“The Zionists Who Hate Jews”: a century of evidence against Zionism’s oldest defence

Zionism has a chequered history: the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, wars without end, apartheid, land theft and now, genocide. Less well known is an older, darker chapter: the harm Zionism has done to the Jewish people it claims to protect. Many prominent adherents of an ideology that presents itself as the guardian of world Jewry have also, throughout Zionism’s history, “hated the Jews”, argues Joss Sheldon in a striking new book.

“We’ve been gaslit for far too long,” Sheldon writes in the book’s opening passage, challenging the familiar premise that Zionism serves the interests of Jews. He continues: “This fabrication – that Israel is the ‘Jewish State’, a place which serves the Jewish people – has been repeated so many times, for so many years, that it’s become entrenched in the public consciousness.”

Across 11 chapters and more than 300 pages, Sheldon draws on historians including Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim and Ella Shohat to make the case that Zionists “have always disparaged and defamed the Jews whom they dislike”, “allied themselves with some of the biggest Jew-haters on the planet” and “denied us our right to self-determination”. His formula for the whole book: Zionism and antisemitism go together, just like cream cheese and bagels.

The book opens with the movement’s founders. Theodor Herzl, “the godfather of Political Zionism”, believed Jews were “spineless, repressed and shabby”, “corrupted by oppression.” The founder of modern Zionism used the anti-Semitic slur “Mauschel”- which is akin to the word “kike-” for Jews who rejected his project. Another Zionist pioneer, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, wrote of the “typical Yid” as “ugly” and “sickly”, “trodden upon and easily frightened” and “despised by all”. Moses Hess, an intellectual precursor of Labour Zionism, called diaspora Jews “parasites”. This contempt, Sheldon argues, was the engine of the project: denigrate Jews first, then offer the “Jewish state” as the cure.

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Jewish critics of Zionism saw this clearly at the time, Sheldon explains using detailed historical record. Karl Kraus, one of the most celebrated Jewish writers of his day, called Herzl’s movement “Jewish anti-Semites” as early as 1898, warning that “anti-Semitism, as preached by the Zionists” would only encourage the real thing. As Sheldon puts it: “The nineteenth-century Jews weren’t blind. They could see that Zionism was riddled with Judeophobia.”

The contempt Zionist leaders showed for the people they claimed to be saving was not theoretical. Herzl believed that European anti-Semites could become useful allies. He wrote: “The Governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism, will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.” He then acted on that belief, seeking the support of Kaiser Wilhelm, who believed Jews “want stamping out.” Arthur Balfour, too, is quoted as agreeing with “several anti-Semitic postulates.” Zionists and anti-Semites, Sheldon contends, were therefore not always straightforward adversaries: although their motives differed, both supported Jewish emigration from Europe and, at crucial moments, cooperated to advance it.

Nowhere is Sheldon’s argument more disturbing than in his account of the Shoah—the Holocaust. In 1944, as Hungary’s Jews were being deported to Auschwitz, two escaped prisoners produced a report explaining what awaited them there. It reached Rudolf Kastner, a Hungarian Zionist official whom Adolf Eichmann later called the “authorized representative of the Zionist movement”. According to Eichmann, Kastner agreed to “help keep the Jews from resisting deportation” in return for the rescue of a selected group, including members of his own family—people Eichmann described as “human material that was capable of reproduction and hard work”.

The wider Jewish community was not warned, and hundreds of thousands were deported to Auschwitz. Sheldon presents this as part of a broader pattern: Rabbi Stephen Wise admitted helping keep news of the killings “out of the press”, while Zionists serving on Nazi-imposed Jewish councils helped compile deportation lists.

David Ben-Gurion made the same calculation from Jerusalem. In 1933, he told his party that, if forced to choose, “the good of the Zionist enterprise” came before “saving individual Jews”. Weeks after Kristallnacht—the November 1938 Nazi pogrom in which Jews were attacked and synagogues and Jewish businesses were destroyed across Germany and Austria—he said he would rather save half of Germany’s Jewish children by sending them to Palestine than all of them by sending them to Britain, because “we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel”.

The same pattern, Sheldon argues, played out in Palestine under Arthur Ruppin, the Zionist official who directed Jewish land purchases, immigration and settlement. Ruppin, who spoke of “the cancers of Judaism”, promoted a “closed Jewish economy” in which Jewish-owned land and businesses employed Jewish workers.

