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.

^

More on Jabotinsky and the Palestine Mandate Arabs

Jabotinsky and the question of the relationship to the Arabs residing in Mandate Palestine from archival materila of the late 1930s 

and

^

Did Balfour Promise the Jews a 'State'?

Just read this:

In a secret report dated 2 September 1946, James Robertson, head of MI5’s Middle East section, argued that the declaration had never committed Britain to establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.

Robertson maintained that Zionists had attached meanings to the declaration that went far beyond its original intention, transforming a commitment to a Jewish “national home” into a demand for statehood.

So, I went to re-read Martin Gilbert who asserted: "Lloyd George and Balfour had both agreed 'that by the Declaration they had always meant an eventual Jewish State."

Excerpts:

On 31 October 1917, Balfour had told the War Cabinet that while the words ‘national home…did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State,’ such a State ‘was a matter for gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution.’2

Robert Lansing, the American Secretary of State, asked Weizmann for clarification ‘as to the meaning of the words “Jewish National Home.”...The Zionist Organisation wanted permission ‘to build Jewish schools where Hebrew would be taught, and to develop institutions of every kind. Thus it would build up gradually a nationality, and so make Palestine as Jewish as America is American or England English.’

The Supreme Council wanted to know if such a ‘nationality’ would involve eventual statehood? Weizmann told them: ‘Later on, when the Jews formed the large majority, they would be ripe to establish such a Government as would answer to the state of the development of the country and to their ideals.’6

the King-Crane Commission, appointed by President Woodrow Wilson, published its report criticising Zionist ambitions and recommending ‘serious modification of the extremist Zionist programme for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish State.’9

Churchill’s critical attitude did not last long...In an article entitled ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism: the Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,’ he wrote in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on 8 February 1920 that Zionism offered the Jews ‘a national idea of a commanding character.’ Palestine would provide ‘the Jewish race all over the world’ with, as Churchill put it, ‘a home and a centre of national life.’ Although Palestine could only accommodate ‘a fraction of the Jewish race,’ but ‘if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event will have occurred in the history of the world which would from every point of view be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.’

On 24 April 1920, at the San Remo Conference, the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George accepted a British Mandate for Palestine...The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, noted in his diary that there had been a ‘two-hour battle’ among the British and French delegates, ‘about acknowledging and establishing Zionism as a separate State in Palestine under British protection.’14

at a meeting in Balfour’s house in London on July 22, Lloyd George and Balfour had both agreed ‘that by the Declaration they had always meant an eventual Jewish State.’21

Churchill’s adviser, Major Young, likewise favoured a policy that, he wrote to Churchill on August 1, involved ‘the gradual immigration of Jews into Palestine until that country becomes a predominantly Jewish State.’ Young went on to argue that the phrase ‘National Home’ as used in the Balfour Declaration implied no less than full statehood for the Jews of Palestine. There could be ‘no half-way house,’ he wrote, between a Jewish State and ‘total abandonment of the Zionist programme.’22

Let us also recall the 1915 Cabinet Memorandum, in Wikipedia, too:

Case closed.

^

The Altalena Found

I heard from those who were in charge of the locating of the Altalena, the Irgun arms ship, after it was towed out to sea in December 1949 and sunk.

Photos:

 

In the process of being submerged

^

Arab Palestine Youth Movement and the Nazis

For all those trying to characterize Zionism as akin to Nazism:

Excerpts from 'Palestine's forgotten "Hitler Youth": Al-Futuwwa and the youth programs of Hamas' by Jan Kapusnak, November 1, 2026 (translated from mthe German version)

"In 1936, Palestinian-Arab nationalists founded a youth movement that was partly modeled on the Hitler Youth of Nazi Germany.

Its founders openly admired Hitler's rise to power and wanted to mobilize a new generation to fight against Zionism and British rule in Mandatory Palestine...

On February 11, 1936, as Adolf Hitler consolidated his power in Nazi Germany, Palestinian Arab nationalists founded a youth organization aligned with his regime. Initially known as the "Nazi Scouts," it soon received the Arabic name Al-Futuwwa, which can be roughly translated as "youthful knighthood."

