By Barry Finger, "Review of Molly Crabapple, 'Here Where We Live Is Our Country' (Random House, 2026)"

On this new trend of romanticizing an old trend that died in genocide

Rummaging through the artifacts of her great grandfather’s obscure past, Molly Crabapple transports herself back to the intellectually and politically tumultuous world of Eastern European Jewry: a world of national awakenings, pogromist outrages, emerging modernity, democratic ferment and revolutionary struggle. It was a whirlwind, whose centrifugal force yanked Jewish communities from their traditional moorings and hurled them into political life. But it was also a maelstrom that culminated in the barbaric destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, Yiddish civilization and, with it, the Ashkenazi Jewish working class.

Ms. Crabapple is a conjuror who resurrects her great love of Yiddishkeit from spectral haze to a fully realized embodiment and does so with great verve, poignancy, wit and pathos. With the craft of a skilled novelist she breathes life into the minutiae of ghetto life—its struggles, its victories, its tragedies, challenges and defeats-- time travelling from her great-grandfather’s days in the old country to her awakening as a link in the chain of Jewish life and back into the world and the fate that her great-grandfather fortuitously left behind. It is a work of immense scholarship, beautifully illustrated by the author. She taught herself Yiddish and used her immense linguistic and literary skills to pour over, it would seem, every existent source of Bundism and reanimate its beating heart.

She posits that the Bund’s secular, anti-clerical, anti-Zionist principles remain a living model for the struggle against authoritarianism and a unparalleled guide to Jewish survival. She links the fight against antisemitism to the struggle against Zionism; for solidarity across differences. “For leftist Jews longing for resources without our own past for combating the Zionist death cult, the Bund is a model.”

And it is a work of great inversion and of ultimate betrayal.

As the great protest movement against exploitation and oppression, socialism became a natural node of attraction for many young Jewish intellectuals. But, Moses Hess aside, the most prominent socialist authorities had little interest in Jewish emancipation per se. As intellectual heirs of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, their vision of equal rights for the Jew extended no further than the Jew as an individual, the freedom to assimilate and be accepted into the polity of the nation in which he resided as an equal. Of Jews as a collectivity, its dissolution was welcomed, as their survival retained no intrinsic value for the larger commonweal.

Marx and his more unimaginative and Jewishly-indifferent followers understood Jew hatred as the glue that sustained an otherwise anachronistic remnant. The difference between Marx and his later adherents resided in this. Marx attributed the animus to an historical hangover rooted in Jewry’s relatively unique economic role as middlemen, tax agents, moneylenders and merchants in feudal society and as a fermenting agent during its transition to capitalism. But because the emerging and more progressive order largely displaced Jews with fellow Christians, now imbued in Marx’s repugnant language with the spirit of Jewish hucksterism, as the primary agents of financial and industrial exploitation, and largely relegated Jews to backwater ghetto economies, reactionary antisemitism, in Marx’s view, would give way to a mature and dynamic anti-capitalism. Jews would thereby be released from any special animus as an economic caste.

By the turn of the century, it was quite clear that the forward march of bourgeois society alone offered no such reflexive respite from antisemitism. If Marx thought freedom for Jews to be a natural byproduct of capitalist maturation, his later social democratic and Bolshevik followers could only continue to entertain such illusions in defiance of lived history. For Marx’s great and greatly hidebound interpreter, after the death of Engels, Karl Kautsky, the persistence of antisemitism simply demonstrated that “we have (not) completely emerged from the Middle Ages as long as Judaism still exists among us. The sooner it disappears, the better it will be, not only for society, but also for the Jews themselves.” Presumably “it” refers both to the Middle Ages and the Jews as two-sides of the same coin, which the socialist revolution against capitalism will finally pay haste to. The Jew under socialism “will continue to live in the memory of man as man’s greatest sufferer, as he has been dealt with most severely by mankind, to whom he has given most.”

Were the Jews a nationality? For most socialists Jews had a national past, but were ground first by repeated dispersion and then by feudalism into a caste wedged in the interstices of nations and, once emancipated and accorded political liberty under socialism would surely not reconstitute themselves into a nation, when offered the free choice of assimilation. And assimilation, so chosen, would be the democratic solution to the Jewish Question.

