{"id":175243,"date":"2026-09-22T10:10:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T14:10:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=175243"},"modified":"2026-09-22T10:10:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T14:10:19","slug":"plan-b-is-extremely-dangerous-benjamin-moser-on-anti-zionism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/09\/22\/plan-b-is-extremely-dangerous-benjamin-moser-on-anti-zionism\/","title":{"rendered":"Plan B Is Extremely Dangerous: Benjamin Moser on Anti-Zionism<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Benjamin Moser in 2015, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Benjamin Moser is no stranger to life-writing, having written both the definitive English-language biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector and a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning biography of Susan Sontag. In his latest book, he takes on not one but twelve biographies in a sprawling attempt to excavate the lesser-known history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, from the nineteenth century to the present. We might even say thirteen lives, because <\/span><\/em>Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History<\/span><\/a> (out September 22 from Doubleday) is a deeply personal project for Moser, and it opens with an extended meditation on his own migration from passive Zionist, as a Jewish child in Houston, to adult anti-Zionist. <\/span><\/em>He conceived of the book shortly after October 7 and researched it at a breakneck pace, including on reporting trips to South Africa, Germany, and Egypt. <\/span><\/em>We became friends when he was putting the finishing touches on it last year at the New York Public Library, where we were both fellows. The book is an emotional and propulsive attempt to trace a lineage for those in the often-lonely position in which he found himself as an adult. But it\u2019s hardly just for Jewish readers; the book\u2019s diverse, impressionistic portraits of individuals from a nineteenth-century rabbi to the celebrated photographer Nan Goldin suggest, cumulatively, that anti-Zionism has been, and will continue to be, a big tent. Moser spoke to me last month about his work, goals, and process from his home in Utrecht. Usually, he jokes, prepublication activities are the \u201ccalm before the calm\u201d\u2014but, given the strong opinions elicited by this subject, he predicted that the rollout of this book might be a little more eventful. <\/span><\/em>\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

Courtesy of Doubleday.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

What did you know before you started this book?<\/span><\/p>\n

BENJAMIN MOSER\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Before I started it, I knew that anti-Zionism existed as a tradition, but I hadn\u2019t heard of half these people. For me, one of the lessons of the past few years has been that Zionism affects everything, far beyond what you would think if you just looked at the absolute numbers of Jews in the world. Zionism sums up so much of what the West has done, including to the Jews, but also to nonwhite peoples\u2014you can see how often India or South Africa come up in the book, for example. Palestinians often talk about \u201cthe centrality of Palestine,\u201d and it\u2019s because what happens in Palestine has a weird knock-on effect on so much else.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s the function of repetition in this book? There are a number of refrains\u2014the apostle Paul saying it\u2019s time to put away childish things, other Biblical epithets like \u201cthe stiff-necked people\u201d (the disobedient Israelites), and the detail that the most dangerous country for Jews today is Israel.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, you know whom I got that from?<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Sontag? Clarice Lispector?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

No\u2014V.S. Naipaul.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Can you elaborate?<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

When I was younger, he told me that people don\u2019t remember anything they read in nonfiction books. You put all this detail in to make something feel real, but then people read forward, and they forget. So you have to keep recalling things, whether it\u2019s through a physical characteristic\u2014so-and-so with red hair\u2014or a Homeric epithet, like \u201crosy-fingered dawn.\u201d The fact that Israel has been the most dangerous place in the world for Jews since 1945 is not just a fact that you want to mention in passing. Israel\u2019s national argument is based on the idea that Israel keeps Jews safe\u2014that we can exist in Sweden or in Holland or in New Jersey only because we have this plan B. But it turns out that the plan B is extremely dangerous.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You open with two pages of epigraphs from the Old Testament, and a lot of them are from lesser-known prophets\u2014at least, lesser-known to me. What were you hoping to achieve with these dozen quotations?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

