Scenes from the end of Zionism: Reflections on the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna
Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress poster, July 2025
Daniel Friedman reports in Mondoweiss on 20 July 2025:
The decision to hold the first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna was significant for historical reasons – being where Theodore Herzl formed the ideology that became modern Zionism, as well as Adolf Hitler’s birthplace – and for modern reasons – Austria, alongside Germany, provides unconditional support for Israel, a symptom of its guilt over the Holocaust.
Western nations’ complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has left the supposed ‘rules-based’ order they claim to represent in ruins. The U.S., UK, Europe, and their allies have provided Israel with the means to act with impunity through weapons, which flow freely, and information, which certainly does not.
The Congress began just as Israel was bombing Iran, a reminder of the threat Zionism poses to global stability. Against this backdrop, over 1,000 anti-Zionist Jews and their allies from across the globe met in the Favoriten District in Vienna, June 13-15, 2025, at a time when the tide is turning, too slowly, but turning, against the settler-colonial ethnostate of Israel.
Israel still has its well-funded lobby groups, and far too many people still believe its hasbara. It seems it’s up to a plucky group of not-so-well-funded anti-fascist dissidents in keffiyehs to turn the tide. While we have the truth and international law on our side, at times our goals seem insurmountable. But as several speakers highlighted, we must keep going, and we do not have the luxury of despondency.
I was there representing South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) alongside Roshan Dadoo, the conference’s only South African speaker and coordinator of the South African Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) coalition.