Whereas Enlightenment liberalism rejected the participation of Jews as Jews in national life, socialism extended that even farther proposing the voluntary elimination of Jewish self-identification even in the private domain. Neither the capitalist nor the workers’ wings of the democratic movement offered the Jewish people a lifeline.

The Bund too, at its inception in at the very tail end of the 19^th Century, did not address itself to the Jewish Question. Their founders did not seek a new political party with a defined ideological program and detailed constitution, with a clear division of functions between political party and trade union work. Neither did their leaders necessarily speak Yiddish as their primary language. Some had, as did Ms. Crabapple, to learn it. Some were even baptized and may not have initially identified as Jews. The organizers saw themselves as Russian intellectuals who assumed the task of organizing the Jewish section of the Russian working class. They accepted the Jewishness of the workers and the fact that they spoke Yiddish as the objective parameters within which they necessarily needed to operate. What they originally wanted was an “inclusive association” that would embrace all the Jewish workers within Czarist Russia, without overtaxing ideological demands and obligations that might deter mass participation.

Julius Martov, a founder of the Bund and later the renowned Menshevik leader of the Russian Social Democracy, recognized that Jewish workers were doubly oppressed: exploited as workers and outcast as a nation. But, insofar as Martov’s internationalism sought to overcome all national distinctions, to unite all workers regardless of nationality under the banner of socialism, the specific survival of the Jews as a nation carried no special significance. Worse, it, like all lingering or newly awakened national sentiments, presented an unwelcome obstacle.

The Bund, however, could not long dodge the issue of the double oppression of the Jews. As a practical matter, neutrality in the cause of assimilation meant not the elimination of all national particularities, but Russification. And this prospect was singularly lacking in mass appeal to Jewish workers. Under pressure from below, from competing territorial-nationalist and Zionist sentiments percolating among both Jewish intellectuals and workers, the Bund was reluctantly compelled to seek a solution to the Jewish problem that addressed the issue of (Russian-) Jewish collective survival. It finally adopted a National Program (1903), that anticipated (but was not endorsed by) Austro-Marxism and by Dubnov’s “spiritual-nationalism”, recognizing Jewry, dispersed among other peoples within the Czarist empire, as a national community and called upon the socialist movement to fight for a social order that would assure the Jewish population of a future liberated Russia the opportunity to carry on as a distinct community; to regulate its cultural affairs according to its needs. They reinvisioned a future socialist Russia— a prison house of nationalities, a synthetic country—as a federation of culturally autonomous free peoples. The Bund’s nationalism of “hereness”—doikayt in Yiddish—was an endorsement of a proto- identity politics in the form of Ashkenazi ethno-socialism.

The Bundist demand for national-cultural autonomy won adherents among Byelorussian and Georgian socialists and the Dashnaktsutiun movement in Armenia. The Socialist Revolutionaries at their first congress in 1905 also voted to support a federalist solution and to recognize the principal of national-cultural autonomy.

But the Bund’s national program met an implacable wall of hostility, not only from their Menshevik allies, but also from their Bolshevik opponents. Whoever raised the demand for Jewish national culture, no matter how well intentioned, Lenin argued, was “an enemy of the proletariat, a supporter of all that is outmoded and connected with caste among the Jewish people.” Bundists were accused of advancing the slogan of the “rabbis and the bourgeoisie” and acting as “instruments of bourgeois nationalism among the workers.” Lenin went so far as to compare the call for separate national schools to the segregation of black and white students in the former slave states of the US. ^l

For the Russian Social Democracy, the Bund were nothing but Zionists suffering from sea-sickness.^*

This was a baseless slander. For the tendency to grasp the Jewish question locally and culturally, and not globally, also placed the Bund squarely in the anti-Zionist camp, as both Bundists and Zionists fully agreed. Bundism did not address itself to Jewish survival writ large, but to the narrowly defined aspirations, as they perceived it, of Jewish workers within the Russian Empire. It was also diametrically opposed to the thoroughly liberal Zionism of Herzl, who placed his hope for a conventional Jewish state—and his appeal to world powers—on the proposition that Zionism could also be a pressure valve dissipating the revolutionary unrest of Jewish workers.

