This is a good summation, and I especially appreciate bringing up the Melbourne Bund – in my opinion, no conversation about either Bundism or so-called neo-Bundism is complete without an acknowledgment of what extant Bundist communities with actual continuity are actually saying about their views and positions.
The only thing I want to add is a bit of additional nuance to the concept that historical Zionism was “fucking over the safety of a vast majority of Jews for a small minority”, and that’s that this is a little bit conflating two distinct concerns, and coming out with a third concern, which was certainly present, but not at all the focus:
Concern #1 is that Israel could not be the ultimate solution to the problem of eg. Polish pogroms. This is entirely true and born out by history. People tend to point to Israel’s role in accepting refugees as evidence that Israel is a solution to global antisemitism, and indeed, specific incidents such as Operation Moses make a compelling case… But note that not everyone made it out of Ethiopia… or Yemen, or Egypt, or the USSR, for that matter… and it’s rank historical revisionism to claim that if Israel had existed before the Holocaust, everyone would have made it out of Germany or Poland or Lithuania. Even if Israel has a guaranteed open door for Jewish refugees, Jewish safety will always be to some degree reliant on the counties where Jews actually live, because in order to even be able to leave, you need either some rights (such as freedom of movement), or enough resources to get out anyway. A maximalist policeman-of-the-world Israel that was willing to militarily occupy any country that made noises towards disenfranchisement until every last Jew had been safely evacuated could maybe guarantee Jewish safety – but if, chas v’shalom, the United States were to turn aggressively fascist and start revoking Jewish passports and sending Jews to camps, would Israel really be able to hold off the US armed forces for long enough to Operation Moses the entire Jewish population of New York? Let’s imagine the most militarily mighty Israel possible – the Israel of the wet dreams of the hawkiest of hawks – is even that Israel really a solution to global antisemitism, or is it merely one of many harm reduction strategies? And for Zionists gearing up to say “well no one is saying that Israel can save everyone”, 1) many Zionists are, and 2) you’re moving the goalposts; if “Bundism can’t save us all” is a coherent argument against Bundism, then “Zionism can’t save us all” is an equally coherent argument against Zionism.
Concern #2 is that, setting physical safety aside for a moment, Zionism was (and I’d argue, still is) fucking over the cultural preservation of the vast majority of Jews for a minority. Ironically, this is specifically an anti-assimilationist point: the Ben-Yehuda vision of a modern Hebrew revival is a powerful one, and its success is a triumph of cultural preservation and restoration… and at the same time, it’s a vision that has no room at all for Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, and that’s a problem. The Ethiopian kahen line is being forcibly broken by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel as we speak – while it’s true that Israel has preserved Beta Israel lives, that culture will be just as lost in a generation as it would have been had Israel not existed to “save” it. You can’t make a Jewish unity omelet without breaking a few galut community eggs… but who gets to decide what that final omelet looks like? And which eggs are we comfortable breaking to make it happen? Should we really be trying to unify such diverse Jewish communities at all? Why not instead form a common front on political lines, and accept that the continued existence of individual Jewish communities with their own distinct cultural features is a good thing? Maybe self-determination means not just self-determination for “Jews”, but also self determination for Litvaks, and for Galitzianers, and for Italkim, and Gruzim, and Parsim, and Temanim.
These two concerns are often synthesized into the quite distinct Concern #3 which is “Zionist agitation is making things more politically dangerous for those of us with no desire to pick up our entire lives and make aliyah, stop rocking the boat.” And… I mean, to be clear, that’s also a thread of concern, and some Bundists raised it pre-WWII, and some are raising it now. But overall, this is not the primary thing that Bundists were on about. I think it’s worth remembering that the Bundist position was never “let’s sit on our ass in galut and hope the goyim come to accept us” – the Bundist position was “socialism should be achieved through an Austro-Marxist program of national-cultural autonomism”. The idea that we should work to dismantle the modern nation state completely and instead form nations which were “not in territorial bodies but in simple association of persons” is hardly a “don’t rock the boat” position! Some Bundists were concerned that early Zionists weren’t getting on very well with other groups in the region, sure – but the ultimate hardcore Zionist vision was one in which a modern State of Israel was Germany’s equal, and the ultimate hardcore Bundist vision was one in which Germany did not meaningfully exist.
Tl;dr: Handwringing about how Zionism has caused or exacerbated antisemitism is silly and disingenuous – antisemitism is caused by antisemites, full stop. And while I certainly can’t claim that Bundists have never partaken in that sort of vacuous argument, that was clearly never the main thrust of their criticism, either historically or now.
pixelskylines
dailybridgerton
janainaart
tangentwithtanner
