Anti-Zionism as Jewish Alternate History

Peace Through Ethnic Disaggregation and Other Uncomfortable Truths

Neo-Bundism: the Jewish left’s favorite genre of speculative fiction. Source: Wikimedia Commons (slightly modified)

“What if?” is a question that haunts any sentient being. It can also haunt an entire people. Modern Jewish history is defined by two singular events: the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel. What historian Salo Baron called “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” focuses on suffering and persecution, with genocide as the telos of exilic existence. Then, from the ashes of Auschwitz emerged, for the first time since antiquity, a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. Am Yisrael Chai! It’s natural for sophisticated Jews to puncture this simplified Hebrew-school narrative. Life in the Diaspora wasn’t all powerlessness and misery. Zionism is morally complicated, and as its prophets can attest, Israel was never without sin. It’s fun, and perhaps even educational, to imagine if the Jews had never revolted against Rome and lost their homeland in the first place, if Julian the Apostate had succeeded in rebuilding the Third Temple, if the Khazar Khaganate had lasted as a Jewish steppe empire, or if a Jewish homeland had been established in Australia, Africa, East Asia, or South America. It’s also proper, and perhaps even noble, to reject the Zionist tendency toward negation of the galut and reclaim the cultural legacy of the Jewish dispersion. But October 7 and the war in Gaza have mainstreamed Jewish anti-Zionism, a politics of fantasy in which Israel’s establishment can be reversed, in which the destiny of half the Jewish people can be sundered from the rest, and which imagines that, absent evil Israel, the world will love the Jews “again.” Bring back the Bund, dissolve Israel, start speaking Yiddish again (never mind Mizrahi Jews), and the antisemitism against which Zionism emerged will disappear. This isn’t just an interesting “What if?” question or the reclamation of a lost culture. It’s a naive, ahistorical delusion.

No, the Holocaust wasn’t inevitable. But it wasn’t a random eruption from the mouth of Gehenna either. In 1895, Theodor Herzl wrote that European Jews “must finally end up at the bottom, rock bottom. What appearance this will have, what form this will take, I cannot surmise. Will it be a revolutionary expropriation from below or a reactionary confiscation from above? Will they chase us away? Will they kill us? I have a fair idea that it will take all these forms, and others.”¹ Herzl couldn’t have envisioned the Final Solution as ultimate “rock bottom,” but he could read the signs of the times. Karl Lueger’s election as Viennese mayor proved the potency of antisemitic mass politics. The false conviction for treason of French-Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus showed that assimilation was no protection against ancient hatred, even in an enlightened country. Anti-Jewish laws and pogroms in the Russian Empire, where the bulk of European Jews lived, made traditional Jewish life increasingly untenable. Tsarist minister Konstantin Pobedonostsev famously said that the goal of his government’s Jewish policy was that “One third will die out, one third will leave the country, and one third will be completely dissolved in the surrounding population.” Even setting aside Nazi Germany, anti-Jewish restrictions were enacted in interwar Poland, Hungary, and Romania. Between 1881 and 1914, over 2.5 million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe. But after World War I, the United States and other countries closed their borders. Even in 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, a conference on the German-Jewish refugee crisis ended with only the Dominican Republic agreeing to accept more Jews.

It’s reasonable to imagine that if a young British soldier had shot a wounded Adolf Hitler in 1918, instead of sparing his life, the Holocaust could have been avoided. (These sorts of counterfactuals are always fraught. What if Hitler had been killed, but some future Führer, just as malign but more capable, who died in our timeline had survived instead?) But Zionism was the product of a historical logic bigger than one man. In sum, the Jews of Eastern Europe had all the characteristics of a nation (including shared language, religion, culture, ancestry, and history, plus demographic heft) except a territory. In the context of multinational empires like Austria-Hungary, they could fit into a state structure based on dynastic loyalty. But in the modern era, economic growth requires mass literacy and education, which, in turn, spur cultural uniformity and national consciousness. Europe’s multinational empires were replaced by nation-states, in many of which Jews were resented for their disproportionate economic success (a consequence of being a middleman minority) and religious and ethnic differences. The obvious solution was for Jews to assimilate into the dominant nationality, but those who did were often rejected as parvenus and pretenders. (And, in principle, why should Jews, alone of all peoples, be forced to surrender their ethnic identity anyway?) In Western Europe, where Jews were smaller in numbers and their host countries had traditions of civic tolerance, compromises like becoming “Frenchmen of the Mosaic faith” were often tenable. But in Eastern Europe—and, with the rise of Nazism, in Germany—they were not.

