My grandfather, himself a Holocaust survivor, never told me this story. I’m not sure that he even knows it. I stumbled upon it randomly it while sifting through Holocaust testimony a few years back. But this account matches everything that he has ever told me about the Shoah.

As a teenager, I signed up for a Jewish youth group trip to Auschwitz, Madjanek, Treblinka, and the other slaughterhouses of Eastern Europe. My grandfather was dismayed. “I spent years trying to get out of that godforsaken place,” he said with a defeated sigh. “And now you’re just going back.”

This idea—that the Jewish people were abandoned to burn during the Shoah, even by those who should’ve been our natural allies in the face of Nazi aggression—is a, if not the, running theme of early Jewish Holocaust testimony and historiography. In the great decadeslong argument between the Bundists, who told Jews that the solidarity of the working class would protect them from persecution by their neighbors, and the Zionists, who urged mass emigration from Europe to Palestine, the Zionists were proven right, and the Bundists were proven to be tragically, and comprehensively, wrong.

Founded at the tail end of the Russian Empire, the Bund advocated for socialism, Jewish integration in the Diaspora, working-class solidarity, and internationalism. Though ardently anti-assimilationist, a position that later threatened their Soviet rulers, the Bund presented itself as a Jewish alternative to Zionism, embodied in their concept of doykeit, or “hereness.” “Where we live is our country!” was their rallying cry.

In the 1920s, the newly-formed Soviet Union crushed the Bund, but its Polish counterpart survived. In fact, it thrived, skyrocketing to popularity in pre-war Poland, enjoying 80% of the Jewish vote in some cities, most notably, Warsaw, though a significant portion of its base was drawn to the group not so much for their anti-Zionism but for their commitment to workers’ rights. Then the Nazi tanks rolled in.

Everybody knows about the heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but few are familiar with the intra-Jewish politicking that preluded it. After all, the enduring—and infinitely inspiring—story is that Jewish youth from across all political persuasions cast aside their differences, from Zionist to anti, and united to form the Jewish Combat Organization, to stick it to the Nazis one final time. As Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the Organization’s leaders, said, “No one doubted how it was likely to turn out … the important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youth after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers, and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising.”

But as is often the case with these things, the real story is not so simple.

In the years preceding the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Bund hesitated, even as Zionist youth groups were itching for a revolt. Underground Bundist newspapers in the ghetto promoted instead the idea of working-class solidarity among the Jews and the general Polish population, themselves suffering from the Nazi occupation but spared the indignities of life inside the ghetto walls. When, week after week, month after month, the solidarity failed to materialize, the Bund downplayed or ignored the abandonment, gaslighting its own constituents. Finally, the older Bundists relented to their younger members’ demands and reluctantly agreed to join the Jewish Combat Organization, along with Labor Zionist youth movements Hashomer Hatzair, Dror, and Poale Zion. You know how the rest of the story goes.

In the decades preceding World War II, the Bund had been ideologically driven by two principles: doykeit and working-class solidarity. But by 1945, Zionism had become the near-unanimous position among Holocaust survivors, ex-Bundists included, with Jews in Displaced Persons camps advocating fervently for the British to open up the gates to Palestine. Both the U.S. government-sanctioned Harrison Report and a myriad of later surveys found that an overwhelming majority of stateless, destitute survivors—as many as 97%—demanded to go to Palestine and only Palestine, and when asked to list a second choice, thousands wrote, “crematoria.” Jewish DPs demonstrated against the British often, and they minced no words: “Eretz Israel for the People of Israel!” their signs read. “We demand to open the gates to Palestine!”

“They want to be evacuated to Palestine now, just as other national groups are being repatriated to their homes,” Earl G. Harrison noted in his report. “With respect to possible places of resettlement for those who may be stateless or who do not wish to return to their homes, Palestine is definitely and pre-eminently the first choice.”

So much for working-class solidarity, and so much for doykeit.

The resurrection of the Jewish Labor Bund, doykeit and all, at a time when antisemitic violence in the Diaspora parallels 1930s numbers, may suit the needs of elites who find Jewish national existence inconvenient. Never mind that the Bund’s anti-Zionism and today’s anti-Zionism have little in common. The Bund opposed the establishment of a not-yet-existing sovereign Jewish state, whereas today’s anti-Zionists demand the dissolution or outright destruction of an already-existing Jewish state, with 10 million citizens who are expected to somehow simply vanish—to avoid being murdered en masse by their neighbors.

