Holocaust and resistance: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, June 2021

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.

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Town v. country: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, February 2023

I’m a city boy. I call myself a flâneur, an individual who strolls city streets for personal freedom, independence, and enjoyment. I’ve lived in cities pretty much all my life and the very brief periods I resided in the countryside drove me bats.

It was love at first sight when I visited New York City in autumn, 1988. People I befriended living in San Diego invited me to holiday in the City and I returned nearly every year thereafter for a decade. That initial trip I was a total tourist. I got a crick in my neck the first day from walking around, looking up and marveling at all the tall buildings. I’d leave the collective household’s Park Slope brownstone where I was staying, maybe stop by the nearby Food Coop for some breakfast, then catch early morning subway rides into Manhattan neighborhoods. Graffiti was everywhere, and the subway cars were rolling works of underground art. I hit the main sightseeing spots.[A] I spent afternoons in St. Mark’s Comics and the Strand just browsing. Missing Foundation’s overturned martini glass tag was ubiquitous on the Lower East Side. Because I was a drunk, a 16-oz can of cheap malt liquor and a couple of hot dogs or slices of pizza from street food stands were all I needed.[1]

Most of my friends had day jobs—bike messengers, temps, low-level secretarial or warehouse grunts—as well as office workers, librarians and academics. I’d arrange to meet them after work at the Cube at St. Marks Place where we regrouped for more food, drinks, and partying. We’d go out for inexpensive ethnic dinners where it was always BYO. And we’d end most evenings talking politics, either socially over more food and drinks or at meetings of Neither East Nor West, Anarchist Black Cross or the Libertarian Book Club.  Several of my friends had “red-eye” radio shows on WBAI, so we would sometimes stumble home at 2-3-4 in the morning. The sidewalks were crowded curb-to-wall with people, pedestrians on the streets all hours of the day and night. There was always something happening. Anything you wanted to do or transact, legal or illegal, was available if you only looked hard enough or had enough money.

I also experienced New York during the late Koch, Dinkins and early Giuliani years when city cops were fat, and stop-and-frisk, “zero tolerance” and “broken windows” policing were at their height. Enforcing “quality of life” violations meant racial profiling, rousting the homeless, and harassing nonconformists. Punk was raging as was hip-hop. The Tompkins Square Park riots of unruly countercultural teens and the homeless occurred in the summer of 1988, resulting in 35 injured and 9 arrested, with over 100 complaints lodged against the police. The New York Times called it a “police riot.”

New York had a reputation for filth, vermin, noise, crime, corruption, homelessness, disorder, brutal cops and racial antagonisms. But it was also known as the capital of the world, the city that never sleeps, and the city of dreams. Some 80+ ethnicities spoke over 200 languages, serving up 35 different global cuisines, worshipping in 150 different religious denominations, residing and conducting business in 278 neighborhoods in 5 boroughs. As the line goes, “there are 8 million stories in the Naked City,” only it’s closer to nine million now. I admired the direct, no nonsense, practical attitude of New Yorkers, their irritated impatience embodied in the term “New York minute,” their borough-distinctive street accents, their raised middle finger stance toward the world. I always returned from my NYC vacations reinvigorated and renewed. Yet I could see how living permanently there and experiencing the City’s monumental indifference and relentless grind could wear on a person’s body, mind, and spirit.

Karl Hess once argued that Ireland had an anarchist society for centuries, how its cities of tens of thousands of people operated without a government and avoided crime without a police force, and how the English took hundreds of years to conquer the Irish because they had no national government to surrender for them. When I remember back to my New York City experiences I sometimes think it’s just the opposite, that it’s a city with lots of police and government but which is fundamentally ungovernable. I’ve lived in West Coast cities[B] and visited various world-class cities[C] sometimes for extended periods. Nothing, no city can compare with New York. But maybe it’s useful to find alternatives to city life. Perhaps socialism can provide different options to the typical urban experience.

Murray Bookchin gained notice for his 1969 pamphlet Listen, Marxist! which presented a left-anarchist critique of Marxism using orthodox Marxist categories (means of production vs relations of production, proletariat vs bourgeoisie, objective vs subjective forces, etc.) Bookchin was a Trotskyist whose acquired anarchism retained a flavor of vulgar Marxism thanks to that stodgy vocabulary. He would eventually develop politically beyond these origins in the 1980s and 1990s but his 1971 book, a collection of essays entitled Post-Scarcity Anarchism (P-SA), still had that crude feel. P-SA proposed a utopia of small decentralized communities founded on communal property that integrated town and country, industry and agriculture, manual and intellectual labor, individualism and collectivism, etc.[2] Federations of such integral communes constituted an idealized stateless, anarchist-communist society of abundance where all social, economic and political contradictions would be resolved.

