The Origins of Anti-Zionism

Rabbi Elmer Berger was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1908 and studied at the University of Cincinnati before undertaking rabbinical studies at Hebrew Union College. After his ordination in 1932, he served as rabbi of various Reform congregations in Michigan for a decade. In 1942, a half-decade after the Reform movement’s Columbus Platform overturned classical Reform Judaism’s opposition to Jewish nationalism, and three years into World War II, Berger wrote an essay titled “Why I Am a Non-Zionist.” Shortly thereafter, he was appointed head of the American Council for Judaism (ACJ), a newly founded organization that promoted the Reform movement’s earlier anti-Zionism. Berger propagated his anti-Zionist views, first at the helm of the ACJ, which he led from 1942 until 1955; then as its executive vice president until 1968. Finally, in his remaining three decades, he led a still newer one-man organization called the American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism (AJAZ).

For Berger, the idea of a “Jewish people” was a fallacy. “I cannot write about a Jewish people because there is none,” he asserted in 1945 in his first full monograph, The Jewish Dilemma. “To designate them [Jews] as a national group is a vestige of the past,” Berger wrote. “Enlightened states always refer to Jews as citizens of Jewish faith,” he continued, and thus “as nations emerge from absolutism and oligarchy and join the march of freedom into representative government, Jews slowly get out from under the concept of a restrictive, separate nationality group.” In these lines, Berger affirmed the historical process whereby Jews became “no longer” (in the language of the Reform movement’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform) a separate nation but rather an emancipated, integrated religious community among other religious communities of fellow citizens.

Berger’s stance provoked a fierce response from fellow Jews. As one contemporary reviewer of The Jewish Dilemma put it in the American Sociological Review, classical Reform’s anti-Zionism “was understandable in the light of achievements of emancipation in the first half of the [20th] century … but the retention of these effete shiboleths in the era of genocide is scarcely realistic.” In Berger’s “acidulous tract,” this reviewer continued, “there is scant recognition of the bitter realities of the plight of Jewry in the age of crematoria,” but rather “only homilies on the promise of democracy as providing automatic insurance of the safety of the Jews.” For many American Jewish readers, like this reviewer, Berger’s position—written in the midst of the Holocaust—was outrageously, even dangerously, detached from reality.

American Jews were not the only ones to take note of Berger’s work. The American Council for Judaism, and Berger as its chief spokesman, also caught the eye of Palestinian critics of Zionism and Israel. One such Palestinian critic was Fayez Sayegh. At some point in the early 1950s, as Berger recalled in his Memoirs of an Anti-Zionist Jew, he “received a letter on the stationery of the Lebanese Embassy in Washington.” This letter, wrote Berger, “was from Fayez A. Sayegh,” who “suggested that the next time I might come to Washington he would welcome an opportunity to meet and talk.” Berger accepted this invitation, which sparked an extended intellectual friendship. Of Sayegh, Berger wrote, “I enjoyed his intellectual coolness, which was not without passionate conviction and commitment to the cause of justice and political rights for the Palestinians.” Remarking on the development of their relationship, Berger wrote that “we each had some things to learn from the Other. And without ever saying so, we explored each other’s thinking. The process made us life-time friends.”

Sayegh would soon invite Berger to address the convention of the Organization of Arab Students, meeting in Colorado, where Berger’s topic was “How Should Arabs Present Their Case to the American Public?” This was a question Berger was to confront again in the wake of the 1967 war, when he spoke at a banquet in Beirut on the topic “How Can the Arabs Explain Palestine to the West?” at the invitation of sponsors Americans for Justice in the Middle East (founded by Americans at AUB after the Six-Day War); the Fifth of June Society (led initially by the Jaffa-born refugee Shafiq Kombargi); and Friends of Jerusalem (a Christian Lebanese organization that advocated for the welfare of Christians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank).

And when Berger spoke, Palestinian nationalists and their Arab supporters listened. Indeed, in speeches delivered before the Special Political Committee of the U.N. General Assembly in November 1963, Ahmad Shukairy cited Berger’s Who Knows Better Must Say So. Though Shukairy stepped down from PLO leadership at the end of 1967, Berger’s writings, and those of his associates in the American Council for Judaism (including William Thomas Mallison and Moshe Menuhin) were cited frequently in publications of the PLO Research Center, the PLO’s think tank that Shukairy and Sayegh founded in 1965. In fact, one of these publications was a 271-page book published in 1970 titled The American Council for Judaism (al-Majlis al-Amriki li-l-Yahudiyya). In introducing this book, Fayez Sayegh’s younger brother, Anis, then director of the PLO Research Center, wrote that “one of the oft-repeated claims among Arabs … is that every Jew is a Zionist, and that Judaism and Zionism are two names for the same thing.” The Research Center aimed instead “to offer an honest picture of … Jewish tendencies, organizations, and movements that oppose or publicly challenge Zionism.”

