A growing number of Jews are challenging Zionism. Even 'liberal' Zionists, who could previously corral the evils of Israel into its post-1967 occupation, are facing the dramatic unboxing of a state that is foundationally and inherently violent. Yet Zionism has maintained virtually hegemonic power within Jewish communities since the 1970s, and in response to the existential threat of abandonment, its propagandists and institutions are fighting back with malice. 

Marilyn Garson's beautiful book, which focuses on her experiences in Aotearoa, where she settled in 1988, and includes extracts of her indefatigable journalism, is a testament to her emotional courage and intellectual integrity as she navigates the realities of Zionism and Israel-Palestine. Born and raised in Canada, Garson “grew up understanding Zionism as a secular, undemanding way to be a Jew.” However, her experiences as an aid worker in Cambodia, Afghanistan, and especially Gaza, where she lived from 2011-2015 (see the companion volume Still Lives), raised unsettling questions. Now, reflecting a deep commitment to “Judaism … entwined with justice and an outward looking pluralism”, Garson makes an unequivocal and compelling case for Jewish anti-Zionism.

Both Garson's understanding of Judaism and her political conclusions resonate very strongly with me, and with my Jewish comrades in the struggle for justice in Palestine.  Nevertheless, for many Jews, and I am speaking here of Ashkenazi Jews, those of us of European descent, the journey from unthinking support for Israel to staunch solidarity with Palestine, while profoundly fulfilling, is also often intensely painful.

Emergence from what is essentially a cult, complete with its own Orwellian Newspeak, is of course intellectually liberating, and solidarity with deeply committed activists is uplifting, but it would be hard to overstate the complexities of the emotional pain involved. This is not to compare with or distract from the myriad facets of pain endured by Palestinians from the very moment Zionist settler colonialism took root in their land. However, this book speaks to the pain of a people whose own tragedy led them, through both vulnerability and hubris, to make themselves instruments of Empire, to perpetrate decades of injustice with relentless brutality and breathtaking cynicism, culminating, with unbearably tragic irony, in genocide. 

As a secular Jew, my story is vastly different from Garson's. Although it feels strange and sad to be alienated from Jewish places of worship and gathering, my path to engagement with the question of Judaism versus Zionism begins and ends with my simple childhood understanding of what it means to be a Jew. Like Garson though, I know that solidarity with First Nations People in their anticolonial struggle demands solidarity with the Palestinians in theirs. 

… 

My journey to anti-Zionism began when I was twelve years old, although it took decades for me to make the connection. It was 1970, the bicentenary of Cook's landing in Botany Bay, and our school history project was a poster on "Celebration of a Nation." I remember sketching "Invasion of a Nation" in a spidery pencilled arc across the top of the cardboard. 

Around the same time, I found our books on the Holocaust. Those images haunt me to this day, but again, it was decades before I absorbed their lesson. It is acutely painful that Jews are now responsible for emaciated children with accusing eyes, grieving mothers and exhausted fathers, humiliated young men, frail grandparents nursing pathetic bundles being trundled along in barrows, charred corpses splayed in final indignity… 

…

I was born thirteen years after the liberation of Auschwitz. The Holocaust was the backdrop to my understanding of what it meant to be Jewish. My grandparents had fled Europe in 1937, and their flat in Bondi was a hub for survivors. I don't remember being told the stories, but I knew them. The blue number on one man's brown forearm below his rolled white sleeve is particularly vivid in my memory. 

These people could have stepped out of the pages of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story: Blazenstein believed that each month God put a new moon in the sky. Mrs Schneier banished the starvation of the camps by preparing enormous Seder meals, serving each and every one of us with an enormous smile, flushed and sweating from her tiny kitchen. The Lengas had each lost their entire families, including spouses and children, and had remarried in a displaced persons camp.

Our family attended the old Mizrachi Synagogue, where virtually everyone was a Holocaust survivor, most from Poland. On the Day of Atonement, when Jews ask the Almighty for forgiveness, the benches were packed, the grief palpable. As a little girl, I was embraced with a kind of reverence that I understood only in retrospect: children were both a triumph and a terrible reminder. 

Every Saturday evening, when I grew tired after dinner prepared by my beloved grandmother, I lay on the divan in the small dining room, with everyone still sitting around the table talking and arguing in Yiddish, and drifted into sleep. I immersed myself in the folk stories of Yiddish writers, and in tales of Jewish mystics. My early years were steeped in the echoes of a vanished world. 

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We moved from Bondi and eventually joined the Kingsford-Maroubra Hebrew Congregation. Gone were the crowded benches and warm embraces of the old shul. This was a modern place, all parquetry and proper seats, and it was here that Israel entered my concept of Jewishness. The youth group was, of course, run by a Zionist madrich. As an impressionable teen, I was seduced by Israel's mythologised history, its innocent victimhood, its socialist idealism. Israel was the Jewish Phoenix, my people risen, literally, from the ashes. 

