An Abusable Past

Anti-Zionism has been around almost as long as Zionism and has a respectable Jewish pedigree. When Zionists deny this and decry today’s Jewish
 anti-Zionists as self-hating Jews or even antisemites, those under attack can point, with some justification, to history. But usually they go further and return the insult. It is the Zionists, they say, who are tainted by antisemitism. It’s bad enough when such distortions are the stuff of sloganeering. It’s worse when they appear in books that educated people take seriously.

One such book is Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, which The New York Times’s reviewer called a “terrific . . . authoritative history.”Despite her book’s subtitle, Crabapple is almost as interested in telling a story about the nefarious history of Zionism as she is about the noble history of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia and Poland. Another that has just appeared and that seems destined to get a lot of attention is Pulitzer Prize–winning author Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, a book pervaded by hatred of Zionism. Both books depict Zionism as a Jewish form of racism, not only resembling Gentile racism but in cahoots with it. Both not only use history for political purposes, but abuse it.

Molly Crabapple never met her remarkable great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, but he opened a portal to an entrancing Jewish past of which she had known very little. A post-Impressionist painter of the lost world of the shtetl, he had been a Bundist activist before he came to America. Intrigued by his reference in one of his manuscripts to an Eastern European Jewish “underground,” Crabapple discovered the Bund (officially, the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), the Jewish socialist movement founded in 1897. It was a lost Jewish world that gave her something that she never got from the synagogue or Israel. Its heroes became her heroes, whose graves (some of which are located, due to the vicissitudes of history, in and around New York) she continues to visit.

The Bund, founded in the same year as the World Zionist Organization, was the product of Jewish Marxists, who promoted not emigration but revolution as the
 solution to Russia’s Jewish problem. But unlike the more famous Russian Jewish communists, such as Trotsky, the Bund leaders believed that the Jews had the right and the need to take part in the revolutionary movement not as mere proletarians but as a separate (nonterritorial) national group. The Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov called them seasick Zionists and tried to win them over to ideological orthodoxy.

In the eyes of the tsarist regime, the Bund was a subversive force that had to be uprooted. But it managed to survive government persecution while maintaining its independence as a distinct revolutionary movement, until the tsar fell. What the Bund couldn’t survive was the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in the Soviet Union. In independent Poland, however, between the world wars, the Bund had its heyday, and in its later resistance to the Nazis it made an unforgettable mark, before being all but completely extinguished.

The Bundists were, as Crabapple reminds us, admirable, often heroic, idealists. Vladimir Medem, the Bund’s leading ideologue, was born into a family of opportunistic converts and raised as a Christian, “yet turned his back on a posh upbringing to devote his life to a small and persecuted people,” at great personal cost. Tiny Anna Lipshitz, whose older sister had been tortured to death by the police, was only twenty-two years old in 1905 but already the movement’s best orator. Dispatched to Odessa to inspire revolutionary activists there, she was nicknamed “the Fury” by local newspapers. One of the characters in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, identified by the script only as “a Bundist,” apparently represents her.

In the revolutionary year of 1917, the Bund fought for the preservation of the nascent Russian democracy but was helpless in the face of the
 Bolshevik onslaught in October, which one of its leaders, Henryk Erlich, described as a “monstrous calamity.” Erlich soon moved to Poland, where he became one of the leaders of the now legal Bund, which ran for elections to both the Polish Parliament (where it never won a seat), and within the country’s Jewish communities, where it sometimes did well. On the subpolitical level, the Bund set up economic cooperatives, day care centers, sanitariums, sports clubs, libraries, and schools. Crabapple writes: “In the words of Victor Gilinsky, son of Bundist leader Shloyme Gilinsky, “[t]he Bund was your union, your education and your church.”

