There is perhaps no more vivid illustration of the moral nadir Israel has reached than the Knesset’s passage, two days before Passover, of a death penalty law that applies only to Palestinians. The measure, whose approval was greeted with tears of joy and the popping of champagne in the legislative chamber, is a concise legal expression of the core animating idea of modern Israel: that there exists no humane obligation in Jewish tradition with a durable universal ambit. The notion that Jews should have a special concern for the fate of all humanity, regardless of ethnicity or creed, lies dead beneath the rubble in Gaza.
It had to be killed, however, because there was a time when it lived. Cosmopolitanism over nationalism, social democracy over rapacious capitalism, collective liberation over ethno-chauvinist fortress-building – these were the values that animated the Jewish Labour Bund, a revolutionary party founded in 1897 in the Tsarist empire. “For leftist Jews longing for resources within our own past for combating the Zionist death cult,” as author, activist and artist Molly Crabapple puts it, “the Bund is a model.” A model with an audience – Crabapple’s new history of the Bund was already in its second printing the week before it came out.