At the founding assembly, Jamal al-Husseini, chairman of the Palestinian Arab Party, invoked Hitler's extraordinary political rise. As the historian Yehoshua Porath writes in hisIn his standard work , "The Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1929-1939: From Riots to Rebellion," al-Husseini described how Hitler's movement grew from six followers to six hundred and finally to sixty million. He hoped that the newly founded Arab youth organization would also become the nucleus of a powerful national movement.

This admiration was expressed at a time when Nazi Germany had already abolished democratic freedoms, which he had enshrined antisemitic discrimination in law and begun preparations for his territorial expansion. However, some Palestinian-Arab nationalists saw Hitler's ability to mobilize an entire nation as a model to be emulated...

...Emil al-Ghuri, Secretary-General of the Palestinian Arab Party, initially attempted to mobilize existing Arab scouting associations. However, their independence hampered political control. Therefore, the party founded Al-Futuwwa.

According to Porath, Al-Futuwwa took theThe Hitler Youth served as an organizational model. The movement emphasized uniforms, military discipline, and public ceremonies designed to demonstrate strength and unity. At the same time, its members were to be trained to pursue nationalist goals, if necessary by force of arms. Nazi Germany's appeal also had political underpinnings. Hitler's hostility toward Great Britain made Berlin a potential ally for Arab nationalists who opposed British rule. Furthermore, Nazi antisemitism resonated with pre-existing anti-Jewish prejudices among some Arab nationalists. This hostility had existed in the Middle East long before Hitler's rise to power, but Nazi propaganda provided it with renewed ideological reinforcement.

Palestinian Youth: From Movement to Mobilization (1908–2018), Ahmad Jamil Azem, Ramallah: The Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies – Masarat, 2019. 174 pages.

...When Al-Futuwwa was revived after World War II , its founder, Jamal al-Husseini, who also headed the Palestinian Arab Party, remained closely connected to his relative, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had by this time spent nearly a decade in exile. He had fled Palestine in 1937 during the Arab Revolt after the British authorities banned the Arab High Committee he led. He initially found refuge in Lebanon before moving to Iraq, where he supported a pro-German coup in 1941. After its failure, he finally arrived in Nazi Germany.

In Berlin, the Mufti became an active collaborator of the Nazi regime. On November 28, 1941, he met with Adolf Hitler and requested German support for Arab independence and for preventing a Jewish national home in Palestine. He also broadcast his message on the radio.He spread antisemitic propaganda in the Arab world and participated in the recruitment of Muslims for the Waffen-SS. His activities are extensively documented by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After the German defeat, he was detained in France but escaped to Egypt in 1946. From there, he continued to exert considerable influence on Palestinian-Arab politics.

Meanwhile, a new paramilitary organization had emerged in Jaffa at the end of 1945.Inspired by a Lebanese movement of the same name, Al-Najjada emerged from members of a local Muslim sports club. Under the leadership of Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari, a lawyer and former employee of the British Mandate administration, it developed into a nationwide movement that combined Arab nationalist education with physical training and military-like activities. Unlike Al-Futuwwa, Al-Najjada presented itself as politically independent...

The founders of Al-Futuwwa had taken Hitler's rise to power as a model for building a powerful national movement. A decade later, their organization had vanished, while the Jewish state, whose creation they had sought to prevent, was fighting for its survival..."

^

Shiloh Demography based on Eligible Voters

 

^

Quoted in a New York Post Story

"Yisrael Medad, who was born in the Bronx and raised in Queens, believes Netanyahu “is the only one who can get things done in the present constellation of Trump and on the world stage.”"

Unfortunately, the story, on voting inclinations, was headlined:

American Jews who fled to Israel over rising antisemitism could prove decisive for Netanyahu’s future

I did not flee the US in 1970. I returned, calmly, top my historic homeland. No one scared me although I was fearful for the future and am now witnessing how social, cultural and political events unfold in a negative impact fashion on American Jewry.

^

An Yet Another Unpublished Letter to the NYTimes

Bernard Avishai of Dartmouth College writes that "There Is a Zionism That Needs the Support of Progressives" (October 19). He uses the term "cultural Zionism" and writes of "Labor Zionist culturalists."

University professors should be exact when describing historical events, persons and movements. They were Socialists, mostly Marxists, and they created the Histadrut, a unique hegemonic trade union which Ze’ev Sternhell’s 1997 'The Founding Myths of Israel" described as an instrument of "national socialism."

Yisrael Medad
Shiloh
Israel

^