From June 13 to 15, the first anti-Zionist Jewish congress was held in Vienna, aiming to give voice to fierce opponents of the Zionist abomination. From the Austrian capital, and in the name of the memory of the Shoah, the slogan “Neither Herzl nor Hitler” was chanted in unison, as if the two were ultimately one and the same. Is this moral “clarity” sufficient to illuminate the political path ahead? Our correspondent Liam Hoare’s report suggests not: all is not clear among the anti-Zionist Jews, who were joined for the occasion by their allies Roger Waters and Rima Hassan.
VIENNA – Dalia Sarig was barely audible as she took the stage to open what was billed as the First Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress. Technical issues plagued the opening day of the event on June 13, and her microphone screeched and hissed and faded in and out as she made her opening remarks. Delegates, she said, were gathered “in the very country where Herzl launched Zionism as a racist colonist ideology.” Austria and its political elites remain in a “deliberate alliance with Zionism”—a “racist, nationalist and colonial ideology” which has “brought about a genocide”—and that places Austria “on the wrong side of history.”
Sarig was addressing an audience likely in the low hundreds that almost filled the hall, a space typically used for weddings and Turkish community and cultural gatherings. Must-have fashion accessories included the black-and-white keffiyeh typically draped over the shoulders, watermelon earrings, and faux-MAGA hats in green with slogans like ‘Make Palestine Whole Again’ and ‘Make Palestine Free Again.’ The stage was phalanxed by two large olive trees, and the tables in front of the speakers’ black leather chairs were decorated with white roses in memory of the anti-Nazi resistance group and yellow daffodils, the symbol of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Domestic and international Jewish anti-Zionists made up a chunk of the congress’ delegation. These included some of the 36 Viennese anti-Zionist Jews—out of a Jewish community of around 10-12,000 people—who put their signatures to the Viennese Jewish Anti-Zionist Declaration published in December 2024 prior to the congress. The paper ends with the clarion call: “Judaism does not equal Zionism!”
Present too—either in person or via Zoom—were folk heroes of the international anti-Zionist movement: musician Roger Waters, who instead of giving a speech read the lyrics to a terrible new song he had been working on; Francesa Albanese, United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories; and Rima Hassan, Member of the European Parliament for the far-left La France Insoumise and participant in June’s Gaza Freedom Flotilla with Swedish climate campaigner turned anti-Israel activist Greta Thunberg.
The First Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna was a clear and deliberate attempt to seize the memory of the Holocaust and the legacy of anti-fascism to grant moral legitimacy to the anti-Zionist cause. The manipulation of history and memory would become this event’s leitmotif.
From what appeared to be streetside at a Parisian café, Hassan recounted her experience of being, as she framed it, “kidnapped” and detained by the “Israel Occupation Forces.” As she spoke, she cradled in her hands a flower bulb, something evidently of tremendous meaning to her for it brought her to tears to speak of it. It was plucked, she explained, from the soil of historic Palestine prior to her deportation, a gesture one of her captors allowed her to undertake. Her story would be among the first, but far from the last, displays of alarming cognitive dissonance.
Like Hassan, the congress’ political representation came exclusively from the far-left. Among the congress’ supporters were the last remaining Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Communist Party selling copies of their newspaper, the Funke. Also embedded in the organizational structure were prominent members of the Gaza List, which ran for parliament in September 2024’s national elections, gaining a meagre 0.4 percent of the vote. Among its leading candidates were Sarig—who frames herself as someone who lived in Israel for “many years” before returning to Austria because of Israel’s “structural racism”—and Astrid Wagner, perhaps most famous for having acted as the child rapist Josef Fritzl’s lawyer.
At either ends of the hall were two large banners displaying the congress’ principal slogans: ‘Stop Zionism’ and ‘Never Again for Anyone.’ The latter, a reclamation of the German and Austrian anti-fascist commandment ‘never again,’ was a prelude of things to come. The First Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna was a clear and deliberate attempt to seize the memory of the Holocaust and the legacy of anti-fascism to grant moral legitimacy to the anti-Zionist cause. The manipulation of history and memory would become this event’s leitmotif.