The fate of European Jews is part of the larger modern story of what historian Jerry Z. Muller calls “ethnic disaggregation.” As Muller recounts, about half a million people left their traditional homelands during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13; as formalized by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey and Greece swapped 1.5 million Greek Orthodox Christians and 400,000 Muslims; and 12 million ethnic Germans either fled or were expelled from Eastern and Central Europe during and after World War II. (The former German enclave of East Prussia, divided between the USSR and Poland, disappeared from the map entirely.²) To correspond to post-war borders, around two million Poles in what became the Soviet Union were deported to Poland, and 500,000 Ukrainians who had been living in Poland were sent to Soviet Ukraine. Population exchanges also took place between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, while Italians were expelled from Yugoslav-annexed territories and Serbs and Croats were internally resettled. Joining pre-war Jewish refugees, the majority of Europe’s quarter-million displaced Jewish Holocaust survivors made their way to the nascent state of Israel, encouraged by the pogroms that greeted Polish Jews who attempted to return to their homes. (The baseline Western attitude toward Jewish refugees was expressed by a Canadian official in 1945: “None is too many.”) Nor did Europe’s ethnic disaggregation end after World War II. The 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus resulted in the population transfer of over 200,000 Greeks and Turks. In 1989, Bulgaria's forced assimilation campaign drove around 300,000 ethnic Turks to flee to Turkey. In the 1990s, Yugoslavia’s dissolution was accompanied by ethnic cleansing—including the Kosovo War, which displaced Albanians and Serbs in successive waves—and resulted in the formation of new nation-states. Meanwhile, many ethnic Russians in former Soviet states migrated to Russia, ex-Soviet Jews went to Israel, and ethnic Germans in Russia left for Germany.

Europe’s ethnolinguistic and political boundaries before the 20th-century deluge. The splotches and dots indicate sites of future ethnic disaggregation, irredentist ambitions, and/or massacre. Source: Reddit

According to a Eurocentric view of history, Europe solved its “Jewish Question” by exporting it to the Middle East—as if, without Zionism, the region would be a multicultural utopia. But ethnic disaggregation, or what Lord Curzon called “the great unmixing of peoples,” wasn’t unique to Europe. As a result of the 1947 partition of the British Raj, 15 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were displaced to either India or Pakistan. Following Israel’s 1948 establishment, a much smaller, de facto population transfer took place after it was attacked by Arab states. Around 750,000 Arabs fled or were forced out of modern Israel, while about 900,000 Jews were driven from Muslim countries, with most settling in the Jewish state. The fantasy that, absent Israel, Middle Eastern Jews would’ve lived peacefully as an ethnoreligious minority is belied by the fate of Middle Eastern Christians. Christians have declined from around 14% of the region’s population in 1914 to under 4% today. The Ottoman Turks murdered around 1.5 million Armenians, as well as hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Assyrians, during and after World War I. Millions more Middle Eastern Christians have left the region in the face of structural inequality, political instability, and Islamist violence. For example, though only Jews faced violent expulsion, Egyptian citizenship and employment laws also triggered a mass exodus of Greeks, Italians, and Armenians, while Copts continue to face discrimination and sectarian attacks. Lebanon, which was originally founded to be a homeland for the Christian Maronites, is a failed state primarily because it’s become a demographic hodgepodge without a dominant sect or common identity. Outside of Israel, the best-case scenario for a Middle Eastern minority has been partition into a well-armed autonomous region, as in Iraqi Kurdistan following Saddam Hussein’s Arabization campaign. The worst case is genocide, as befell the Yazidis at the hands of the Islamic State.

