Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism is painful reading for anyone who cares about Israel. Here is a list of just a few of the many charges that Moser levels against Zionists in this book: colluding with the Nazis during the Holocaust; planting bombs to ferret Jews out of the oldest Jewish community in the world; murdering a Dutch correspondent to Palestine in 1924 when he refused to soften the tone of his criticism of Zionists; strapping explosives onto dogs to blow up Palestinian and Lebanese civilians; furnishing oxycontin to Palestinians in bags of flour. And of course, the systematic crimes with which readers will already be all-too familiar: ethnic-cleansing, apartheid and genocide.
Moser tells us this history via twelve portraits of anti-Zionists, earning our sympathy through the care with which he develops his protagonists’ backstories For example, in the chapter on Felicia Langer, a lawyer who devoted decades to representing Palestinians in Israeli courts, we learn first of her traumatic background as a Holocaust survivor. With the rest of her story, Moser depicts an Israel that grows ever more repressive over time in response to wars and intifadas. Langer eventually comes to understand that even her most legally airtight arguments would be rejected by Israeli courts. At the same time, she faces violent personal attacks for her work. Finally, Langer concludes that her participation in the system only lends it “a democratic façade;” she leaves Israel for Germany, where she will spend the final years of her life lecturing on the dangers of systems that use the appearance of due process to mask injustice. When Moser makes the accusation that, in 1987, Palestinian women were sprayed by a poison gas while locked in their cells, he is paraphrasing Langer’s own writings. By the time we come upon this passage, we are primed to believe Langer, having spent the previous twenty pages coming to know — and sympathize with — the beleaguered lawyer.
Moser includes accounts of anti-Zionists whose positions evolved in unexpected ways. In a chapter on Avi Shlaim, in which Moser chronicles the Iraqi Jew’s transition from Zionism to anti-Zionism, he also writes of Shlaim’s fellow historian, Benny Morris. In the 1980s, Morris’s writing dismantled the claim that the Palestinians had not been subject to ethnic cleansing, thereby challenging, for the first time in Israel, one of the young country’s foundational myths. Yet after the Second Intifada, Morris lost faith in the possibility of achieving peace through negotiations with the Palestinians, and “abandoned the balanced view that Shlaim had admired.” Similarly, in a chapter about a Texas synagogue facing intense backlash for taking an anti-Zionist stand in the 1940s, Moser admits that the anti-Zionist rabbi at the center of the controversy eventually came to embrace the state of Israel. This acknowledgment of shifting viewpoints, along with his sober tone, seems to establish Moser’s reliability as narrator of this fraught history.
That is, until we reach the book’s startling final chapter. Moser, who has spent hundreds of pages establishing the credibility of anti-Zionism through portraits of activists whose convictions were often a matter of life and death, ends with the American photographer Nan Goldin. What had been a grave historical inquiry suddenly becomes an art-world quarrel: Goldin denounces German cultural institutions; Germans respond with article after article denouncing Goldin, far too many of which Moser quotes in detail. The chapter also introduces a kind of vanity that has been absent from the rest of the book. We learn, for no discernable reason, that Goldin and Moser address each other as “dollface” and “hon” in their text messages. Why devote the conclusion of a book of such historical ambition to this? One clue may lie in Moser’s stated purpose in writing this book: to make young anti-Zionists “feel less alone.” As an art world celebrity, perhaps Goldin adds a certain cultural cachet to Anti-Zionism.
Moser makes a case that Zionism and Israel’s history must be interrogated rather than mythologized, recalling James Baldwin’s formulation: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Many of Moser’s claims will undoubtedly be challenged by historians. Even for readers willing to accept his accounts of Zionist wrongdoing at face value, his repeated insistence on the benevolent treatment of Jews in the Middle East before the advent of Zionism strains credulity. Still, Anti-Zionism performs the work of bringing together, in one highly readable volume, a dozen stories of thinkers and activists who made enormous sacrifices in pursuit of what they believed was an ethical future for Jews.
Basia Winograd, a New York City – based writer and filmmaker, teaches creative writing at Hunter College. She was awarded a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for her novel in progress.
