Jewish Anti-Zionist Movement Founded in Vienna Builds Momentum Across Europe
From Zionism's Birthplace: A Jewish Anti-Zionist Movement Emerges
The second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress is set to take place in Dublin, Ireland later this week.
The 2026 iteration builds on last year’s inaugural gathering held in Vienna, the birthplace of political Zionism, where the movement was formally launched. It was in that very city that Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat in February 1896, the seminal work that laid the foundations for modern political Zionism and helped give rise to the Zionist movement.
Organisers of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress view the establishment of their organisation in Vienna as a symbolic reversal of that history, arguing that the same city that witnessed the birth of political Zionism is now hosting a growing Jewish movement opposed to Zionism and supportive of Palestinian liberation, equality, and self-determination.
“Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust,” activist and author Andrew Feinstein, who is a member of the organisation, tells Palestine Deep Dive. “But it is Palestinians who have suffered the consequences of the establishment, creation, and extreme militarisation of the state of Israel,” he says.
The upcoming three-day conference brings together a range of participants including academics, journalists, politicians, and activists to discuss the evolving landscape of Jewish anti-Zionist thought and its role in contemporary political discourse. Organisers describe this year’s theme as a shift “from words into action”, focusing on practical resistance to Zionist settler-colonialism.
FIRST ANTI-ZIONISTS WERE JEWS.
THE PITTSBURGH PLATFORM (1885): More than a decade before Herzl's Zionist congress, American Reform Jewish leaders gathered to define their movement. Led by figures like Isaac Mayer Wise, they issued the Pittsburgh Platform.
It explicitly stated:
“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine... nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”
The prominent Austrian-Jewish writer and satirist published a stinging polemic titled Eine Krone für Zion ("A Crown for Zion") in 1898. He accused Herzl of aiding anti-Semites by validating the premise that Jews did not belong in their native European countries.
But it was the General Jewish Labor Bund, which were among the first to not only reject but actively campaign against Zionism in the Jewish communities.
Founded in 1897, the Bund was a secular, socialist, and fiercely anti-Zionist organization that operated primarily in the Russian Empire.
The Bund actively opposed Zionism, arguing that emigration to Palestine was a form of bourgeois utopian escapism. Instead of viewing anti-Semitism as an immutable part of the gentile world, their core ideology—known as doykeit (or "hereness")—posited that the Jewish diaspora was their home, and that Jews should stay and fight for equal rights and cultural autonomy alongside their oppressed neighbors.
The Bund did collaborate, and sometimes differed, from the Bolsheviks at different times, since Lenin and the Bolsheviks led a fight to the death against antisemitism and the pogroms.
The Bund fought shoulder to shoulder with the Bolsheviks in the Red Army against the White counterrevolutionary armies that slaughtered thousands of Jews. Needless to say it was the British, French and US that armed the White armies to slaughter the Jews. The majority of the Bund, the "Kombund” joined the Bolshevik party in 1920-1921.
The historic Congress of the Peoples of the East took place in Baku, Azerbaijan, from September 1 to September 8, 1920. Forty-one Jewish delegates attended the congress out of nearly 2,000 majority Muslim participants. Many of these individuals were local Mountain Jews from the Caucasus or Bukharan Jews, alongside European Jewish communists. There, members of the Bund held debates with Mountain Jews and others against Zionism.
It's a very interesting history. I highly recommend reading about it, and in particular the speeches and documents on the fight against colonialism, for women's rights, and against national oppression including the debates on Zionism.
Zionism in fact was opposed by the vast majority of Jews from many different perspectives. Most Orthodox Jews opposed it as heresy, and the overwhelming majority of assimilated Jews in the UK and elsewhere in Europe were anti-Zionist.
In reality it was only after the Holocaust and the abuse of Jewish survivors by the European and US victors that the majority of Jews saw no alternative to forced migration. It was the “allies” who really fulfilled Hitler's “Final Solution” to cruelly drive all the Jews from Europe, to form an imperialist outpost against the Arab masses.
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Jewwashing