Vienna, the city of Lueger, Herzl and Hitler
At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, Vienna was home to three people of enormous significance to the destiny of European Jewry. Vienna was the city of Karl Lueger, mayor of the Austrian capital during the fin de siècle period. Even if he himself was not an antisemite, through antisemitic rabble-rousing, anti-Jewish agitation, and a party platform steeped in nationalism and xenophobia as well as Germanic and Catholic supremacism, Lueger rode a wave of anti-Jewish hatred among the Viennese lower-middle class to reach Vienna’s highest office.
Vienna was the city of Theodor Herzl. Despite the fact that Herzl would later claim that “what made me a Zionist was the Dreyfus trial,” one of his biographers, Derek Penslar, notes that little of his journalistic correspondence from Paris “dealt directly with antisemitism.” More important “were the Viennese municipal elections in April and May 1895,” out of which Lueger’s party emerged with a two-thirds majority on the city council. Shlomo Avineri concurs in his biography of Herzl: “If the country that had treated the Jews best during the nineteenth century was about to disintegrate and pose serious challenges to the well-being of his Jewish population, a radical solution had to be found.”
Vienna was the city of Adolf Hitler, who relocated there in 1907 as part of a failed attempt to get into Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts that left him homeless and destitute. Lueger was still mayor of Vienna at that time, and Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf that he was “one of the most immense German mayors of all time.” Although Lueger and his party were not Nazis, for the Catholics and German nationalists constituted separate political camps divided by the question of Austrian nationhood, Hitler “absorbed pan-Germanism, the concept of the Aryan master race, antisemitism, and anti-Slavism,” in Lueger’s Vienna, Avineri concludes.
By staging their first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna, the organizers undertook a conscious attempt to insert themselves into this historical framework, albeit via an inversion and a perversion of historical and political events. “The antisemitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, once declared: ‘I decide who is a Jew,’” reads the Viennese Jewish Anti-Zionist Declaration. “Those who aligned with his policies were exempt from being labeled as ‘Jews’ by Lueger, while dissenting voices opposing his policies were, by his definition, the voices ‘of the Jews’”:
Even today, our anti-colonial Jewish voices in Austria are silenced and delegitimized according to this principle—albeit reversed as ‘We decide who is not Jewish.’ Those who align with Israel are allowed to be considered ‘Jewish’ and to speak as Jews, while those who do not are expected to remain silent as ‘non-Jews.’ We recognize this as a form of antisemitism and as complicity in spreading antisemitism, as it conflates Jewish identity inseparably with the genocide of Palestinians and fuels hatred against Jews.
Karl Lueger is not dead. He is, in fact, alive and well in the hearts and minds not only of the Austrian political establishment but also, by extension, the Austrian Jewish one too, who are all antisemites. His contemporary victims are Austria’s anti-Zionist Jews whose rights and freedoms are being suppressed: “We, the undersigned, unequivocally demand the right to freely express our democratic and anti-colonial views,” a funny demand to issue prior to an organized anti-Zionist congress and after running an explicitly anti-Zionist party in national elections.
As Dalia Sarig noted in her opening remarks, the Viennese Jewish Anti-Zionist Declaration was issued in Herzl’s city. A week prior to the congress, Sarig and her comrades staged a political action temporarily renaming Theodor Herzl Square—a rather innocuous piece of concrete beside Vienna’s Marriott hotel—Gaza Square. Sarig said: “Theodor Herzl is honored annually in Vienna—and for what? For an ideology of colonialism and racist nationalism? As anti-Zionist Jews, we reject this ideology, which justifies colonial violence and expulsion.”
So too in her address to congress did Sarig reference the Mauthausen Oath, a commitment sworn by survivors of the concentration camp on May 16, 1945, which read in part:
True to these ideals, we make a solemn oath to continue to fight, firm and united, against imperialism and against the instigation of hatred between peoples. … We want to erect the most beautiful monument that one could dedicate to the soldiers who have fallen for the cause of freedom of the international community on a secure basis: A world of free men.
“Invoking this oath in support of radical anti-Zionism distorts its historical meaning,” researcher Stephanie Courouble-Share warned prior to the congress. “By mobilizing the Mauthausen Oath against Israel, the organizers suggest that the Jewish state represents the very system of oppression the survivors vowed to resist. This comparison, lacking historical accuracy, is a rhetorical maneuver that distorts Holocaust memory for political purposes, erasing the specificity of Nazism and the genocide of European Jews.” This, though, precisely the point—not only of this citation but, far too often, this congress.
