This timeline of anti-Zionism chronicles the history of anti-Zionism, including events in the history of anti-Zionist thought.
The 1940s, the Biltmore Program and after
1941 In the wake of the Jewish refugee problem under Nazism, and on the occasion of the Iraqi pogrom against Jews in June 1–2, Arab members of the Palestine Communist Party remonstrated with Iraqi Communist support for Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, insisting that a clear distinction be drawn between anti-Zionism and both anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, a distinction maintained throughout the period by the National Liberation League in Palestine, as they opposed expulsion of Jewish migrants.
1942 – American Council for Judaism, an organization of American Jews committed to the proposition that Jews are not a nationality but merely a religious group, adhering to the original stated principles of Reform Judaism, as articulated in the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, was founded.
1943 – Orthodox Hungarian Rabbi Yissachar Shlomo Teichtal, originally opposed to Secular Zionism, writes Eim HaBanim Semeicha (A Happy Mother of Children) in Budapest before the formal German occupation. In this work he strongly urges Diaspora Jews to, on a religious basis, establish a Jewish state in Palestine as a prelude to The Final Redemption (Geulah Shelemah). He also accused the leaders of Orthodox Judaism who opposed Zionism of unwitting complicity in mass murder He concluded that "Anti-Zionism was the root of evil befalling the Jewish people".Ben-Gurion criticized the decision of a court in Mandatory Palestine implicating Zionists in arm-trafficking by saying that the court's attitude was influenced by anti-Semitism. Christopher Sykes interpreted this as meaning that "henceforth to be anti-Zionist was to be anti-Semitic; to disapprove of Jewish territorial nationalism was to be a Nazi".
1944 – Philosopher Hannah Arendt publishes Zionism Reconsidered, writing "Only folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours [...] If the Jewish commonwealth is obtained in the near future [...] it will be due to the political assistance of American Jews [...] if the Jewish commonwealth is proclaimed against the will of the Arabs and without the support of the Mediterranean peoples, not only financial help but political support will be necessary for a long time to come. And that may turn out to be very troublesome indeed for Jews in this country, who after all have no power to direct the political destinies of the Near East".
1945 – Rabbi Elmer Berger publishes The Jewish Dilemma, which argued that Zionism was a surrender to the racial myths about the Jews and that assimilationism was still the best path for the Jews in the modern world.
1946 – The Jewish Anti-Zionist League founded in Egypt.Sir Isaac Isaacs publishes Palestine: Peace and Prosperity or War and Destruction? Political Zionism: Undemocratic, Unjust, Dangerous. His opposition to political Zionism brought him into conflict with his local community.
1948 - Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land founded by Virginia Gildersleeve and Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., which was later subsumed into the American Friends of the Middle East with Dorothy Thompson, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., and 24 further American educators, theologians, and writers (including Harry Emerson Fosdick).
1953 – Alfred Lilienthal, considered to vie with Rabbi Berger as the 'public face of Jewish anti-Zionism in America,' publishes What Price Israel?, a work which became a sourcebook for anti-Israel polemics.
1961 – Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, leader of the Satmar Hasidim, publishes Vayoel Moshe, a criticism of Zionism regarded by Rabkin as 'the fundamental work of Judaic anti-Zionism, in which he argues that the "idolatry" of the modern Zionist movement was a sin punished by God through the Holocaust.
1962 – Matzpen organisation founded in Israel, a socialist anti-Zionist organization.
1965 – Moshe Menuhin publishes Decadence of Judaism in our Time. In the book he recalls that in his childhood in Palestine, 'it was drummed into our young hearts that the fatherland must extend to the ancient borders and that it 'must become Goyimrein (that is, free of Gentiles)'.The French sociologist Georges Philippe Friedmann (1902-1977) publishes The End of the Jewish People,, in which he argues that the complete emancipation of the Jewish people signaled by both the creation of Israel and their assimilation of the West would lead to the demise of the Jewish people. Israel, he thought, challenging a basic assumption of both secular and religious Zionism, was a melting pot in which Israelization was bulldozing the differences of 102 Jewish subcultures. He altered his stance after 1967.
1967 – Maxime Rodinson publishes Israel, fait colonial? in Jean-Paul Sartre's journal, Les Temps Modernes. Rodinson concluded that:'the creation of the State of Israel on Palestinian soil is the culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the great European-American movement of expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other peoples or to dominate them economically and politically.'
1968 – Elmer Berger, the last active rabbi among those associated with the foundation of the American Council for Judaism, breaks with the lay leadership and founds the American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism(AJAZ).
1970 – Ma'avak party founded, a Maoist–influenced anti-Zionist organization.
