The writer rarely questioned the tenets of liberal Zionism growing up. Now he embraces anti-Zionism with the fervor of a new convert

In 1987, the Israeli human rights attorney Felicia Langer was paying a visit to the Neve Tirza women’s prison when a client named Siham shared some disturbing news: the prisoners held there had recently been sprayed with a chemical agent that left them writhing on the floor. Langer grabbed a tissue that had been exposed to the substance – a piece of evidence, perhaps, in a future legal case. Then, on impulse, she lifted it to her face and inhaled deeply. Her hope, she wrote later, was that doing so might enable a doctor to identify the toxin.

This anecdote appears in Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History*,* by Benjamin Moser. In it, the Pulitzer prize-winning author profiles a dozen Jews who actively opposed Zionism, before and after the establishment of Israel – from Aaron Samuel Tamares, a Polish rabbi who began inveighing against Jewish nationalism in the late 19th century; to British diplomat Edwin Montagu, who sought to derail the 1917 Balfour declaration promising a Jewish state in Palestine; to Israeli “new historian” Avi Shlaim – figures he sees as part of “a hidden tradition … of people who, though long dismissed and despised, were ultimately proven right”. Along the way, he seeks to dismantle the Zionist “fairytale,” as he puts it, piece by piece.

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    As The Guardian notes, the New Yorker review (itself plainly sympathetic and anti-Zionist) pretty badly skewers the factual accuracy of the book’s history and abuse of sources.

    I thought this example was particularly egregious:

    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.

    The man literally took an article written by Jews trying to inspire some small sliver of hope among fellow Jews being subjected to genocide and turned it into “Well clearly they thought everything was hunky-dory.”

    • moldy_rice@piefed.keyboardvagabond.comEnglish
      2·
      13 hours ago

      You should see the conditions of dairy cows or chickens or pigs. These days, factory farms absolutely torture animals before they’re slaughtered.

      Many Holocaust survivors became vegetarian after they left the camps, as they said that they realized how we treat animals is very similar to how they were treated by the Nazis in the camps.