The first anti-Zionist Jewish congress issues historic declaration from Vienna

Future historians will no doubt take note: Vienna, the city where Theodor Herzl published in 1896 his book Der Judenstaat (in French: The State of the Jews), a welcomed last month the first anti-Zionist Jewish congress.

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The text is striking in that it rejects the so-called two-state solution, and on the contrary calls for the establishment of a single democratic and multi-faith state.

We categorically reject the assertion that Israel acts on behalf of Jews, or that all Jews support its criminal acts. We call on Jews around the world to speak out against the Zionist state – to deny its legitimacy and demand an immediate end to its criminal and despicable actions. […]

Israel and Zionism are illegal and immoral while claiming to act on behalf of Jews – thereby putting all Jews at risk. This claim that Jews inherently support Israel and its despicable state constitutes true anti-Semitism. […]

By honoring Jewish heritage and the very principles of Judaism, we encourage Jews of conscience around the world to stand with Palestinians in rejecting the racist ideology of Zionism and its inherent supremacy. […]

Let us unite and do everything we can to build a future of equality, justice and dignity for all the inhabitants of Palestine – a land where coexistence and mutual respect can once again flourish.

One-state solution

There one-state solution is a proposed resolution to the conflict in the Middle East which, as opposed to the obsolete two-state solution put forward by the Oslo accords, advocates the establishment of a single democratic and multi-faith state, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.

The approach is controversial because it rejects any ethno-supremacist dimension; it is therefore decried both by Muslim fanatics in favor of an “Islamic State” and by Zionist fundamentalists who demand the strict maintenance of a “Jewish State”.

Many speakers at the anti-Zionist Jewish congress in Vienna stressed that the one-state solution is now imposed by the reality on the ground, as Israeli control and presence beyond the 1967 borders make any alternative impossible.

Indeed, it was emphasized that the Israeli state is now sovereign de facto throughout Palestine, from river to sea; there it controls borders, airspace, natural resources, taxes, currency, construction rights, etc.

Consequently, an “annexation” of the “Palestinian territories” would at this stage be nothing more than a simple formality, which is not implemented quite simply to maintain the democratic pretension; instead of annexing Gaza and the West Bank, Israeli lawyers declare them terra nullius (a Latin phrase meaning “territory of person”, or “uninhabited land”), which makes it possible to exercise all sovereign prerogatives, to deprive their populations of all civil rights, and to continue to pretend to be a democracy.

In other words: what many speakers emphasized at the conference is that Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank are legally and politically comparable to other indigenous populations from other past colonial enterprises; the so-called “Palestinian Authority” is the Israeli equivalent of office of Indian Affairs in the United States of the 19th century, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no longer a territorial conflict, but rather a fight for civil rights by the indigenous population.

Without a doubt, if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were reformulated in this way in the public consciousness, that is to say if the Palestinian organizations authorized to express themselves to the world began to demand civil rights in Israel (rather than a series of territorial corridors in the middle of Israeli settlements), any ethno-supremacist project in the Middle East would be condemned.

To understand how antithetical this proposition is to Zionism, it is necessary to examine its underlying ideology; indeed, contrary to what one might believe, Zionism does not have the main objective of offering a welcoming land to the Jews of the world (in which case a binational democratic state would be suitable). Its essential objective is in fact to accelerate the occurrence of messianic times; it is therefore assimilated to what could be described as a cult of the end times.

Moses Hess

Moses Hess was a Jewish and German socialist philosopher, and founding father of both Zionism and Communism; he was responsible for Engels‘ conversion to communism, and he was the mentor of Karl Marx to whom he brought an understanding of the economic and social problems of his time.

His book, Rome and Jerusalem, published thirty-three years before Judenstaat by Theodor Herzl, was described by the latter as the founding work of Jewish nationalism; he even has written that if he had read Rome and Jerusalem earlier, he would have found it superfluous to publish his own book.

Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky described Hess in The Jewish Legion in the World War as one of the people who made the Balfour Declaration possible, along with Herzl, Walter Rothschild and Leon Pinsker.

To understand the philosophical and moral ins and outs of Zionism, it is therefore appropriate to study Rome and Jerusalem before any other work. The fact that this book is so little known is perhaps a deliberate offense, as the ambition described in it is so clear.

