Published in Overland Literary Journal, October 15, 2025
Anti-Zionist Jews are saying: we need new institutions. In London, Toronto or New York, this is a literal call for social and religious organisations that do not replicate the harms of Zionism. However, institutions are agreed practices long before they are bricks and mortar. For anti-Zionist Jews to unseat Zionism globally, we must institutionalise a positive, liberatory Jewish identity and new religious, cultural and political practices.
Judaism has a history of re-creating itself in crises. We adapted to dispersion, and we have seen off false messiahs. The arid rabbinic Judaism of the eighteenth century was kindling for the most heartfelt Hasidism. The monstrous culmination of Zionism presents us with such a crisis today. What will we make of Jewishness now?
Israel’s annihilation of Gaza ruptures the world that many Jews thought they inhabited. Some had let Zionism supplant their religion. Others saw their liberal white Jewishness as a safe, reasonable redoubt within a stable world order. Confronted with its moral failure, seeing the starvation of Palestinian children, some freeze in place while others say, “we can no longer remain silent”.
A minority of Jews has worked for years for justice and real peace in Palestine. Whether we are anchored in religion or radical politics, our tools long pre-date the creation of the state of Israel. Israel’s criminality affirms what we knew. Our identity is intact and we strain to apply it to the lifesaving work at hand. We have not yet conveyed our vision beyond that.
The work of restoring Jewishness is integral to our urgent politics on Palestine. We refuse the bad-faith claims of antisemitism that would silence Palestinian voices. We defy the monopoly that Zionism tries to assert. And we do all this as an act of decolonising our own identity. Without it, we are deracinated.
In 2019, anti-Zionist Jewish groups in a dozen countries began to meet online, to bring this vision to life across borders. Global Jews for Palestine (GJP) began as an act of resistance to the coordinated campaign of the IHRA definition of antisemitism — that dreaded trope which conflates opposition to Zionism with the hatred of Jews.
A global organisational forum must bridge many differences. The languages of Left politics, identity and human rights sometimes conflict. What works in South Africa or Ireland, with their histories of apartheid and colonisation, sounds otherworldly to Americans. Next-generation decolonisers can feel held back by the pace of social justice veterans. Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa, for years the smallest member-group, brought the invitation contained in our relational Te Tiriti o Waitangi. That has always distinguished our vision.
When we meet, Zionism is not the only hegemon in the room. Beatriz Kalichman notes from Brazil the challenges,
that we usually encounter when working internationally with high income countries, or the Global North. There are the issues of resources, of language and of worldviews, and if we don’t recognise the structural inequalities between countries we often end up reproducing these power dynamics.
Over five years, GJP became a community of values and practice, with member-groups in twenty-one countries on six continents. We found a voice that brought our geography to bear on issues and events, although we felt reactive.
As Gaza became the fulcrum on which an entire world order is poised, our task became more foundational. To speak the truth. To centre the voices and experience of Palestinians. To be global. Yet Zionism’s bad faith actors also make Jewish anti-Zionism more fraught. Israel’s leaders and soldiers appropriate our name. They take the symbols and language of Jewishness. In the US, the UK, Germany, people are arrested as antisemites and as terrorists for drawing attention to genocide.
Having witnessed Israel’s brutality in Gaza and the instrumentalization of Jewish identity to suppress protest elsewhere, is it futile to hold on to Jewishness and continue to protest as Jews? Has Israel finally destroyed the Jews?
No, we do not concede. Many of us draw our inspiration from Jewishness, and we will not let nationalism steal that. Our future does not lie in negotiating the marginal reform of self-appointed leaders who bring our institutions into disgrace. We need new institutions.
Guided by a social justice ethic as old as the prophets, our Torah is a call for solidarity with the oppressed. We are told that each generation writes the Torah for its time, and we are writing ours by rejecting nationalism, restoring Jewish conscience and planting it firmly within wider solidarity.
Midrash is a Jewish literary form that draws out the story between words. We drew out the story of a Jewish community that takes Gaza to heart. We wrote it into a manifesto that sketches the principles that enact ethical, inclusive, solidarist Jewish community. Dr Sheryl Nestel, its lead writer, envisioned it as
responding in a meaningful way to the overwhelming support for the genocide in Gaza by legacy Jewish institutions. This support verified to many of us that these institutions are morally indefensible and have been so for decades. They are not redeemable, therefore Jews of conscience must refuse to support or collaborate with them. Moreover, we need to publicly refute their claims to represent all Jews – a tactic that is used to defame and undermine the overwhelming opposition to what Israel is doing.
The very first anti-Zionist institution that we are building in each of our countries is new Jewish community itself. Aspects of Judaism are socially enacted. Community is vital, but Zionist institutions have adopted a painful, scarring practice of driving non-Zionists out. The tactic of expulsion tries to impose a spiritual death. When I returned from working in Gaza, I clung to my synagogue for six long years, because I didn’t know how to be Jewish without it. Others endure similar harm within their families or on campus.
Leaving Zionist-Jewish community used to be like stepping from a vision into a void. That is no longer the case. Religious and social anti-Zionist Jewish community is flourishing.
As a public speaker, I sense a desire to construct something beyond dissent. In the past year I have often been asked, “Is there something I can sign?” In one regional city, two of the four anti-Zionist Jews asked that question. In Wellington, a man in his seventies said that he had “never really done much” about being Jewish, but he would like to sign his name to anti-Zionism now.
Signature conveys membership. Beatriz Kalicher adds that signing the GJP manifesto “means we are not lonely… There is something of reclaiming our right to be Jewish after feeling that it was revoked for our refusal of Israel.”
Resistance is relational. It flourishes in the spaces between us, where we make and recognise commitments. It is no small thing to institutionalise a principled, global practice of Jewishness. It ensures that our work for Palestine will derive from, and nurture, our Jewish identity. It says that we have outgrown mere rejection of the identities imposed on us by Zionism.
What lies beyond that preposition, anti, in the phrase anti-Zionist? It is nothing less than a liberatory Jewishness in spiritual, secular, and political forms. It is the Jewish identity for our time.
Marilyn’s books Still Lives – A Memoir Of Gaza and Jewish, Not Zionist are published in Australia by Interventions and be will launched at Sydney’s Trades Hall tonight, 15 October, at 6.30 pm and on Monday 20 October at Melbourne’s Trades Hall, also at 6.30 pm. The events are endorsed by Jewish Council of Australia, Loud Jew Collective, Jews Against the Occupation ’48, NIBS, Search Foundation. The Melbourne event will also be livestreamed.