The book’s author, Ass’ad Razzouk, explained that drawing a distinction between Jew and Zionist was essential for the Palestinian nationalist effort. Conflating “Jew” and “Zionist,” he wrote, “is a mistake that leads to confusion in the strategy of the opposition and yields negative results for the struggle.” Emphasizing this distinction, Berger advised his Palestinian and Arab colleagues, was key to their success.

In Razzouk’s section on the “religious background” of Jewish opposition to Zionism, the 19th-century American Reform movement’s Pittsburgh Platform takes pride of place. Razzouk noted the central role of the Bohemian-born American Reform Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise in articulating the Reform ideas, which “found their classical expression in the platform known as the Pittsburgh Platform,” which Razzouk proceeded to translate into Arabic. (The very next source Razzouk cited is Elmer Berger’s A Partisan History of Judaism of 1951.) The Pittsburgh Platform was central to the PLO Research Center’s conception of Jewish opposition to Zionism and thus the critical element of the historical, “religious background” that explained the outlook of the American Council for Judaism.

In 1968, two years before the publication of the PLO Research Center’s book on the ACJ, Berger was forced out of the organization due to his response to the Six-Day War. A New York Times article published on July 16, 1967, just over a month after the conclusion of the war, began by noting that while “most of the 5.5 million Jews in the United States reacted with pride and rejoicing” to Israel’s swift military victory, “a small but prominent minority of American Jews looked upon the Arab-Israeli war as a ‘tragedy,’ and their leaders charged that their fellow Jews in Israel had embarked on ‘aggression.’” Berger was among this minority. Notwithstanding their opposition to Zionism, the members of the ACJ were unwilling to tolerate Berger’s public attack on Israel after its sensational military victory and so he was pushed out of the organization. As a former president of the ACJ explained in a note to the new executive director, “I know that our members, by and large, want to be assured that their continued support for the Council does not mean their undying hatred of the State of Israel or, of even greater importance, their endorsement of the position and tactics of the Arabs.”

As Anis Sayegh wrote in his foreword to the April 1969 book Isra’ il wa-Yahud al-‘Alam (Israel and World Jewry), the links Israel claimed to Jewish citizens of other countries made it an exception in the world of modern states. Indeed, according to the author, the asserted links between Israel and world Jewry were “illegal in terms of international political principles and international law.” A study of this relationship would help explain, Sayegh asserted, why “the Arab countries do not consider Israel to be a regular state with sovereignty among the states of the region of the Middle East.” The State of Israel has chosen to define itself and to act as something other than “a regular state”; its declared affiliation with Jews beyond its borders is a prime example of the state’s anomaly.

In this book, PLO researcher Mustafa ‘Abd al-‘Aziz articulated three separate, albeit related, arguments concerning Israel’s relationship with Jews abroad. The first was that by claiming a special relationship with and a certain responsibility for Jewish citizens of other countries, Israel violated a basic principle of international law—namely, that states exercise sovereignty only over their own territories and their own citizens.

The second argument ‘Abd al-‘Aziz set forth was that by claiming a connection to world Jewry, Israel undercut the proclaimed loyalty of Jews to the countries of which they were citizens. Moreover, Israel’s claims complicated life for Jews abroad. Whereas a “policy of tolerance toward the Jews” currently “prevails in the world,” ‘Abd al-‘Aziz argued, Israel was effectively working in opposition to this trend. Israel “slows the extent of Jews’ integration in their societies and works to … isolate them from their nations.” Israel, through claiming this link to world Jewry, “actively helps to bring about waves of antisemitism that break out from doubt surrounding the loyalty and allegiance of the Jews of the world.” For the welfare and security of world Jewry, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz contended, all “states of the world that desire peace for their citizens” must resist Israel’s presumptions of responsibility for Jews beyond the state’s borders.

Third, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz claimed that Israel’s asserted connection to citizens of other states violated basic principles of international law. Citizenship, wrote ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, was properly based on “a political bond, that is, belonging legally to a particular state,” and not on “religious ties.”