But Zionism also had a socialist wing, Poale Zion, absent except in cartoon form from Crabapple’s account, that also opposed Herzlian nationalism. They insisted that a homeland cannot be granted from on high by world powers, it must be a revolutionary act of Jewish creative ferment and activity from below culminating not in a conventional bourgeois state, but—in Nachman Syrkin’s view—a Jewish socialist state. And it mounted a spirited left-wing attack not only against liberal Zionism, but also against Bundist cultural nationalism. They, like the Bund, organized Jewish workers—carters, wagoners, teamsters butchers, horse-thieves and gangsters as well-- to defend their communities from pogromists. They, like the Bund, engaged in revolutionary activity, trade union organizing and electoral campaigns within the Russian Empire. And, they, like the Bund were to write an unforgettably glorious chapter of Jewish pride and resistance against German armies in the ghettos, the forests and the camps of Eastern Europe. They created what was to become the Israeli working class in the pre-state years and to fashion its key parties, social and cultural institutions, and self-defense organizations.

Whether Crabapple finds Poale Zion’s critique of Bundism meritorious or not, it is a dereliction of political responsibility to have simply ignored it. Dov Ber Borochov, another leading theoretician of labor Zionism argued that a nation that does not control the conditions of social reproduction cannot sustain a forward-looking national culture. By conditions of production Borochov was referring to the historic, geographic and technological context, the control over which is the precondition for a distinct self-sustaining national civilization. Without a territorial economic base, the call for cultural autonomy remains both idealistic and fantastical.

The ghetto and shtetl economies, out of which the galuth (diasporic) nationalism of the Bund was rooted, were unraveling. Jewish workers were not concentrated in heavy industry and agriculture, but only in the secondary distribution and final processing phases of production. And the vastly disproportional middle elements—intellectuals, small shopkeepers, peddlers, intellectuals, technicians, white-collar workers and professionals—were becoming rapidly impoverished, prevented by national oppression, including hostile Russian and Eastern European working class competition, from absorption in the host economies. This abnormal and peculiar structural frailty was the insurmountable consequence of an absence of territory upon which a normal national economy could be built. National hatred and lack of economic opportunity invariably spurred Jewish masses towards emigration.

Galuth nationalism is not a radical solution to the Jewish problem, maintained Borochov, and cannot remove the anomalies of Jewish life absent a strategic economic base. Socialist –Zionists found the Bund’s Vladimir Medem’s assurance that the revolution would be “lubricated by Jewish blood” less mollifying than repugnant. What the struggle for cultural and political autonomy could do, and what it did do, is to have provided the Russian and East European Jewish working class with the necessary political awakening, language and tools to struggle for their immediate rights. Like the Bund, Poale Zion demanded national political autonomy with broad cultural jurisdiction for those nationalities whose needs could not be met territorially. But this was a stopgap for the Jewish people. The conditions of marginality and the continued outsized presence of Jews in precarious middle class and professional fields peripheral to the national economic centers, was seen as a replicative byproduct of global dispersion and national domination. It was also a basic functional element that made Jews a convenient target of vilification and hatred by other oppressed people, and a tempting scapegoat of social and political deflection for vulnerable ruling classes.

And it, in good measure, traumatized a people unable to fully unpack their suitcases in the various national hotels that provided them with temporary lodging. Zionism was, for Borochov, the minimal program for a normal national, rooted existence, the precondition for the full participation of the Jewish people as equals in the global struggle for a democratic and emancipated future. The Jewish people, ever on the move, would finally be driven by “elemental (stychic) processes” to Palestine, an under developed land “remarkably well suited, “in Zvi Gitelman’s summary, “for experiencing the entire gamut of economic development.”

