A lesson from Molly: Israel is the enduring legacy of Western anti-Semitism

Molly Crabapple's inspirational history of the Bund reminded me of the many ways in which the self-styled "Jewish State" is a monument to hatred (of Jews as well as of Palestinians)

Comrade Molly Crabapple! What a brilliant nomme d’guerre! What a brilliant artist! What a brilliant revolutionary! And what an utterly extraordinary writer!

There are many, many reasons to read, reread, and study her exquisite and vital history of the Bund — I’ll probably keep circling back on them, because there really is so much to digest in this book. I’ve never read such a vivid and vivifying history of the revolutionary struggles in the old Tsarist empire — having read so many deadening histories of the debates in the Petrograd Soviet etc. etc. ad nauseum, I’m utterly in awe of her craft, her ability (hewn in part from many years of her own activism to the organizational drudgery of which she clearly brings an artist’s life-affirming imagination) to channel so much of what it felt like to be there. Her pen breathes an emotional complexity rare in the writing of history into the characters in these great historical dramas from the Russian Revolutions, both (well, all three), to Warsaw Ghetto fighters choosing to die on their feet fighting back, like Gaza’s youth (a connection she draws repeatedly, as did the legendary Bundist Warsaw Ghetto fighter Marek Edelman many years later).

And the urgency of her project couldn’t be sharper, as many thousands of young Jewish people around the world grapple with a genocide being committed in their name in Gaza, and an apartheid regime that claims to represent them — Molly’s book unearths a history and tradition of Jewish resistance to Zionism that Zionism has long sought to erase along with its violent erasure of Palestine. (The Bundists had warned for decades before Israel’s creation that the consequence of European Jews, under the aegis of British colonialism, creating a settler state on Arab land would end in a lot of blood and a lot of tears).

The vital service Molly’s book provides is to show today’s many thousands of Jews who oppose Zionism, apartheid and genocide, that they have a proud history — that the Jewish youth of Eastern Europe who fought against the pogromists who terrorized their communities and later against Polish fascists and the Nazis, who joined the struggle to overthrow the Tsar and who stood for socialism and human solidarity, had also firmly resisted Zionism.

Critically important, and as relevant today as it was a century ago, is the sub-stream of clarity running through the book that connects Zionism and Western anti-Semitism.

Sometimes that connection was literal collaboration, various Zionist establishments essentially lobbying European anti-Semitic governments for support in settling Palestine on the basis of their shared goal of forcing Jews out of Europe. But the strategic and philosophical connection ran even deeper.

In my teenage years in the Zionist left, I was taught that “liquidating the Galut” (Hebrew for “the exile”, the Zionist term for the Jewish Diaspora) was one of the aims of our movement — a belief that Jewish life in the Diaspora was doomed, and should be ended via mass migration to Palestine. And it’s not hard to see how that goal aligned squarely with how the rightwing anti-Semitic regimes of Europes saw the presence of Jews in the countries they shared.

Fighting anti-Semitism — an existential priority of the Bund — was never Zionism’s intention. On the contrary, the movement’s founder, Theodore Herzl deemed it eternal and immutable, even natural where Jews lived among gentiles. He wrote in his diary of the conclusion he reached while covering the Dreyfuss trial:

In Paris, then, I gained a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism which I now began to understand historically and make allowances for. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of efforts to “combat anti-Semitism.”

Instead, he famously noted that in his goal of settling European Jews in Palestine, “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. We want to emigrate as respected people.”

The Bund instead embraced solidarity, and a common fight against anti-Semitism as part of a broader socialist agenda. “Here where we live is our country” was its motto. Of course many — millions, actually — of Eastern Europe’s Jews chose to leave the spectacularly brutal lives under unceasing pogroms. (Molly vividly captures the horrifying experience of mass, sustained anti-Semitic violence that made life in parts of the old Russian empire, and Poland before, during and even after the war (at the hands not simply of Nazis, but of nationalist Poles.) But the overwhelming majority of those who chose to leave didn’t go to Palestine; they went to the United States.

As I wrote here earlier,

I’ve always wondered at the silence in the contemporary Jewish-American mainstream narrative when it comes to reckoning with official U.S. anti-Semitism of a century ago that condemned hundreds of thousands of European Jews to die at Hitler’s hand, or else to be conscripted into the violent colonization of Palestine as their only option for survival. Immigration laws passed with bipartisan support in 1924 barred the vast majority of European Jews fleeing pogroms and later, even genocide, from landing on these shores. Yes, shocking as it may sound to a contemporary American culture that from the late 1970s began to quite bizarrely make the Nazi Holocaust a central feature of the national memory, the immigration policies that barred most Jewish survivors of the camps from immigrating here continued to apply even after World War 2.