Israel is weak but the game is strong
The First Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress was undermined by a series of internal contradictions and characterized by a detachment from historical and political reality. In the early hours of June 13, Israel launched a series of quite extraordinary targeted strikes against Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructure. Its long-term ramifications remain unclear, but in the short-term, in contradistinction to the deadly failings of October 7, 2023, it demonstrated the inherent strength of Israel’s military and intelligence apparatus.
The [Jewish Anti-Zionist] congress could never quite make up its mind whether Zionism was so weak that it was on the verge of total collapse or so strong that it is responsible for all the world’s ills.
Whether congressional delegates knew or could comprehend this is unclear. “This is the first day of Israel’s fast decline,” thundered Haim Bresheeth, professional research associate at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, one of the many old comrades from the international anti-Zionist movement to make it Vienna. “They have attacked humanity. They have no longer just attacked in Gaza, but everywhere in the Middle East. No one anywhere in the Middle East is safe from Zionism. There is no safety anywhere as long as Zionism is with us.”
Bresheeth—who gave a largely irrelevant speech to congress about the history of Andalucia—was rather prone to aphoristic proclamations that appeared to come from nowhere and had about as much substance as a Kinder Egg. “There is no place for Zionism in today’s world—anywhere,” for example, or “the UN is a useless body and it was made useless by Zionism and the West.” At one point, he asked delegates: “Which side are Jews on?”: with the European West, responsible for colonialism, or the East, which, it goes without saying, has never perpetrated an act of war or colonialism in its life.
Much like Bresheeth himself, congress could never quite make up its mind whether Zionism was so weak that it was on the verge of total collapse—not just a decline but a fast decline, no less—or so strong that it is responsible for all the world’s ills, its reach stretching from the bomb-damaged nuclear facilities of Iran to the congress halls of Vienna where anti-Zionists’ free speech was being stifled. “Everybody in this room is convinced that this is the beginning of the end of Zionism,” the Egyptian journalist and influencer Rahma Zein said in remarks that somehow were not intended as a joke.
Anti-fascism and identity politics
This congress, Israeli anti-Zionist activist Ronnie Barkan said in his opening address, “is not about discussing Judaism or identity politics”—a rather astonishing statement for an event that frames itself as being both Jewish and anti-Zionist. If Barkan’s words are genuine, then Palestinian author and academic Ghada Karmi, who spoke explicitly both about Jewish identity and her perception about the role of Jews both in the Zionist and anti-Zionist movements, didn’t get the memo.
“Anti-Zionist Jews are still a small minority in Israel and in the world outside,” she observed. “The majority of Jews actively or passively support Israel. You have to ask yourself how would Israel have become so powerful in the U.S. and Europe if it were not for these Jewish accomplices.” It is her belief, therefore, that “the fight against Zionism is an intra-Jewish affair in which the Palestinians should play no part. It is for Jews to turn away from Zionism.”
Zionism, Karmi said, “has caused dissimilation among Jewish communities in Diaspora,” before going on to argue that “we need a transition from tribalism to universalism” among Jews in Diaspora who have tended towards a view that “they belong to a tribe.” Rather giving the game away, she appealed: “It is the task of anti-Zionist Jews who have seen the light to do this work and only they can do it. It doesn’t have the same credibility as Jews who have turned away from Zionism or were never for it in the first place.”
Barkan’s perception of his own congress was incredible. “We are following in their footsteps,” he said of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. An attempt to claim the legacy of Jewish anti-fascism is nothing if not a form of identity politics. In an op-ed published on the anti-Zionist portal Mondoweiss prior to the event, Barkan wrote that “the Jewish anti-Zionist voice demonstrates moral fiber, progressive history, legal vigor, morality of coexistence—in joining the struggle against Zionism, fighting on the Palestinian side to liberate not only Palestine—but also liberate Judaism from Zionism.”
The Viennese Jewish Anti-Zionist Declaration is also bound up in identity politics and intracommunal struggle: “We do not feel represented by the [Jewish Community of Vienna], which claims to represent Jews in Austria and unconditionally supports every action of Israel,” argue its three-dozen signatories. The declaration is, too, an attempt to situate anti-Zionism in the legacy of Jewish anti-fascism:
We, the undersigned, are individuals with Jewish family backgrounds, descendants of displaced persons and/or Holocaust victims, Holocaust survivors, and resistance fighters against the Nazi regime with ties to Austria. We are committed to universal human rights, equality, and a just peace.
