Arkush on Jabotinsky in his Review of Crabapple's Book on the Bund

One Mary Crabapple, born Jennifer Caban in New York City to a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother, who was the daughter of a Belarusian immigrant, has published a book on the Bund, It has been criticized as just another anti-Zionist tract using the anti-Zionist Bund as a vehicle.

One review is here by Allan Arkush. As it mentions Jabotinsky and almost Betar (see below), I thought I would add some context and even corrections.

In the first section:

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.

As for Jabotinsky and the national rights of Arabs in the Jewish state:

Jabotinsky denied the Arabs' national claim.

and this section:

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.

Arkush peripherally notes that Crabapple "doesn't neglect to berate Jabotinsky and the Revisionists," adding that she does so "With some justification." Why? He agrees that the "blame for the agitation that led to Arab riots in Palestine in 1929" belongs to them even if he does admit that "Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem...played a key role in fanning the flames." The Mufti was no minor player.

In Amin el-Husseini's 1921 election campaign, a central slogan was "Defend Al-Aqsa" and throughout the 1920s, he never missed an opportunity to highlight supposed Zionist designs on the Haram Al-Sharif. During masonry work on the supposed Al-Buraq Wall, stones fell somehow on the Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall alleyway. Donkeys were driven through the yard dropping their dung. Dervish music was loudly played. Seats were removed in 1925. He pressured the British administration to issue the November 1928 White Paper after the infamous mechitza incident the Mufti instigated on Yom Kippur the previous September.

That White Paper stemmed from High Commissioner John Chancellor's "conclusion...that there must not, in the first place, be any attempt to expropriate, in favour of the Jews, the area of the pavement in front of the Wall." The result was no benches permitted, tables for the Torah reading must be removed immediately after use, no prayer partitions set up and eventually, no shofar blowing. A new status quo came into force.  On this background, the stabbing murder of Avraham Mizrachi by an Arab on August 16, 1929 and the resulting violent confrontations between Jews and Arabs over the next few days should be considered the real spark that permitted the Mufti to initiate the pogrom on the Friday, August 23, sending thousands of Muslims out of the Temple Mount compound.

Here is another section in that review:

“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.

Anielewicz was in Betar until his middle teens and he later bemoaned that while in the Marxist HaShomer HaTzair, he neglected his earlier military training in favor of cultural activities/ The Bund, of course, sabotaged any cooperation with Betra and the Revisionists in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

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