Is Zionism’s Moral Crisis About Roads Not Taken—or Original Sin?

Where Benjamin Moser replaces one story of Jewish exceptionalism with another, Omer Bartov shows what’s lost when polemic takes the place of history.

September 13, 2026

A ship named for the founder of political Zionism brings Jewish immigrants to the Port of Haifa, in 1948. According to Moser, Zionism and Nazism were ideologically congenial, but his argument relies on distortions and elementary factual errors.Photograph by Robert Capa / ICP / Magnum

The greatest cognitive dissonance in the debate over Gaza concerned the fate of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Many Jewish Americans fervently believed that the conflict had to continue until every last hostage was freed. As Israel systematically destroyed Gaza without achieving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated goal of eliminating Hamas, the hostages’ gruesome ordeal became one of the last rhetorical weapons available to the war’s American proponents.

The debate in Israel was different. Broadly speaking, those who wanted to continue the war also considered the fate of the hostages less important than collectively punishing Palestinians. Polls showed that a majority of Israelis—though mostly undisturbed by a war in which children were starved to death—understood that Netanyahu was prolonging the conflict to preserve his far-right coalition and that hostages were most likely to be freed through a ceasefire. So, while American Jews posted pictures in their neighborhoods of hostages, one of Netanyahu’s closest media allies, the anchor Yinon Magal, regularly mocked their families’ grief, portraying them as weak-kneed appeasers willing to pause the war to get their loved ones back.

The idea that many American Jews were naïve or uninformed about a society to which they felt strongly connected was among the topics Benjamin Moser, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Susan Sontag, explored last year in a long essay for Equator. Moser was born in 1976 and raised in a relatively secular Jewish home in Houston. For the Jews he grew up with, he wrote, “Israel was like a hospital or a university or a park, and I think that most Jewish-Americans looked at Israel with the same kind of benevolence with which they might view a dog shelter or a food bank: which is to say that they were happy it existed, willing to help, grateful for a brief tour, but not overly interested in its inner workings.” (I remember my grandmother’s shocked dismay when I sent her something I had written about the attack that Israel, alongside Britain and France, launched against Egypt in 1956. She believed the oft-repeated claim that Israel had fought only defensive wars and never investigated whether it was true.)

This naïveté helped explain why, as late as October, 2025, when a rickety ceasefire began and the last living hostages returned, polls showed that about half of American Jews supported a conflict some of Israel’s own human-rights organizations had labelled a genocide. Meanwhile, many American Jews who had once defended free expression welcomed crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech. The conflict, Moser wrote, “stripped the pretence of liberalism, of tolerance, to which the American Jewish leadership had, for generations, paid such pious lip service.”

His essay was angry, especially at liberal Zionists. He was troubled by the exceptionalist ideas that even secular American Jews had developed about their community after the Second World War. “We really did think, in some way that we would never have dared to articulate, that Jews were better,” he wrote. In his telling, this superiority eventually allowed American Jews to accommodate the United States’ “imperial power structure.” And, if “the marriage of American exceptionalism and liberal Zionism led to genocide,” reform was inadequate; Zionism itself had to be abandoned.

Moser’s new book, “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History” (Doubleday), reminds Jewish Americans that another tradition is available, one that opposes Israel’s existence rather than merely seeks to curb its worst impulses. Anti-Zionists now generally hold that Israelis and Palestinians should coexist in one binational state. Though many people find this radical, it shouldn’t be controversial to say that everyone living under Israeli control between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea deserves equal rights. But Moser does not detail what a future resolution might entail; he argues instead that anti-Zionism offers a way out of the moral abyss to which Zionism has led.

A rich intellectual history could be written about Jewish anti-Zionist thought, tracing its competing ideas about nationalism and diaspora. Moser has something else in mind: a series of inspirational portraits framed by autobiography. “Anti-Zionism” opens with brief reflections on his own upbringing and on Theodor Herzl, the Austro-Hungarian journalist and playwright who founded modern political Zionism, publishing a seminal manifesto in 1896. Moser’s book then devotes a chapter each to twelve Jewish anti-Zionists. His gallery ranges from early-twentieth-century critics of Zionism, such as the rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares, to contemporary activists, like the South African politician Ronnie Kasrils and the photographer Nan Goldin.

How similar were those who opposed the notion of Israel when its creation seemed a remote possibility to those who opposed and continue to oppose its functioning as a Jewish state from 1948 onward? What connects Tamares, born in the Pale of Settlement in 1869, and Goldin, who campaigns against a nuclear-armed state backed by the world’s most powerful country? The book’s implicit answer is that both recognized the danger of fusing religion with nationalism, and of seeking Jewish sovereignty over a land already inhabited by non-Jews.