Which is amazing in Rome and Jerusalem, this is the dimension that the eschatological aspect takes on (ER: eschatology).

Indeed, Moses Hess was a socialist and a materialist; in his various writings he scolds Hasidic religious Jews, whom he considers to live buried in medieval obscurantism; he claims the heritage of the Enlightenment, and celebrates the French revolution, Napoleon and the Risorgimento. Anchored in the ideas of the Haskala, it lays the foundation for “Jewish nationalism” – that is, it is the first to characterize Judaism in terms of ethnic and national affiliation, rather than religious.

Now this is precisely what makes the eschatological dimension of his remarks astonishing; indeed, one might expect that a left-wing intellectual, who establishes reason as the supreme virtue, would reject Bronze Age prophecies and superstitions. Thanks to Moses Hess, we therefore understand that eschatological belief is the founder of Zionism from its earliest beginnings, even if it is in fact basically secular, materialist and socialist.

The book Rome and Jerusalem is so imbued with the messianic idea, and the notions of an end times and a new age constitute such an essential subject, that it is difficult to select a passage to illustrate it. The following paragraph still condenses this idea:

[The mature age of the social world] will begin, according to our historical religion, with the messianic era. This is the time when the Jewish nation and all other historical nations will be reborn to new life, the time of the “resurrection of the dead”, “the coming of the Lord”, the “new Jerusalem” and all other symbolic expressions whose meaning no longer needs to be demonstrated.

The messianic era is the current era, which began to germinate with the teachings of Spinoza, and which finally entered history with the great French Revolution. With the French Revolution began the regeneration of nations that had only acquired their national historical religion under the influence of Judaism.

What this quote reminds us is that Hebrew eschatology is in fact, unlike Christian eschatology centered on spirituality and the afterlife, essentially earthly, political and collective; it aims for concrete redemption in the temporal world. This “world to come” provides that the Jewish people come back to Palestine and become a nation of priests, guiding them survivors of the nations who are required to observe them seven Noahide laws.

Now it is precisely in this context that Moses Hess envisages the return of the Jews to Palestine; as the first step in a millennial promise, which must culminate in the subjugation of nations and the establishment of world peace under the reign of the Messiah, a human and conquering king.

In other words, Zionism from its earliest foundations is philosophically and intrinsically an end-times theology. The objective of wanting to accelerate the eschaton is therefore not, as is often believed, the prerogative of the Israeli extreme right.

This is also the main reason why the vast majority of Orthodox Jews (Haredim) rejected (and always reject) Zionism; they cite the three oaths that God would have imposed after the destruction of the Second Temple, and consider that trying to force the coming of the Messiah is a serious sin; for them, only God decides the moment of redemption, and any human attempt to achieve this is considered usurpation.

This is also the reason why the idea of a single multi-faith state stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean is mutually exclusive of Zionism; because, in the absence of a genocide of the Arabs, the Jews would constitute a minority there; but supremacy is imposed by superstition itself; without a “Jewish state”, no messianic times are possible.

We therefore understand why the declaration of the first anti-Zionist Jewish congress is so remarkable; by recommending renouncing the two-state solution, it undermines not only Jewish supremacism in Palestine, but also the very philosophical and ideological foundation of Zionism.

Zionism and anti-Semitism

Everyone knows the tendency of Zionist activists to call anti-semitic any criticism of their positions; this argument is of course inadmissible, as demonstrated by the international conference in title, and as also proven by the fact that the most practicing and Orthodox Jews are the first to reject this ideology.

The truth is that the majority of Zionists in the world are not Jewish, and many Jews are not Zionists; there can therefore be no confusion between the two.

This attempt at amalgamation also represents an inversion: by confusing an age-old religion with a modern supremacist and nationalist doctrine, these activists are themselves guilty of anti-Semitism. By seeking to blame all Jews for Israeli abuses and colonialism, they are using Jews as ideological human shields.

Unfortunately, this is not the only way Zionist supporters demonstrate their anti-Semitism. As explained for the case of Moses Hess, the Zionist founding fathers historically showed immense disdain towards their co-religionists, and sometimes went so far as to encourage their persecution to accelerate their colonial project in Palestine; the Israeli documentary Theodor Herzl and the Anti-Semitic Side of Zionism in fact the astonishing demonstration.

