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

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.