Yet ‘Abd al-‘Aziz identified what for him was a “glimmer of hope”: that many Jews opposed Israel’s claims of responsibility for “the Jewish people.” The publications of Elmer Berger and others associated with the ACJ filled a significant portion of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s bibliography: Twenty of the 85 English-language sources listed were either written by Berger or published by the ACJ. Such Jews, wrote ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, “insist that they are an inseparable part of the national majority among whom they live” and that “they do not believe in Israel’s proclamation that it is the natural place for all of the world’s Jews.” Moreover, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz noted in conclusion, these Jewish anti-Zionist heroes “oppose mixing the spiritual and the worldly.” For ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, in line with the views of the ACJ and of the PLO Covenant, Jewishness belonged in the realm of al-ruhaniyat, the spiritual, and had no proper place in the realm of temporal or secular law. The mixing of the two realms was a fundamental flaw in the logic and, consequently, the legitimacy of Zionism and Israel.

As we have seen, the PLO Research Center scholars saw Berger as a kindred spirit with respect to his perception of Jewishness. What did Berger, for his part, think of the PLO? While he was regularly accused of being more interested in the welfare of Arabs than of Jews, Berger denied this accusation. In his memoirs, published in 1978 by the Institute for Palestine Studies, Berger wrote that his ACJ was:

not a pro-Arab organization nor were our primary concerns, in the first instance, with “Arab rights.” All of my new Arab friends understood this. In fact, I have been told by more than one of them and more than once that it was precisely my point-of-departure from American interests and my concern for the integrity of Judaism against the pollutions of Zionism’s politics which gave me credibility in the Arab world. This Arab perception of my motivations never prevented the Zionist propagandists from charging me with “pro-Arabism,” even of being paid by the Arab League.

Berger’s motivations remain open to debate. What is clear, however, is that he was right on the money in thinking that the more his views were perceived as part of internal American Jewish discourse and motivated by “authentically” American Jewish values and interests, the better these views served Arab critics of Israel.

Notably, Berger’s critique of Zionism went well beyond his insistence on the rejection of Jewish nationhood, and exposed what he saw as Israel’s racist laws and acts. Moreover, he ultimately expressed profound sympathy for Palestinian nationalism and specifically for the PLO. In 1983, a few years after the publication of his Memoirs and in the wake of the 1982 Israeli war against the PLO in Lebanon, Berger reviewed a book about the PLO published that same year. This book, Cheryl Rubenberg’s The Palestine Liberation Organization, Berger wrote, “breathes a living soul into the recognized leaders of the Palestinian nation” and “eliminates any excuse for caricaturing the PLO as one-dimensional ‘terrorists,’ single-mindedly devoted to the ‘destruction’ of the State of Israel.” Adopting a laudatory tone, Berger opined that the PLO’s “dedication to the total welfare of its forcibly dispersed people approximates a religious commitment.” In fact, the PLO’s “network of institutions serving Palestinian education, arts, health services, labor organizations, and many other needs,” Berger declared, is comparable “to only enlightened, humanistic, socially conscious States.” Berger singled out the Research Center as the PLO’s crown jewel.

Another layer of complexity in this nexus between the PLO Research Center and the American Council for Judaism is the fact that Elmer Berger apparently had, as late as the 1950s, professional ties to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Historian Hugh Wilford has argued that the network of the ACJ and the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), on the board of which Berger served, was “both a government front and a lobby group with an agenda of its own.” Berger, who acted as AFME’s “chief pamphleteer,” wrote in his 1978 memoirs that “by now … everyone knows it [AFME] was conceived and financed by the CIA.” In private correspondence from 1978, Berger wrote to an associate that “at one point in my life, when [Kermit] Kim Roosevelt was running the Middle East section of CIA, I served as a consultant—part time.”

Wilford contended that Berger was not doing the CIA’s work so much as engaging in coordinated efforts to advance interests he shared with the CIA Arabists (and with the anti-Zionist Arabist Protestants at the helm of AFME). “Berger and his friends did not see Kim Roosevelt as their boss,” according to Wilford, but rather as “a partner working in a common cause.” Nonetheless, the CIA’s support of Berger and its role in connecting him to figures in the Middle East lead us to ponder how the conception of Judaism espoused by the PLO and its Research Center may have been, however indirectly, informed and influenced by an American intelligence agency.