Zionism, at least for socialist-zionists, was not meant as a solution to the “Jewish Question”, if by Jewish Question is meant the reoccurring, shape-shifting problem of antisemitism. Then again neither was the Bund’s proposed cultural autonomy. These were alternative programs for Jewish national survival, the right of any nation hated or not. The Jewish Question for the Bund and Labor Zionists addressed Jewish defenselessness and its connection to territoriality. Liberals and democratic socialists, not to mention Communists, simply assumed that the march of civilization, alternatively—socialism, would dissolve antisemitism and all other forms of “race” prejudice, but had no declared or particular interest in Jewish survival. They seemed remarkably incurious as to why the march of civilization never even quenched these poisons within their own ranks. They never offered any alternative program, unless the malicious fraud and Bundist parody of Birobidzhan is to be taken seriously, and held both sides of this very Jewish vexation in equal, abject contempt for even having ventured such solutions. This was largely a matter of Jews speaking to Jews, and a dynamic subsection of socialist Jews speaking to socialist Jews, and those scarce few allies actually concerned with Jewish survival. For Marxist parties in the main, Zionism, including its left wing iterations, and cultural autonomy were alike seen as a vote of no confidence in socialism and therefore disloyal.

Bundists rejected as utopian the ingathering and reconstitution of the Jewish nation in Palestine. Their own “non-utopian” program of national-cultural autonomy, on the other hand, was fully enacted by the Ukrainian Central Rada (1917-18) and not only for Jews but for the Russian and Polish minorities as well. Still, the Bund, for good cause, straddled the idea of full Ukrainian independence advocating, instead, federation with Russia. It had already earned the distrust of the Russian Social Democrats for its Jewish “nationalism”, but now made a new and intractable enemy of already suspicious far-right Ukrainian autonomists. The Bund rightly feared that the drive towards an independent Ukraine would splinter Jewish communities and subject them to outright persecution; that it would strengthen the power of Jew-hating reactionaries. And that is exactly what occurred. Ultimately the Rada proved unable and unwilling to intervene when the autonomists partnered with the White armies during the Russian civil war to unleash the bloodiest anti-Jewish massacres prior to the Holocaust.

What stronger rebuke could there be to the tragedy of Bundist illusions? It failed, horribly failed, the judgment of history, in the one grand national laboratory experiment where it was actually tested, a conclusion unpardonably glossed over by Crabapple and her fellow Bundist reenactors.

Hersh Mendel, a revolutionary socialist militant who seemingly fought in every European arena as a Bolshevik and later as a Trotskyist cut his teeth with the Bund and later, to the shock of his comrades, defected to the ranks of socialist-zionism. He expressed his gratitude for the Bundist experience long after he had repudiated their politics. For it was the Bund that introduced him to the synthesis between international socialism and the Jewish national question and “I was deeply thankful to the Bund for having made me a proud Jew and a passionate socialist.”

Even Borochov, for all his telling criticisms, nevertheless paid tribute to the real accomplishments of the Bund, writing, “future generations of the Jewish proletariat will erect it a splendid monument in Palestine. It cultivated the Jewish workers’ consciousness of themselves as a class, educated them to organized struggle for their interests, developed their spirit of discipline and cultivated their democratic concepts…”

After the Bolsheviks took power, the social democratic Bund was forced to disband in 1920, and decamp to Poland leaving a small pro-Bolshevik Russian remnant that had capitulated to the increasingly authoritarian Communist Party. And it was in Poland that the Bund fought it’s last heroic, doomed battles culminating in a belated united front with labor Zionists; a united front reluctantly joined under pressure from its youth wing when their preferred alliance with the Polish Socialist Party failed to produce an uprising aligned to urgent plight of the Jewish people. To the end, in the face of mounting Nazi bestiality the Bund stubbornly held to its principles, insisting, all evidence to the contrary, that a workers’ revolution alone could save the Jews, and ruled out, in principal, organizing a mass emergency exodus to Palestine for being an unpardonable affront to the Arabs.

By the mid-30s, Stalinism had extinguished what few embers of working class autonomy the Bolsheviks still tolerated. German social democracy and its militias had ignominiously collapsed in the face of Nazi thuggery without offering any resistance. The more heroic downfall of Red Vienna, the citadel of Austrian socialism, followed soon after. The Spanish Republic was destroyed with the active connivance of the GPU, whose Russian masters preferred a fascist victory to democratic socialism.