An entirely sympathetic figure in Moser’s gallery is Edwin Montagu, one of the first Jews to serve in the British Cabinet and perhaps the British Empire’s most liberal Secretary of State for India. Montagu came from a prominent Jewish family and, like many British Jews of the era, saw no need for a Jewish homeland in Palestine or anywhere else. On this question, he disagreed strongly with Arthur Balfour, a former British Prime Minister who, as Foreign Secretary, was responsible for the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised British support for a “national home” for Jews in Palestine. (It also stated that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”)

The section on Montagu and the Balfour Declaration makes one of Moser’s central arguments especially clear—namely, that prewar European nationalism and Zionism held a deep affinity because both envisioned Jews leaving the Continent. Balfour, whose government passed the Aliens Act, in 1905, to stem Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, seems to have had a streak of antisemitism himself. Montagu, by contrast, launched elegant broadsides against the government and the Zionist movement in general. These showed his concern for the Muslim and Christian peoples of Palestine, as well as his fear of what would happen to the Jewish people if they formed a state. (They would “hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine.”)

“Montagu’s insistence on his Englishness,” Moser writes, was “something beyond patriotism or nationalism—beyond the refusal of a racialization that Hitler shared with Herzl, and that could only be repellent to any self-respecting person.” The pairing of Hitler and Herzl is, by design, startling, but Moser’s position is that both treated Jews as a people apart, even though Herzl sought a homeland for those whom Hitler would seek to destroy.

Some later Zionists had more direct affinities with the European right. Revisionist Zionism, which emerged after Herzl’s death, in 1904, was fiercely anti-socialist, and some of its adherents admired aspects of fascism. Moser emphasizes episodes in which Zionists and right-wing European nationalists found it useful to deal with each other. That history has a contemporary echo in the close alliance between the current Israeli government (Netanyahu’s Likud Party is the modern successor to the Revisionists) and right-wing European leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, at least until Orbán’s defeat earlier this year. Netanyahu and Orbán shared a hostility to liberal élites, refugees, and Muslims generally, which evidently explained why the antisemitic overtones of Orbán’s anti-Soros campaigns never seemed to bother the Israeli government very much.

One much discussed example of such dealings came after the Nazis gained power, in 1933. Some Zionists were convinced that the resulting persecution might encourage Jews to move to Palestine, then under British rule. That year, the Nazi government and Zionist leaders in Germany and Palestine negotiated the Haavara Agreement, which eventually enabled at least fifty thousand German Jews to immigrate to Palestine and to transfer a portion of their assets. The arrangement served both parties’ immediate purposes, as the Israeli historian Tom Segev observed. The Nazis removed Jews from the country and sabotaged a boycott of Germany launched mostly by American Jewish groups; the Zionist movement drew settlers who might otherwise have gone elsewhere. “Only slowly did it become clear that they owed their very lives to the agreement, as well,” Segev noted.

How did Zionism become a movement that could accommodate such compromises? How did it come to attract so many adherents? For a people whose safety had repeatedly proved provisional, Zionism held out the promise of refuge—a promise that acquired new force after the Nazis murdered two-thirds of Europe’s Jews. Moser acknowledges this history, but it rarely enters into his account of the movement. Indeed, as his character studies accumulate, Zionism itself remains oddly indistinct. He provides no sustained critique of its animating ideas, a peculiar omission in a book celebrating those who have challenged them, often at a real cost. In his section on Herzl, Moser offers a string of dismissals, calling him a “bad writer,” someone with “the mind of the petty attorney,” “thoughtless, as in without thought,” and “childish,” but fails to ask what made his vision persuasive. Even Herzl’s treatment of the Dreyfus Affair—he covered the trial and later emphasized Dreyfus’s Jewishness to argue for Zionism—is presented solely as Herzl’s attempt to seize “power and glory.” Moser is under no obligation to find Herzl sympathetic, but it’s striking that he shows so little curiosity about Herzl’s arguments, or about the competing, even contradictory forms that Zionism took.

“In a brilliant sleight of hand, these early Zionists found an enemy in their own parents,” Moser writes in his section on Tamares. “Their idea of Zionism was modern, not because it was Jewish but because it was European. Judaism was backward; rank-and-file Zionists, the Sensitive Rabbi found, were ‘enamored of “Europeanism” in general and the title “Doctor” in particular.’ ” The passage might have opened onto Zionism’s complicated relationship with Europeanism, the way it borrowed from European nationalism while seeking to escape European antisemitism. Instead, Moser appears to view the younger Zionists’ contempt for their religious and conservative elders as discrediting, an odd line for a twenty-first-century progressive to take.

