In the West, Jewish voices are embracing anti-Zionism. Palestinians must seize this moment

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In the West, Jewish voices are embracing anti-Zionism. Palestinians must seize this moment Submitted by Awad Abdelfattah on Mon, 11/09/2026 - 15:53 With Israel's top global…

The publication of Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History comes at a significant political moment.

Alongside the growing anti-genocide movement in the West, and the British Green Party’s recent adoption of a motion supporting a single democratic state in historic Palestine, the book helps to bring a question once marginalised in mainstream western debate into sharper focus: is Zionism an inseparable expression of Jewish identity, or a political ideology that must itself be challenged?

Moser, an American Jewish writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, approaches this question by recovering a largely suppressed tradition of Jewish opposition to Zionism.

Through portraits of 12 Jewish figures, including Hannah Arendt, Edwin Montagu, Felicia Langer and Avi Shlaim, he demonstrates that opposition to Zionism is neither new nor alien to Jewish intellectual and political history.

The importance of his intervention goes beyond the historical recovery of individual voices. It challenges one of Zionism’s most powerful political claims: that Jewish identity, collective security and national existence necessarily require a state organised around Jewish privilege in Palestine.

Moser’s work helps to establish that Jewish identity and opposition to Zionism are not contradictory, and that Jewish political and ethical traditions have also produced alternatives to exclusive nationalism.

This is particularly relevant after the genocide and destruction of Gaza, which have exposed the consequences of a political system founded on Palestinian dispossession, ethnic cleansing and the denial of Palestinian national rights.

The growing willingness of Jewish intellectuals, activists and public figures to question Zionism has contributed to a wider shift in western political discourse.

The British Greens’ decision reflects this changing atmosphere. So does the mobilisation of Americans, Palestinians, Muslims, Jewish anti-Zionists, students, trade unionists and ordinary citizens who have…

Opening of the article, excerpted from Middle East Eye. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.