But it also fought for you. One of the Bundists to whom Crabapple devotes the most attention was not a political leader or a social activist but Bernard Goldstein, a leader of its battle squads, which saw action first against the Jewish communists, the Bund’s bitter enemies in peacetime, and eventually, in wartime, against the Nazis. The communists were so enraged by Goldstein’s activities that they passed a death sentence on him. After one of them tried to assassinate him outside of his apartment, “Bernard shot back, wounding the communist, who left a trail of blood across the pavement. When the cops showed up, Bernard refused to reveal the identity of his attacker.” In the Warsaw Ghetto, after he was smuggled out (because he was too hard to conceal), Goldstein’s disciple Marek Edelman led the Bundist fighters. Both men miraculously survived the war. Goldstein despaired of a decent future for anyone in a communist Poland and moved to the Bronx, where he became “an honorary grandfather to his comrades’ children,” while Edelman become a cardiologist and eventually a leader of Solidarity in Poland.

Crabapple has honored the Bund with a book that admiringly and movingly tells a “story” about it, as the book’s subtitle proclaims—but it doesn’t really recount its ideological and political history. She has clearly picked up what historical knowledge she has on the fly. In her review of Russian Jewish history, for instance, she asserts that Nicholas I, who ruled Russia from 1825 to 1855, “wrote his policies with the declared aim of forcing a third of Jews to die, a third to emigrate, and a third to convert to Christianity.” Her source for this is a 1951 article entitled “Pobedonostsev’s Conception of the Good Society,” but it actually attributes the remark to the tsarist official Pobedonostsev, who, as more recent research has shown, probably didn’t say it. And Pobedonostsev served Nicholas I’s grandson, Nicholas II.

After Austria’s attack on Serbia in 1914,
 Crabapple writes, “mutual defense pacts with Serbia pulled England, France, and the tsarist empire into the war.” But there never were any such pacts, and the leaders of Great Britain certainly never felt any obligation or even inclination to go to war on account of Austria’s moves against Serbia. She goes on to write that after years of industrial killing in European colonies, “almost everyone—banker and trashman, poet and line cook—itched to bring that murder home.” She goes on:

War would become an adventure, Europeans thought. It would wipe out the decadence. Make men manly. Put women in their place. Even European workers thought this way. European workers’ parties followed.

No one at all conversant with the broad and nuanced literature on the very mixed response to the onset of World War I in all of the belligerent countries would make such a sweeping statement about virtually the whole population of an entire continent. It’s an early warning of the groundless assertions to come.

When it comes to Zionism, they can be found in abundance. One wouldn’t, of course, expect a paean to the Bund to contain anything other than denigration of Zionism, whether it was written by a historian or a storyteller. But she goes a great deal further. In lionizing the Bundists as paragons of solidarity with the downtrodden and doikayt—the still valid idea that “here where we live is our country”—she constantly, misleadingly, and nastily takes potshots at the movement that believed otherwise.

Early in the book, Crabapple recounts the visit of Vladimir Medem, one of the founders of the Bund, to the Congress of the World Zionist Organization in 1903, the site of the famous controversy over the British offer of territory in East Africa for Jewish settlement. She doesn’t tell us what Medem said about that dispute, but she does echo his observation that Herzl seemed to have hypnotized the people in attendance and then adds that “the audience moaned and writhed” whenever he appeared on stage. She highlights in particular their enthusiastic approval (and Medem’s horror) when “Herzl spoke proudly about his meeting with the notorious Russian minister of the interior, Vyacheslav von Plehve,” because he had agreed to pressure the Ottoman sultan to turn over land in Palestine to the Jews.

Plehve is absent from the verbatim protocols of the Congress, which include Herzl’s opening speech in which he did express gratitude to the Russian government for its support. In any case it is unlikely that a Zionist assemblage could ever have applauded (let alone writhed and moaned) when the official believed to be behind the Kishinev pogrom just four months earlier was mentioned. But
 Crabapple doesn’t seem concerned with details that could complicate her effort to depict Zionists as both craven and unprincipled. She immediately contrasts these deplorables with the Bundists, who didn’t kowtow to the “bigots who wanted to kick Jews out of their homes” but fought “for freedom and dignity in the place where they lived.”