As with all things social media, the fetishization of the Bund has not remained confined to social media. This April, an imprint of Penguin Random House published Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of The Jewish Bund, by anti-Zionist Jewish author and illustrator Molly Crabapple, which details a grade-school level history of the Bund, intertwined with her own family’s story, to a glowing review from The New York Times. That would be all well and good—fascinating, even!—except that in numerous interviews and in her own social media posts, Crabapple presents the Bund as the righteous path not taken. “We will win,” she wrote, alongside a screenshot of The New York Times article.

We will win? How noble-sounding. It’s as if the tragedies of the 20th century never happened for these people.

The early 20th century relationship between Zionism and Bundism can be characterized as a vigorous debate over the Jewish future, as Jews grappled with the disheartening realities of their newfound emancipation and empires splintered off into independent nation-states. It was the Holocaust that finally settled this debate—and not in the Bund’s favor.

In the DP camps, surviving Bundists, who’d long condemned Jewish emigration, particularly to Palestine, asked the British to reverse their anti-Jewish immigration policies to the Holy Land. In the words of longtime anti-Zionist Jewish writer and journalist Isaac Deutscher, “I have, of course, long since abandoned my anti-Zionism,” he said in 1954, “which was based on a confidence in the European labor movement, or, more broadly, a confidence in European society and civilization … 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. For the remnants of European Jewry, the Jewish state has become a historic necessity. It is also a living reality.”

A living reality. Indeed, after the Shoah, some of the fledgling remnants of the Bund reestablished themselves in the State of Israel, though, of course, their popularity had long plummeted.

What is it, then, that today’s neo-Bundists, devoid of any contextual historical understanding, are trying to accomplish? A reversal of this reality? And what, in practice, would that look like? Do seven million Israelis pack their bags and ship off to Poland, Germany, Iraq, Russia, Yemen, and the like? What would happen to them there? Does Israel turn into Palestine, and its Jewish citizens forsake their aboriginal rights, and the thriving society they have built, and cross their fingers and hope for the best, amid a population that openly sees their very presence in what they deem Islamic land as an affront to God? What form of justice would any of these insane gestures achieve?

I suppose that for people who live in a world of ideological abstraction, protected by their own wealth and privilege, the logistics of someone else’s life don’t really matter, as long as the inconvenience is removed. And listen, I get it. When your political understanding of your Jewish identity is rooted on such flimsy historical ground, you’ll hang onto whatever straws you can grasp.

“One of the many things that [Zionists] have done is they’ve tried to colonize all of Jewish history,” Crabapple stated in an interview with the New Internationalist, which just about sums it up the illustrator’s own childish and blinkered understanding of history. As the neo-Bundist argument goes, the Jewish community turned to Zionism, not out of lived experience, but out of trauma. In other words, the Holocaust so traumatized worldwide Jewry that it clouded our collective moral judgment, and turned us into oppressors, Nazis, settler-colonizers, génocidaires, and whatever other libel is in vogue at any given moment. This is, of course, an example of Holocaust inversion, which is itself a form of soft Holocaust denial.

What the neo-Bundists fail to grasp is that the post-World War II universal Jewish embrace of Zionism did not come from a Holocaust-induced moral lapse—if anyone is to contemplate moral lapses, it’s the Shoah’s perpetrators, rather than its victims—but from bitter conclusions drawn from lived realities. That is not to suggest, in any form, that the Bund bears responsibility for the Holocaust. That lies with the Nazis and their accomplices alone. But whatever the Bund had thought—about political organizing, about working-class solidarity, about doykeit—was proven false, on the largest and most consequential scale imaginable. Working-class solidarity only works when it is reciprocal, and it wasn’t. Hereness only holds real weight when Jews can find a place among neighbors, and they didn’t.

As for my great uncles, all six of them became partisans, most belonging to Zionist youth movements, though rumor has it one had been a Bundist. By the war’s end, five of them had been murdered all the same, their remains having long rotted into the earth in the forests of Poland, Zionist and Bundist alike. Only my great-uncle Szulim lived to tell the tale. By the time he reunited with my grandfather, who was only a child at the time, he was an ardent Zionist, braving Red Army checkpoints, the Austrian alps, and a DP camp in Italy for the slim shot that he might make a home in the Promised Land. He never did, but he remained a Zionist to his dying day.

Who are we to challenge his wisdom? Even today, anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors are an outlier, tokenized by Jew-haters to the high heavens. I hold no animosity toward the Bund, which did what it could, what it thought best, with the information that it had. Anybody could be forgiven for thinking that the Bund’s ideology would succeed in the 1920s, 1930s, and even into the early 1940s. But to continue to argue in its favor 80 years later, with the enormous privilege of hindsight, which the original Bundists didn’t have, and with the living achievement of a Jewish state in which the majority of the world’s Jews now live, is beyond historically ignorant and practically absurd. It’s indefensible.