Israel is the safest place for Jews? The data says the oppositePlan B Is Extremely Dangerous: Benjamin Moser on Anti-Zionism

In a new book, Benjamin Moser profiles twelve Jewish anti-Zionists and argues that Israel sells itself as the Jewish plan B — a plan B that turns out to be extremely dangerous.

Zionism is the belief that there should be a Jewish state in Palestine. Benjamin Moser, a Pulitzer-winning biographer, has written a book about twelve Jews who opposed that idea, from a nineteenth-century rabbi to the photographer Nan Goldin.

A story that starts with plan B

As a Jewish child in Houston, Moser was told a simple story: we were persecuted, almost everyone was killed, and luckily we got Israel.

His grandfather fled Nazi Germany in 1938 with one possession that mattered — a big blue volume of Theodor Herzl's writings. Herzl founded the Zionist movement. The grandfather never went to that promised land; he went to America.

Years later Moser finally read the book and found it deranged. Yet it reshaped the lives of millions.

Why the book was hard to write

Moser says Zionism installs a little censor in your head. Get a fact about Vermeer wrong and maybe someone tweets about it. Write about Israel and you are afraid the whole time.

So he says up front who he is and where he comes from, rather than pretending to be objective. In his view nobody writing about immigrants, or gay people, or any group, can stand at a total remove.

One line runs through the book: since 1945 the most dangerous country for Jews has been Israel. He credits the writer V.S. Naipaul with the habit of repeating what matters.

The part nobody argues about

Moser says his critics rarely engage the substance — whether it was right for European Jews to take over Palestine and drive out the people living there. They would rather fight over a semicolon or a footnote.

He offers the Dutch poet Jacob Israël de Haan, killed in 1924, who wrote the night before his death about how wondrous the 23rd was, given he would be shot on the 24th. Moser's point: they would rather kill him than argue with him.