To underscore this point, she mentions “two hundred of these youth” who “beat back a pogrom in Gomel” just weeks after the Zionist Congress. What Crabapple fails to say (or more likely doesn’t know) is that the self-defense effort in Gomel was led by the socialist Zionist Yehezkel Henkin. A few years later, Henkin moved to Palestine, where, along with other Gomel veterans, he helped to found the self-defense organizations Bar Giora and Hashomer, the predecessors of the Haganah.

What happened within the Zionist world between the 1903 congress and the Russian revolution in 1917 is something about which Crabapple has nothing to say. She completely overlooks, for instance, the Russian branch of the movement’s endorsement in 1906 of the need for what it called “work in the present” (gegenwartsarbeit, its version of the Bund’s doikayt), which involved the “entry of the Zionist masses into the liberation movement of the territorial nations of Russia.” While she does take note, very briefly, of the massive governmental oppression of the millions of Russian Jews caught in the eastern war zone during World War I, she demonstrates no awareness of the extent to which their bitter experience steered them toward Zionism, making it the largest political force in Russian Jewry during their country’s brief interlude of freedom in 1917.

When she eventually focuses on the Zionists again, she comments that they presented the Bund in that year with a “new competitor for the Jewish vote.” Their sudden acquisition of political strength was due, she says, to the Balfour Declaration, “which gave the previously implausible idea of Jewish statehood the backing of an imperial power.” But, she writes, even the Jews who expressed their gratitude to Great Britain “had no intention of going to Palestine” but simply “hoped a Jewish state might advocate for their rights in Russia.”

Here, however, Crabapple is putting the cart before the horse. It was in fact Russian Jews’ evident enthusiasm for Zionism in 1917 that in part motivated the British to issue the Balfour Declaration toward the end of that year. They hoped that it would heighten their support for Russia’s waning war effort as Britain’s ally. Crabapple’s sour observation that Russian Zionists had no intention of going to Palestine themselves, meanwhile, is utterly baseless and belied by the facts. As soon as it was possible, many thousands of them made their way there.

When Crabapple turns to what the Zionists who did immigrate to Palestine after World War I actually did, she returns to just-so postcolonial storytelling in lieu of actual history. They “aimed to supplant Palestinian society,” she claims. The immigrants, she writes:

bought land from Palestinian feudal leaders, brutally expelled farmers who had lived there for generations, and used these dispossessed farmers’ labor to build up a parallel society of Jewish-only collective farms, towns, and even a city, Tel Aviv.

While condemning the Zionists in general for exploiting the Palestinians’ labor, Crabapple criticizes the Labor Zionists in particular for locking them “out of the Zionist economy in the same way Polish labor policy locked Jews out of jobs in Warsaw.” Even worse, she writes, was the “fascist” Vladimir Jabotinsky, who allegedly wrote in his famous essay “The Iron Wall” (1923) that “Israel could only be built by subjugating the native people.”

This is all false or—what is worse in popular history—mendaciously half true. The Zionists did not aim to “supplant” the Arab population of Palestine, though most of them did hope to eventually outnumber them through peaceful immigration. They usually promised, and they usually intended, however, to treat them decently if that goal were to be reached. This is true even of Jabotinsky. In the very essay that Crabapple describes as shattering “the genteel doublespeak of the Zionist Congress,” he looks forward to a time when one could discuss with a moderate Arab leadership “honestly practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizens, or Arab national integrity.” In his later writings, he defended even more emphatically the entitlement of Palestinian Arabs to equal and even national rights in a Jewish state.

How many Arab tenant farmers were evicted from their land during the Mandate period as a result of legal Jewish land purchases and how much they suffered as a consequence are difficult questions to answer, as is the question of precisely how many Arabs immigrated to Palestine from neighboring countries at the same time to benefit from its burgeoning economy (though there were at least many thousands). It was not these immigrants, however, or native Palestinians, as Crabapple writes, who built up the new Jewish collective farms, since they were based on “Hebrew labor” alone. But, for Crabapple, the Zionists were damned if they employed Arab labor and damned if they didn’t.