Inevitably, I went to Israel. I lived on a kibbutz and was utterly captivated. Israel was the unfamiliar experience of not being a minority, of feeling powerful in my Jewish identity instead of always feeling, at some level, precarious, a child who had to behave perfectly lest my people be judged even more harshly than they already were. My experiences of antisemitism at school and in society had ranged from casual and individual to brutal and institutional. I was acutely aware that Jews are only ever conditionally equal, ephemerally secure. Israel brought out in me a kind of proprietary swagger that I had never known. 

Eventually, life went in a different direction. I was a belated child of the sixties, in search of spiritual meaning, connection with nature, a sense of belonging untainted by convention or capitalism. Bored by the aspirational blandness and insularity of the Jewish community, I drifted away. I was nostalgic for the depth of experience, the culture, the roughness around the edges of those Jews of Eastern Europe. That was who I was, and, aside from my brief flirtation with the Zionist "Muscle Jew," I never wavered, despite that voice not being answered for decades. 

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Like Garson, who lived through the bombardment, subsequently losing all “patience for sentimental Liberal Zionism”, my own unexamined liberal zionism was irrevocably shattered by Operation Protective Edge. For those fifty-one days in 2014, I watched in horror and disbelief as Israel rained death and destruction upon the terrified, screaming, bleeding, desperate people of Gaza. I paced and cried, virtually sleepless and barely able to eat. I cannot overstate the shock as the entire edifice of my identity as a Jew crumbled. Was this our ethical tradition of justice and righteousness? Was it for this that my grandmother had carried her infant daughter across a snow-bound border? Was it for this that my irascible grandfather had fought to save at least part of our family from the inferno? 

…

Again, like Garson, I found the support and solidarity of like-minded Jews invaluable in navigating this new terrain. Garson's path was smoothed by her friendship with Fred Albert, an American anti-Zionist Jew, who settled in Aotearoa in 1973. I was fortunate to meet Vivienne Porzsolt, a founding member of Jews Against the Occupation ’48, at a talk I attended at the University of Technology Sydney. Here were Jews whom I could relate to - intelligent, informed, argumentative, compassionate, rough around the edges. It was extremely humbling to encounter people who had been for decades where I had so recently arrived. Their mentoring and comradeship enabled me to embrace my identity with renewed respect, and self-respect. 

Over the past decade, I have pursued the truth about Zionism, Israel, and Palestine, with intense focus and determination. I have confronted the naked cynicism of Zionism, its manipulation of Jewish trauma and exploitation of Jewish history, its symbiotic relationship with antisemitism. I have seen behind its veil of innocent victimhood to its unyielding core of cruelty and aggression. And like Garson, I have seen the meaning of ‘antisemitism’ perverted in order to vilify and suppress critics of Israel, including the growing number of dissident Jews. 

In Aotearoa, Alternative Jewish Voices, which Garson co-founded in 2020, is a crucial voice of resistance to the Zionist narrative. In Australia, Jewish dissent is longstanding, but only now becoming significant enough to challenge Zionist hegemony. Initial opposition to Israel's behaviour has become passionate rejection of the entire Zionist project. While individuals such as Peter Slezak and Anthony Loewenstein, and groups such as Jews Against the Occupation '48, the Tzedek Collective, and Loud Jew Collective, have long been vilified as a self-hating lunatic fringe, the emergence of the Jewish Council of Australia has shown that hundreds, even thousands, of Jewish Australians are taking at least the first steps towards rejecting Jewish ethnonationalist supremacism in Palestine and reclaiming our rich heritage of diaspora life. 

The work of International Jewish anti-Zionist groups is also bearing fruit. The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network was founded in 2008 to "oppose Zionism and the State of Israel," and Garson's Alternative Jewish Voices, "is a founding member of the largest sustained Jewish organisation for international political change, Global Jews for Palestine," founded in 2019 and enjoying exponential growth. As our 'Global Jewish Manifesto for Collective Liberation' (see Appendix) states, "Jewish dispersion has been central to Jewish intellectual, cultural, and spiritual development and to multidirectional flows of knowledge in every sphere. This dynamic is tragically diminished when the State of Israel claims dominion over Jewish political, emotional, and intellectual life."

…

We Jews have a rich tradition to inspire our rejection of Zionism. My favourite comes from the Mishnah, the first text of Jewish oral law. 

"Know that a person has to cross a very narrow bridge in this world. And the main thing is that he shouldn’t fear at all.” – Rabbi Nachman of Breslov

The Rabbi understood that when we are afraid, we deviate from what is right and true, and thus imperil ourselves. We can uphold the Jewish ethical tradition only when we refuse to be morally enfeebled and destabilised. Zionism, which cultivates and thrives on our fear, must be resisted. 

Ultimately, Jewish Not Zionist is a story of such resistance, told with clarity and grace. It offers profound insights into a uniquely Jewish dilemma and struggle, as well as much-needed encouragement to Jews facing the crucial and inevitable reckoning ahead. 

…

Michelle Berkon

Jews Against the Occupation ‘48

Sydney, 2025