This is the first in a series on Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country (Penguin Random House, 2026).
Molly Crabapple’s book about the Jewish Labour Bund is at its best when it stays in Warsaw. The chapters tracing the Bund’s origins in the Pale of Settlement, its years of street battles and general strikes, the generation that chose to stay in Poland and face what was coming, these are vivid and genuinely moving. Crabapple has spent serious time in the Bundist archives, and it shows. The book earns its emotional authority in Vilna and Warsaw. The book is also strikingly illustrated, Crabapple's own art giving the Bundist world a visual weight that prose alone couldn't achieve.
The problem is that the book uses the Bund’s story as a platform for a parallel argument about Zionism and Palestine, and the sourcing for that argument does not hold up. The errors appear at the center of the book’s political claims, in the chapters where its argument is most contested, and they are the kind of errors that compound: each one misrepresents a source, and several misrepresent the source cited in the footnote immediately attached to the claim.
What follows is a precise account of four of those errors. The sources used to correct each one are the same scholarly sources any careful reader of the period would reach for, and in one case, the source used to make the correction is the same source Crabapple herself cites.
Error 1: Lehi Did Not Exist in the 1930s
In Chapter 18, Crabapple writes that the Polish government provided “machine guns, Mauser rifles, and military training to three Zionist militias in Palestine — the Haganah, which secretly answered to David Ben-Gurion; Jabotinsky’s Irgun; and the fascist Lehi militia — even though all three groups had already murdered countless Palestinians.”
This sentence has a problem that no amount of sourcing can fix. Lehi did not exist in the 1930s. The organization was founded in 1940, when Avraham Stern broke from the Irgun after disagreeing with its decision to suspend attacks on the British following the outbreak of war with Germany. The chronology is established in every standard reference on the period.
Anita Shapira’s Israel: A History (Stanford, 2014) is explicit: Lehi was “led by Avraham Stern and founded in 1940 by an extremist Etzel splinter group.” Eugene Rogan’s The Arabs: A History (Basic Books, 2017) describes how “one faction in the Irgun dissented and continued its attacks on the British. The splinter group... are better known in the West as the Stern Gang, after the leader of the faction, Abraham Stern” — a split that Rogan dates to the decision to suspend hostilities in 1940.
The endnote for “three Zionist militias in Palestine” cites a 2018 web article from the Warsaw Institute, a Polish nationalist foundation established under the PiS government. The article does not support the claim. It explicitly states that “the main beneficiaries of the organized training were Irgun fighters,” describes the 1938 conference as attended by representatives of “Haganah and Irgun,” and correctly identifies Lehi as a 1940 creation.
The specific footnote anchor she links to is a postwar letter of personal thanks from one Lehi member. Not documentation of training.
Her cited source describes one militia receiving Polish military training, not three, and places Lehi’s founding after the period the claim describes.
The chronology is not contested. Every standard account of the period places the Stern Gang’s split from the Irgun in 1940 at the earliest.
Error 2: The Iron Wall Ends With Equal Rights
In Chapter 17, Crabapple summarizes Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay “The Iron Wall” as follows: it “shattered the genteel doublespeak of the Zionist Congress. In it, he said that, like all colonies, Israel could only be built by subjugating the native people. Palestinians would resist, as all native people do, and one had to either accept this or give up on Zionism and remain powerless and doomed in the diaspora.”
This is not wrong about what Jabotinsky argues in the essay’s first half. The Iron Wall does begin with the case that Palestinian Arab resistance to Jewish immigration is rational and will not be overcome by diplomacy or goodwill. That part of the argument she has right.
What she omits is the essay’s explicit conclusion. Jabotinsky writes that once Palestinians accept that the Jewish presence in Palestine is permanent and further resistance is futile, negotiation becomes possible, and his vision of that negotiated outcome is not subjugation but equality. The essay ends: “but if and when they find that further attempts at converting us [to accepting an Arab majority] are useless, then they will drop this stand, and both peoples will live together in the land as good neighbors, and mutual respect will grow.”
Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (California, 1996) summarizes the essay’s logic precisely: once Palestinian Arabs lost hope of ridding themselves of Jews, the moderates among them “would seek a platform of mutual concessions guaranteeing against removal, equal rights, or national self-determination; and I believe and hope that then we will be able to give them such guarantees.” Derek Penslar’s Zionism: An Emotional State (Princeton, 2023) notes that Jabotinsky “urged an uncompromising militance in the face of Arab opposition to Zionism, but he saw that opposition as rational and commanding of respect”, and that in his 1940 book The Jewish War Front, Jabotinsky envisioned complete equality for Arabs in a Jewish state, including a provision that “in every Cabinet where the Prime Minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab, and vice versa.”
Crabapple cites the primary source directly. Her mischaracterization is entirely her own reading, not inherited from a secondary source.
Dropping the explicit conclusion of an argument you are summarizing is not a minor omission.
Error 3: Individual Policemen Become Institutional Policy
In Chapter 17, Crabapple writes: “The new Labor Zionist paramilitary, the Haganah, sometimes kidnapped and sexually tortured Jewish women who dated Palestinian men.”
The footnote for this claim cites page 209 of Hillel Cohen’s Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 (Brandeis, 2015).
Cohen’s book is a serious and unflinching account of that year’s violence, deeply critical of Jewish conduct. What page 209 actually documents is a different and more specific thing: individual Hebrew policemen in Tel Aviv in 1924-25 who took enforcement action against Jewish women they accused of consorting with Arab men from Jaffa. Cohen describes one specific method used, which is genuinely harrowing. He does not attribute this to the Haganah as an institution, and the timeline, 1924-25, predates the period Crabapple is writing about in this chapter.
Cohen is in fact careful about attribution. He writes that “the Hebrew police seem to have stretched the concept of prostitution beyond its original meaning” — a formulation that captures the ambiguity of the situation, where some cases involved consensual relationships that the policemen chose to treat as prostitution. The transformation from individual Tel Aviv policemen in 1924-25 acting outside any institutional mandate, to Crabapple’s characterization of the Haganah as an organization with a policy of kidnapping and sexually torturing women, is not supported by the source cited.
The incident is real; the torture as policy is not.
Error 4: Two Errors Against Her Own Source
In Chapter 18, Crabapple writes: “British police beat Musa Kazim Pasha to death in 1933 at a protest in Jerusalem.”
The endnote cites page 212 of Michael Provence’s The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge, 2017).
What the passage actually says (pp.240-242 in my copy) is this: Musa Kazim did not die at the protest. He died five months later, in March 1934, not 1933. And Provence’s characterization is not “beaten to death” but that “many believed injuries received from British police hastened his death” — a meaningfully different claim about causation.
A contemporary JTA wire report from March 28, 1934, corroborates the date and further undermines the manner of death claim: it describes him as having “been in ill health for some time,” with no mention of a police beating as the cause of death. This was findable in a basic search. The claim in the book is wrong on two specific points, year and manner of death, and both corrections come from the source attached to the endnote.
A reader who pulled the book from a library shelf, or conducted basic fact checking would find the sources do not say what Crabapple claims.
The Pattern
These four errors are not independent. They share a structure: each one makes a Palestine-related claim more stark, more dramatic, or more attributable to organized Jewish institutional action than the cited source supports. Lehi is added to a list of militias where it cannot historically belong. The Iron Wall is presented as a permanent ideology of subjugation rather than a tactical argument with an explicit equal-rights endpoint. Individual policemen become institutional Haganah policy. A death from deteriorating health in 1934 becomes a beating to death in 1933.
The chapters where these errors appear, 17 and 18, have more footnotes per thousand words than any other section of the book, including the Holocaust chapters. That density creates an impression of rigorous sourcing. But as we will examine in the next post in this series, the footnotes in those chapters overwhelmingly cite Bundist sources about Warsaw. The Palestine-specific claims rest on approximately ten citations in total, and the majority of those citations either predate the institutions they describe, argue the opposite of what they are cited for, or, as in the case of Musa Kazim, simply do not say what Crabapple claims they say.
The Bund’s history deserves better than to be the scaffolding for claims this imprecise. The people the book memorializes — the Bundists who chose to stay and were murdered — are not well served by historical arguments about their antagonists that cannot survive contact with the sources used to support them.
Next in the series: The Footnote Architecture: How 77% of the citations in the Palestine chapters source events in Warsaw, and what the remaining 23% actually say.
Great work.
Good read! Thanks!