“Hebrew labor” was indeed a discriminatory policy, but to equate it with the antisemitic policies enacted by the Polish government in the 1920s is facile and misleading. The purpose of the Polish policies was to expel the Jews from the Polish economy and eventually the country. The Labor Zionists, for their part, weren’t seeking to undermine the Palestinian Arab economy but to create a self-sufficient Jewish one alongside it. Their efforts, whatever their political and economic wisdom, were not tantamount to the enforcement of “racial segregation.”

Much as she enjoys besmirching the reputation of socialist Zionists, Crabapple doesn’t neglect to berate Jabotinsky and the Revisionists (whose minority status within Zionism she never bothers to indicate). With some justification, she places blame on them for the agitation that led to Arab riots in Palestine in 1929, but astonishingly (or not) she makes no mention of Haj Amin el Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who by all accounts played a key role in fanning the flames.

“During the same years that the Polish government demanded the expulsion of three million Jewish citizens,” Crabapple tells us, “Jabotinsky toured the country calling for their ‘evacuation,’ a fine distinction that the Bund didn’t appreciate.” What the Bund did understand was how this illustrated that “Zionists were ideological twins of the same people trying to force Jews out of Europe”—as if the implacable victimizer and the aspiring rescuer were morally indistinguishable. In this context, Crabapple mentions a memoir that she ran across at YIVO of a teenage girl who had belonged to a Revisionist youth group in the 1930s. Quickly disenchanted both by its hostility toward Arabs and its plan to “kick Jews out from every country” but Palestine, she joined the Bundist Tsukunft (Future). One cannot help but wonder what good that did her in the immediately ensuing years.

Only when she describes the last-ditch joint resistance of Jewish youth of diverse political stripes in the Warsaw Ghetto does Crabapple grant that any Zionist ever behaved honorably, though even here she gets in a dig. The Zionist-organized Jewish Combat Organization, she relates, “elected a tough, grandiose boy named Mordechai Anielewicz, a member of the left-wing Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair” to play “the mostly ceremonial role of commander in chief.” Why? “They picked him because he wanted it so much.” That, at any rate, is what Crabapple gleaned from a sympathetic biography of the Bundist Marek Edelman. You’ll find an utterly different account of Anielewicz’s selection in the authoritative account of Warsaw Jewry during the war by another survivor of the fighting in the ghetto, the Israeli historian Israel Gutman.

Finally, I should say something about the way in which Crabapple deals with developments in Palestine after the war. Among other things, she relates how in 1947, “secretly, Ben-Gurion and his generals began to plan for the realization of their long-held dream—the mass expulsion of the Arab population of Palestine.” Before long, they “violently expelled over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes.” You really can’t say things like this without dealing with Benny Morris’s authoritative account, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which tells a very different story, or rather, recounts a very different history, based on deep archival research. Morris refutes the existence of any longstanding scheme for mass expulsion and presents a much smaller tally of forceful removals of Palestinian Arabs (as but one factor in the general upheaval). His book, a landmark classic, doesn’t appear in Crabapple’s footnotes or bibliography. She relies exclusively on the anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappé, who says what she likes to hear.

Molly Crabapple has written a stirring story of the dedicated and courageous heroes of the Bund, a movement whose overall failure does not, in her eyes, negate its moral superiority. Unfortunately, her story is bound up with an extended, prejudiced, and distorted one about the Bund’s more successful rival, Zionism. That success, it is clear, is something that she would like to do her part to undo. While working on her book in the New York Public Library, she tells us, she sometimes used to go outside and join the anti-Israel demonstrations whose chants she could hear from inside the building.

It was not the memory of an anti-Zionist great-grandfather but something that once belonged to a tepidly Zionist grandfather that helped open Benjamin Moser’s eyes to a history he didn’t know. Moser had been carrying around his forbear’s German edition of Theodor Herzl’s Zionist writings for some years before he finally delved into it. In his introduction, he tries to rip the disguise off of “my grandfather’s Herzl.” Nothing that he says about Herzl’s obsessions, fears, and foibles will come as a surprise, however, to any reader of one of the better biographies of the man, such as Ernst Pawel’s Labyrinth of Exile or Derek Penslar’s recent Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (which is one of Moser’s sources). What Moser says in his introduction about Herzl’s Zionism isn’t new either, but it is often indefensible.