Moser eventually turns his gaze to Hannah Arendt, who reported for this magazine on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, and whose harsh criticism of the Israeli state’s handling of the case earns Moser’s admiration. Although recent scholarship has suggested that Eichmann was a passionate antisemite rather than the unthinking drone of Arendt’s account, as captured in her phrase “the banality of evil,” Moser takes little interest in such debates. What catches his attention is Eichmann’s brief visit to Palestine, in 1937, part of a mission to assess it as a place to send German Jews. This gives Moser a way into his more explosive thesis: that Zionism and Nazism shared “an ideological sympathy that bled into collaboration.”

Moser presents this thesis as a buried truth, absent from the “fairy tale” history he learned growing up and from mainstream accounts. But he has merely inverted the triumphalist exceptionalism of his childhood. In his essay in Equator, he said he had been raised to believe that Jews were uniquely virtuous, in part because of the “responsibility” imposed on survivors by the Holocaust; in his book’s counter-history, Zionist Jews become so uniquely sinful that they rescued the Nazi regime from collapse. To sustain that inversion, the book increasingly relies on distortions and elementary factual errors.

Earlier episodes depict Zionist leaders dealing with European antisemites when their immediate interests converged. The historian Richard Evans called the Haavara Agreement “a marriage of convenience.” Moser sees something more. He tells us that, in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wrote “of ‘a great movement called Zionism,’ ” and that, when he took over, Zionists “rushed to become privileged interlocutors with the regime.” (The German word translated here as “great,” große, refers to the movement’s scale, not its virtues.) In sentences Moser ignores, though, Hitler portrays Zionism as another Jewish deception: “To outward appearances it seemed as if only one group of Jews championed this movement, while the great majority disapproved of it, or even repudiated it. But an investigation of the situation showed that those outward appearances were purposely misleading. . . . When the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the new national consciousness of the Jews will be satisfied by the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, the Jews thereby adopt another means to dupe the simple-minded Gentile.” In other words, Jews were only pretending to be arguing about Zionism; in fact, they planned to use Palestine as a headquarters to rule the world. (The notion that Nazis supported Zionism is a long-standing antisemitic trope.)

Several pages later, in trying to argue that Zionists were sympathetic to Nazi ideas, Moser quotes from what he describes as “the introduction” to the Nazis’ antisemitic Nuremberg Laws: “The ardent Zionists of all people have objected least to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg Laws, because they know that these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people.” Here, he sees a “recognition,” on the part of the Nazis, “that many Zionists endorsed their principles.” But the Nuremberg Laws did not include an introduction. The words Moser reproduces appeared in a Nazi journal two months after the laws were announced. A book he cites by the historian Francis Nicosia tells us that the author of the journal piece argued the position for propaganda purposes.

Moser has an unfortunate tendency to misrepresent the authorities he enlists. That’s on display in his discussion of the Haavara Agreement. He quotes the historian Hava Eshkoli-Wagman as writing that the agreement’s biggest proponents “did not see the saving of lives as an independent goal at that time, rather they sought to extract German Jewish property for the benefit of the Yishuv”—the Jews in Palestine before 1948. But she didn’t write that sentence; she was quoting it as a “widely held criticism” that she goes on to complicate. (To “extract German Jewish property” meant extracting Jewish assets from Nazi Germany, not extorting them from German Jews.) Elsewhere in the same discussion, Eshkoli-Wagman described Haavara as, in part, an attempt to prevent the forced sales of Jewish property, and wrote that this stance, which gave precedence to building a homeland in Palestine over preserving Jewish civil rights in the diaspora, “cannot be attributed to selfish motives.” Moser, with no patience for complexity, supplies his own gloss: “It was, in other words, a shakedown.” Eshkoli-Wagman said nothing of the kind. “The allegations of Zionist-Nazi cooperation in the 1930s,” she concluded, “fail to meet the criteria of responsible historical research and analysis.”

In the same section of the book, Moser tells us that, “in 1938, the Zionists therefore blocked a plan to bring twenty thousand Jewish children to the United States,” without citing a source for the claim. The apparent reference is to the Wagner-Rogers Bill, introduced in Congress in 1939, which would have admitted twenty thousand refugee children from Nazi-controlled Germany. As it happens, Rabbi Stephen Wise, perhaps the most prominent Zionist leader in the United States, testified in its favor; the bill died in committee after a North Carolina restrictionist sabotaged it. Some of Moser’s errors, including misdescriptions of well-known events, seem merely slipshod: amid the Suez machinations, Israel never “seized the canal.”