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According to Sheldon, Ruppin’s policy displaced Palestinian tenants, excluded Arab labourers and helped fuel the resentment that erupted in the 1929 Palestine Riots, in which more than 100 Jews were killed. Hans Kohn, a committed Zionist historian, resigned afterwards, admitting that his movement had “set ourselves goals which by their very nature had to lead to conflict”. A British inquiry likewise concluded that displacement and economic exclusion of Palestinians had contributed to the violence in Palestine.

This is where Sheldon’s central claim is most persuasive: he challenges the assumption that Jews needed a Zionist state to be safe. When Israel was founded in 1948, Jewish communities had existed in Iraq for more than 2,500 years and elsewhere across the Middle East for centuries, mostly under Muslim rule. Even Chaim Weizmann acknowledged that “the Ottoman Empire received Jews with open arms”. Sheldon also cites Palestinian appeals for coexistence and equal citizenship: a 1918 petition promised Jews “equality… their rights are our rights”, while the Nazareth Petition called them “our brothers”. His point is that Zionism did not arise because coexistence was impossible; it rejected such offers in favour of establishing a separate Jewish ethno-state.

Iraq, Sheldon argues, shows how Zionism damaged a long-established Jewish community that largely saw itself as part of Iraqi society. Jews made up around a third of Baghdad’s population, and relations were often close enough that Muslims attended Jewish weddings. Many Iraqi Jews rejected Zionism altogether; the educator Ezra Haddad insisted, “We are Arabs before we are Jews.” Yet, according to the author, Zionist activity in Palestine caused hostility towards the settler colonial ideology to spill over onto Iraqi Jews, whether they supported the movement or not. In June 1941, that hostility culminated in the Farhud, a pogrom in Baghdad in which at least 179 Jews were murdered. Britain’s ambassador blamed the growing divide directly, writing that Zionism had “sown dissension between Jews and Arabs”.

Similar exiles followed across Egypt, Yemen and beyond: Sheldon puts the number of Arab Jews displaced at up to 850,000, in what he calls “the Jewish Nakba”. Most ended up exactly where Zionism said they belonged: Israel. There, Sheldon documents a hierarchy with European “pioneers” at the top and Arab Jews at the bottom, sprayed with DDT on arrival and confined to transit camps where infant mortality ran at double the national average, and roughly 100,000 children were subjected to dangerous X-ray doses in the so-called Ringworm Affair, leaving many with cancer or infertility.

Ben-Gurion described North African Jews as looking “like a savage”; Golda Meir asked whether they could be raised to “a suitable level of civilization”. Sheldon calls the resulting system “Zionist-on-Jew Apartheid”, and documents children separated from parents and given to European families in what he calls the “Zionist baby-snatchers”.

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Zionism’s alliance with the far right, Sheldon argues, has deep roots. In 1941 the Lehi, a Zionist militia group, offered to fight alongside Nazi Germany in exchange for backing “the establishment of the historic Jewish state”; its leader declared that Zionists and Nazis shared “common interests”. That history, Sheldon suggests, explains Zionism’s modern courtship of the far right: Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who has called Jews “vengeful”, and Reform UK’s Nigel Farage feature in a chapter on Israel’s “axis of antisemitism”, alongside Evangelical pastors such as John Hagee, who said “God sent Adolf Hitler”, eager for Jews to make Aliyah and trigger an End Times in which “pretty much all of us will die”. The book quotes Truman calling Jews “very selfish” and Nixon calling them “obnoxious”.

The closing chapter argues that Zionism does not merely coexist with anti-Semitism, but manufactures it, by conflating Jews with Israel and crying wolf so often that genuine anti-Semitism becomes harder to spot: “The Gaza Genocide has been causing instances of anti-Jewish crime to spike… while I’ve been writing this book.”

What makes The Zionists Who Hate Jews valuable is not its polemical tone, but its evidence: a century of documented statements demolishing the idea that protecting Jews was ever Zionism’s true purpose. Jewish life across the Middle East long predated the movement, and long survived without it, until Zionism arrived and both Palestinians and Iraqi Jews found their offers of peaceful coexistence ignored.

That history matters more now that Israel stands accused at the International Court of Justice of genocide and helps explain why younger Jews in the US and Britain are increasingly willing to say what Sheldon says at length: that an ideology now inseparable from racism, apartheid and genocide cannot indefinitely claim to act in the name of Jewish safety.