1972 – Arie Bober (ed.) The Other Israel: the Radical Case against Zionism Doubleday & Co, is published. The work consists entirely of a compilation of Matzpen writings, and Part 3 consists of a 5-chapter critique of Zionist ideology.
1973 – Trial of the Revolutionary Communist alliance - Red Front members including Daud Turki, Udi Adiv and Dan Vered. The trial is described by Uri Davis as constituting a milestone in the history of the anti-Zionist movement within Israel.
1975 – United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 passed, which "determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination".
1979 – Edward Said publishes The Question of Palestine, arguing that Zionism was an idea that grew out of European imperialism, and which, once imported into Palestine, caused the Palestinians to suffer in consequence.
1980 – Naeim Giladi, an Iraqi Zionist who later renounced his Israeli citizenship and militated as an anti-Zionist, writes Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews.
1983 – Noam Chomsky, interpreted by many American Jews to be an anti-Zionist, writes The Fateful Triangle which in later editions analysed what Chomsky regarded as 'the pro-Zionist bias of most American media and intellectuals'.USSR founds the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, headed by David Dragunsky.
1984 – Uri Davis (academic and civil rights activist), defining himself as not Jewish but rather "a Palestinian Hebrew national of Jewish origin, anti-Zionist,". joins Fatah.Alternative Information Center founded in Palestine, a joint socialist anti-Zionist Palestinian–Israeli non-governmental organization which was founded by an anti-Zionist, Michel Warschawski (Mikado) and "engages in dissemination of information, political advocacy, grassroots activism and critical analysis of the Palestinian and Israeli societies as well as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict".
1988 – Ella Shohat publishes Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims.
1989 – The theologian and anti-Zionist Marc H. Ellis, who believes that a Jewish state and the power it wields is incompatible with the ethics of Judaism, writes The Future of Dissent: a Reflection on What Shall I Do With This People? Jews and the Fractious Politics of Judaism.
1990 – Thomas Kolsky writes Jews Against Zionism.
1994 – Israel Shahak, whose work often equates Zionism with Nazi racism, Israel divided between Jews and non-Jews, writes Jewish History, Jewish Religion: the Weight of Three Thousand Years, in which he argues that Zionism has been an instrument in reimposing on Jews what he considered a totalitarian Jewish community model developed in classical Judaism.
2000 – Norman Finkelstein publishes The Holocaust Industry, which was read by some critics as representing both Holocaust denial and anti-Zionist feelings, which they impute to its author.
2001 – Israel and the United States pull out of the World Conference against Racism 2001, following implications by the Conference that Zionism was linked to racism.
2004 - Yakov M. Rabkin, professor of history at Montreal University, publishes Au nom de la Torah: une histoire de l’opposition juive au sionisme,, which was issued in an English version in 2006. Rabkin, according to Joseph Agassi, challenges as a myth the idea, equated with Zionism, that Israel constitutes the natural homeland of Jews by surveying the history of Jewish opposition to Zionism. The work was hailed by Rabbi Baruch Horowitz as an important survey of rabbinical authorities who regarded the foundation of a Jewish state as a threat to the survival of the Jewish people and as a factor in the exacerbation of anti-Semitic trends.
2005 – Michael Neumann, described as an anti-Zionist polemicist, writes The Case Against Israel.The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, regarded as a 'so-called anti-Zionist' movement, is initiated, which calls for "various forms of boycott against Israel until it meets its obligations under international law".
2006 – Ilan Pappé, defined by Avi Shlaim as 'the cutting edge of radical anti-Zionism', publishes The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
2008 – Shlomo Sand, called 'the scourge of anti-Zionist secular Jews,' publishes his controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, a polemic both against secular Zionism and anti-Zionism, which argues against the idea of Jewish nationalism and the use of Jewish values to defend the state of Israel.
2010 – Former BBC and ITN journalist Alan Hart, considered an anti-Israeli polemicist, publishes Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, in which he argues that,'There is nothing anybody in publishing, the media in general and politics fears more than being accused of anti-Semitism. Since the obscenity of the Nazi Holocaust, the false charge of anti-Semitism is the blackmail card Zionism has played brilliantly to prevent informed and honest debate about who must do what if there is to be a peaceful resolution of the Palestine problem, which is the prerequisite for averting a clash of civilizations, Judeo-Christians v.Islamic'.
2011 – Gilad Atzmon publishes The Wandering Who?:A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, a work that is contemptuous of anti-Zionists. In it he argues that Zionism is, for native secular Israelis, essentially an archaic or foreign concept, and that much anti-Zionist discourse has no effect on them since Zionism itself is 'largely a Jewish diaspora discourse'.
Timeline of anti-Zionism Wikipedia (Text) CC BY-SA