An ardent labor Zionist of the 1930s, R. E. Ashery, answered in frustration the entire array of anti-Zionist sentiment, Bundist and non-Bundist alike, “There is little the love of mankind nor is there any informed intelligence in the stupid argument that surely the world is big enough to find a place for the Jews without crowding the Arab nation. … (T)he very obvious retort is, where is that land where Jews may go, and where is that land which the Jews, as free and independent people, can reconstitute in terms of an organic past, present and future? Unless one has in mind the Gobi Desert. As to the other crackpot solution that Jews, en masse, should join the revolutionary movement in the lands they reside in that they may be the beacon and light of the revolution, it seems the revolutionary theologians have formed a new incarnation for the hoary concept, Jews as a Chosen People…. The ‘revolutionaries’ preach a gospel of becoming the chosen cannon-fodder for the German, Polish, Roumanian and Lithuanian brothers whose revolutionary growth is retarded or stunted. Meantime are the Jews gladly to let themselves be killed in pogroms by these future brothers?”^*

When principles harden into dogmas and dogmas become blinders, they cease to be a useful guide to action. To leave would have meant letting their tormentors win, and so this “right to stay” ossified into an inviolable principal that the Bund refused to relinquish even when its further insistence became pure folly. “(A)s a man who dedicated his entire life to the struggle for socialism, “ explained Hersh Mendel, “ and, as a matter of course, for the victory of a socialist Jewish people as well, I experienced the deepest moral crisis when Hitler’s army invaded Paris. For their part, the French Stalinists took a positive attitude towards Hitler’s armies. But I asked myself, as a Jewish worker what must I do? It was soon clear to me that Hitler’s victory meant the destruction of Jewry in every country in Europe. And it is clear to everyone who lived under the occupation that had the war continued for one more year, the Jewish people would have been wiped out to the last man.”

Antek (Yitzhak) Zuckerman, a socialist-zionist hero of the Jewish Combat Organization in Poland, walked away at the conclusion of the war in utter exasperation at the Bund’s “hereness”, which he damned as a “self-destructive delusion.” “Any one could see that the Jews had no future without a state.”

Not for Molly Crabapple. For her, evidently, social justice has no future if the Jews do have a state. No sloppy, snidely unexamined anti-Zionist and anti-Israel cliché remains unturned. And why shouldn’t they be invoked? These are the axiomatic beliefs of a modern leftist worldview—increasingly the worldview of a generation-- where narrative coherency supplants factual correspondence. Absent this subtext, I suspect that this work, elegantly written as it is, would never have broken out of its academic niche to attain the mass appeal it has garnered. Ms Crabapple is a creature of this party of the left. And she has paid her dues here in kind.

Zionism is criminogenic because it is a settler-colonial enterprise, supercharged by its alignment with American power. And because it is a settler-colonialism enterprise, it has a genocidal telos. The more that the genocidal beast is subsidized, and fattened, the more it, paradoxically, remains unsated. Israel is the epicenter of a wider American vortex-- the torchbearer and repository of all the crimes of Western civilization—a vortex that extracts and strips wealth from the rest of the world, a global imperium and the machine shop of social injustice. As long as the American-Israel nexus remains unbroken, and resources diverted to its defense, the longer fundamental social problem will remain unaddressed and addressable. That is why climate change, and Black Lives, and police brutality, and the housing crisis, and health insurance, and wage stagnation, and LGBTQ+ rights are interlocked. That is why AIPAC is the most monstrous of all lobbyists. That is why Gaza is a trade union issue, a feminist and gay issue, a wealth disparity issue and income inequality issue, and above all, the omnibus social justice issue. That is why all local politics are anti-imperialist politics; why Gaza is the central issue for New York City politics and all the lesser city and municipality and village politics, and, above all, to national politics

This Manichean, apocalyptic worldview, it should be redundant to point out, is unlike any leftist worldview known to history. It hijacks the concerns of the left, the grievances of the left and the language of the left. And inverts them all. It creates a moral permission structure to ostracize and purge all those who stand in the way of social progress by failing to respect the “link” between it and its material dependency on the elimination of Israel. In its twisted but consistent logic, it further calumniates anyone who upholds the Israeli right to self-determination for being white supremacists, upholders of the present global structures of hierarchy and advantage. If Carey McWilliams once saw antisemitism as a mask for privilege, the modern left considers the fear of antisemitism to be the apprehension of privileges lost. And it creates a ready-made, all-purpose scapegoat for present and future failures by would-be social reformers to implement their programs. “We can’t have Medicare for All because the necessary funds have been diverted to the child killers of the IDF.”

