The intellectual fraud and moral vacuity of Benjamin Moser

The more he studied Zionism, the more he spent time there, the more he realised that “every inch of Israel is Palestine. It was always Palestine.” So says Benjamin Moser. You have to wonder where and with whom he studied, as well as where and with whom the man spent his time in Israel. Bottom line, when it comes to Israel and Zionism, and indeed, Palestine, Moser apparently knows little and understands even less.

That, however, hasn’t stopped the Pulitzer Prize winner penning 400 pages entitled Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, in which he claims to have uncovered a hidden tradition of Jewish opposition to Zionism. Moser has been doing the rounds promoting his book to an audience excited by his “as a Jew” credentials. He declares Zionism “a terrible idea” from the outset and has questioned Israel’s very existence. His Jewishness and Pulitzer Prize give his pronouncements an air of authority, which he exploits to the max, to peddle a deeply flawed, selective and disingenuous interpretation of Jewish history, all the while claiming the moral high ground. He is, of course, entitled to his opinions, however ignorant, offensive or downright absurd. What he is not entitled to do is butcher Jewish history, manipulate the evidence and pass off his political and ideological prejudices as serious scholarship.

Moser has been remarkably obliging in providing us with evidence that undermines both the man and his credibility. Before the book was even published, he announced that it was his contribution to “the greatest cause of our time, the resistance to Zionism”, which he equated with resisting “racism, colonialism, imperialism” and the “wars endlessly fought in its name”. For Moser, Israel’s insistence on defending itself and fighting wars imposed upon it by those who seek the destruction of the Jewish state is offensive and further evidence of Zionism’s moral bankruptcy. How dare the Jews fight back, and worse still, have the audacity to win. Those who repeatedly set out to erase Israel from the map barely warrant consideration.

Moser had a verdict. He just needed to rewrite history to support it.

Moser builds his case around twelve Jews, selected for their opposition to Zionism, whom he describes as “the moral aristocracy of Jewish people”. Their objections arose from vastly different beliefs, motivations and circumstances, distinctions he is only too willing to distort or disregard in his determination to enlist them in his own crusade against the Jewish state. And quite what qualifies this particular collection for the moral aristocracy is another matter entirely. Edwin Montagu was a thoroughly assimilated British politician, desperately concerned that Zionism would undermine his standing as an Englishman. Rabbi Hyman Judah Schachtel was a leading American opponent of Zionism who subsequently embraced it following Israel’s establishment. Hannah Arendt’s objections to Jewish nationalism were considerably more complicated than Moser’s wholesale rejection of Israel. Others opposed Zionism out of religious conviction, pacifism, socialism or their rejection of nationalism itself. Some were principled, others politically compromised, and some changed their minds as history unfolded.

Moser is rather less generous when it comes to Theodor Herzl. He goes after the father of modern Zionism’s character, his writing, his mental health issues and even entertains the possibility of “delusional ideations”. Apparently, due to Herzl’s human frailties and shortcomings, the Jewish national movement he helped create can be dismissed. It’s an extraordinary argument from a supposedly serious writer. Herzl could have been an arrogant, insufferable bastard. By all accounts, he wasn’t always the easiest man to get along with. His personality, however, has precious little bearing on the legitimacy of the Zionist movement and the righteousness of its cause.

One of Moser’s more revealing subjects is Edwin Montagu, a British cabinet minister who fiercely opposed the Balfour Declaration. However, there was something painfully desperate about Montagu’s position. He belonged to that familiar breed of assimilated Jews who believed that if they were sufficiently patriotic, sufficiently loyal and sufficiently indistinguishable from everybody else, their Jewishness would eventually cease to be an issue. He wanted to be accepted as an Englishman, without qualification, and Zionism threatened to remind everyone that he was also a Jew. His opposition was as much about protecting his place in British society as it was about the future of the Jewish people.

Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares is another revealing choice. He initially supported Zionism and even attended the Fourth Zionist Congress in 1900, before turning against it. A committed pacifist, he believed nationalism, political sovereignty and the use of military force were fundamentally at odds with Judaism’s moral and spiritual purpose. Yet he recognised the Jewish people’s historical connection to the Land of Israel and supported Jewish immigration and settlement there. His objection was to the establishment of a nationalist state, rather than the Jewish presence in their ancestral homeland. Quite how Moser translates the convictions of a religious pacifist who died in 1931 into an indictment of a Jewish state repeatedly forced to defend its very existence nearly a century later is another matter entirely.