There were forty-eight prophets and seven prophetesses\u2014anybody through whom God speaks is considered a prophet, even if they don\u2019t get a full chapter of the Bible. And their message is pretty unanimous, namely that you must keep to the laws and the commandments or you will be punished. The way you get punished is that God withdraws his favor and punishes all the Jews. Not just the bad Jews\u2014all of them. So there\u2019s a sense of responsibility for the whole people. Moreover, the punishment, per many of the prophets, is that you\u2019ll be expelled from your land, which happens in the Old Testament\u2014more than once.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Your sweeping, global narrative opens with a concrete, personal image\u2014your grandfather\u2019s copy of Theodor Herzl\u2019s <\/span>Zionist Writings<\/span><\/i>, which traveled with him from Nazi Germany to Texas. How did you land on that?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

I wrote that part last, actually. My grandfather left Germany in 1938, and the only thing he took with him was this big, blue Herzl book, which I have right downstairs. But instead of going to <\/span>that <\/span><\/i>promised land, he went to another promised land\u2014America. That book was one of his few possessions that survived through to my childhood, and to me, it was just a symbol of our Jewish story. We were persecuted, almost everybody was killed, and then, luckily, we got Israel\u2014that\u2019s what I was told as a kid. A very simple story.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But then I finally read the book, and I was utterly stunned by it. It is the weirdest book that you can imagine. In the first chapter, Herzl even says that when he showed his work to a friend, the friend started crying. And Herzl goes, \u201cOh, I was so moved when I was writing it, too.\u201d But the friend is like, \u201cNo, no, I\u2019m not crying because I\u2019m moved by it\u2014I\u2019m crying because you\u2019re nuts.\u201d And that was exactly the feeling I had. It\u2019s such an important book, which has affected the lives of so many millions of people\u2014but none of your literary training equips you to read Herzl.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Why was it important for you to preserve your subjective response to the book, rather than try to persuade through some sort of dispassionate or \u201cobjective\u201d criticism?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s really a principle in all my work. I start with an explicit acknowledgment of what I think, because I\u2019ve always hated the pretense of objectivity. You write about anything from a certain perspective. You are asking me questions that you\u2019re interested in, because of your interests and your experience, and then you\u2019ll edit this in a way that will show what you thought I said that was good, or, if you don\u2019t like me, you\u2019ll try to put in all the stuff that makes me sound stupid.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I got some criticism for <\/span>Sontag <\/span><\/i>for emphasizing the gay aspects of her life. Well, it so happens that I\u2019m gay and I\u2019m interested in gay people\u2019s lives. I can\u2019t pretend to write about Jews or gay people or Americans or really any of these \u201cidentities\u201d from a total remove. So I like to get that out of the way\u2014who I am, where I\u2019m coming from, what my family background is. In the case of Zionism, I think my background is pretty similar to that of a lot of American Jews. We didn\u2019t grow up with fanatical Israelism, and we didn\u2019t really have Birthright. Zionism was just hanging in the air, rather than being shoved down our throats. It really was a different time. There was a consensus on Israel in this country, and not only among Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019d love to discuss your selection of subjects\u2014perhaps taking the German Israeli lawyer Felicia Langer, who defended Palestinian political prisoners, as an example. The legal element of the occupation is obviously essential, but there are so many individuals who could potentially illuminate that. How did you land on Langer?<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

