jews who accepted integration and/or assimilation principles saw Zionism as a threat to efforts to facilitate Jewish citizenship and equality within the European nation-state context.
In particularly, many Jews oppose Zionism due to their left-wing and internationalist beliefs. The Jewish Anti-Zionist League, in Egypt, was a communist-influenced anti-Zionist league. In Israel, there are several Jewish anti-Zionist organisations and politicians.
Prof. William Rubinstein writes, "In 1936, the (Jewish) Social Democratic Bund won a sweeping victory in Jewish kehilla elections in Poland. Its main hallmarks included 'an unyielding hostility to Zionism' and to the Zionist enterprise of Jewish emigration from Poland to Palestine. The Bund wished Polish Jews to fight anti-Semitism in Poland by remaining there. The Zionist goal was also opposed, as a matter of principle, by all the other major parties and movements among pre-1939 Polish Jewry. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe Zionist strength was weaker still."
Allan Brownfield writes, "The corruption of Judaism, as a religion of universal values, through its politicization by Zionism and by the replacement of dedication to Israel for dedication to God and the moral law, is what has alienated so many young Americans who, searching for spiritual meaning in life, have found little in the organized Jewish community."
Daniel Lange (Levitsky) writes, "Jewish critiques of Zionism — and Jewish participation in the Palestine solidarity movement more generally — are significant beyond the bounds of Jewish communities themselves chiefly in the United States, and mainly because of the privileges given to Jewish voices in the discussion of Palestine and Israel here. Still, as Esther Kaplan wrote in her essay “Globalize the Intifada” (in Alisa Solomon & Tony Kushner’s Wrestling with Zion), Jews in the United States and beyond have a role to play in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and in some cases occupy a strategic position, but are in no way at its center. For Jews, as for everyone engaged in that struggle, the task is to work with our Palestinian, Arab, and other friends and comrades to move from our shared opposition to Zionism into strategies of resistance that can, in the end, free Palestine."

Canaanites
Canaanism was a cultural and ideological movement founded in 1939 which reached its peak in the 1940s among the Jews of Palestine. It has significantly impacted the course of Israeli art, literature, and spiritual and political thought. Its adherents were called Canaanites. The movement's original name was the Council for the Coalition of Hebrew Youth.
The Canaanites believed that much of the Middle East had been a Hebrew-speaking civilization in antiquity. They hoped to revive this civilization, creating a "Hebrew" nation, disconnected from the Jewish past, which would embrace the Middle East's Arab population as well. They saw both "world Jewry and world Islam" as backward and medieval; Kuzar writes that the movement "exhibited an interesting blend of militarism and power politics toward the Arabs as an organized community on the one hand and a welcoming acceptance of them as individuals to be redeemed from medieval darkness on the other."
Because the Canaanites sought to create in Israel a new people, they mandated the dissociation of Israelis from Judaism and the history of Judaism. In their stead they placed the culture and history of the Ancient Near East, which they considered the true historical reference. They argued that the people of the Land of Israel in the days of the biblical monarchs had not been Jewish but Hebrew, and had shared a cultural context with other peoples of the region. Citing contemporary biblical criticism, the Canaanites argued that the Tanakh reflected this ancient history, but only partly, since it had been compiled in the period of the Second Temple by Jewish scribes who had rewritten the history of the region to suit their world-view.

Catholics
Many modern Popes have been openly critical of Zionism, including Pius X, Benedict XV and Pius XII. Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val reportedly explained the Church's policy of non possumus to Theodore Herzl and his emerging movement of Zionism, saying that as long as the Jews deny the divinity of Christ, the Church certainly could not make a declaration in their favor. The Vatican did not establish relations with Israel until 1993 because of these issues.

Arabs
Pan-Arabist narratives in the 1960s Nasser era emphasized the idea of Palestine as a part of the Arab world taken by others. In this narrative, the natural means of combating Zionism is Arab nations uniting and attacking Israel militarily. Pan-Syrian narratives, promoted mainly by Syria, are essentially parallel.
Palestinians who struggle for self-determination emphasize their view that the history of the Israeli-Palestine conflict has led to over 90 percent of the pre-1948 British Mandate of Palestine being controlled by Israel and millions of Palestinians made refugees.
In contrast, a poll of 507 Arab-Israelis conducted by the Israeli Democracy Institute in 2007 found that 75 percent profess support for Israel's status as a Jewish and democratic state which guarantees equal rights for minorities. Israeli Arab support for a constitution in general was 88 percent.