The same problem arises with Hannah Arendt, whose criticism of Zionism and the direction of Jewish nationalism Moser enthusiastically embraces. Arendt was a German Jewish refugee who understood the dangers of nationalism and statelessness rather more intimately than most. She warned against the consequences of establishing a Jewish state without securing a political future for the Arabs living alongside Jews, and she fiercely criticised aspects of Israeli policy. Her arguments deserve to be taken seriously and to be understood in full, rather than reduced to another endorsement of Moser’s conviction that Israel should never have existed. Arendt’s thinking about Jewish political existence, federation and the rights of both peoples was considerably more complicated than the crude moral division Moser now insists upon.

His selection of Avi Shlaim is equally revealing. Born into a Jewish family in Baghdad, Shlaim has become a fierce critic of Zionism and Israeli policy, promoting a version of Iraqi Jewish history in which Zionism bears much of the blame for the destruction of that ancient community. He has argued that Zionist agents were responsible for some of the Baghdad bombings of 1950 and 1951, an allegation whose evidence remains disputed, yet one Moser repeats with remarkable confidence. The Farhud massacre of 1941, anti-Jewish legislation, arrests, confiscations and the persecution that drove almost the entire Jewish community from Iraq are rather less convenient to this narrative. Reducing the destruction of Iraqi Jewry to another Zionist crime is an extraordinary distortion of history, stripping those Jews of their experiences, fears and decisions. For someone so concerned about the manipulation of Jewish history, Moser seems remarkably comfortable doing precisely that.

The Bundists, although not among Moser’s twelve portraits, expose another weakness in his attempt to turn historical Jewish anti-Zionism into a verdict against Israel. They were among the most important Jewish opponents of Zionism, fiercely committed to Jewish culture, Yiddish language, workers’ rights and the belief that Jews should fight for their future in the countries where they lived. Their “doikayt”, the Yiddish principle of “hereness”, held that Jews should fight for their rights and their future wherever they lived. In other words, their insistence on belonging where they were was a courageous and deeply human position. Why should Jews abandon their homes because antisemites wanted them gone? Why should centuries of Jewish civilisation in Eastern Europe be surrendered to the people who hated them?

The Bundists were neither fools nor self-hating Jews. They were proud Jews who believed passionately that Jewish life had a future in Europe, that they belonged there and had every right to remain. And they fought for that future, politically, culturally and ultimately with guns in their hands. In the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Bundists fought alongside Zionists, including Marek Edelman of the Bund and Mordechai Anielewicz of the socialist Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair.

The Germans, of course, couldn’t have cared less about their ideological differences. Most of the Bundists in Eastern Europe were murdered, and the world in which their vision of Jewish life had taken root was destroyed. Bundists believed Jews could secure their future among the nations of Europe. The Zionists believed Jews needed a country of their own. History pretty much settled that argument, albeit far too late for far too many.

Moser wants the arguments of Jews who rejected Zionism, but he is considerably less interested in allowing the circumstances in which those arguments were made, or what subsequently happened, to complicate his conclusions, where just perhaps the Zionists had a point after all.

His treatment of Zionist dealings with Nazi Germany is especially manipulative and repugnant. Moser makes much of the Haavara Agreement, negotiated in 1933 to enable German Jews emigrating to Mandatory Palestine to recover part of their assets. It was bitterly controversial because it undermined efforts to boycott Nazi Germany, and there were serious disagreements among Jews over its merits. But the purpose of the arrangement was simply to rescue Jews, to get them out of Nazi Germany. It is not, as Moser would have you believe, evidence of ideological sympathy between Zionists and Nazis.

Moser’s handling of the evidence has been exposed in devastating detail by Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker, hardly a bastion of support for the Jewish state. He falsely presents a quote from a Nazi journal as part of the Nuremberg Laws, twists the words of historian Hava Eshkoli-Wagman, attributing to her an argument she was actually challenging, and claims Zionists blocked an American plan to admit 20,000 Jewish children in 1938, although the bill was introduced in 1939 and prominent Zionist Rabbi Stephen Wise supported it. These are serious distortions of the very evidence upon which Moser builds his accusations. Chotiner called his treatment of facts “slovenly to the point of reckless”, a judgement made all the more damning by Moser’s own admission to The Paris Review that he kept discovering mistakes whenever he returned to his manuscript.

No kidding.