But more than that, the declaration ties to distinguish anti-Zionist Jews from the Zionist Jewish majority and cast that majority as racist, colonialist, and ethno-nationalist by implication. “Around the globe, Jews like us condemn Israel’s actions against Palestinians, the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing, and the colonial seizure of the West Bank. We unequivocally declare”—in case you had missed the point—’This does not happen in our name!’”
Historical unreality, moral unclarity
Ronnie Barkan notes that, in the year The Jewish State was published, “a mass movement of Jewish workers in Eastern Europe and Russia, the Socialist Labor Bund” was born. (The General Jewish Labor Bund was actually founded one year later.) “While the Bund became a large movement in several East European countries, Zionism represented less than 1 percent of the Jewish population in Europe.” And then two extraordinary sentences:
If not for Hitler, Zionism would have remained a small and insignificant Jewish colony in Palestine in all probability. The six million Jews who died in the Holocaust were not Zionists: most were anti-Zionist, either as Bundist socialists or ultra-Orthodox religious Jews who saw Zionism as anti-Jewish in the extreme.
Setting aside the implication that only the good Jews died in the Holocaust, never has the small word ‘if’ been responsible for so many heavy lifting. Indeed, if not for the rise of Nazism, perhaps European Jewish history, and therefore Israeli history, would have been different. But that is neither the history we have nor the reality in which we live. Israel is an established state, and two peoples with two distinct national identities claim ownership, either in whole or in part, of the same strip of land. The anti-Zionist movement claims to have the power of facing unpleasant facts while displaying none of it, choosing instead to comfort itself in an alternate reality.
Historical flights of fancy were a problem at the First Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress. Donny Gluckstein, who teaches at Edinburgh College (rather troublingly for his students), claimed that Herzl didn’t even mention a Jewish state in Palestine, which suggests he either has not read or could not read The Jewish State, in which Herzl wrote of Palestine as Jews’ “ever-memorable historic home.” Gluckstein further argued that antisemitism is a product of capitalism and that to erase capitalism would be to erase antisemitism, which would be news to the Jews of postwar Poland and the Soviet Union.
The anti-Zionist movement claims to have the power of facing unpleasant facts while displaying none of it, choosing instead to comfort itself in an alternate reality.
Comfort food was one of congress’ catering options. Rahma Zein said—again, apparently in all sincerity—that “anybody who’s here today is proving that they’re human.” What kind of humanity is it, however, what kind of morality, that regards Zionism as a conspiracy and the dominant force in the world, responsible for all its problems. Ghada Karmi described Zionism in insidious terms as “a foreign political force was snaking its way into our homeland with malign intent.” No question about it, she said: “Zionism is evil, and if you are against evil, you must be against Zionism.”
What kind of morality, too, that blurs the line or inverts the relationship between victim and perpetrator. “Israel has to stop using the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis to justify their crimes against the Palestinians,” said the local Palestinian activist Samy Ayad. “Like de-Nazification in 1945, there has to be a de-Zionization of every single institution, every single group” in a future Palestinian one-state, Haim Bresheeth said, who also remarked: “After 1945, there was a problem: How do you live with Germans in Europe? Just as difficult a question as we are discussing in Palestine. How do you live with génocideurs in your midst?” before he was cut off in something resembling his prime.
“Wide opposition to Zionism is emerging from across society,” Ronnie Barkan wrote, but if the post-October 7 protest movement against Israel is a sign of that, the narrow, far-left audience at the First Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress scarcely indicated a burgeoning future. The situation today in Gaza is indeed intolerable: for the remaining Israeli hostages in Hamas captivity as well as the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced en masse, their homes and environs destroyed. Yet October 7 itself was hardly acknowledged at the congress, and in the sessions I attended, there was not one critique of Hamas, its ideology, or its actions which provoked Israel’s counter-operation.
Moreover, if the conversation is to be, as Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud framed it, that “the solutions should be focused on a one-state solution, a state called Palestine, and nothing else,” then the suffering of the Palestinian people is doomed to continue. It was to her credit that Karmi was prepared to acknowledge that there were two communities in Palestine who, fundamentally, do not want to live together—who would prefer a divorce over an arranged marriage. “What do you do?” she asked, a question to which the First Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress had no answer.
Liam Hoare
