Opinion | Jewish Anti-Zionists, Check Your Privilege

“Our home is wherever we are. There’s no nation-state that is our national homeland,” said a Jewish instructor at the University of Chicago who helped organize an anti-Zionist Seder held during this spring’s campus protests against Israel. So The Chicago Tribune reported.

“Zionism does not make you safe. Zionism makes the world more dangerous for Jews,” a member of Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) at the University of North Carolina told the Religion News Service.

JVP reportedly took a prominent role in organizing protests on college campuses this spring. “Zionism was a false and failed answer” to the antisemitism faced by “many of our ancestors” in Europe, says JVP’s own statement on its website rejecting Zionism.

To which I must respond: Check your privilege.

Given how that phrase is often used, I’ll clarify: I’m not referring to the skin color of people who made these statements. I’m speaking of the safety they enjoy as Jews in America while they attack Zionism. For nearly all, that safety is due to historical luck: Before they were born, their ancestors were able to come to the United States.

To explain, let’s take a look at the statement on JVP’s website, with its mix of historical facts, distortions and lacunae. Accurately, it says that some Jews tried to assimilate into European society; many emigrated to America; and some “turned to revolutionary socialism.” And some, it says disapprovingly, chose Zionism.

Two essential pieces are missing from this picture. First, of those who stayed in Europe for the sake of revolutionary socialism, a great many were murdered in the Holocaust—or, in smaller numbers, in Stalin’s purges. Many survivors or their descendants would emigrate to Israel.

Second, America shut its gates. The Johnson-Reed Act, enacted in 1924, set quotas for immigrants from each country, with deliberately low quotas for eastern and southern Europe. As Jia Lynn Yang writes in her 2020 book One Mighty and Irresistible Tide, the laws’ architects saw people from those areas as racially inferior.

If you’re an American Jew, you are probably descended from people who got in before that—people who won a fateful historical lottery.

This was also a turning point for Zionism. From 1924 on, ever more Jews migrated to British-ruled Palestine. For some, it was pragmatic: Tel Aviv was an option; New York wasn’t. Some were more ideologically Zionist. But America’s decision validated the Zionist view that only a national home would provide Jews a lasting refuge. And British decisions to limit entry to Palestine in the 1930s made it clear that the “national home”—formerly a politically vague concept—had to be an independent state to be a true haven.

For nearly all, that safety is due to historical luck.

Trapped in Europe, millions of Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Jewish survivors made up part of the “last million”—author David Nasaw’s term for the displaced persons (DPs) who couldn’t return to their pre-war countries. In June 1948, Congress enacted a law to allow some DPs to come to the United States. Under the pretext of excluding Communists, the law was written to keep out most Jews. In 1950, a new law allowed in more Jewish DPs. By then, most survivors had found sanctuary in Israel. Only in 1965 did a new law significantly reopen America to immigration.

So again: If your parents or grandparents were survivors who got to the United States, you’re enjoying a benefit not of your making.

After Israel’s independence, Jewish immigration from the Middle East and North Africa climbed dramatically. That story is too complex to sum up here. But the anti-Zionist narrative that Israel shattered idyllic coexistence in Muslim countries is a myth. “Jews were always second-class citizens under Moslem [sic] rule,” as the renowned anti-colonial thinker Albert Memmi wrote, in his explanation of why he, as a Jew, left Tunisia. Newly independent Arab states, like newly independent Eastern European states before them, were inhospitable to Jews.

Some Mizrahi Jews found homes in the West, especially France. Many more, by choice or necessity, came to Israel. A smaller number reached America. If that’s your family, you too are holding a lottery ticket dealt by history.

I’m not suggesting that American Jews should feel guilt for being the heirs of what, so far, has been a safe haven. Guilt over historical good luck is silly. Nor do American Jews need to refrain from criticizing Israeli policies. Most Israelis are critical of the Israeli government these days; why shouldn’t American Jews be? If you believe that Israel should end the occupation of the West Bank and avoid the reoccupation of Gaza, from where I sit—in Jerusalem—it seems you have Israel’s best interests in mind.

On the other hand, claiming that Jews don’t need a state because you personally are doing fine outside that state is the ultimate in unthinking entitlement. It’s time to take a good hard look at your privilege, and learn some humility.

Gershom Gorenberg’s most recent book is War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East.

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