The first thing to which Moser objects is Herzl’s use of the term “people” (Volk) to describe the Jews. “In the nineteenth century,” Moser writes, “this word’s associations were political and above all racial, and therefore clashed with the traditional definition of the Jews as a community of religious believers.” But what he calls the “traditional definition” was in fact the new one of the Reform movement, which overturned the usual understanding of the previous two millennia. As Leora Batnitzky elegantly shows in How Judaism Became a Religion, it was only from the late eighteenth century onward that modern Jews abandoned their age-old self-definition as a people in favor of a purely religious one.

Moser is on more solid ground when he outlines Herzl’s disparagement of contemporary Jews and his distance from Judaism but, in timeworn fashion, preposterously describes him as “one of the most antisemitic extremists of his time.” Unlike his fellow “antisemitic extremists,” Herzl devoted his adult life to attempts to save oppressed Jews and to creating the conditions for a Jewish cultural renaissance. Moser fantasizes that Herzl fantasized that “Jews will disappear, will cease to exist as Jews, will sacrifice anything unique about themselves—about their culture or their traditions that they might have wished to hand down to their children—in order to become like everyone else.” He doesn’t mention how eager Herzl was to bring Orthodox Jews into his movement, on their own terms, or the place of Judaism and Jewish culture in Altneuland, his utopian novel about the future Palestine.

It was not simply the discovery of Herzl’s skeleton in his family closet that turned Moser, who had long been a sort of liberal Zionist, against the Zionist project. It was Israel, though he prefers to use the term “the Israeli state” (better, I guess, than “the Zionist entity”). The depth of his denial of the legitimacy of the Jewish state within any boundaries whatsoever is most evident in his description of what he saw when he first visited it and caught sight of “the prettified Israeli areas of Palestine, with their beaches and their designer falafel”—places like Tel Aviv.

Unlike Crabapple, Moser labels his book a “history,” but like her he has assembled a gallery of (mostly) Jewish heroes who were ardent opponents of Zionism, though, for some reason, none of them are Bundists. As with Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country, what is objectionable in Moser’s Anti-Zionism is not so much the people Moser chooses to valorize but his depiction of the Zionists against whom they arranged themselves. Sometimes, the falsity of Moser’s account results from his endorsement of his protagonists’ hostile accusations against Zionism; sometimes he relies on other equally unsound sources.

In his account of the Balfour Declaration, Moser adopts the perspective of its most formidable Jewish opponent, Edwin Montagu. This could have been an at least interesting approach if it had been well or carefully done. In pro-Zionist accounts of the genesis of the Balfour Declaration, Montagu appears as the deluded, sometimes even sinister, representative of Britain’s Jewish elite who fought a last-ditch, behind-the-scenes battle to stop the Zionists in their tracks. The only Jew in the British cabinet at that moment, he circulated a memorandum entitled “The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government.” In it, he complained bitterly that if Britain were to endorse a Jewish national home policy, “every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens” and “Palestine will become the world’s Ghetto.” But Montagu, Moser says, was up against more than he could handle, though why this was the case is “one of the mysteries of modern history.” Through highly selective and frequently inaccurate recourse to the massive literature on this subject, Moser nevertheless attempts to resolve the mystery, mostly by portraying the Balfour Declaration not as an answer to antisemitism but as the product of it.