Honestly, I had never heard of her beforehand, but I kept coming across her name in different left-leaning publications and human rights reports. So I googled her, and I found that she\u2019d written a lot. It\u2019s always helpful when people do that, because there\u2019s more material.\u00a0<\/span>I\u2019ll sketch her story in brief. She was born in Poland in 1930, and in 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, her family fled to the Soviet Union. She had this unbelievably horrific childhood\u2014her father died in exile, and she and her mother survived, but then they discovered that their entire family had been killed. To make a long story short, they end up going to Israel, and Langer becomes one of Israel\u2019s early female lawyers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think she was the only woman in her graduating class, which included the future Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. She was a communist and a leftist, and so was her husband, so they joined the Communist Party, which was the only party in Israel at the time with both Jewish and Palestinian members. Through that, she started getting to know some Palestinians, and to see the similarities between what she\u2019d experienced as a European refugee and what they were experiencing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Soon she became the most prominent Israeli lawyer for Palestinians. In her own writing, she posits that her contribution to the cause was to show how Israel used law and used the appearance of democracy to create this absolutely ruthless, inhumane, racist system to colonize and expropriate the Palestinian people. She\u2019s also an incredible person to spend time with, on the page\u2014she died in 2018. You feel strengthened by reading her memoirs. I went to Germany to meet her son and spend time with her family there. I think the best part about this book, for me, has been getting to know anti-Zionists from all over the world, because they\u2019re always the best people.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Your chapter about your grandfather\u2019s Herzl book is structured like a detective story, while your section on the gay Dutch poet Jacob Isra\u00ebl de Haan has a three-act arc, with a tragic conclusion. How did you think about narrative tension, which is generated in different ways in each chapter?<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

A lot of it happened in editing, because I was trying to do a big panorama of a huge story, and I wanted to do it economically. The book is only four hundred pages, including notes, but it could be much longer. There\u2019s so much more to say. But I do think each of the lives in the book has a certain arc. De Haan\u2019s reads like a thriller\u2014it\u2019s a jaw-dropping, tragic story ending in heartbreak, with him trying to get back to Europe from Mandatory Palestine, having been informed by anonymous political enemies that they were going to kill him. De Haan\u2019s 1924 assassination was the first political killing of a Jew in Mandatory Palestine.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the night before he was scheduled to be killed, he writes, \u201cHow wondrous is the 23rd, when one is going to be shot on the 24th!\u201d He had a real flair for the dramatic. But narrative propulsion does become harder to achieve when you have to tell a new story in every chapter while also advancing the broader arc. I wanted to sketch out the whole story of anti-Zionism, so that by the time you\u2019re about halfway through, you understand the basic outline of the ideology and can then spend time with specific case studies. But the book is designed to become more narratively propulsive the further you read.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How much prior knowledge do you tend to assume in your readers?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

I learned about this when I was writing my first book. Since I was writing in English about Lispector, a Brazilian writer who was basically unknown in the U.S., I couldn\u2019t assume prior knowledge about anything. I would say, \u201cRio de Janeiro, famous for its beaches and mountains,\u201d and so forth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The funny thing is, when it eventually came out in Brazil, I told the publisher they could edit all that stuff out in the translation. But they were like, \u201cNo, no, no, we have to leave it in, because nobody knows those basic things in Brazil either.\u201d They probably know that Rio has beaches, but they don\u2019t know why the National Congress was dissolved in 1937, or whatever. People forget.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So you can\u2019t assume prior knowledge. But you also don\u2019t have to assume ignorance\u2014saying something like, \u201cThe Jews are an ancient religious sect that believe in something called the Torah.\u201d You don\u2019t have to go <\/span>that <\/span><\/i>deep. You can give people a subordinate clause. So I say, \u201cZionism, the belief that there should be a Jewish state in Palestine \u2026\u201d You can go deeper into that, and I do, later in the book\u2014but you don\u2019t have to beat people over the head.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

