Can a Jew be an Anti-Zionist?

Better be careful here, Josh. When walking into a minefield things can go KA-BOOM in the night. And in the day. And I enter this particular field because?

So, here’s my question, one that I’ve been thinking about for the past half-century. “To be a Jew, must one be a Zionist?” The key word here is “must” as in “I must breathe to live.” And what is meant by Zionist? Until someone suggests a better response, let this suffice: A Zionist believes, as a minimum, that there is something called “the Jewish people” which combines a unique combination of genetic and historic heritages and has a right to create a state of its own in (here’s the tricky part) the Promised Land/Palestine/ Israel. Now obviously one can be a Zionist and not a Jew. Many Gentiles fall into this category. I wrote a book, “Our Great Solicitor”, about one such man, Josiah Wedgwood, who in the 1930s and ‘40s strongly advocated for the Jews in Parliament. Some Fundamentalist Protestants make a religion of their support for Israel, their motivations though sometimes give us pause.

But let’s stick with the question of Jews. In the beginning of the movement to create a Jewish state, many Orthodox opposed the idea, arguing that only with the coming of the Messiah would it be appropriate. Concurrently, many in the Reform camp were also hostile to the idea most famously in the so-called Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 which declared that they no longer expected Jews to return to a national homeland in Palestine. This was an American version of the still older claim of Jews in Napoleonic France that they were Frenchmen of the Mosaic persuasion, not a separate people. But that was then. With the rise of the Nazis a lot changed.

I consider it a form of blasphemy to argue that God brought on (in a variant that He allowed) the Holocaust so as to advance the ingathering of His people. But while the theory may be obnoxious, the reality is that the Holocaust allowed Jews and Gentiles to re-think their attitudes toward the creation of a Jewish state. Ironically, then, the attempt to destroy the Jews created a climate in which the State of Israel could be born.

As always there are those who cling to old ideas even when they are repudiated by new realities. Such people open up buggy whip factories and then wonder why there are no customers. In America we have the American Council for Judaism, the current president of which, Stephen Naman, was recently profiled in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/26religion.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=anti-zionst%20jews&st=cse). Like the Haredim who continue to deny the existence of the Israel upon which at the same time they try to impose their values, Naman’s group has perverted the old Reform concept that Jews are members of a religious group, not a people. I say perverted because he goes farther than the old Pittsburgh Platform which was merely non-Zionist. His group, founded in 1942, in the midst of the Second World War is adamantly anti-Zionist.

The Times article purports (Naman must have been the source, though what follows is not directly attributed to him) that “The rejection of Zion goes back to the Torah itself, with its accounts of the Hebrews’ rebelling against Moses on the journey toward the Promised land and pleading to return to Egypt.” But this is an absurd understanding of the text. Yes, the bible is replete with examples of the followers of Moses rejecting his leadership and pleading to return to Egypt, but that crowd was always pictured as the weak and cowardly, the slaves who were free of their old masters but not of their fears. It was that crowd that God in His despair almost destroyed (on several occasions) opting instead to allow it to die out over 40 years. It’s with that crowd that the Council looks to inspiration? Pshaw.

So I return to my original question. Must a Jew be a Zionist? Well, Jews can eat pork and still be Jews. They can vote Republican and still be Jews. They can be pro-Israel and pro-peace and pro-Israel and anti-withdrawal from the West Bank. All are Jews, but if to be a Jew requires stating “Next Year in Jerusalem” and meaning it, at least for the moment, at least for others who are persecuted, then maybe being an anti-Zionist is incompatible with being a Jew. Ka-Boom.