Moser attaches a lot of the blame to Montagu’s first cousin, Herbert Samuel, who preceded him into the British cabinet but had left it by 1917. Samuel was a Zionist, but he had kept that to himself until November 1914, when the turmoil caused by the war seemed to render his dream of a Jewish Palestine attainable—and potentially beneficial to Great Britain, as he argued to his cabinet colleagues. He soon linked up with the little-known Zionist Chaim Weizmann (whom Moser misidentifies as having been the leader of British Zionism at the time). In their conversations, Moser claims, Weizmann “played on British ideas of secret Jewish power, including of the influence that, he hinted, the Jews enjoyed in Russia and America.” He also pointed to “the dangers of allowing Palestine to fall into the hands of the French” and appealed to imperialists by claiming that the Jewish state could serve as an outpost of “civilization.” Samuel, Moser tells us, then “funneled” these misbegotten ideas to his government colleagues, which is how Zionism “entered the agenda of the highest levels of government.”

None of this is in Leonard Stein’s history of the Balfour Declarationor Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani’s comprehensive biography of Chaim Weizmann. A refugee from Russia himself, Weizmann knew full well how utterly powerless its Jews were at that time, and it highlighted their victimization, not their (nonexistent) political strength when he lobbied on their behalf. Concern with American Jewish power did eventually play a partin the British government’s stance toward Zionism, but not because of Weizmann. At the end of 1915, after Herbert Samuel’s pro-Zionist memo had been discarded and before the British government entered into serious talks with Weizmann, the journalist-diplomat Lucien Wolf argued that support for Zionism would help rally influential American Jews to Britain’s side in World War I. But even Wolf didn’t say anything about the power of Russia’s Jews. That became relevant only toward the end of 1917, when the hope emerged that the Balfour Declaration might keep them from joining the forces attempting to get Russia out of the war.

Whatever slender reeds of philosemitism can be detected in the ranks of British leadership, Moser maintains, “Zionism would have gone nowhere without the appeal to this covert mythology,” of Jewish clandestine power. That this “basically antisemitic” contention proved effective was due to the prevalence of antisemitism at the highest levels, most notably in “Arthur Balfour himself, who made no secret of his racist views and who had earlier campaigned to keep Jews out of Britain.” Balfour, Moser goes on to say:

wrote that Zionism would “mitigate the age-old miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.” The Jews were a potentially subversive fifth column—could never be fully equal citizens—and their very existence created “age-old miseries” for Western civilization: It is hard to think of more classical antisemitism than this, which is why it might have been surprising to find this sentence printed in Balfour’s introduction to Nahum Sokolow’s History of Zionism, published in 1919. As it had from the days of Herzl, Zionism made explicit alliances with racists who saw the movement as a way to rid their own countries of their unwanted Jewish citizens—and this at a time when thousands of Jewish soldiers were fighting and dying for Britain.

 But was Arthur Balfour really an antisemite? He did support the Aliens Act of 1905, which was mostly designed to restrict Jewish immigration into Great Britain, but how do you get from that to classifying him as a man who wished to rid his country of his Jewish citizens? Isn’t it evident, from the sentence he quotes, that Balfour blamed Western civilization for taking the wrong stance toward the Jewish minority in its midst for “too long” and thereby inflicting “miseries” on itself? And if we read Balfour’s introductory words in their proper context, we see that he hoped, like Zionists since Pinsker, that the creation of a Jewish homeland would help to normalize the Jews’ situation elsewhere. “Everything which assimilates the national and international status of the Jews to that of other races,” he wrote, “ought to mitigate what remains of ancient antipathies: and evidently this assimilation would be promoted by giving them that which all other nations possess: a local habitation and a national home.”

Moser’s anti-Zionism reaches its peak in his discussion of Hannah Arendt, who he really uses as a peg on which he can hang his own polemic. Moser augments Arendt’s hostile description in 1948 of Menachem Begin’s newly formed Herut party as one “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties” with the assertion that Zionism as a whole had a lot in common with Nazism. To prove its inherently racist character, he quotes “the proto-Zionist Moses Hess” who did indeed say in 1862 that “race struggle is primary.” Taken out of context, it does make it sound like Hess was a proto-Nazi; in fact he was a socialist and a believer in racial equality and eventual interracial harmony. Moser then quotes Herzl’s deputy Max Nordau’s declaration that he agreed with Eduard Drumont, France’s leading antisemite at the turn of the twentieth century, but Moser doesn’t tell us what position they shared. If you read Nordau himself, you learn that he agreed with Drumont when he said, “France to the French!” In just the same way, he added, his own nationalism cried out: “Palestine to the Jews!”

