olution to come would do away with anti-Semitism and pogroms. Jews should forget about being Jews as so much bourgeois nonsense. On the other hand, the Bundists (called this because they were members of the ArbeiterBund, or Workers' League in German and Yiddish) were socialists who believed that, keeping their own identity, Jews should fight as Jews for a new socialist and democratic society in their European homelands, thus solving the Jewish Question once and for all. The Zionist preached a different gospel. There was no place for the Jews anywhere but in Palestine. It was all right to be socialistsbut only in their own historical homeland. Neither communism nor social-democracy would be able to do away with anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism, according to the Zionist doctrine, was the inevitable result of the very existence of the Jews as a minority.
These three doctrines, then, were mutually exclusive, and fighting among them was bitter, made more so by the intense competition among them. Young Jews in czarist Russia were the best recruits for every revolutionary movement; if one became a Zionist, he was lost to the Bolsheviks, and vice versa. Thus the enmity that arose among these movements went far beyond mere ideological quibbling. To this day, Soviet Russia's attitude toward Israel is influenced by the ancient hatred, imbedded in the mentality of all old-guard Bolsheviks and their pupils. The same hatred, at times bordering on the pathological, is just as typical of old-time Zionists. When Russia sided with the Arabs in the 1967 war, people in Israel were only confirmed in their belief that the Soviets want to destroy Israel, a belief to which Ben-Gurion is a life-long adherent.
The synagogue of Plonsk was an arena for all these early fights. Zionists, Bundists, Bolsheviks and many others gathered there from all over Russia to preach and proselytize. Local talent joined in these jousts. The most effective of the native speakers was the son of Avigdor Green, a boy who started making speeches in his early teens. Young