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

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 sponsor in decline, dramatic shifts in public opinion are taking place across the western world Demonstrators wave a Palestinian flag during a nationwide day of strikes and protests in Milan, northern Italy, on 30 October 2026 (Piero Cruciatti/AFP) Off

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. 

Questioning Zionism

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 challenged their governments’ military and political support for Israel. 

What began, for many, as opposition to the destruction of Gaza has increasingly developed into a broader questioning of the structures of occupation, apartheid and settler-colonialism. Israel has become one of the most widely condemned countries in the world, and its founding myths are increasingly collapsing.

The central challenge is not simply to oppose Zionism, but to articulate and organise an alternative: a democratic political order in which Palestinians recover their rights

Yet an important distinction remains. Not everyone who opposes Israel’s actions supports anti-Zionism, and not everyone questioning Zionism has embraced the vision of one democratic state. 

Nevertheless, the boundaries of political debate are changing. The question is no longer confined to how Palestinians might obtain a state alongside Israel, but increasingly concerns the legitimacy of the colonial Zionist project and the political framework that governs the entire territory, from the river to the sea.

Here lies an uncomfortable paradox for the Palestinian national movement. While sections of the western left are beginning to challenge Zionism as a political framework, much of the Palestinian leadership continues to negotiate within that framework, seeking a Palestinian state alongside Israel through a partition formula that has become increasingly detached from the realities on the ground.

This is not simply an intellectual disagreement. It concerns the future of the Palestinian liberation struggle. 

International recognition of Palestinian statehood remains important and should not be dismissed. But recognition cannot be a substitute for the exercise of national rights, nor can it resolve questions about refugees, equality, dispossession and the fragmentation of the Palestinian people.

Right of return

The challenge is to move from a discussion around the “legitimacy” of partition to the legitimacy of rights. A single democratic state throughout historic Palestine - based on decolonisation, equal citizenship, collective rights and the right of return - offers a different political horizon. 

It is not a merger of two existing states, or an arrangement that preserves colonial privilege. It requires dismantling the structures that prevent Palestinians and Israeli Jews from living together as equals.

The recent Israeli elections provided another perspective on this contradiction. Despite the continuing strength of the Zionist political consensus and ever-escalating colonial brutality, Palestinian citizens of Israel participated in unprecedented numbers. 

Turnout in Arab localities reached approximately 80 percent, while Arab-led parties secured a combined 19 seats in the Knesset.

As a former head of the Balad party who advocated boycotting Israeli elections after the Knesset’s endorsement of the racist and colonial nation-state law in 2018, I regard this development as politically significant, but it must be interpreted carefully. 

It would be a mistake to read this participation as an expression of confidence in Israeli democracy or acceptance of the Zionist state. Palestinians voted in circumstances of growing existential insecurity, political repression, narrowing of the public political space, state-sponsored organised crime, and escalating attacks on their communities. 

For many, the ballot box remains one of the few available spaces through which they can defend their immediate interests, express their collective political identity, and resist the far right.

At the same time, these results expose the limitations of parliamentary politics. The increased electoral weight of Palestinian citizens has not removed the constitutional and institutional structures that deny them national equality. Nor can replacing one Israeli government with another, by itself, transform the political order.

Inseparable struggles

The deeper question is whether Palestinian participation can become part of a wider national project, rather than remaining confined to managing the consequences of colonial rule. Palestinians inside Israel cannot be reduced to a minority seeking better integration into the existing state. 

Their struggle is inseparable from that of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, the refugee camps and the diaspora. Such an approach to the struggle and its political solution requires a radical shift in thinking, as well as an understanding that liberation is a long process that must be viewed in historical terms.

The contrast is striking. In parts of the western political arena, the legitimacy of Zionism itself is increasingly being questioned, and its lies exposed. Yet Palestinian political institutions remain largely trapped within the assumptions of the Oslo framework and the two-state paradigm.

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This contradiction reflects years of political fragmentation, institutional stagnation and international pressure. But it also raises an urgent question about Palestinian political responsibility: Why should western progressive movements move beyond the political assumptions of partition, while Palestinians themselves remain hesitant to reconsider them?

Moser’s book and the British Greens’ decision do not offer Palestinians a ready-made political solution. Nor should the Palestinian future depend on western political parties or Jewish intellectuals. 

Their significance lies in helping to open a political and intellectual space that Palestinians must now occupy with their own historical experience, political thinking and liberation project.

The task is to rebuild an inclusive Palestinian national movement, reconnect Palestinians across geographical and political divides, and transform the growing international solidarity movement into sustained political alliances.

Anti-Zionism without a democratic alternative and an agreed liberation vision and strategy remains incomplete. Equally, a one-state formula without decolonisation, equality and the right of return could reproduce domination under another name.

The central challenge, therefore, is not simply to oppose Zionism, but to articulate and organise an alternative: a democratic political order in which Palestinians recover their rights, and Israeli Jews - who will have to relinquish their colonial privileges - enjoy individual security, freedom and collective cultural rights, without the domination of one people over another.

The debate has begun to move beyond the legitimacy of partition. The Palestinian national movement must now confront the implications of this shift, and act in light of the dramatic changes taking place in American and European Jewish circles, as well as the evolving global solidarity movement struggling for justice and dignity. 

The remarkable results of the American elections are opening up a new horizon, as the major supporter of the genocidal regime is in rapid decline, and the continued funding of crimes against humanity in Palestine and across our region is increasingly being questioned.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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