Moser deplores the fact that “in the newspaper Jüdische Rundschau, the Zionists had endorsed the yellow star that publicly stamped Jews with a badge of medieval pariahdom eight years before the yellow star became compulsory.” Bewildered and outraged readers should take a look at the famous piece to which Moser refers, Robert Weltsch’s “Wear it with Pride, the Yellow Star.” They will see that Weltsch was responding to the order that Jews mark their stores with Jewish stars on “Boycott Day,” April 1, 1933, by calling upon them to do so not shamefacedly but with pride in their identity.

But it is more the Zionists’ actions than their words that, in Moser’s view, expose their perversity. In the spring of 1933, the Zionist leadership struck a deal with the Nazis that enabled German Jews to bring some of their wealth with them to Palestine, not in funds but in the form of German-made goods, for which they were forced to pay too much. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt discusses this “Transfer Agreement” only very briefly and quite dispassionately; Moser does so at greater length, and quite inaccurately. But what is more important for him than the terms of the agreement are the Zionists’ motives for engaging in it. As an authority on this matter, he brings in the Israeli historian Hava Eshkoli-Wagman. He quotes her as saying that:

The staunchest supporters of the [Transfer] agreement in the Yishuv did not see the saving of lives as an independent goal at the time. . . . Rather they sought to extract German Jewish property for the benefit of the Yishuv.

Wagman did indeed write these words—but in quotation marks! They are part of her discussion of the work of another scholar whose conclusion she refutes. In fact, Wagman draws upon the statements of Zionist emissaries in Germany who described the benefits of the agreement not as an extraction of German-Jewish property but as “the enhanced prestige of Zionism in Germany and increased aliyah from Germany.”

The most damning example Moser presents of Zionist dealings with Nazis is that of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who, in the first years of World War II, was a member—not the leader, as Moser writes—of the Lehi underground. Late in 1940, the Lehi sought an alliance with Nazi Germany against the British, who in their eyes, as Moser correctly states, were “the enemy”—but not simply because “they occupied Palestine.” In truth, the Lehi, which was, Moser unsurprisingly neglects to mention, a tiny group of extremists, took this desperate (and brainless) measure for a more defensible reason. As Moser somehow manages never to note, in 1939 the British issued a white paper designed to effectively end Jewish immigration to Palestine and prohibit Jews from buying land, in service of a future Arab state. Only in these circumstances could the Lehi imagine that Nazi Germany (which they termed the tzorer, oppressor) might be their ally against their more immediately threatening enemy (oyev). Since Moser himself identified Hava Eshkoli-Wagman as an authority on these matters, I’ll return to the very article he misquotes. She writes, “The portrayal of Zionist-Nazi cooperation in the 1930s as a collaboration grounded in a shared ideological framework and Palestinocentric egocentrism is based on marginal examples and specious arguments.”

Both Moser and Crabapple relentlessly distort, cherry-pick, misquote, and misrepresent their sources to stage a predictable puppet show in which racist Zionists deceived and manipulated the Jews, cynically collaborated with the very worst of the Gentiles, and systematically oppressed some of the most innocent of them. What is most distressing is not that they tell such stories but that we live in a cultural moment in which so many are eager to accept their just-so stories as actual history.

Zionism is a political movement with a complex history. Like other historical movements, it is not blameless—no such movement ever has been. But it has by and large been rooted in humanitarianism, led by noble men and women dedicated to constructing and sustaining a Jewish state for the benefit of their own beleagured people and, indirectly, for others. If it hasn’t succeeded completely in achieving all of its laudable aims, it needs to be corrected, not maligned and jettisoned.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this review suggested that Molly Crabapple was not aware of Israel Gutman’s book The Jews of Warsaw: 1939-1943