Most important, it catapults the most reactionary, fascist, theocratic, irredentist, misogynist and racist movements and regimes that plague the Middle East and the world to noble heroes of the anti-imperialist struggle for having thrown a spanner in the machinery of global oppression. Progressive and freedom loving are any movements that threaten to disrupt the world order, even if they do so with the intent of blocking or hurling backwards any gains of human rights or democracy. Condemned is any war against fascism, religious fanaticism and jihadi imperialism that operates within that order, even if it lays the predicate to future democratic openings, for upholding the status quo.

Towards the end of her book, as the remnants of the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party together survey the horror and destruction of the war, Ms. Crabapple relates a Polish socialist’s plea for reassurance and, if not for forgiveness, then for understanding; asking pleadingly of the Bundist, had we Polish comrades done enough? Had we done all we could do? And she imagines herself now, in the place of the Polish socialist, looking across the chasm of the “Gaza genocide” and asking similarly for a reassuring absolution for her opposition to Israeli retaliation presumably from a representative of Hamas, now obscenely cast in the roll of the Bund. This perverse analogy between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto, between Hamas and the Jewish resistance fighters—this appropriation of Jewish tragedy and heroism—in service to Islamism is, lamentably, a feature and not a bug of contemporary socialism.

There is, from the outset, a fundamental incoherence in Ms. Crabapple’s neo-Bundist embrace of identity politics with her strident rejection of “ethno-states,” Doubly so, since she celebrates the ethno (Ashkenazi) socialism of the Bund, and yet misidentifies and condemns, on the basis of that mischaracterization, the multiethnic, multicultural Jewish state consisting of Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, Sephardim and African Jews as ethno-particularism. Marek Edelman, a justly venerated Bundist hero of the Warsaw ghetto revolt and fearless champion of the Polish Solidarnosz trade union movement, was also an unabashed Ashkenazi chauvinist, who characterized Israel derisively as an just another Arab state with a Jewish religion. Was that not also an expression of her beloved “identity” politics?

Ironically given her devotion to Bundism, she utterly fails to give notice, much yet appreciate, the scope of national-cultural freedom accorded the Arab Israeli community. Does not the Israeli “ethno-state” fund a separate Arabic-language educational system, where Arab communities determine the curriculum for language, literature and history enabling them to impart Palestinian culture, heritage and Arabic language skills to their children? Does not the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sports provide financial support to Arab theaters, orchestras, museums and athletic events? Haven’t Israeli governments periodically advanced multi-year spending plans to increase investment in Arab arts and cultural programming with the goal of expanding local facilities and encouraging coexistence? Which is not to deny that these subsidies have often run afoul of political objections when specific productions were deemed, often speciously, “disloyal”. Nor is it to deny that the Arab community has not been proportionally subsidized. The point is, nevertheless, that Israel recognizes in principle and in fact, the right of its Arab and non-Jewish ethnic minority communities to national-cultural autonomy.

The author considers the gestation period of the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine to be fraught with original sin. Perhaps the world owed Jews fleeing persecution and annihilation an open door. But the Zionist Jews who entered Palestine abused that right, for “unlike immigrants, who generally try to integrate into their new countries … (they) aimed to supplant Palestinian society,” to build an autarkic “parallel society.” Or, to state it less uncharitably, the Jews who immigrated to Palestine yearned for an existence in which they could master their own fate, prioritize their own needs and no longer subordinate their dignity to the good will and tolerance of others; where they were no longer challenged, as a test of sufferance, to demonstrate and perpetually reconfirm their usefulness to non-Jewish populations in whose midst they dwelled.