More often, even Moser’s mundane mistakes suggest a pattern—an eagerness to endorse whatever claims he thinks will strengthen his case. And so he wants to argue that the Jewish-led boycott of Nazi Germany, which began in 1933, was close to bringing down the Third Reich until the boycott was sabotaged by Zionists. It’s an arresting suggestion. Did Zionists really rescue the Third Reich? According to Moser, German exports fell by fifty-one per cent in the first half of 1933 alone, leading the regime to the “verge of collapse.” Here, he’s quoting statistics that he credits to Tony Greenstein, who, yes, has also used the phrase “verge of collapse.” (Greenstein, a British polemicist and Jewish anti-Zionist, was recently expelled from the Green Party; he suggested that the expulsion was at the behest of the Israeli Embassy.) But Greenstein’s own source is a book by Edwin Black, and it turns out that Greenstein confused a shift in Germany’s trade surplus with a shift in export volume. The actual decline in exports was far lower than it had been in the previous two years, before the Nazis took power and thus before the boycott. Moser, drawn to the implication that Zionism saved Nazism, makes claims that no serious historian would support.

It’s when Moser touches on the Nazis’ victims that his approach to the facts truly emerges as slovenly to the point of reckless. “There was abundant proof of the way the Zionist press laundered the stories of atrocities emerging from Europe,” Moser writes. “ ‘Jewish culture flourishing in the Warsaw Ghetto with 24 bookstores and libraries,’ Ben-Gurion’s newspaper, Davar, reported on October 16, 1942.” Moser is correct that an article published in Davar on that date included these words. But it was the type of story—one that you might hope to read about Gaza today—that aimed to show the resilience of people living under hellish circumstances. “The name ‘prison’ is too soft to suggest what this is,” the author wrote in the same piece. “The Warsaw Ghetto is more like an animal enclosure that is right by the slaughterhouse in which you hold the cows until they are ready to be killed. But they don’t torture the cows the way they torture Jews in the ghetto.” The article ends as follows: “Their spirit is still with them in the face of the destruction that the enemy is perpetrating. This shows that there is still a will to live. The enemy cannot hurt their soul.” This, according to Moser, was “laundering” Nazi atrocities.

And so it goes. “In the newspaper Jüdische Rundschau, the Zionists had endorsed the yellow star that publicly stamped Jews with a badge of medieval pariahdom—eight years before the yellow star became compulsory,” Moser writes. A 1933 article in the newspaper did address the yellow star. The piece was written by Robert Weltsch, the paper’s editor. In response to a Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses and the painting of yellow stars and anti-Jewish slogans on the storefronts themselves, Weltsch wrote, “A powerful symbol is to be found in the fact that the boycott leadership gave orders that a sign ‘with a yellow badge on a black background’ was to be pasted on the boycotted shops. This regulation is intended as a brand, a sign of contempt. We will take it up and make of it a badge of honor.” To characterize this as an “endorsement” of Nazi antisemitism is grotesque. (Weltsch—whom Moser codes as “the Zionists”—was an ardent proponent of a binational state in Palestine.)

As the book progresses, Moser increasingly uses the phrase “the Zionists” without bothering to specify which Zionists he means, or even what country they are in. That’s a problem because his story jumps from Germany to the United Kingdom to the United States to Palestine, places where Zionists faced different political circumstances and often pursued conflicting ends. The phrase is not inherently offensive; Zionism is a political idea, and those who identify themselves with it should be prepared for criticism. But Moser presents himself as someone trying to delineate complex historical phenomena for his readers. By turning Zionism into an ideological essence detached from its historical context, he fails to do so.

Moser’s biggest failure, though, may be his inability to escape the very solipsism that he denounced in his Equator essay, titled “We Have Talked Enough About Ourselves,” and that he again identifies as a distinctively Jewish predilection in his book. “More than anything,” he writes, he hopes that the next generation of activists “will shed the solipsism that has ever been a fault of the Jews.” After recounting that he grew up thinking that Zionism was a “unanimity,” he asks, “How would my life have been changed if I had known that it was not?” The question, though it might be better addressed to a therapist than to a reader, is somehow fitting in a book that ends by quoting the author’s own text messages. Moser tells us, in his introduction, that he felt “duped” by what he’d learned as a child and set out to discover the truth. The charitable explanation for his distortions is that, in the course of vacuuming up material for the book, he was duped a second time.