Muslim anti-Zionism generally opposes the State of Israel as an intrusion into what many Muslims consider to be Dar al-Islam, a domain rightfully, and permanently, ruled only by Muslims.
Palestinian and other Muslim groups, as well as the government of Iran (since the 1979 Islamic Revolution), insist that the State of Israel is illegitimate and refuse to refer to it as "Israel", instead using the locution "the Zionist entity". Maps of the Middle-East frequently do not show Israel. In an interview with Time Magazine in December 2006, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said "Everyone knows that the Zionist regime is a tool in the hands of the United States and British governments".

Anti-Zionist conspiracy theories
From the 1960s, the Soviet Union promoted the allegation of secret ties between the Nazis and the Zionist leadership. This included claims that the Zionist movement inflated or faked the impact of the Holocaust. The thesis of 1982 doctoral dissertation of Mahmoud Abbas (a co-founder of Fatah and president of the Palestinian Authority who earned his Ph.D. in history at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies, with Yevgeni Primakov (currently Russian Foreign Minister) as thesis advisor) was The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement. In his 1983 book The Other Face: The Secret Connection Between the Nazis and the Zionist Movement, based on the dissertation, Abbas wrote:

"It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand."

A different version of this conspiracy theory claims that Nazis and Zionists had a shared interest or even cooperated in the extermination of Europe's Jewry, as persecution would force them to flee to , then under British administration. Similar claims are occasionally made by or Hamas sources.

Before the Second World War many prominent Britons maintained that the tension between and Britain was the result of Jewish warmongering. In 1935 the British Union of Fascists mounted a "peace campaign" against war, claiming an alliance of international financiers and Jews were leading Britain to war with Germany. However by 1938 the public mood had changed and wrote "it is interesting to see how permeated these people are with the war germ. Israel has done its work well." Similar accusations have been made regarding Zionism and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The Sudanese government has alleged that the Darfur uprising (in which some 500,000 have been killed) is part of a wider Zionist conspiracy. Egyptian media have alleged that the Zionist movement deliberately spreads HIV in Egypt.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, Neo-Nazi and radical Muslim groups allege the US government is controlled by Jews, describing it as the "Zionist Occupation Government".
Article 22 of the 1988 Hamas charter claims that the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, colonialism and both world wars were created by the Zionists or forces supportive of Zionism. Article 32 alleges that the Zionist movement seeks to create an Empire stretching from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates river in Iraq.
There have been widespread allegations that the September 11 attacks were the work of Zionists.

Is it Anti-Zionism or Antisemitism?
In his book "Aftershock: Anti-Zionism & Antisemitism" (2005) David Matas writes:
One form of antisemitism denies access of Jews to goods and services because they are Jewish. Another form of antisemitism denies the right of the Jewish people to exist as a people because they are Jewish. Antizionists distinguish between the two, claiming the first is antisemitism, but the second is not. To the antizionist, the Jew can exist as an individual as long as Jews do not exist as a people.

In his article "The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism" (2007) Brian Klug has argued that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are distinct concepts:
There is a long and ignoble history of "Zionist" being used as a code word for "Jew," as when Communist Poland carried out "anti-Zionist" purges in 1968, expelling thousands of Jews from the country, or when the extreme right today uses the acronym ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government) to refer to the US government. Moreover, the Zionist movement arose as a reaction to the persecution of Jews. Since anti-Zionism is the opposite of Zionism, and since Zionism is a form of opposition to anti-Semitism, it seems to follow that an anti-Zionist must be an anti-Semite. Nonetheless, the inference is invalid. To argue that hostility to Israel and hostility to Jews are one and the same thing is to conflate the Jewish state with the Jewish people. In fact, Israel is one thing, Jewry another. Accordingly, anti-Zionism is one thing, anti-Semitism another. They are separate. To say they are separate is not to say that they are never connected. But they are independent variables that can be connected in different ways.