In retrospect, it is certainly debatable whether this period might have have been managed better had the dominant labor-Zionists taken a less absolutist course. Perhaps had the Jews seen their way to allotting the Arabs a share in employment, markets and all other benefits contingent upon their readiness to cooperate with the Jews, Arabs might have been induced to moderation and to see extremism as a self-defeating liability.

Or perhaps, this was simply too much to have expected from those charged with the task of building a National Home for their desperate and beleaguered brethren, pitilessly constrained by hostile British authorities. It was they who sought to mollify Arab opposition, while ostensibly complying with their Mandatory obligations, by limiting immigration quotas through alignment with absorptive capacity. But not one Jew was hired in the Arab sector. Products produced in the Jewish sector were subject to organized boycott. No state domain was put at the disposal of the Zionist movement; and whatever cultivatable lands that were made available were only placed at the disposal of Arab landowners. Taxes from the Zionist enterprises, collected by the Mandatory authorities, flowed primarily to the Arab sector to subsidize education, health care and public works. Absorptive capacity therefore meant the ability of the Jewish sector on its own to grow and generate employment opportunities for refugees, while being drained of revenues, starved of land and cut out of the Arab domestic market for labor and produce.

In any case, labor-Zionists believed their policies were not harmful nor unjust to the Arabs, since the Jews were not seeking to deprive Arabs from anything they already possessed.

Not quite so, Molly Crabapple avers. “New Zionist immigrants bought land from Palestinian feudal leaders (and) brutally expelled (tenant) farmers.” This remains a common indictment. It skips a couple of key steps, however, in the very real process of fellahin dispossession. The Arab tenant farmers were saddled, like sharecroppers elsewhere, with debt owed to the very same effendi class that owned the land. Recognizing this vulnerability, the Mandatory government decreed laws for the protection of the Arab tenantry. It was forbidden to evict a leaseholder from the land, if he failed to honor his debt, without assuring the farmer an equivalent piece of land elsewhere. It was permissible, on the other hand, to evict him if he refused to pay higher rents. The tenant could then be evicted if he refused to work the land assigned to him or, if there was no surplus land, could also be evicted if he refused to pay the higher rent. This was in any event a rearguard action as the feudal land system was already in a state of collapse, as debt-ridden tenants abandoned the land in search of more lucrative employment in nearby towns. The landlords generally sold land to the Jews on the sly that could not be leased or reassigned to Arab peasants for being sand dunes and swamps. But they could also sell land for which the tenant could not pay the higher rent. Insofar as the Jewish sector had little surplus lands to offer, the Jews did not appear to the peasants as lessors who could legitimately evict them.

But how wide spread were these evictions occasioned by Jewish land purchases? According to Arieh Avneri, who examined every land transaction between 1878 and 1948, approximately 5-6000 families (10-12000 people) were displaced or dispossessed as a result of Jewish land purchases from Absentee landlords, who resided in cities or neighboring countries. This amounted to less than 1% of the Arab population of 1947. Writing in the mid1930s, the Palestine Royal Commission Report, no friend of the Zionists, found that only 664 Arab farmers had legitimate claims. Of these 347 were resettled at Government expense, the rest found employment in the cities. Surveying the larger period, Avneri notes that Jewish buyers often made efforts to mitigate the displacement of tenant farmer: in some cases by setting aside a portion of the purchased land for the tenants, by offering financial compensation for relocation or by providing alternative employment.

And so it goes, drop by drop. The author treats the Arab revolt of 1936 as if it were a colonial insurgency in the mold of Ireland and India. But the British Mandate was not colonial in the classical sense. They sought a strategic imperial advantage by ensuring for themselves the Suez Canal, the road to India and a base from which they could control oil interests in other Arab countries. They did not seek raw materials, of which there are few, nor did they set up colonial enterprises, nor did they enjoy any special economic benefits. They certainly did not offload their surplus population, unemployable in the motherland, on Palestine as they had elsewhere. Their charge was to bring the Arab nations, freed from the Ottoman Empire after the war, to independence while also securing a Jewish homeland in accordance with international agreements. And by assuming the Mandate, they could secure their primary imperial interests, as a means to their ends.