Thirty years ago, in The New Republic, the historian Omer Bartov reviewed Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” a book that may have spawned more academic debate about the Holocaust than anything since Arendt’s dispatches from the Eichmann trial. Goldhagen argued that antisemitism had been deeply embedded among ordinary Germans even before Hitler’s rise, allowing the Nazis to quickly mobilize a citizenry primed to act out its “eliminationist” fantasies about the Jews. Bartov—who was born in Israel, served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War, in 1973, and later wrote a series of important studies of the Holocaust—methodically dismantled Goldhagen’s thesis. “The most troubling aspect of Goldhagen’s book is its contention that ‘ordinary’ Germans belonged to a wholly extraordinary people, a people unlike any other, which had been that way for the better part of a century,” he wrote. “Like all essentialist views it does not require evidence; it is inimical to strictly historical analysis.” He continued: “And what are the implications of such a notion that there exists a nation of ingrained murderers? How useful is this assumption for explaining an historical phenomenon?”

Three decades later, Bartov again shows why we should resist an account of mass violence as the expression of an immutable national character. This time, the nation is his own. In his important new book, “Israel: What Went Wrong?” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Bartov expands on his argument, which he laid out in the Times last year, that Israel’s war was genocidal; he also seems intent on combatting what might be called the Goldhagen Thesis as applied to Israel. Gaza’s ruin, the apartheid in the West Bank, and the ascendancy of Israel’s far right are, in his account, the products of political choices rather than of predestination. Where Moser wants to replace a largely comforting story with an entirely damning one, Bartov refuses exculpation while remaining attentive to contingency.

“The focus on Zionism as state ideology,” Bartov writes, meant that, “in the competition between being Jewish and being democratic, the state tilted increasingly toward the former, first in the sense of being a state strictly for Jews, and then in becoming an ever more Jewish state.” Yet “this was a long process and never an inevitable one,” he cautions. “There were many forks in the road where the country could have chosen to go one way and not the other.” One revealing fork concerned Israel’s borders. Bartov explains why the country’s declaration of independence left them undefined, a result of cynical political manipulation compounded by bureaucratic confusion.

But Bartov doesn’t lose sight of Zionism’s principal failure: from Herzl’s time onward, the movement’s dominant currents never seriously reckoned with the Arabs already living in Palestine. He sees a continuity between what he calls the “colonial views” of pre-state Zionism—epitomized in the infamous phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land”—and the “settler colonialism” Israel has practiced since 1948. “Having undone two millennia of exile, Israel never managed to normalize Jewish existence, as Zionism so wished,” he writes. “Having sought to become a Jewish majority state at any price, it paid the price of creating a vast Palestinian refugee problem that it still refuses to address.” While rejecting the idea that Israel’s path was predetermined, Bartov wants us to see that some of the thinking behind the slaughter in Gaza was present from the start of the Zionist project.

Like Moser, Bartov is invested in the American debate over Israel, for political as well as personal reasons. He, too, was dismayed by the Biden Administration’s backing of Netanyahu’s government, and by much of the American Jewish community’s response to the war, and he urges American Jews to adopt a definition of antisemitism narrow enough to leave room for vigorous criticism of Israel. His preferred political settlement is a confederation of Israel and Palestine, which would allow freedom of movement between sovereign states. Yet he sees little prospect that the current Israeli government, or any government that Israelis are likely to elect soon, will change its course toward the Palestinians. Whatever hope he retains lies in the possibility of pressure from the rest of the world, including the United States.

Bartov’s appeal to American power suggests that, for American Jews, the moral weight should fall on the adjective “American.” Moser remains preoccupied with the noun, filtering Jewish history through his own family history. Early in his book, he refers to his co-religionists who were “horrified that Jews could be associated with such an evil.” Later, in his chapter on Tamares, Moser writes, “The Jews’ status as ‘the chosen people’ had benefits, but it also had responsibilities.” That chosenness, Tamares warned, gave the Jewish people a “special capacity to befoul the ethical atmosphere more than any other nation.” Even if this is the best kind of chauvinism, it is chauvinism all the same.

Palestinian suffering deserves to be understood on its own terms, without being subsumed into a narrative of Jewish psychodrama. Many American Jews, especially younger ones, simply do not want their government aiding and arming a country that behaves like an outlaw nation—the one we live in is enough, thank you—and recognize that many non-Jewish Americans share their revulsion. As Bartov makes clear, Gaza’s destruction followed from political choices, including choices made in Washington. Instead of asking what this destruction means for American Jews, we should ask how America helped make it possible. ♦

• Parents disagreed on whether to vaccinate their children. Then the kids got sick.

Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with public figures in politics and international affairs.

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