Here, it’s worth reviewing Muller’s balance sheet for ethnic disaggregation. The costs include the direct human suffering often inherent in the process, the reduced cultural vitality that may result, and negative economic effects like the loss of enterprising minorities. On the plus side, relative homogeneity is often a source of cohesion and stability, which is reflected in the Pax Europa that followed the continent’s ethnic disaggregation. The human toll of population displacement must be weighed against potentially worse outcomes, including failed states, internecine warfare, and mass slaughter. As Muller writes, “The fact that ethnic and state boundaries now largely coincide has meant that there are fewer disputes over borders or expatriate communities, leading to the most stable territorial configuration in European history.” It’s notable that European populists are on the rise in response to mass immigration, which challenges the shared identity underlying the continent’s welfare states. Here, we can supplement Muller’s narrative with the insights of political scientist Walker Connor. For Connor, the core of nationalism is ultimately ethnonationalism, and most of the world is “is subdivided into a series of perceived homelands to which, in each case, the indigenous ethno-national group is convinced it has a profound and exclusive proprietary claim.” Other groups may live as civic equals among—and sometimes join—that dominant ethnos, but its sense of ownership will inevitably affect a nation’s politics. This “proprietary claim” can lead to discrimination against minorities, but it’s also necessary for most modern states to function. Per Muller, ethnic disaggregation may also mitigate the negative effects of ethnonationalism by satisfying the drive for collective self-determination.

As Aris Roussinos summarizes, “Before modernity, nations could die or meld into each other or assume new identities.” But “after the age of nationalism, the tendency is for nations to be set into permanent, immovable forms, and for sub-state groups which had not acquired national identities to adopt them, inspired by the contact with other peoples brought about by modernity, increased mobility, and the reaction to centralizing state power.” We shouldn’t speak of historical inevitability, which is a Hegelian/Marxist pretension. But it was very likely that, in the age of nationalism, the Jews—who, after all, were a distinct people going back to the Bronze Age, and had become the “sub-state group” par excellence—should develop their own modern variant. It was also very likely that this nationalism would center on the Jews’ historic homeland, no matter the temptations of Siberia’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Herzl’s The Jewish State (1896) was preceded by the Lovers of Zion movement (founded in 1881), which promoted Jewish immigration to the Holy Land, and Moses Hess’ proto-Zionist manifesto Rome and Jerusalem (1862). Other proposals for a Jewish return to their homeland were made, with varying degrees of practicality, by figures as varied as English author George Eliot in her 1876 novel Daniel Deronda; Sephardic rabbi Judah Alkalai, who founded in the Society of the Settlement of Eretz Yisrael in 1852; the French emperor Napoleon in 1799 during his Middle Eastern campaign; and the renegade Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who speculated about reestablishing a Jewish state in his 1670 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Zionism wasn’t foreordained, but it was a latent historical possibility made probable by the concurrent rise of 19th-century nationalism and antisemitism, as well as the perceptible failure of Orthodox quietism to meet the moment.

The Holocaust, a cataclysm unprecedented in its magnitude, wasn’t inevitable either. But the age of nationalism, which left Jews, absent their own territory, as the odd nation out, combined with an ancient history of theological anti-Judaism, recently transmogrified into racial antisemitism, combined with economic resentment of Jews as a successful middleman minority, made mass violence or expulsion a distinct possibility. Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who tried to arrange the evacuation of European Jews in the 1930s, knew which way the wind was blowing. Germany’s loss in World War I (blamed on the Jews), the rise of Bolshevism (blamed on the Jews), and the Great Depression (blamed on the Jews) contributed to Nazism’s appeal, but if history had unfolded differently, the Jews would simply have been blamed for other misfortunes. It’s understandable that many European Jews sought alternative solutions to their plight, whether through assimilation, communism, diaspora nationalism, or the Yiddish socialism of the Bund. But we now have the benefit of hindsight, even if we lament history’s verdict. As the Jewish Marxist Isaac Deutscher remarked in 1954, “I have, of course, long since abandoned my anti-Zionism, which was based on a confidence in the European labour movement, or, more broadly, in European society and civilisation, which that society and civilisation have not justified.” Today’s Jewish anti-Zionists have swapped their predecessors’ misplaced faith in the European labor movement for a misplaced faith that “From the river to the sea” means equal rights for all, not October 7 at greater scale. But most Israelis aren’t willing to invite another massacre to earn a mea culpa from Peter Beinart.

