I have heard nothing about Hilberg taking my side. He is pretty stupid and crazy. He babbles now about a “death wish” of the Jews. His book is really excellent, but only because it is a simple report. A more general, introductory chapter is beneath a singed pig.
—Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers, 4/24/1964
I have Raul Hilberg’s three volume opus The Destruction of the European Jews. I’ve read it, skimming it in parts, and studying select chapters. I’ve also used the footnotes and index for related research. Hilberg relied on mostly German primary sources supplemented by secondary literature, but precise figures of Jewish deaths were hard to come by. He necessarily had to round his numbers. The conventional view is that between 5 and 7 million Jews perished in the Nazi Final Solution, with the number 6 million cited as standard. Hilberg’s comprehensive research, with various rounding factors taken into account, posits a range of 4.9 million to 5.4 million deaths, with a mid-point of 5.1 million Jewish lives destroyed by the Nazis.
Hilberg’s landmark study, with its exhaustive research, focused on German collective responsibility and bureaucracy, not on the Nazi leadership or their victims, and arrived at a figure that was at the low end of the official range. But Hilberg could be cantankerous and didn’t shy away from controversy. As Hannah Arendt knew, it was possible to like the man’s work but dislike the man. Hilberg was clear on a number of contentious points, principal among them that the Jewish people were overwhelmingly passive in the face of Nazi persecution and murder. “The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by almost complete lack of resistance […] [T]he documentary evidence of Jewish resistance, overt or submerged, is very slight,” according to Hilberg, who further stated: “In exile, the Jews […] had learned that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies. […] Armed resistance in the face of overwhelming force could end only in disaster. Thus over a period of centuries the Jews had learned that in order to survive they had to refrain from resistance.” These historical tendencies were augmented by Jewish communal structures—in particular the cooperation of the Jewish councils, or Judenräte, that made the Nazis’ job easier—and a deference for authority. Further, Hilberg rejected the contention that “[e]ven passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance” as highly problematic.
Hilberg argued that Jewish resistance to the Nazis was grossly overstated and that less than 300 Germans were killed by Jews during the second World War. The Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB, Socialist Zionist and Labor Bund fighters) and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW, Revisionist fighters) futilely attempted to defend the Warsaw Ghetto from Nazi deportations in 1943.[1] Similar armed actions followed in the Vilna and Bialystok ghettos. But had every Nazi-controlled Jewish ghetto in Eastern Europe rebelled in emulation of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and given the resources the Nazis needed to deploy to crush that insurrection alone, the German military on the Eastern Front would have been totally immobilized. Hilberg disagreed with what he called a “campaign of exaltation” of heroic Jewish resistance to the Nazi Holocaust. Mitchell Hart stated that “[t]his sort of ‘inflation of resistance’ is dangerous because it suggests that the Jews truly did present the Nazis with some sort of ‘opposition’ that was not just a horrible figment of their antisemitic imaginations.”
Yad Vashem disagreed with Hilberg and countered that his thesis amounted to blaming the victims for their plight; that the Jews themselves somehow bore some responsibility for the extent of the Nazi genocide. I visited Yad Vashem in 1974 and walked through the rooms dedicated to depicting Jewish heroism. I choked up over the portrayal of Jewish resistance in German-occupied Europe—from the armed uprisings in Eastern European ghettos and concentration camps and guerrilla groups (like the Bielski and Parczew partisans and the UPO) to the sabotage, disruption, intelligence gathering and participation within national resistance movements in Western Europe. Given my proclivity for revenge, I was particularly taken with the post-war Nokmim partisans/Nakam assassins—the Jewish Avengers—who intended to annihilate as many Germans as the Nazis had killed Jews. But compared to the decades long Vietnamese/Cambodian/Laotian national liberation struggles happening concurrently in Indochina against Western imperialism, I had to admit that Jewish resistance to the Nazis seemed sparse. And I understood why most Israeli Jews believed that European Jewry went “like sheep to the slaughter,” walking meekly into Hitler’s gas chambers. I had burned my draft card, applied for a Conscientious Objector status, and otherwise spent six years of my life protesting against the Vietnam War. My resistance to America’s slaughter conservatively of 1,156,000 Vietnamese, 273,000 Cambodians and 28,000 Laotians, not to mention the reduction of the Indochinese countryside into a subtropical moonscape saturated with Agent Orange, felt exceedingly paltry to me at the time.[2]
My Polish Catholic mother lived through the second World War and was interned in a Nazi forced labor camp as an adolescent. She developed an abiding hatred for all things German and once said that there must be something positive about the Jews because the Germans despised them so much. I inherited my knee-jerk anti-German sentiments from her. As a libertarian Marxist, I’ve found the Jewish left particularly constructive and instructive for my own socialism. The Jewish Labor Bund and its program for diaspora socialism—emphasizing do’ikayt (here-ness), Yiddish, secular Jewish culture, national-cultural autonomy, trade unionism, and community control—was liquidated by the Nazis along with the Jewish community of Eastern Europe. What remained was Jewish nationalism as exemplified by the tens of thousands of socialist Zionists who immigrated from Eastern Europe to Palestine prior to 1940 to found a socialist society. I’ve been an admirer of the former having befriended a Bundist union baker in 1969 who retired from Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, to Ojai, California. And I became a student of the latter at UCSC taking World Systems Theory in Walter Goldfrank’s Sociology class.
