"'Liquidate Zionism'": The Bund Treated the Hebron Massacre Like Their Descendants Treated October 7 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

"'Liquidate Zionism'": The Bund Treated the Hebron Massacre Like Their Descendants Treated October 7

Whenever today's progressive anti-Zionists have claimed to march in the tradition of the pre-1948 anti-Zionists, I have waved the comparison away. Most Jews who were ambivalent about or against Zionism before the Holocaust — Reform Jews, the bulk of the Orthodox world — became its most energetic champions after it, once the alternative to a Jewish state had been demonstrated in the gas chambers. And opposing Zionism as a political idea in 1926, when it was a proposal, bears little resemblance to demanding the dismantling of a living nation of nine million people in 2026. The two acts share the nomenclature and almost nothing else.

There is one exception, the one the activists themselves keep naming. But the lesson they learn from it is the exact opposite of reality.

When the socialist anti-Zionists insist that their hostility to Israel descends directly from the Jewish Labor Bund, they are right. The Bund is having its moment: Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country, a loving history of the movement, became a New York Times bestseller, drew praise from the New York Times Book Review for a party that supposedly "fought antisemites head-on," and carries a blurb from Naomi Klein. The book presents the Bund as secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist, a usable past for a generation that wants its anti-Zionism to feel Jewish and humane.

The inheritance is real. The Bundists were as consumed by hatred, and as fluent in excusing the murder of Jews, as the progressive anti-Zionists who have claimed their mantle. The clearest proof sits in how the Bund met the slaughter of Jews in Hebron, Jerusalem, and Safed in 1929 — a reaction immediate, documented in the Bund's own newspaper, and essentially identical to the reaction of the Western socialist Left to October 7.

The Hebron massacre ran across August 23 and 24, 1929, when Arab mobs murdered 67 Jews, many of them students at the old yeshiva, and ended a Jewish community that had lived in the city for centuries. Across Mandatory Palestine the toll reached 133 Jewish dead. The Safed massacre occurred on August 29. Two days later, on August 31, a Saturday, the Bund filled Warsaw's Splendid theater with an overflow crowd of three thousand. The banner headline over the report in the Bund's Naye Folktsaytung the next morning read "Liquidate Zionism."

They didn't say that they merely opposed Zionism. They said Zionism itself must be destroyed. This is not political disagreement - it is eliminationist rhetoric that can (and did) leads to violence.

That was the literal demand from the podium, repeated and applauded. The speaker, identified as Comrade Hersh, told the hall that "as long as Zionism exists, the slaughters in Palestine will return and return," and closed to thousands of clapping hands with a call to "mobilize the masses and liquidate Zionism." The paper described the rally as a "mass judgment over the Zionist dreams," staged while the Hebron dead were barely buried.

The vast majority of the Jewish world was in mourning for the victims. The Bund saw the massacre as an opportunity. And many newspapers in 1929 denounced the Bund for its callousness while Palestine was still in turmoil.

The resolution the three thousand adopted laid out the theory beneath the slogan to "liquidate Zionism." and every move in it has a direct descendant on campus after October 7.. The blood spilled in Hebron, the resolution declared, "is the heaviest judgment against all of Zionism." The Zionists who organized memorial rallies for the murdered were charged with "exploiting the victims of the tragic events and the self-evident grief of the Jewish population" — the murdered Jews recruited, days after their deaths, as props in a Zionist confidence trick. The events meant "a collapse of Zionist activity, of all Zionist hopes."

The Bundist newspaper's treatment of the Arab murderers shows that their pruported anti-racism was always a myth - and that myth remains. "Given the low cultural state of the Arab population," the resolution explained, "and given the absence of democratic forms of political life, the accumulated hatred inevitably had to burst out at the first opportunity into the form of beastly outbreaks, bloody attacks, and bestial murders." The Arab who murdered a yeshiva student was not a moral agent who could be condemned. He was a primitive in whom hatred, once introduced by Zionism, had to discharge — as predictable and as blameless as a flood. Moral responsibility in the resolution belongs entirely to the Zionists and the imperial powers, the educated and the European-facing; the actual killers are weather. To clear the murderers, the Bund had first to strip them of the dignity of choice, which is its own bigotry wearing the mask of sympathy.

The structure is exact a century later. The perpetrators of October 7 dissolve into the inevitabilities of resistance and occupation, their agency removed in the same gesture that claims to defend them, while the only party left holding moral responsibility is the Jewish state that "created the conditions." The Bund's "low cultural state" is the grandfather of "what did you expect them to do." Both formulas spare the killer by denying him the capacity to have done otherwise.

The Bund's own categories blinded it to who had actually died. A movement that could process a massacre only through the lens of the worker and the class struggle had no room for the murdered students of the Hebron yeshiva, who produced nothing, organized nothing, and wanted no part of any revolution. And the bodies refuted the thesis where they fell. The Jews slaughtered in 1929 were disproportionately the old religious communities and Arabic-speaking Jews who had the least to do with Zionist settlement — Jews killed for being Jews, not for being Zionists. The Bund blamed Zionism for the murder of Jews who themselves stood outside Zionism, which is the whole antisemitic maneuver in miniature: a Jew is dead, and a Jew's politics are summoned to explain why he had it coming.

The resolution closed on prophecy. The 1929 bloodshed marked "a collapse of Zionist activity, of all Zionist hopes," and Hersh was certain the slaughters would recur until Zionism was liquidated. Nineteen years later the Jewish state they had pronounced dead was born, and it has now outlived their prediction by seventy-eight years and counting. The failure of the forecast has never once disturbed the philosophy that produced it, because a worldview that explains every Jewish death as the wages of Jewish nationalism was never built to be falsified.

Crabapple and her admirers present the Bund as proof that their anti-Zionism carries an illustrious pedigree, that they invent nothing, that their forebears were principled. In 1929 a Jewish socialist could hold the Bund's three core convictions out of innocence: that liberation "here where we live" was a real future for European Jewry, that the socialism the movement served would deliver justice, and that Zionism was a colonial dead end about to collapse. The past century answered all three at maximum volume. The "here" was reduced to ash at Treblinka, with no Jewish state to flee to — the Bund did not fade into irrelevance, it was murdered, and its leaders Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter were executed not by fascists but by the Soviet socialism the movement had treated as humanity's hope. The Bund bet against a Jewish refuge and for the international left, and was annihilated in the space between the two errors. The Zionism it ridiculed is the reason "never again" carries any weight at all.

So the pedigree the activists claim is a death certificate they have mistaken for a coat of arms. Crabapple is proud of the conference resolutions that instrumentalized the massacres of Jews in Palestine while accusing the Zionists of doing exactly that. The current anti-Zionists have curated a brave and tragic movement down to its most shameful hour and made that hour the heirloom. The ancestors at the Splendid had the excuse of not knowing how the story ended. Their great-grandchildren have the Holocaust, the gulag, and seventy-eight years of Israeli statehood in the record.

If any philosophy has been falsified by history, it is the philosophy of the pre-war Bundists. They had an excuse for their blindness. Today's socialist Jews have no such excuse.

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