In the city of its birth, Jews reject Zionism
Over a weekend in mid-June, about 500 people gathered in Vienna, Austria, for what organizers dubbed the city’s first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress. Israelis, Jews, allies, activists and academics from around the world gathered under banners in German and English that read: “Stop Zionism,” “Judaism is not Zionism” and “Never Again for Anyone.”
They came to reject Zionism in the very city of its birth.
In 1896, Theodor Herzl, a Jewish journalist, writer and Vienna resident, published “Der Judenstaat, or “The Jewish State,” arguing that Jews could only be truly safe in a country of their own.
On the side of a small stone stairway in Vienna’s first district, a plaque memorializes Herzl as the man who had “the bold idea for the foundation of the state of Israel.” Herzl wasn’t the first to advocate for an independent Jewish state, but he is largely seen as the father of secular, national Zionism.
From the bottom of the steps, one can see across the Danube River to Leopoldstadt, once a marshy island, which later became a densely populated Jewish neighborhood — in part because of antisemitic persecution and expulsions of Jews from the center of Vienna. Leopoldstadt was also where Herzl’s family first settled upon arrival from Budapest, Hungary, in 1878.
Herzl held his First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 — not in Vienna or Munich as he had first planned. Dr. Yavov Rabkin, a history professor at the Université de Montréal in Canada, said that Herzl’s idea was met by three types of Jewish opposition.
“One, religious, [against] the idea that you can gather Jews in the Holy Land before the arrival of the Messiah,” Rabkin said. “Two, the Jews who were integrating into European societies, and they didn’t want to hear that they don’t belong there because Zionism had pretty much the same message as antisemitism. And finally, there were people who considered Zionism to be a distraction from class struggle.”
Within several decades, however, that opposition was eroded among many European Jews who had survived the Holocaust during World War II. For American Jews, that moment came after the 1967 Six-Day war, which resulted in Israel’s capture of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Old City of Jerusalem from Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria.
Rabkin added that Jewish people no longer feared being seen as having split loyalties — an accusation that had often been levied against them.
“So, you can be a Zionist and all the while remaining a good American,” he explained. “It wasn’t always like that, because between the two wars, there was real concern about dual loyalty. [Afterward], this concern disappeared.”
But Rabkin said younger Jews today, especially in the United States, are rejecting Zionism for other reasons: “Most young people are averse to the idea of apartheid, of ethnic nationalism, of supremacy of all kinds. And Israel encapsulates all three.”
Dalia Sarig, one of the organizers of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress this month, said her family had fled to Palestine before the creation of Israel, and then returned to Austria after the Holocaust. She said she grew up on the idea of Zionism and even moved to Israel when she was 18 years old.
“I think Zionism delivered something that a lot of people bought into. It was, you know, ‘How can I be Jewish when I’m not religious?’” Sarig said. “So, it’s this that Zionism used to gather Jews around the world and to collect them into this national ideology.”
She said what she saw and learned while living in Israel made her give up on that ideology and once again moved back to Austria. She points to conversations she had with a Palestinian teacher while at the University of Haifa.
“ He told me his story of expulsion. How his family was expelled from their Palestinian village,” she said. “I started to think how he would be feeling as a Palestinian living in this Jewish state. … I understood how racist this was.”
The organizers of the June event kept the exact location secret until just days before the event. Previous Palestinian solidarity events in Vienna have been met with pushback from pro-Israel groups and the official Jewish community. (In Austria and Germany, there are Jewish organizations that are considered official representatives for the community.)
The divide between that official community and those attending the congress is reflective of the growing divide among Jewish communities globally over support for Israel, not just over the occupation of Palestinians or the war in Gaza, but over the very idea of a Jewish state.
The expected opposition from the official Jewish community didn’t materialize, but a Volkswagen hatchback with German plates flying Israeli flags and flags of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party did. One of the two occupants of the car said she was Jewish, and only gave her first name, Sophia.
“For me, anti-Zionism is equal to antisemitism,” she said, despite the organizers of the congress being Jewish. “We have seen from historical experience, anti-Zionism is always connected with killing Jews.”
Participants at the conference reject that notion, and say a Jewish state hasn’t kept Jews safe and has cost the lives and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
And in the very city where Herzl made his case for the Jewish state, they are coming together now to reject it.
