With their black hats and beards, the Haredim (trembling ones) have become fixtures in the movement against the Gaza genocide, settler violence in the West Bank and the wars against Lebanon and Iran.
Their presence at rallies conveniently defuses the accusation that Antizionism is Antisemitism.
Sure, many Jews at these marches dream of reviving the Bund and wear watermelon kippot. But Israel advocates have worked hard to dismiss them as secular leftists who use faith to attack Israel.
Yet it’s hard for Kahanists to talk shit to Haredim. Still, they’re controversial to everyone.
For Jewish Zionists, Neturei Karta are out-of-touch extremists. Progressive Jews view them with similar unease, as they know little about the complexity of Haredi views on Israel.
It hasn’t helped Neturei Karta that some members have mingled with Holocaust deniers.
But whether one supports it or not, religious Antizionism helps us understand the Zionist movement’s antipathy towards Diasporic Jewishness and the spiritual significance of the Israeli state.
So what, as Jerry Seinfeld would say, is the deal with these people?
At first, many religious Jews feared the Zionist settlers in Palestine and their nationalist fervour. Although it has many religious variants today, Zionism began as a secular-adjacent movement that prioritised state-building over Torah study.
But Zionism has never been secular. The idea that Jews are entitled to the land because it was promised to them by God in the Bible remained significant, however abstractly, to Labour Zionists and to the anarchists and communists who founded the first kibbutzim.
The issue was how the Israeli state’s founders rationalised the Jewish faith for immigration and colonisation, not Judaism or Jewish ideas.
Neturei Karta’s religious Antizionism is grounded in a suspicion of being replaced by a new ideology, understood as Jewish.
The Satmars, the Hasids living alongside the hipsters of north Brooklyn, for instance, oppose Zionism, because, as The New York Times said in its obituary for the sect’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, only the “Messiah could create a Jewish state and that the Government committed sacrilege by such practices as permitting women to serve in the military.”
The Netflix adaptation of Deborah Feldman’s memoir Unorthodox, about a Satmar woman who leaves New York City to find another path in Berlin, portrays both Haredi hostility to Zionism and the culture’s retrograde gender roles.
This Antizionism hardly fits into a left agenda. But the idea of Zionism being a false messianism is hard to ignore when one looks at the degree to which Zionism has overtaken synagogues, Jewish federations and Jewish artistic and literary events. Devotion to the state almost leapt over the 613 mitzvot in terms of importance.
And while no Zionist leader has ever been ghoulish enough to create a metal likeness of Israel that all Jews should bow towards, the centring of a state, a physical creation of man, in an almost God-like position does feel eerily close to idol worship.
But to truly understand the blasphemy of making Israel advocacy a form of Jewish civil religion in the Diaspora, we must turn to Judaism’s holiest text: Not the Talmud, not the Tanakh, but the Big Book of Jewish Humor.
In this sacred volume, the scholar finds a series of lightbulb jokes. How many Satmars does it take? The answer is two. “One to screw it in and another to denounce it as a Zionist plot.”
There’s another for Zionists. It’s four. “One to stay at home and convince someone else to do it, a second to donate the bulb, a third to screw it in, and a fourth to proclaim that the entire Jewish people stand behind their actions.”
That these two jokes exist alongside each other–there are gags for Chabadniks and Jewish mothers, too–where the Zionist and the Antizionist are equally worthy of light-hearted ribbing, shows a kind of ecumenical understanding that Jews come in all political shapes and sizes.
This brings us to another famous joke: A Jew is stranded on a deserted island, and his rescuers ask why he built two synagogues for himself rather than one.
The answer is simple: One is his shul; the other is the place he wouldn’t be caught dead in. Or consider the quip: five Jews, seven opinions. These jokes illustrate the Jewish soul because Judaism is an ongoing discussion of ethics, a debate over interpretation, a lifelong commitment to questioning and seeking answers to new dilemmas, and a diversity of cultures and opinions.
A Jew can be rich or poor, left or right, long-haired or straight-laced, European or African, non-traditional or Orthodox. In a saner world, Zionism would be one of many political currents among Jews, while the Yiddish notion of doikayt, devotion to a Jew’s home wherever it is, would be another.
As a civil religion, Zionism has purged that openness. It has ended the argument and prohibited alternatives to itself, whether it’s Jewish socialism, the Antizionist ultra-Orthodoxy of Neturei Karta, and everything in between.
Zionism has led to a crazy world where Bernie Sanders and Zack Polanski, whose Jewishness has built their politics, are disregarded as Jews by the rest of the community simply because of the Israel question.
Battleground contributor Wieland Hoban has talked about how the German Jewish establishment doesn’t even recognise Jewish protesters against the genocide in Gaza as Jewish. If you knew how many of them are Israeli expats, you’d be horrified.
The late Christopher Hitchens, famously atheist, once told Charlie Rose that Zionism was a “waste of Judaism”.
Maybe Hitchens was sentimental about the fact that he was Jewish on his mother’s side. But why would a man who thought the idea of “God” was the root of all evil get gushy about Abraham’s covenant?
One theory is that, as a Marxist, Hitchens admired Judaism’s dialectical spirit. Zionism’s goal, largely achieved throughout a great deal of Jewish institutions, is to extinguish this vibrancy for cold obedience to a state.
A state, I might add, that persecutes Jews who disagree with it and is increasingly undemocratic. Not just for Palestinians, but for Jews. Get the idea?
Pro-Palestine activists fight for the same reason one might stand with an Armenian in Ottoman Anatolia, a Jew in Nazi Germany, or an Algerian under French occupation.
This is about material social justice, not about settling a spiritual score.
Zionism’s biggest victims are the Palestinians. That goes without saying.
However, the injury Zionism has inflicted on the Jewish tradition is immense, which is why a great many Antizionist Jews take this issue so seriously.
For better or for worse, the continued existence of Neturei Karta, for all their eccentricities, exposes that injury to the broader public.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