I’ve argued that socialist Zionism was perhaps the first example of a modern socialist struggle for national liberation, albeit one with a fatal flaw—that being its program of “socialism for one people” in a settler-colonial context. I sympathize with the bi-nationalist libertarian communism of the Hashomer Hatzair which became MAPAM, and I have a soft spot for the left communism of the Gdud Ha’avoda/Labor Brigades. Socialist Zionism ultimately failed to achieve a socialist society both internally and in socialist peace and justice with the Palestinians. What’s more, when Labor Zionism took power as the social democratic State of Israel in 1948, and especially when Revisionist Zionism—openly rooted in European Fascism—gained control as Likud after 1977, Israel can be understood as a settler-colonial regime little different from apartheid South Africa.[3]
As for the present Palestinian/Israeli conflict I unequivocally oppose the Jewish settler movement, Israeli ethnic cleansing and the IDF’s ongoing repression and massacre of Palestinians. I favor first a decentralized bi-national socialism of autonomous federated Jewish and Palestinian communities residing side by side in the region. Then I support, ultimately, a bi-national democratic one-state solution for all of Palestine/Israel, with the formal two-state solution that Amos Oz called “a peace through gritted teeth” coming in a distant third. Yet none of these solutions are likely, with the current de facto degraded Israeli apartheid state reality of endless occupation and war the norm for the foreseeable future. So I protest Israeli military attacks on Gaza and the West Bank, and Israeli civilian assaults on Palestinians and their lands, without rejecting the promise of a bi-nationalist Jewish socialism upon which that society was founded. And I express solidarity with Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler-colonialism without endorsing Palestinian politics as “objectively anti-imperialist.”
I also plant olive trees in Palestine through a variety of non-Zionist charities, a symbolic act at best but one that I can take whether or not Israel is currently bombing the hell out of the Palestinians. By “supporting the act but not the actor” I reverse the precept held by Gandhi and later Martin Luther King to “hate the sin but not the sinner.” I thus refuse to reduce my politics to simplistic Leftist anti-imperialist drek. It’s a stance I take in confronting Stalinist tankies, crude Leninists and generic campists alike. But the dogmatists, sectarians and vanguardists of this leftover Left have never been good with political subtleties and ambiguities.
SOURCES:
Personal recollections
The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg
Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969 by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner
“The historian’s past in three recent Jewish autobiographies” by Mitchell B. Hart
Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation by Isaiah Trunk
The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State by Ze’ev Sternhell
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Zionism warned that the Jewish community in Eastern Europe was in imminent danger of antisemitic persecution and mass murder almost from its inception. But whereas the socialist Zionist/Bundist ŻOB wasn’t formed until 1942 and then mainly in response to the Nazi threat to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto, the rightwing ŻZW—founded by Revisionist Zionism and Betar in 1939—anticipated the threat posed by Nazism. Soviet censorship aside, the ŻZW’s role in the uprising seems to have been exaggerated. I despise Revisionism’s parafascist politics even as I acknowledge its contributions to Jewish resistance to the Nazis.
[2] And these are very much the conservative estimates of the death toll. R.J. Rummel puts the upper estimates of American mass murder at 3,207,000 for Vietnam, 273,000 for Cambodia, and 115,000 for Laos, giving a grand total of 3,595,000 killed by US imperialism in Indochina from 1954 to 1975.
[3] In the 70s I took note of principled bi-national socialist anti-Zionism within Palestine/Israel—mainly Rakah, Maki and the pivotal Matzpen. Inspiring and influential, Matzpen was numerically marginal back in the day. I remember reading Arie Bober’s The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism and following the various debates and subsequent splits. Now bi-national socialist anti-Zionism within Israel is virtually non-existent, examples like the Da’am Workers Party and Hadash notwithstanding.
What's Left? 
