An Open Letter to Anti-Zionists from a Veteran of the Left

[Mosby]

For 25 years, I was a member of a small, insular, Trotskyist organisation. Periodically during some febrile internal dispute, our Great Leader would invoke Oliver Cromwell. ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ’, he’d howl, ‘to think it possible that you may be mistaken.’ The Great Leader seldom admitted he was wrong about anything, of course—any more than I did or, I suspect, than had Lord Protector Cromwell himself. Still the injunction is a good one. You must at the very least be able to think it possible that you could be wrong.

I want you to consider that your beliefs about Zionism are seriously distorted and that the way a broad swathe of the left community responds to Israel both reflects and perpetuates antisemitism. I say this as someone who for many years shared these beliefs. I marched against Israel countless times and railed about ‘Zionist terror’. I believed Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II; that there was nothing wrong with comparing Israel to Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa; that twinning the Magen David with a swastika was an unobjectionable way to indicate their moral equivalence. I know how good it feels to take what you believe is the side of oppressed against oppressor, and to anathematise those who challenge this worthy goal. I want you to think again.

https://fathomjournal.org/an-open-letter-to-anti-zionists-from-a-veteran-of-the-left/

[Collimator]

1. It may be important to the discussion. . .

. . . to clearly define both Zionism and Anti-Zionism. I have read about extremely devout Jewish groups who oppose the existence of the modern State of Israel. I don't wish to misrepresent their position, but I think that they believe that the restoration of Israel should have a clearly demonstrated supernatural cause. The fact that Israel came about by human-made, political decision processes renders it illegitimate in their eyes.

In this manner, they are unlike some extreme Christian sects, who are willing to claim God works in the social sphere by giving them what they want when they flex their political muscle.

[Mosby]

3. The number of religious anti-zionist Jews is so small

That it makes them irrelevant to the discussion.

More to your point, their position on Israel is based on a
tendentious reading of religious texts. Their form of anti-zionism is part of their dogma, and certainly not related
the degree of religiosity, because the vast majority of Jews, including the Haredim, support Israel.

[Behind the Aegis]

2. It is about Jews and anti-Semitism.

It will fall on deaf ears.

[benpollard]

4. Palestinians are religious conservatives...

... so why are some liberals so pro-Palestinian if it's not antisemitism?