The truth, however controversial it may be, therefore comes to light: by using Judaism as a pretext and a shield, Zionists are the greatest enemies of Judaism; not only do they breed anti-Semitism, not only do they profit from anti-Semitism, but they are often anti-Semitic themselves.

Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Continuing the research reveals a much darker truth, although congruent with the above: that of the close collaboration between certain Zionist leaders of the 1930s and the Nazi regime.

In 1933, as Nazi Germany faced a global boycott, the Zionist Federation did the unthinkable, and agreed with the German regime on a policy that would serve to populate Palestine with Jews, and on the other hand to allow the Nazis to circumvent the boycott to which they were subject.

This agreement, called the Haavara Accord, facilitated the expulsion of German Jews and the confiscation of their property; upon their arrival in Palestine, this despoiled wealth could be recovered in the form of German industrial property. It allowed the forced emigration of tens of thousands of Jews to Palestine, and German military reconstruction.

Beyond the Haavara agreement, the book 51 Documents de Leni Brenner demonstrates, irrefutably and irrefutably, the close collaboration between Zionist leaders and Nazi Germany. The book of Antony Sutton Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler allows, in a less explicit but no less obvious way, to understand to what extent certain Western financial interests allowed Hitler to exercise the reign of terror that we know him to have.

Thus, Hobbes’ quote that “the origin of every society is found in the mutual fear of all its members” takes on its full meaning; to create an artificial nation, we must artificially encourage, even arouse, mutual fear.

War has Gaza: what next?

ER: Seasoned readers of this site know that we have a different answer as to why the Israeli regime does little or nothing to hide its atrocities perpetrated on the Gazans and Palestinians in general.

While Trump talks about deportation mass of Palestinians towards Libya, and that the Israeli regime consider it a giant concentration camp, massacres continue in the Gaza Strip.

A question immediately arises: how can we explain that the Israeli government is doing so little to keep up appearances? For example, why doesn’t it do more to prevent the publication, on social networks, of abuses committed by his own soldiers? And why bomb hospitals, schools and food distribution centers so brazenly and openly?

Depopulation does not seem to be the only explanation: with 60,000 dead Palestinians since the massacres began in October 2023, the Israeli government has killed some 3% of the 2 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, less than the annual demographic replacement rate in recent decades. Given the means available to the Israeli army, and the notorious lack of scruples on the part of its leaders, it seems that the Israeli government is ready to pay, proportionally, a very high price in terms of image.

The above statement should above all not be interpreted as an attempt to minimize the crimes of the regime, or to put into perspective the undeniable suffering of the Palestinian population; it’s just a matter of understanding all the ins and outs of this war. However, it is undeniable that the image of the Israeli government is suffering more, in proportion, than that of other countries which have committed similar or worse abuses.

Israeli leaders will of course allege that this difference in perception constitutes proof of the “anti-Semitism of nations”. The truth is that the Israeli regime itself has no interest in mollifying international public opinion, on the contrary.

Given the above, we understand in fact that its objective is not only to maintain the false amalgamation between Judaism and Zionism, but also to arouse global vindictiveness against the Jews; this is part of a historical continuity, fuels a narrative of persecution, and contributes to the discomfort of Jews in the diaspora in their respective nations. This is a strategic goal that Zionist planners have pursued for over a century.

Worst of all: the eschatological script running foresees that the whole world must, in the end, turn against Israel and its inhabitants; according to fanatics obsessed with eschatology, this is the last episode before the coming of the Messiah.

Fortunately, the anti-Zionist Jewish Congress just held partly thwarts this goal, refuting the false conflation of Zionism and Judaism, and hopefully hindering the new persecution of innocent Jews in Israel and elsewhere, would be led, on purpose, to suffer in the future.

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Meeting in 1990 between the leader of Lubavitch, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, messianic rabbinical figure of foreground, notoriously racist, and whose birthday is one public holiday in the United States, and Benjamin Netanyahu, about how the coming of the Messiah must be accelerated.

Source

Featured image source, right (screengrab): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpVJrxlu_f4

Featured image source, left: https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/scenes-from-the-end-of-zionism-reflections-on-the-jewish-anti-zionist-congress-in-vienna/

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