The intellectual dishonesty that has become the epicenter of the anti-Zionism movement never ceases to amaze me.

The latest example: A new undercurrent of half-researched understanding of the history of the Jewish Labor Bund movement. It’ll show up like this, from someone who signed up for the JVP newsletter or saw a tiktok float across their feed: “Did you know Jews invented anti-Zionism?” they’ll ask with the hint of smug self-satisfaction they’ve ginned up because they think they’re about to win an argument. “The Bund predates the State of Israel by 50 years. Some of the most ‘authentic’ Jews in history hated Zionism!” The condescension gets palpable, like I’ve never heard of the Bund, like it’s going to short-circuit something in my brain and I’ll suddenly agree that the lone Jewish state shouldn’t exist.

And look—it’s successful precisely because it’s true. The General Jewish Labour Bund was founded in Vilna in October 1897, the same year Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel. It was a real, mass, secular Jewish socialist movement, built on the Yiddish principle of doikayt—”hereness”—and it contradicted Zionism with the specific fury of a rival fighting for the same voters. It’s also very much having a moment right now: Molly Crabapple’s new history of the Bund landed a glowing New York Times review this spring, actress Hannah Einbinder has invoked it, even The Economist has run the “Jewish alternative to Zionism” line. Jewish Voice for Peace’s own director has said she draws on “the tradition of the Jewish socialist anti-Zionist labor Bund.”

Here’s the problem: the “gotcha” only works if you stop reading about Jewish history in 1939.

Finish the story, and the Bund isn’t a rebuttal to Zionism. It’s the most devastating argument for Zionism that Jewish history ever produced. Not in theory. In bodies. Six million bodies, to be more precise.

A quick history lesson, since apparently we need one:

Then the Germans invaded. And here’s the part the gotcha conveniently skips.

Doikayt wasn’t refuted by an idea. It was refuted by what actually happened to the people who believed it.

Bundist doctrine held that Jewish safety ran through solidarity with the non-Jewish working class—that Polish workers and Jewish workers, bound by shared class interest, would stand together against fascism. Inside the Warsaw Ghetto, Bundist newspapers spent the early years of occupation preaching exactly that, waiting for a solidarity that never showed up. It was Zionist youth movements—Hashomer Hatzair, Dror, Poale Zion—who pushed hardest and earliest for armed resistance, while the Bund’s older leadership hesitated, still hoping the alliance would materialize, before finally, reluctantly, joining the Jewish Combat Organization that fought the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising alongside the Zionists they’d spent 40 years arguing with. When the reckoning came, Bundist and Zionist fighters died in the same bunkers, for the same reason: because they were Jews, and their non-Jewish neighbors’ “solidarity” ran the other way with murderous regularity. Polish Home Army units killed Jewish partisans—Bundist and Zionist alike—even while both were fighting the same German occupier. Szmul Zygielbojm, the Bund’s own man in the Polish government-in-exile in London, killed himself in May 1943 in protest of the world’s silence while the extermination was already well underway. A suicide note addressed to a world that had let doikayt’s promise die with the people who believed it.

Long story short: the Bund’s own base didn’t survive to keep believing it.

By the time the war ended, the Yiddish-speaking working-class Jewry of Poland that had voted the Bund into first place in 1939 was simply … gone. Murdered, overwhelmingly, by the people of the very continent the Bund had insisted was worth staying in and fighting for. And here’s the part that should end the argument outright: the survivors didn’t conclude doikayt had just been unlucky. They reversed themselves. In the displaced persons camps of 1945, survivors—plenty of them former Bundists—demonstrated for the British to open the gates to Palestine. Not Poland. Not Russia. Not “here.” The U.S. government’s own Harrison Report on the DP camps found that as many as 97% of Jewish survivors surveyed named Palestine as their first choice for resettlement; asked for a second choice, thousands simply wrote “crematoria,” because there wasn’t one worth naming. Isaac Deutscher—one of the twentieth century’s most committed anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals—put it as plainly as anyone has: “I have, of course, long since abandoned my anti-Zionism, which was based on a confidence in the European labor movement… If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s, I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were to be extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers.”

That’s not a movement quietly fading into irrelevance. That’s a movement’s own surviving members standing over its grave and taking it back.

So when someone trots out the Bund like it’s a mic drop, what they’re actually doing is quoting the losing side of an argument that was settled by the people who lost it, in the ruins of what they’d built. Whoever’s citing the Bund’s authority against Zionism today is leaning on a position its own adherents abandoned once they’d lived through the consequences of holding it. That could not be a more a-historical take, utterly committed to ignoring the gruesome lessons that were violently provided.

There’s a sleight of hand buried in it, too. The Bund opposed the establishment of a Jewish state that didn’t exist yet, on the theory that Jews were safer building solidarity where they already lived. Nobody serious is out here relitigating 1897. What’s actually on the table when today’s anti-Zionists cite the Bund is the dissolution of a Jewish state that has existed for 78 years and is now home to roughly half the world’s Jews—including the actual grandchildren of the DP camps, and the Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews forced out of Baghdad and Cairo and Fez with nowhere else that would take them, for whom “hereness” meant precisely “nowhereness.” Borrowing the Bund’s vocabulary to justify that isn’t doikayt. It’s a flat-out lie, dressed in the clothes of the Warsaw Ghetto.

And can we talk about who gets erased in this borrowed nostalgia? The Bund’s world was Ashkenazi, Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European—a rich, real culture, but not the whole of Jewish history, not even in 1897. At that exact moment, thriving Jewish communities existed across Baghdad, Aleppo, Cairo, and Fez, speaking Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Ladino. None of that was touched by doikayt. None of it was saved by it either, once pan-Arabist and Islamist movements emptied those communities in the mid-20th century. Most of those Jews ended up in Israel too—not because Zionist propaganda seduced them, but because it was the only place that would have them. A politics built entirely around one Ashkenazi movement’s memory of Poland has nothing to say to them. It treats their history as a footnote to a story that was never really about them.

Now, I’ll give the gotcha-slingers this much: it’s true that Jewish anti-Zionism has real historical roots, and that Jews have never spoken with one voice on this question—saying so isn’t dishonest. Serious historians will tell you the Bund/Zionist debate before the war was genuinely close, genuinely uncertain, and that it’s too easy in hindsight to treat the Zionist side as inevitable rather than contingent on catastrophe.

Where it curdles, however, is the leap from “Jewish anti-Zionism has a real history” to “so anti-Zionism is the more authentically Jewish position.” That leap treats the Bund’s collapse as incidental to its argument instead of what it actually was: a refutation of its central premise, on the largest and most consequential scale imaginable. Doikayt wasn’t defeated by a better argument. It was defeated by a Home Army grenade in a Polish forest, by neighbors who watched the trains leave for Treblinka and did nothing, by the vast majority of the handfuls of survivors who lived the experiment and concluded, unanimously and at unbearable cost, that “hereness” had completely failed them.

You can admire the Bund. You can mourn what it might have become. What you can’t do—not honestly, not 80 years later, with the entire weight of the Holocaust sitting right there in the record—is wave its flag like the people who carried it hadn’t, in the end, put it down themselves.

They did. Take the hint.