Moser describes the Holocaust as Zionism’s “biggest trump card”, a phrase so grotesquely cynical that it is difficult to believe it came from a man who claims to care about Jewish history. The murder of six million Jews becomes something Zionists supposedly used to legitimise an illegitimate state. The fact that Zionism existed long before Hitler came to power, that the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917 and that the League of Nations recognised the historical connection of the Jewish people to Palestine in 1922 is of little interest to Moser.

Yet, the Holocaust neither invented Jewish nationhood nor created the Jewish connection to the land. It simply demonstrated, with unimaginable horror, the danger of Jewish powerlessness and the consequences of leaving the fate of Jews in the hands of others and at the mercy of tolerance.

Moser’s insistence that every inch of Israel was always Palestine is another example of his disingenuity and dishonesty. Jewish history in the land is hardly a matter of conjecture. Jewish artefacts, sites and culture permeate the land. Israel, Judah, Judaea, Jerusalem and the continuous Jewish connection to the land existed long before modern Zionism, and long before the emergence of Palestinian nationalism, a 20th-century invention. Indeed, early Mandate-era Palestinian Arab leaders sought Arab sovereignty, initially as part of Greater Syria, while opposing Jewish sovereignty. The official idea of Palestinian statehood was established with the PLO itself in 1964.

Yet Moser would have us believe that an ancient Jewish homeland is somehow a foreign European invention, while a relatively modern Palestinian national movement represents an eternal claim to the land. A rather extraordinary and wholly false rewriting of history, even by his standards.

It is easy enough to denounce a country’s creation from the comfort of a Dutch-American literary career. The consequences of declaring that country illegitimate are rather more serious for the people whose lives he is discussing.

Moser’s most valuable contribution to the modern-day anti-Israel movement has little to do with his research. It is his Jewishness. A Pulitzer Prize-winning Jew who denounces Zionism as racism, colonialism and imperialism is an extraordinarily useful figure for people who already believe precisely that. He provides the reassurance that their hostility to the Jewish state is entirely respectable, that their understanding of Jewish history is superior to that of most Jews, and that accusations of antisemitism can safely be dismissed because a Jew has endorsed their conclusions.

There is something depressingly familiar. Montagu wanted to be more English than the English. Moser appears determined to be more anti-Zionist than the anti-Zionists, anxious to demonstrate to his enlightened friends that he is one of the “good” Jews, untainted by the nationalism, tribalism and supposed moral blindness of the rest. His dedication of the book to Palestinians as an act of “repentance” is particularly revealing. Moser was born in Houston, has not personally committed the acts for which he is repenting and does not live in Israel. Yet he has managed to turn Palestinian suffering into a public performance of his own Jewish moral purification. It’s as sick as it is sanctimonious and narcissistic.

His remarks at a Greens for Palestine event take him into considerably uglier territory. Discussing accusations of antisemitism, Moser went on to spout a litany of conspiracy theories and antisemitic tropes as old as history itself. This ‘as a Jew’ Jew said this: “But in the case of the Jews, they scream at you, and they call you a racist, and they call you an antisemite, and they call you a self-hating Jew. And at the same time, they have a lot of money, so they’re very good at producing propaganda. They’re very good at bribing politicians.”

Oh, the irony.

The man who has devoted 400 pages to supposedly rescuing Jewish morality from Zionism exposes rather more about his own morality. ‘As a Jew’ he claims the moral high ground over Zionists, while basking in the approval of a progressive audience and the red-green alliance, only too happy to have a Jew legitimise their antisemitism. They get their prejudices endorsed. He gets to parade his moral grandiosity. His Jewishness, used as the perfect alibi for both.

Moser’s entire exercise reeks of intellectual dishonesty.

He begins with a verdict, manipulates Jewish history to support it, distorts the convictions of those he claims to honour and passes off his prejudices as scholarship. He appoints himself an arbiter of Jewish morality while casually recycling antisemitic stereotypes, apparently oblivious to the irony and hypocrisy. His Jewishness does not excuse his dishonesty. His Pulitzer cannot compensate for his lack of factual integrity.

For a man so eager to lecture Jews on their morality, Moser seems remarkably unconcerned with his own. He has taken a genuine and complex history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, misrepresented it, perverted it and exploited it to lend credibility to his campaign to demonise the Jewish state. For a writer who has built his reputation on serious research, his willingness to bend the facts to suit his prejudices is nothing short of disgraceful.

With this book, Moser exposes himself as little more than a scam artist, while the cult of Palestinianism has found itself another willing Jewish accomplice.

Gary Cohen is a writer and filmmaker. His substack can be found here: