here where i live is my country

22 Sep, 2026

One of the book releases I had been most looking forward to this year was Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple because I had heard the author discuss her book in two podcast episodes on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff by Margaret Killjoy, the author of A Country of Ghosts, and because she was endorsed by Naomi Klein.¹ Aside from the endorsements by people whose work I admire, the topic of anti-Zionism in pre-Holocaust Jewish communities was one I was already exploring. As this is an exhaustive piece of work, that I highly recommend reading if you’re interested, it makes little sense to summarize it. My aim is to give a brief summary of what I consider to be relevant for my argument and weave that into my personal story as well as the current political climate.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how much of my own struggles with belonging would be reflected in this book. As an immigrant in one of the countries involved in a holocaust, I was always made to feel like I didn’t belong and should go back to where I came from, sometimes simply because my origin provided me with a perspective on politics that differed from others. I’ve long struggled with my political identity, so much so that I didn’t want to pursue a career in law because it would’ve more strongly tied me to this country. I didn’t want to dig in my roots just to be uprooted just like my parents were, especially in a place that constantly rejected me in every way possible. But the Bund was founded precisely because the Jews were made to feel this way and it had an answer for it: Here where they lived was their country and their place in it was worth fighting for.

The book starts out as a sort of memoir detailing her grandpa’s involvement in the Bund, her own path to the story, and a broad painting of the context in which an organized resistance movement was necessary. She details the modern history of Jews in Russia, their migrations, the repressive policies under which they lived that constrained them to a specific area of the empire and barred them from education, and follows it up with a brief history of relatively unorganized Jewish resistance like what led to one of the most badass assassinations in history—the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. in St. Petersburg by Sophia Perovskaya and Vera Zasulich. Molly Crabapple writes from a personal attachment to the story. Her great-grandfather, a painter, was one of the punk activists who organized strikes in Volkovysk in today’s Belarus. He emigrated to NYC during the First World War, but his socialist spirit never died. She became interested in the Bund when she discovered his memory paintings of his political activity in Russia.

The Jewish Labor Bund was founded in 1897 as an internationalist umbrella organization for various small Jewish parties fighting for a socialist, multiethnic, secular, feminist, and decentralized Here in the Russian Empire which at the time occupied most of Eastern Europe including the Pale of Settlement where most Ashkenazi or Eastern European Jews lived. Its predecessor movements and the Bund itself were a response to the reactionary politics of the orthodox Tsar and vital for the actualization of many progressive and egalitarian policies in Tsarist Russia and beyond. It might seem surprising that they parted ways with the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) six years later at the second party congress over policy disagreements and the role of the Bund within the RSDLP, but I’d argue it isn’t a surprise, given that the party was dominated by a majority (=Bolsheviki) of what we now call Marxist-Leninists who treat leftist politics like a Holy Crusade.

Unlike the RSDLP, the Bund was more in touch with its constituents and less prescriptive about what’s to come. With forty thousand members at its peak, it was the biggest socialist party in the Russian Empire. They built communal infrastructure—like soup kitchens, Yiddish libraries, secular Yiddish schools, after-work programs to combat illiteracy, and much more—to lift each other up and provide their children with some modicum of dignity. They fought bloodily for worker protections and created defense squads to defend their neighborhoods from pogroms (Russian for destruction). The Bund in Europe and the Black emancipation movement in the USA mutually identified with each other’s struggles against racialization and marginalization because they both recognized the parallels in the logic used to suppress their humanity.

What caused a lot of inter-Jewish bickering was the question of Zionism. Around the same time that the Bund was founded, Theodor Herzl was throwing a lavish party in a Swiss casino to make his case for a settler colony on inhabited land, so that the Jews of Europe would get a taste of European colonialism. The premise of Zionism, using the Dreyfus affair, was that assimilation or even conversion to Christianity didn’t protect Jews from antisemitism and so Jews needed their own nation-state. The Bund was fundamentally anti-imperialist and anti-racist, so Zionism was out of the question. The Zionists knew the place that Judaism still occupied in Jewish life and so they picked the Promised Land for their project to convince as many Jews as possible. They were employing the colonialist logic of terra nullius and just pretended that the Palestinians didn’t exist, weren’t human enough to worry about their ethnic cleansing, or even their massacring.

All of this didn’t change their unpopularity among Jews. Zionist Jews were often assimilated, well-resourced Jews and part of the European aristocracy, often working hand in hand with the powers oppressing their people to make their lives harder to “convince” them of the alternative in Palestine. They worked with the Russian Minister of the Interior in the following manner:

Like Herzl, von Plehve thought that Jews needed to abandon Europe. When Herzl asked von Plehve to pressure the Ottoman sultan to turn over land in Palestine for settlement, the minister had generously agreed. … Von Plehve promised to support the colonization of Palestine if, in return, Herzl convinced the Jewish Labor Bund to stop its activities against the tsarist state [sic]. The conversation between Herzl and von Plehve illustrates the Bund’s problem with Zionism. Zionism was not just impractical, in Bundists’ eyes. It was submission to the same bigots who wanted to kick Jews out of their homes. The Bund believed that Jews belonged in eastern Europe [sic]. “We are not strangers here and not guests, even though the Russian government considers us as such,” one local Bund committee wrote. “The richness of the land is soaked through with our blood…. We demand and fight for that which belongs to us, for human, civil and political rights.” To leave meant letting their tormenters win. The Bund coined a word for this stubborn insistence on staying: do’ikayt. Hereness, as opposed to the There of Palestine. Bundists would fight for freedom and dignity in the place where they lived (p. 53).

The reality simply was that people didn’t want to be uprooted to go elsewhere, away from the village they lived in and the people they knew. It cannot be overstated how traumatizing relocating is, even under peaceful and voluntary conditions. Add on top of that that Zionists expected the racialized Jews of Europe to do the same to another group elsewhere and you see why Zionism was unpopular.

Around the time of the Great Depression, Endek thugs, part of a chauvinistic movement similar to National-Socialism, in Poland gradually terrorized the Jews out of the public, forcing about two hundred thousand to flee to Western Europe, making them into a prime scapegoat for the Nazis. “Look how the flood of Jews is taking away your jobs!” The NSDAP’s win further emboldened the Endek to do more. As Nazi repression and expansion grew, more Jews were fleeing anywhere, just away from the terror. The refugee and the Jew became one and refugee destinations began restricting visas. At a conference on the refugee question—the aims of which, the reasons for it, as well as its consequences remind me of the EU summits on distributing Syrian refugees post-2015 because nobody wanted them—, Zionists campaigned for Palestine to be the only destination. Even after, and probably especially because of, the Balfour Declaration, Zionists didn’t stop treating Jews as pawns in their colonial project to repopulate Palestine, now emboldened by the British promise of their own state.

As Poland was partitioned between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the Poles had to make space for the Germans. To make that possible, the Jews had to be relocated, meaning deported. Ghettos within cities like Łódź, Vilna, and Warsaw were created to house some of the Jews while others were to be deported elsewhere. When that didn’t suffice, the Nazis began building concentration camps. These camps became crowded, so they started exterminating them—the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

What this book did well was highlight how the victims didn’t sit by idly and let this happen. So far from it. With so little at their disposal, they tried to rescue as many people as possible from deportation. The Polish Home Army refused to supply them with guns for many reasons: First, if the Jews were freed from the Nazis’ project of extermination, they would demand their expropriated property back which the Poles who benefited from their expropriation wouldn’t accept. Second, the Home Army, headed by the government-in-exile in England, was filled with Polish fascists who were pissed it was Germany that was winning against the Jews and not them. Eventually, they gave them some guns—not enough to win anything—, yet that didn’t stop Warsaw Jews from planning the Warsaw Uprising.

Similarly to how Jewish resistance was sidelined by Zionists for whom the effeminate Yiddish man had to be masculinized into the Hebrew man who wouldn’t let the Holocaust happen to him, the role played by recruited troops from the colonies in Nazi resistance was brushed under the rug as best as possible. Shortly before the French resistance reached Paris to liberate it from the Nazis, troops from the colonies—Senegalese, Maghrebi, or Martinican—were sent home. But because not enough Free Frenchmen were left, white-passing Algerians and Syrians were ordered to stay to inflate their legion’s numbers.

Another thing this book does well is comparing the techniques used in the Holocaust to European colonial policies in Africa.

Pioneered by the British in South Africa during the Second Boer War, concentration camps imprisoned minorities and dissidents rather than criminals, and were soon taken up by governments across Europe (p. 127). … On October 12, 1939, Hitler annexed Lodz and Poznan to the Reich. The rest of Poland would become a province, where half a million German “pioneers” could settle on dream plantations, served by Polish slaves. Poles of German extraction, the so-called Volksdeutsche, would have special privileges. Jews would be ghettoized in cities, starved, and murdered. This Nazi plan came straight from Western imperial projects in Africa and Asia. If, as Martinican philosopher Aimé Césaire later wrote, fascism was colonialism turned inward, then Poland would be the European ground zero for its most savage technologies of degradation, separation, and erasure (emphasis mine, p. 357).

After the war was over and the camps were freed, millions of Jews stripped of their citizenship found themselves in displaced people camps. Many tried to emigrate to the USA, Canada, Australia or others to start a new life, but they weren’t granted visas to those countries. The Zionists made sure to lobby for that so more would go to Palestine instead. Efforts were ramping up over there to formally take over what Britain would leave behind. Appeals to patriotism to join the fight for a Jewish state didn’t work, so the Zionists began bullying traumatized Holocaust survivors into their “duty” to fight in the Zionist paramilitaries that would later become the IDF by making the camps systematically punish non-Zionists into submission, e.g. by firing and fining them and denying them their meager allotted rations. If I ever harbored any doubts that Zionism wasn’t fundamentally a form of fascism with slightly different characters, this book quelled them.

In his last article written before his death in 1948, Bernard Goldstein’s best friend Shloyme Mendelson condemned the “totalitarian” methods that Zionism used to repress Jewish dissent. “What a bitter irony that after the utter destruction brought upon the Jewish people by Fascism, the latter’s methods of terror are now triumphant in Jewish life…. It is as if the slaughterer had infected his victims with his germs during the slaughter” (emphasis mine, p. 367)

When I still used Mastodon on a liberal German instance, I had posts taken down on the grounds of so-called Nazi inversion that posited that Israel was very capable of becoming the Nazi Germany of the Middle East, like in the quote above. The takedown was rooted in a (maliciously) false understanding of the Holocaust and what Israel is. Germany wants to treat Israel as its repentance for the Holocaust only because they’d rather have Jews elsewhere where they can’t demand reparations for the crimes committed against them. For decades, the institutionally instilled memory of the Holocaust has exceptionalized it into a civilizational rupture that befell the Jews, this now still abstracted and homogenized group, and now we must atone by unquestioningly standing behind a foreign state, that has been committing a genocide for three years with the genocidal intent inseparable from its origins. Not only has this memory culture flattened Jewishness into infallibility, their suffering into a heavenly trial, and punished Palestinians for European crimes, it has blinded us from the possibility of history repeating itself—of antisemitic tropes being revived under the guise of islamophobia and what that could lead to.

Especially, when the German Catechism has become so tied to correct integration into German and Austrian society, primarily Arab anti-Zionist voices are rejected as and punished for an “imported antisemitism,” and anti-Zionism is conflated with antisemitism, immigrants—a lot of whom are Arabs—are being forced to conform to German moral righteousness that doesn’t take their experience into consideration, and repent for crimes neither they nor their ancestors committed. Evidently, German anti-antisemitism is not keeping Jews safe while also being used to marginalize primarily Arabs as well as anti-Zionist Jews further into the periphery. While the tongue-in-cheek White Savior Complex is not new, this form is most insidious because it is institutionalized and legally protected, mostly because of the pretense that antisemitism in Germany and Austria is a relict from the past that Arabs are reviving here.

I’ve been called an antisemite as a thirteen-year-old for being an anti-Zionist for recognizing the Palestinian plight as wrong and I will never accept the perpetrator’s, Israel’s, “right to exist”—because states have no rights. Rights are granted to people by a higher authority without which these rights neither exist nor are enforced. Unless Israel becomes incorporated into a higher authority, it won’t be able to hold any rights whatsoever. And even then, such rights would be binding in accordance with Israel’s relationship to that higher authority. Rights have no validity outside of the granting authority’s area of influence because anything else would be logically absurd. Hannah Arendt has written plenty on how little human rights have helped the displaced persons precisely because those people were in no rights-granting authority’s area of influence. Their statelessness leading to their “rightlessness” can be used as a metaphor for the state of anarchy in international politics that leads to the same outcome for states. Therefore, any argument for a state’s right to exist is based on the conflation of a group of people’s right to exist with the state that claims authority over them—exactly the same way Zionism and Judaism are routinely and harmfully conflated.

All of this is not new: The Jewish Labor Bund and the various Zionist factions have fought it out on paper and in the streets before the Holocaust. Yet, we still cannot move past it because there is a vested political, and obscenely, Christian-Evangelical interest in having Israel exist with whatever means necessary. If atonement for the Holocaust was truly such a focal point of support for Israel, it wouldn’t be instrumentalized so conveniently against Jewish dissenters or used to scapegoat minorities for homegrown antisemitism. But here we are because we have learned nothing from the Holocaust and were never serious about “Never Again!”.

Despite all this, I’m fighting the urge of damning myself to the eternal rootless nomad life because I have a right to live here as much as anybody else. No legal framework will ever change that every part of this Earth belongs to everybody living on it, regardless of how much some assholes want their fortresses fortified against those they deem beneath living among them. As Naguib Mahfouz wrote, “Home is not where you are born. It is where all your attempts at escape cease.” So, here where I live is my country.

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