What did your research and reporting notebooks look like, and how do you use technology?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, I had about eight hundred pages of notes from Egypt and about <\/span>Ahmad Sadiq Saad<\/span>\u2014a Jewish Egyptian Communist\u2014for chapter four. I do a lot of recording, and I like voice notes that you can transcribe and edit directly in Apple\u2019s Notes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The worst thing that can happen to you while working on a book like this is that feeling of, Where the hell is that quote? Something else I do is take a lot of pictures of book pages. I underline things and then take a picture, and I also annotate the transcriptions. That way, when I need to write about a certain subject, everything is searchable. I can look up a word, like <\/span>pariah<\/span><\/i>, which comes up in relation to Hannah Arendt, and find everything about that subject.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the only Tamil loanwords, by the way\u2014<\/span>pariah<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, congratulations. Well, that concept comes up again and again in the Arendt material. So then you\u2019re looking for connections. The twinned concepts of the conscious \u201cpariah,\u201d one who rejects assimilation, choosing to be an outsider, and the \u201cparvenu,\u201d the arriviste, essentially, who\u2019s said to embody negative materialistic stereotypes, become really important in the history of Zionism, because Zionism embraces the parvenu\u2014the individual who wants to live with power and money and armies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How did you think about fact-checking, expansively construed? On a basic level, there is a lot of source material, in several languages. But, more broadly, were you stress-testing your claims and assertions as you went along?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

I was writing this book with real anxiety about getting the facts right. As I say in the book, Zionism has the effect of installing a little Zionist censor in your head. If I write a fact about Vermeer that\u2019s wrong, an academic might tweet about it, but it\u2019s not really going to go past that. Whereas with Zionism, you\u2019re always very afraid. That\u2019s why one of the themes of the book is tone policing. The chapter about Hannah Arendt, for instance\u2014am I really suggesting that Zionists worked with Nazis? First of all, yes\u2014that\u2019s on the record and has been for eighty years. But it does make you very paranoid.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even after I turned in the book, I kept going over it and going over it, and in every pass I found mistakes, because it\u2019s so broad. It covers a hundred and fifty years and five continents, so there\u2019s not really one person to whom you can hand it and say, \u201cFact-check this.\u201d The people who were still alive, like Nan Goldin and Ronnie Kasrils, read their chapters and gave comments, which was really useful.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is, in general, a hard subject to write about, because you know you\u2019re going to be attacked for certain things long before you even write one word. So I think the question is, does that make you timid or does that make you more bold?<\/span><\/p>\n

Zionists will never argue about the substance, which is, was it right or wrong for these European Jews to take over Palestine and ethnically cleanse the native population? We don\u2019t want to talk about that, so instead we\u2019ll talk about this semicolon or this footnote. You can see it in the book\u2014they would rather kill de Haan than argue with him. They do it to every single one of us. That can give you a sort of freedom, but you still need the facts to be right. It\u2019s been very hard, I have to say, more so than any book I\u2019ve ever done.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You once told me, and I\u2019ve never forgotten, that as you get older and keep on writing, some books will just come more easily, because you\u2019ve been thinking about them for such a long time. Could you elaborate on that?<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSER<\/span><\/p>\n

Knowing who you are is such a hard part of becoming a writer. But you have to have a sense of who you are before you can write about certain things. At fifty, I finally have that. By midlife, there are themes or questions that you\u2019ve been thinking about for years or decades, and all of that counts as writing, or perhaps research. <\/span><\/p>\n

You also develop a muscle memory for reporting and interviewing people, even if it\u2019s in a new setting. And I don\u2019t think that can really be taught, because it\u2019s so subjective. It\u2019s about the kind of person you are in a room. I used to wish someone had told me that, but it wouldn\u2019t have worked. I could tell you my tricks for interviewing people, too, but you wouldn\u2019t remember them. What you do remember is your own experiences.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite everything I just said, right before I started this book, I was at a low point. I had written in my journal, \u201cI\u2019ve had a good run \u2026 but I have to just accept that it\u2019s over.\u201d Then, a week later, I had the idea for this book. And what\u2019s more\u2014I\u2019m once <\/span>again <\/span><\/i>in that phase, and it feels quite inconceivable that I\u2019ll ever write anything again. But I guess the good thing about getting older is that you\u2019re like, Okay, we\u2019ve been here before.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Krithika Varagur\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/em>The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project\u00a0and an editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Drift\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Equator.<\/main><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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