We can’t turn back the clock, but we can learn from history. For example, the anti-Zionist solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—either expel all the “settler-colonialist” Jews or form a single Arab and Jewish state—ignore the historical logic of nationalism and ethnic disaggregation. The expulsion of almost eight million Israeli Jews (plus “collaborationist” minorities like the Druze) would re-create the situation of the Jews as a stateless nation, only this time with a recent history of statehood. It would thus be categorically different from the 1962 evacuation of 800,000 European settlers from Algeria to France. Given the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in the West, it’s extremely unlikely that America or Europe would happily absorb what would unambiguously be a nation within a nation. (Nor is it likely that Muslim countries would welcome the descendants of their previously expelled Jewish populations.) While there are some successful examples of multinational states, like Switzerland and Belgium (the latter a questionable case with its own sectional divide), they’re far from the modern norm. Given the deep-seated enmity and religious divide between Israelis and Palestinians, a binational state is most likely to go the way of Yugoslavia, and thus end in partition accompanied by ethnic cleansing. On the other hand, Israeli settlements in the Arab-majority West Bank re-create the multiethnic aggregation that helped make modern European history so calamitous. Nor is the expulsion of the Palestinians and their absorption by unwilling Arab states a realistic solution. A distinct Palestinian nationality only emerged in the 20th century in response to Zionism. Nevertheless, once a group has acquired a national identity, it’s not so easily abandoned. When enough people have killed or died for an “imagined community,” it’s no longer just imagined.

Given the definitional drift of the word “Zionism,” Jewish anti-Zionism is partly a response to the actions of the Israeli government. But more fundamentally, it reflects discomfort with (or sheer ignorance of) history’s painful truths, and a view of the world based on an idealized extrapolation of the American experience. Consider the term “ethnostate,” which is uniquely applied to Israel as if most countries aren’t intrinsically linked with their majority ethnicity. (And as if the Palestinian Authority’s own constitution doesn’t declare that “Palestine is part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian Arab people are part of the Arab nation.”) In Ezra Klein’s framing, “For Jews of the diaspora, multiethnic democracy — in which the rights and security of political minorities are protected — is the bedrock on which our safety is built. For Jews of Israel, a Jewish majority is the bedrock upon which their state is built.” Actually, minority rights are built on the bedrock of a national majority with a tradition of civic tolerance. Absent such a majority, no matter the legal protections, multiethnic democracy won’t last. The League of Nations’ minority treaties failed to protect Europe’s minorities, while ethnic disaggregation provided them with the security of their own nation-states. Today, there would be no Jewish safety in a majority-Maghrebi France or Pakistani-dominated Britain. That both scenarios are unlikely is due to the enduring appeal of the nation-state over unrestricted mass immigration. Of course, minorities still have rights within France and Britain, just as Arab citizens have rights within Israel. Nationalism and classical liberalism aren’t mutually exclusive; historically, they’re intertwined. But pretending that ethnonationalism isn’t a sociological reality, and that ethnic disaggregation plays no role in political stability, flies in the face of history. Jews, of all people, should know better.

1. Quoted in Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return: The Struggle for a Jewish Homeland (1978), p. 47.

2. There’s some counterfactual speculation about a Jewish state being formed in East Prussia after World War II, an idea also floated by Lord Moyne in 1941, when the assumption was that there’d be “millions” of post-war Jewish refugees to resettle. Jews don’t have roots in the region, but neither do the Russians who now inhabit the Kaliningrad Oblast. It’s tempting to imagine the Yidishe Medine as a core member of the European Union, instead of being embroiled in regional conflict. There’s also poetic justice to the notion of Germany ceding territory to its Jewish victims. But in this alternative timeline, a Baltic Ashkenaz could also intensify German neo-Nazism and serve as a scapegoat for European integration. More importantly, a Zionist proto-state and population center had already been established by the 1940s, most displaced Jews wanted to leave Europe, and Stalin, who was already suspicious of Soviet Jewish efforts at autonomy, was unlikely to support a Jewish state within his post-war sphere of influence. Even if you will it, sometimes a dream is just a dream.