The Anti-Zionists You’re Not Thinking About
Friday, June 5, 2026 – כ׳ סִיוָן תשפ”ו
When American Jews hear the term “anti-Zionist,” fairly predictable images come to mind: a campus protest, a keffiyeh, a chant about the river and the sea. The anti-Zionism that dominates our communal conversation is the kind that comes from outside — from the progressive left, from Islamist movements, from the United Nations, and yes, also from many Jews. It’s real, it’s serious, and we are right to push back against it.
But this week in Alon Shvut, a national-religious settlement in the Gush Etzion area, a different kind of anti-Zionism reared its head.
A mob of ultra-Orthodox Jews descended on the home of Supreme Court Deputy Chief Justice Noam Sohlberg, shattered windows, destroyed property, smashed his car windshield, and attempted to break into his house while he and his wife were inside. Among the images from the scene: a small Israeli flag with a swastika replaced the Star of David. Judge Sohlberg’s wife, Meira, stood outside her vandalized home and said what every Israeli watching felt:
“Look at this devastation — it’s a pogrom. What is this, Kristallnacht?”
The word “pogrom” did not come from a polemicist. It came from an Orthodox woman who was inside her own home while a Jewish mob tried to break down her door.
I want to be clear about something that often gets lost in translation when we talk about this with North American audiences: what happened to Noam Sohlberg’s house was not just criminal thuggery. It was an ideological act, rooted in a theology that is, at its core, anti-Zionist in the most foundational sense. These are not fringe actors with no intellectual framework. They are the expression, at its most violent, of a worldview held by significant segments of Haredi society — a worldview that rejects the legitimacy of the State of Israel as a Jewish enterprise, that refuses to serve in its army, that has for decades accepted its massive subsidies funded by the Israeli taxpayer while teaching its children that the Zionist state is an affront to God.
The proximate cause of Wednesday night’s riot was Sohlberg’s rulings on Haredi military conscription. He was part of the unanimous nine-judge panel that struck down the blanket draft exemptions for yeshiva students. He has been outspoken about the government’s failure to enforce the law that followed. For insisting that the law apply equally to everyone in the Jewish State, he became a target. The Jerusalem Faction extremists who led this riot, and who previously broke into the home of the military police chief with his family inside, are not acting randomly. They are systematically targeting the institutions of Israeli civil governance, which are themselves religious, because they do not accept those institutions’ right to govern them or to enforce laws that apply to other Jewish citizens.
President Herzog and Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit called it “a dangerous crossing of a red line.” Former Prime Minister Bennett said Sohlberg’s home was attacked “only because he won’t surrender to the criminal ploys of the Netanyahu-Deri-Gafni coalition.” The Judicial Authority released a statement that judicial officers would continue working “without fear, in accordance with the rule of law.” These are the right words. But they need to be heard in Diaspora Jewish communities too, particularly in ours, because we need to expand our map of what anti-Zionism looks like.
For liberal Zionists like me, the past several years have demanded a reckoning. We have had to hold the complexity of standing with Israel while objecting, sometimes loudly, to specific policies and the governments that pursue them. We have been accused by some of providing cover for Israel’s critics and by others of providing cover for its failings. Neither charge is fair, but both reflect the genuine difficulty of the position. We do this because we believe in what Israel is supposed to be: a Jewish and democratic state, a home for the Jewish people, a place where Jewish sovereignty is expressed through law rather than through the barrel of a gun or the coercive theocratic authority of a Chief Rabbinate, and a nation that treats its minority non-Jewish communities with equal rights and dignity.
The Haredi anti-draft movement, at its extreme edges, does not believe in that vision. It never has. The ideological progenitors of Wednesday’s rioters opposed the founding of the state on theological grounds. Their descendants today happily demand and take government money, enjoy government protection, and send their political representatives into governing coalitions, all while raising a generation that is taught, explicitly in some schools, that the Zionist project is illegitimate and that its laws need not apply to them.
This is the anti-Zionism ofblack hats, peyot, and tzitzit. And in some ways, it is more corrosive than the kind we’re used to dealing with, because it operates from the inside. It cannot be countered with hasbara or with vigils in Times Square. It can only be countered by what Justice Sohlberg himself was trying to do: insisting that in a democracy, no community is above the law.
Netanyahu condemned the riot, as did Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Kalman Ber. But Netanyahu also built the political coalition and the culture of impunity around the fight over the draft exemption that produced it. UTJ leader Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf rushed to express support for the yeshiva students “whose honor has been trampled,” while barely acknowledging that a mob had just attacked the home of a Supreme Court Judge(!). The message was clear: the violence may be regrettable, but the grievance is legitimate. That framing is itself an incitement.
We should name what we saw. A mob attacked a Supreme Court justice in his home because he applied the law. That is not a protest. It is an assault on the rule of law, which is to say, an assault on the democratic dimension of the Jewish and democratic state. And the people who carried it out are not, in any meaningful sense, Zionists or law-abiding citizens of the State of Israel. They are anti-Zionists in religious garb, cashing government checks, and they have been growing in numbers and in boldness for years[1].
The conversation about Zionism’s enemies needs to be wide enough to include them, and they deserve the same condemnation as those protesting around the world for Israel’s destruction.
Shabbat Shalom!
[1] According to the Israel Democracy Institute, in 2025, the Haredi population numbered approximately 1,452,350, constituting 14.3% of Israel’s total population — up from 750,000 in 2009. The growth rate of 4.2% per year is the highest of any population in the developed world. According to Central Bureau of Statistics forecasts, the Haredi share is expected to reach 16% in 2030 and two million people by 2033.
Looking further out: if current growth rates continue, by 2065, Haredim will constitute 32% of all Israelis and 40% of Israeli Jews.
In the 2023–2024 school year, approximately 401,000 students were enrolled in Haredi education — 20% of all school students in Israel and more than a quarter (26%) of Hebrew-language education.