It is fair to ask, I think, based on simple demographics, whether the State of Israel would even exist were it not for official U.S. anti-Semitism?

Consider: Between 1881 and 1925, the number of Jews who migrated from the Yiddish speaking heim of Eastern Europe to Palestine, was less than 100,000. In the same period, the number of Jewish immigrants fleeing Yiddish Eastern Europe to settle in the United States was between 2.3m and 2.5m. America was the overwhelming preference of Jews seeking a safe home away from the pogroms and violent anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe.

But things changed in 1925, when the U.S. Immigration Act sharply restricted Jewish immigration in line with the white-nationalist preference for Northern European settlement. Before World War 1, America’s average annual intake of Jewish immigrants had been 115,000; from 1925 to 1934, it slowed to just 9,200 per year — and consciously anti-Semitic visa policies reduced it even further after the Nazis came to power in Germany.

Some 210,000 Jews settled in Palestine between the wars, not because they were necessarily imbued with Zionist ideology, but because the preferred U.S. option was now closed for most. (It remained closed, or sharply restricted, for two decades after the Holocaust.) The historic impact of American anti-Semitism is rarely discussed, but would the Zionists have built a viable Yishuv without it?

Ben Gurion, it turns out, had asked — and answered — the same question, making clear how essential American anti-Semitism had been to the success of the Zionist project: “Had the gates to America opened wide after the war, it may well be that the masses of Jews would have flowed to America and only a minority would have come here,” he said shortly after Israel’s creation, in a quote cited by Molly.

The Zionist establishment in America literally discouraged the U.S. government from opening those gates to Jewish survivors. FDR confidante and ACLU lawyer Morris Ernst was berated for his efforts to persuade the President to allow in more Jews from Europe’s IDP camps; FDR told his friend that the American Jewish establishment had rejected throwing open America’s closed gates to survivors lest this weaken the case for creating a Jewish state in Palestine.

Tom Segev has done a magisterial job in his essential book, “The Seventh Million: Israeli Jews and the Holocaust” of unpacking the shockingly cynical approach of the Zionist Yishuv to the Holocaust from the early 1930s through the early 1960s. But less attention is paid to the U.S. Zionist establishment’s obvious awareness that the success of their project required that America’s gates remained mostly shut to Jewish immigration: Morris Ernst has been furiously denounced and even accused of treason by the Zionist establishment for his efforts to persuade FDR to accept 150,000 Jewish refugees from Europe. For the Zionist movement, the Jews of Europe who had survived the Holocaust had to be left with no choice but to settle in Palestine.

I was reminded of that episode in 2004, when Israeli government official Sallai Merridor attacked Germany for making it too easy for Jewish refugees from the former Soviet bloc to settle there: “The German government is enticing Jews to emigrate from the Former Soviet Union to Germany under refugee status, despite the fact that the State of Israel has already existed for over 56 years,” he said. “The government of Israel must take serious steps to counter Germany since this situation drastically affects immigration to Israel.” (Once again, Jews looking to migrate from difficult situations should be given only one choice, per the Zionists…)

Zionism as a movement, really, has always been premised on anti-Semitism, and mirrored some of its core beliefs — particularly on Jews never belonging in predominantly non-Jewish societies. This ontology stretches all the way back to Herzl.

But there’s a second reason for citing the U.S. example in the way we think about anti-Semitism: That would be the need to understand anti-Semitism in historical context, rather than in the Zionist fable of anti-Semitism being the universal leitmotif of human history, or more correctly, that somehow hovers above and outside of human history, a single undifferentiated hatred that periodically intervenes.

In this instance, it’s worth remembering that the prejudices behind the 1925 Immigration Act were not confined to Jews: The Act set harsh quota limits on all the brown-eyed peoples. Before it, the annual intake of Italian immigrants to the U.S. had been 200,000; after the 1925 Act an average of just 4,000 Italians a year were accepted as immigrants here.

It’s also worth remembering that while the vast majority of its inmates and victims were Jewish, Auschwitz also held and murdered Roma and Sinti people, as well as people of a number of other nationalities.

South Africa was a great place to learn the underlying lesson. There, we lived under an apartheid regime, whose leaders were literally Nazis and whose anti-Semitism coexisted quite comfortably with their support for Israel. And where there was never any doubt that primary victims of this Nazism were not Jews, but were South Africa’s Black majority. It could only be defeated by making common cause with their liberation struggle. The lesson, the leitmotif that runs throughout Molly’s book, is that solidarity is all we have.