“Against Zionism, For Socialism”

I’ve spent the last few years neck-deep in archives, researching a book on the Jewish Labor Bund. The Bund was a socialist, secular, and revolutionary Jewish party founded in 1897 in Tsarist Russia that grew to be the most popular Jewish party in interwar Poland. It was anti-Zionist to its bones. Born in perhaps the most antisemitic empire on earth, the Bund believed that Jewish workers were oppressed both for their ethnicity and their class. Over the first 50 years of their existence, they resembled a sort of proto-Black Panthers, combining armed self-defense, Marxist solidarity, mutual aid, and the swaggering uplift of their own racialized and subaltern culture. They unionized sweatshops. They tangled with religious fanatics in their own community. They were champions of Yiddish, the language of the working-class Jewish street, promoting it through a network of schools, libraries, and choirs they created. They fought evictions and published radical newspapers, and when Polish racists tried to force Jews from the country, the Bund’s militias fought them with brass knuckles and iron bars.

To the Bund, the fight for Jewish freedom and safety was not in Palestine but against the governments and capitalists in the Eastern European countries where they had lived for the past thousand years. After the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain bequeathed to Jewish settlers a Palestine that was not theirs to give, the Bund expressed disgust that Zionism had become a tool of the British Empire to establish an imperial outpost in the Middle East.

In 1929, anti-colonization riots broke out in Jerusalem, then spread across Palestine. While Jews murdered some Palestinians, the vast majority of the victims were Jews, both new Zionist immigrants and Arab Jews who had lived in Palestine since time immemorial. After the riots, a wave of rage and grief swept the Jewish world — the tenor was almost identical to that after October 7. It went beyond mourning the Jewish victims and quickly morphed into a call for bloody vengeance. All Palestinians were portrayed as bloodthirsty fanatics, and the riots against the British Mandate as the irrationality of savages rather than the predictable reaction to over a decade of colonial dispossession. Mass protests broke out across the Jewish world. In Warsaw, crowds whipped up by the right-wing Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky screamed that they would kick Arabs out of the place they called the land of Israel, that Jerusalem would be theirs. Money flowed to armed Zionist militias in Palestine. 

The Bund refused to join in, denouncing the “sentimental mass hysteria” that followed the attacks. While they mourned the victims, they blamed the riots on Zionists, who had bound their project up with the British occupation and played the part of small-time imperialists. The Bund published pamphlets alongside a national lecture tour in Poland to discuss the root causes of the violence. In the archives of their newspaper, Naye Folktsaytung, I found an article about a 3,000-person meeting they held at the Splendid Theatre in Warsaw, where they passed the resolution “Against Zionism. For Socialism.” I’ve translated this excerpt from Yiddish: “The Zionists have built all their hopes on depriving the existing Arab population of Palestine of their political rights to manage the country in which they are the repressed majority… [Zionists] have stood with every occupying power in Palestine — first Turkey, now England — and have used every means to make sure that Arabs are not granted their most minimal demands for political freedom and self-governance… Zionism poisoned the atmosphere and put the Jewish population of Palestine in danger…

“The nationalist demonstrations that Zionists have organized exploit the victims of these tragic events and the understandable agitation of the Jewish community… This meeting calls on Jewish workers to fight, with all their energy, the storm of nationalism and chauvinism that the Zionists are unleashing on the Jewish street. The answer to this tragically but pointlessly spilled blood cannot lie in strengthening national hatred, which will inevitably lead to more communal clashes, but in international solidarity and the growth of the socialist movement.”  

In response to the Bund’s critique, David Ben Gurion, who would become the first Prime Minister of Israel, denounced the party for “providing ideological justification for murders [of Jews].” Zionist newspapers led a campaign to defund the Bund’s school system in Poland, attempting to rob working-class Jewish youth of their educations. Today, I feel like I’m watching a rerun as Zionists attack university students, artists, and writers who dare criticize the genocide in Gaza. Then and now, oppressors stick together — but so does a radical resistance that never went away.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham), which was long-listed for a National Book Award in 2018