Argument · heard from pro-Palestinian voices
“Jews don't need a state — they should live as equal citizens wherever they're from.”
Zionism accepted the antisemites' premise that Jews don't belong in Europe. The Jewish Bund had it right: 'here, where we live, is our country'. Jews should fight for equal rights where they live, not take someone else's land. And Israelis could go back to where their families came from.
Common pro-Palestinian argument — e.g. Helen Thomas
Where it's been said
“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine … They should go home, Poland, Germany, and America and everywhere else.”
Traps in play:◆ Judging by origin◆ The strict enemy frame
Why people find it convincing
- The Bund, founded in 1897, built a mass movement on doykeit, 'hereness': Jewish rights, Yiddish culture and socialism where Jews already lived. In Warsaw's December 1938 city elections it won 17 of the 20 seats that went to Jewish parties.
- Most of the world's Jews still live outside Israel, many of them safely and fully at home, above all in North America and Western Europe.
- Early Zionists sometimes did agree with antisemites that Jews were foreigners in Europe, and some antisemites supported Zionism for that reason.
- A new generation of Jewish writers and activists has revived the Bund's idea, for example Molly Crabapple's 2026 history of the Bund, 'Here Where We Live Is Our Country'.
What's true
'hereness' is a real Jewish tradition, and diaspora life can flourish.
The Bund was no fringe group. It was a mass Jewish party that fought for equal rights and dignity in Poland and Russia and organised Jewish self-defence against pogroms. Its idea that Jews belong where they live, as equal citizens, is the principle every liberal democracy now accepts, and much of Jewish life in the diaspora today proves it can work. Zionism's early claim that Jews could never be at home in Europe was, in part, a mirror of the antisemites' own.
historyWarsaw municipal elections, December 1938: the Bund wins 17 of 20 seats won by Jewish parties (1938) ⚠
historyMolly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (2026) (2026)
What's left out
The Bund's world was murdered, and 'where they're from' expelled half of Israel's Jews.
Hereness depended on the neighbours. The Bund's Poland was destroyed in the Holocaust. Its representative in London, Szmul Zygielbojm, took his own life in May 1943 to protest the world's indifference, and Bundists fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, survivors who went home were met with pogroms like Kielce's (1946). About half of Israeli Jews descend from communities in Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt and elsewhere that were driven out or pushed out after 1948, so 'go back where you're from' points them to countries that expelled them. Most Israeli Jews were born in Israel, often to parents who were too. The idea that Jews should be safe wherever they live is right, and it includes the place where seven million of them now live.
Traps here:◆ Judging by origin◆ Which territory?
primary documentSzmul Zygielbojm's last letter, 11 May 1943 (Yad Vashem) (1943) ⚠
Where it leads if pressed
From 'Jews belong everywhere' to 'Jews don't belong here'.
The Bund's principle was inclusive: Jews belong where they live. Turned against Israel, it becomes the opposite, a claim that one place is the exception where Jews may not live, and that seven million people should 'go back'. That's the step from a diaspora ethic to a demand for expulsion. The honest version survives: Jews should be safe and equal everywhere, which means both fighting antisemitism in the diaspora and accepting that Israel is now one of the places where Jews live.
Traps here:◆ The strict enemy frame
The usual reply — and its own traps
Arguments travel in pairs. Here is what the other side typically answers. Check whether both lean on the same trick.
heard from pro-Israel voices“Jews can only be safe as a majority in their own state.”