Moser, who recently turned 50, admits: “I was not even aware that Zionism was controversial.” The shift in perspective culminated in a visit to the occupied territories in 2016, during which he found “the reality of the occupation of Palestine … deranging”. His new book includes 12 portraits of Jewish figures who have opposed Zionism, a movement formed in the late 19th century to advocate for the creation of a homeland for Jewish people in Palestine. It is contentious to oppose Zionism today, but Moser wants contemporary Jewish activists to “feel less alone” by showing that debates about Zionism were once mainstream in Jewish communal life.
While around 90% of American Jews now support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state (although fewer identify as Zionists), fewer than 1% belonged to the largest American Zionist organisation in 1914. The first character study is of Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares, who thought that Judaism offered a vision of a world beyond the devastating nationalism of the first world war. The book closes with a moving account of the photographer Nan Goldin, who spoke out, at considerable cost, as the assault on Gaza began in 2023 following the October 7th attacks.
Many of the protagonists, like Moser, were once committed Zionists. When he was 10, Ronnie Kasrils set up a stall in front of his home in South Africa to sell toys and raise funds for Israel. He was later an anti-apartheid leader who became an ardent anti-Zionist during 27 years living abroad in exile: “Ronnie drives them crazy,” a friend of his tells Moser.
He was murdered in 1924 by Avraham Tehomi, a 21-year-old member of the Haganah paramilitary organisation, after his increasingly outspoken opposition to the Zionist leadership. Hannah Arendt worked for Youth Aliyah in Paris, supporting refugee children to immigrate to Palestine, after fleeing from Germany herself in 1933. Her orientation changed after the Biltmore Conference in 1942, when some 600 delegates from Zionist organisations gathered in New York.
Before Biltmore, some in the movement still imagined a single state rooted in the historically strong relations between Jews, Muslims and Christians in Palestine. The Holocaust sharpened the urgency of the argument for a Jewish state instead, but Arendt warned that this would leave the Arabs with “the choice between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship”. She foresaw, Moser writes, that “a victory [in the fight for a state] would bring the Jews of Palestine neither peace nor security”.
Moser’s study includes many instances of despair. The scale of the devastation wreaked on the Palestinians disturbs each of Moser’s subjects, many of whom are demonised or accused of antisemitism “so promiscuously that the word would eventually become meaningless”. After the Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank began in 1967, the lawyer Felicia Langer dedicated her life to representing Palestinians.
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