P-SA created a stir among anarchists in the 1970s and not merely because it repurposed Marxist ideas and terminology to defend left-anarchism. Anarchist study groups based on the book emerged, while criticisms arose from classical anarchists of various stripes. P-SA’s pro-technology bent, in particular, elicited negative reactions in Luddite and primitivist circles. As a left-anarchist I realized Bookchin’s integral commune sounded a lot like the Israeli kibbutz I lived in for six months in 1974.

I consider Israel a settler-colonial apartheid state that failed primarily because Labor Zionism practiced an exclusionary “socialism for one people,” placing ethnic identity over class identity. At the same time I consider the Jewish socialism that established Israel to be one of the more autonomous, communitarian, emancipatory forms of socialism I’ve experienced. I consider both true.

Kibbutz Mizra was established by the Hashomer Hatzair socialist-Zionist youth movement in the Jezreel Valley under the slogan “from commune to communism.” The commune members practiced “from each according to ability, to each according to need” where, for their community labor, they received free housing, food, clothing, education, entertainment, even a monthly stipend to purchase luxuries at the general store. Property was held in common and children were raised collectively. Mizra was a small town communal farm on 1915 acres of land purchased from an absentee Arab feudal landowner whose Arab peasant tenants had been evicted by the Jewish National Fund. Located between the Arab cities of Nazareth and Afula, it had maybe a thousand adults and children and a mixed economy of agriculture (crops, orchards, eggs, chickens, dairy) and industry (meat processing plant, hydraulics machinery factory). Kibbutzim were in the vanguard of the Zionist colonization and economic development of Palestine (Hebrew land, labor, products). They were also on the frontlines of defending the Jewish Yishuv via the Hagana and Palmach (Hebrew defense).

To say life on the kibbutz was bucolic was an understatement. I worked, ate, read, hung out and slept. There was occasional communal TV or a movie available, and we took weekend trips to tourist destinations[D]. But otherwise my stay was uneventful to say the least. Commune life was excruciatingly boring. I started down my long, sordid years of alcoholism living at Mizra because I had to stop smoking marijuana when I arrived and so I purchased bottled wine from the kibbutz store to get high every day.

Jewish socialism shared the idyll of creating the “New Man” with the broader socialist/communist movements of its day. It’s the notion that, come the revolution, the free association of producers would construct a global society without a state, social classes, hierarchies or private ownership of the means of production through a fully developed communism to produce a new humanity. In P-SA Bookchin used the terms “the rounded man, the total man.” This utopian individual is described as cooperative, selfless, virtuous, hard working and comradely. Hardly a portrayal of your average New Yorker, let alone your typical Israeli kibbutznik.

The concept that the new socialist individual is the product of the new socialist society is standard-operating-procedure. Leftists contend that human nature changes depending on lifestyle (hunter-gatherer nomadism, agricultural sedentism, urban civilization) or stages of production (primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism). I consider humans to be social beings by nature, but the broader nature-versus-nurture debate over humanity’s essence remains unresolved in my mind.

The kibbutz movement, like the hippie back-to-the-land movement, was a conscious rejection of urban life. But there’s truth to the WWI song lyric that “how ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” I experienced a triumphant yet tedious rural socialism in Kibbutz Mizra, then a chaotic yet dynamic urban capitalism in New York City. Much as I favored enlightened communalism theoretically, in practice I enjoyed privatized decadence more.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections

FOOTNOTES:
[1] “The liver is a muscle! It must be exercised!” (b)ob McGlynn
[2] “Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.” (Communist Manifesto, 1848) “The first great division of labour in society is the separation of town and country.” (Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1877) “Also characteristic of civilization is the establishment of a permanent opposition between town and country as basis of the whole social division of labour.” (Friedrich Engels,The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884)

THE LISTS:
[A] Museums galore, Times Square, Central Park, Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, Brooklyn Bridge, Fifth Avenue, Grand Central Station, New York Public Library, etc.
[B] Ventura, San Bernardino, Santa Cruz, San Diego, Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco
[C] Jerusalem, Athens, Vienna, Warsaw, Kraków, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Bristol
[D] Jerusalem, Haifa, Baha’i Gardens Nazareth, Akko, Sachne pools, Eilat, Lake Kinnereth, Beit She’an, Dead Sea, the Sinai, Mar Saba Monastery, etc.

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