The Arab national movement in Palestine, under the leadership of the Mufti of Jerusalem, sought, with the connivance of Hitler and Mussolini, to eject one imperial power nominally committed to Jewish self-determination—and with them, the Jews, and to replace them with another set of imperial allies, who, acting in their own strategic interests would bring under their control of the same strategic assets that attracted the British. The Arab resistance was, in other words, a nationalist movement that was derailed, assumed a reactionary character and relied on fascist power to oust the Jewish population of the country in the only way that could—by first defeating the British.

And although the revolt was suppressed at a terrible cost to the Arabs (and to the Jews), it succeeded in convincing the British to issue the infamous White Paper choking off Jewish immigration to Palestine at their point of maximum peril. Suddenly the British had alighted to the revelation that the absorptive capacity of Palestine had been unexpectedly exhausted. Jews were prohibited from settling in extensive areas of Palestine, including on land already acquired by the Jewish community. And it ordered the dismantling of the Hagana.

The reader would not learn this from Ms. Crabapple’s account. Of what they will be apprised is how “ruthless” the Hagana was in supplementing British forces to quell the revolt. A revolt, she forgets to mention, that rampaged through Jewish communities leaving in its wake hundred of murdered, mutilated and raped victims, communities and businesses sacked. Another writer might have made the indelicate connection between the Hagana’s defense of these embattled communities, many of who were well-established traditional religious Jews and not Zionists, with the Bund’s self-defense units. They may have even noted a similar social composition between the Arab and Russian pogromists. But Ms. Crabapple’s moral antennae are solely attuned to Zionist perfidy and Zionist brutality. Leaving aside the fact that the Hagana largely refrained from tit-for-tat reprisals, one wonders whether she dares to imagine that her beloved Bund’s self-defense squads wielded their truncheons, knives, blackjacks, brass knuckles and pistols with a maximum of Ghandian forbearance and love of other?

Perhaps left unsaid is that Zionists as “settler-colonialists”, as opposed to the deep rooted Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, are morally undeserving of her unflinching anti-imperialist sympathies. If so, she may have forgotten that unwanted Jews have always been seen, in effect, as “settler-colonialists,” and in Europe, as an unwelcomed and uninvited Asiatic implantation. And when Israel declared its independence, in accordance with the recommendation of the international community, Jamal Husseini, representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the UN justified their rejection of the new nation by invoking their god-given right to enforce “racial homogeneity” in the “Arab” world. ^*

And the AHC recruited the dregs of world fascism—Bosnians who had fought with the Nazis, mercenaries from Italy, Croat Ustasha, Serb Chetniks and Polish veterans of General Ander’s army who refused to return to Communist Poland--to help crush the nascent Jewish state in its shell and ensure just that outcome.

Here, where we live, is our country. Except if “we” live in Israel. There is much more to be said. Suffice to say, the Bund deserves better. These fearless secularists and democratic socialists, who stood up against religious obscurantism and defied mass authoritarians on both the right and left, who waged a doomed rearguard battle for the dignity of European Jewry, should never had their legacy tarnished and perverted to backhandedly justify Hamas’s atrocities of October 7. But here we are.

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^l Hyman Lumar, ed,, LeninOn the Jewish Question, International Publishers, NY 1974 p 89 and p 107. Also found in Collected Works of Lenin, vol 19, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965 pp 26 and 32.

^* Attributed to Georg Plechanov. See Abraham Blumberg, “Anniversaries in Conflict: On the Centenary of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund, Jewish Social Studies 5, 1999, pp. 196-271. https://edu/pub/3/article/18207.com.

^* Enzo Sereni and R. E. Ashery, eds.,, Jews and Arabs in Palestine, Hechalutz Press, New York, 1936, p. 20a.

^* Jeffrey Herf,” From the River to the Sea, ” Responses to 7 October, Rosa Freedman and David Hirsh ed, with Odeliya Lanir Zafir, Routledge, NY 2024, p. 46.