Religiously devout Jews denouncing Israel make nonsense of the claims that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism

They’re at every demonstration for Gaza, those pesky people with their violent denunciation of Israel as “satanic”, and their signs equating the Star of David with the swastika. They’re an embarrassment. But not to pro-Palestinian demonstrators. This “fringe” group’s large hats, heavy black coats and side curls tell why. They’re Jews, from highly religious ultra-Orthodox orders, and they have been anti-Zionist since Zionism was first mooted by secular Jews in the cafes of Vienna in the 1890s.

With their increased presence in the recent large-scale demonstrations against the destruction of Gaza across the world, they have become too significant to ignore. They are now something more than a nuisance to the monolithic global Zionist PR push. By their very existence, such groups absolutely refute the notion that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. 

So how on earth can Jews be both religious and anti-Zionist? The question is the answer in a way. Judaism is a religion of deferred redemption and the return of the Messiah. In its modern form, it is created not out of being a settled people with their own earthly kingdom, but of a people in exile. The exile from a kingdom is an earthly analogue to life in exile from the presence of God.

As Aviezer Ravitzky notes in a useful summary, religious anti-Zionist groups such as the Satmar Hasidics and the Neturei Karta group see the Jewish relationship to God as outside of history, and based on a covenant that cedes redemption wholly to God. Israel cannot be rebuilt by secular means, and to do so is ultimately a satanic — i.e. an adversarial — relationship to God, which will have satanic results. Nothing Israel or Israelis can do will redeem the Zionist project. As the late leader of the Hungarian Satmar Hasidics Yoel Teitelbaum (quoted by Ravitzky) notes: “Even if the members of the Knesset [the Israeli Parliament] were righteous and holy, it is a terrible and awful criminal iniquity to seize redemption and rule before the time has come.”

The Satmar Hasidics have protested against numerous Israeli government and Zionist moves, such as the US transfer of its embassy to Jerusalem. They, and the smaller Neturei Karta group, have been active in the pro-Palestinian movement since Israel’s destruction of Gaza began after October 7. 

In response to their theologically well-argued rejection of Zionism, the religious anti-Zionists are often treated with pure disdain by the Zionist mainstream. The US Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has a public entry on Neturei Karta, in which it states: “In an interview with Al Jazeera in March 2012, [Neturei Karta leader] Weiss claimed: ‘Zionism has created rivers of blood … this is against the will of the Almighty and this is not what it means to be a Jew’.”

Which is not the slam-dunk denunciation of Neturei Karta the ADL thinks it is. Elsewhere, the same piece says: “Indeed, Neturei Karta leaders have even called on the Jewish community to dialogue with Hamas and apologise for ‘stealing their land’.”

Imagine, dealing with Hamas!

Do these two groups represent the general view of all ultra-Orthodox Jews? Not at all. But their cogent theological argument against Zionism is a problem for the Zionist movement in making a religious claim for its dispossession of Palestinians and continued violence against them. Zionist lobbies have a flip reaction to the large number of atheist or secular anti-Zionist Jews who are playing an increasingly prominent part in the pro-Palestine protests. Such Jews are described as “renegades”. These accusations restate the arguments made by anti-Semites against Jews themselves in the 20th century: that they were rootless cosmopolitans and disloyal. It’s a measure of the degree to which Zionism has taken on the intolerant and monolithic features of the political movements that oppressed Jews.

Jewish religious anti-Zionism absolutely refutes this. For who are Jews, if not these groups, who live meticulously by the hundreds of laws about everyday life encapsulated in the Torah? For decades they argued that Zionism would become a satanic force. Now in Gaza, we see that it has come to pass. There, death is a master from Israel. There, it is not Hamas that is the primary enemy. The capacity for life itself to continue is the enemy, presided over by a prime minister who has said: “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.”

What more adversarial, satanic sentiment could one adduce? What more proof does one need, that religious anti-Zionist Jews got it right? “When someone tells you who they are, believe them” has been thrown around by Israel’s uncritical defenders since this destruction began. When they show you who they are by raining down mass death on civilians, for month after month, it might be worth paying attention to your co-religionists who have already denounced it for the evil it is.