The Bund: An Alternative to Zionism

At the end of last semester, Naomi Klein shared her historical analysis of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Middle East to a packed auditorium in her talk, “Israel, Palestine, and The Doppelganger Effect.” Essential to her understanding of this crisis and Zionism more broadly is the fact that the history of Jewish politics and political resistance to antisemitism, while often reduced simply to the Zionist movement that ultimately prevailed, is in fact quite multifaceted. In particular, Klein highlighted another possible vision for Jews in Europe which rejected Zionism and its tactics of violent displacement and dehumanization. This alternative idea was embodied by the Jewish Labour Bund, an organization and movement whose labor radicalism, staunch anti-Zionism, and commitment to the Jewish diaspora was central to Jewish politics in the 20th century. As the devastating and genocidal effects of Zionism on Palestinians has become only more evident over the summer, this issue is just as relevant as ever, and I think Klein’s historical understanding of Zionism as not necessarily an inevitable response to antisemitism warrants closer examination.

From its inception, the Bund developed in tandem with and as a rejection of Zionism. It was founded as a political party and trade union in the western Russian Empire in 1897, the same year that Theodor Herschel convened the First Zionist Congress. Zionists argued that Jews, faced with mounting hostility and antisemitism in Europe, needed to form their own ethnically Jewish state in Palestine, unconcerned with the devastation that such an ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project would bring. However, the Bundists saw this Zionist escapism as a submission to the prevailing antisemitic narratives across Europe: that Jews must get out. In fact, many of Zionism’s strongest proponents were quite antisemitic. This Bundist condemnation of Zionism was integral to the Bundist philosophy which grounded itself in the Yiddish idea of “do’ikayt,” meaning “hereness.”  For members of the Bund, this meant a pragmatic and unmistakably socialist embrace of existing Jewish culture, community, and diaspora wherever it was across the world. This commitment to the diaspora was essential to their understanding of what genuine liberation and a true rejection of antisemitism should look like. Marek Edelman, a Bund leader during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising clearly articulated this vision: “The Bundists did not wait for the Messiah, nor did they think about migrating to Palestine. They wanted Poland to be a country of justice, socialism, and equal rights for national minorities.” 

In her book “Doppelganger,” Naomi Klein articulates how the Bundist vision of liberation was decidedly more universal and more genuinely liberatory than that of Zionism. She writes that “The Bund held fast to the belief that Jews would be free when everyone was free, and not by building what amounted to a militarized ghetto on Palestinian land.” For many left-wing Jews across Europe, their opposition to antisemitism was not grounded in a departure from Europe and thus a continuation of the cycle of violence and displacement, this time against Palestinians. Rather, they sought to build solidarity and political power within Europe among Jewish workers, and Bundists often worked closely with other leftist groups, especially in Poland where the Bund’s power was the strongest. The Bundist leader Victor Alter was explicit: “Your liberation can only be a by-product of the universal freeing of oppressed people.” 

It is difficult to deny that Zionist fears of antisemitism were quite legitimate. However, the narrative often becomes that because of this, Zionism and its ensuing settler colonial violence, were and still remain the only option, the only possible response to such antisemitism. Clearly, the Bundists would disagree. In fact, in many cases, members of the Bund were much more engaged than Zionists in tangibly resisting and organizing against discrimination. According to Majer Bogdanski, a Bundist who was captured and imprisoned by the Soviets when they invaded eastern Poland in 1939, “Zionists did not lift a finger in the fight against rampant antisemitism in Poland during the 1930s … It was activists from the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party who led that daily struggle.” For the Bundists, the way to combat antisemitism was through labor organizing and the solidification of political power in the hands of the (Jewish) working class. And, for several decades, they were quite successful. 

The Bund quickly became the leading Jewish labor party in Poland and, by the 1930s, comprised nearly one hundred thousand workers. They helped coordinate general strikes in 1936 and 1937 in protest of the Przytyk pogrom and gained electoral support across the country in 1936. Bundists were also willing to be militant, and they organized a disciplined militia which offered protection from violent antisemitism. Even in its early days, the Soviet Bund had been willing to militantly defend its commitment to social democracy. They played an important role in the ultimately unsuccessful Russian Revolution of 1905. Later they were allies of the Mensheviks, the broad socialist faction within the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, in the Revolution of 1917. 

The history of the Bund sheds important light on a Jewish resistance movement which wholeheartedly rejected the formation of a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine. Clearly, Zionism was not inevitable and should never be thought of as the only possible response to the very real threat of antisemitism in Europe. Even after the Holocaust, when arguments for the necessity of a Jewish state would have been the most convincing, the Bund rejected the formation of Israel and called instead for a bi-national Jewish-Arab state in Palestine. Often the narratives we take for granted as simple and unavoidable are much more complex. The Bund represents an inspiring story of a movement that could have been.