Winner Take All / Revolution Carousel

When I was a kid in the sixties, I learned that Hitler killed Jews, the US beat Hitler, and then, Jews got their own country: Israel!

In other words: yes, Jews suffered—a lot—but then, we got the biggest prize ever.

What’s the takeaway? Do your homework, and you’ll get ice cream.

More important: live your whole life this way: suffer, and win. No pain, no gain. Winner take all.

Well, why not tell our kids this stuff, when the truth is unbearable?

Who wants to acknowledge—let alone teach—that Holocausts lead to Nakbas; that oppressed Jews turn around and become oppressors of Palestinians?

My wife Gaia Abraxas wrote a brilliant song about this pathology, called “Revolution Carousel,” back in her days as lead singer in the band Clockwork Robin. I’m posting the music video below.

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I just finished reading Molly Crabapple’s masterwork, Here Where We Live Is Our Country—a book that supports and underscores a point Jack Zipes made in the blurb he wrote for my recent book, Oh No! Did My Family Screw Up the Middle East Peace Process?: “This is an intriguing and empathetic study of how Jews have sought to assimilate into anti-Semitic countries, only by copying their oppressors and attacking the oppressed. The irony is haunting.”

Now, I’ve drawn from Molly Crabapple’s book to write an extra passage in my own book:

Was Zionism colonialist or not? Zionist Jews argued that the Holy Land had been their national home since before any Arabs lived there—check the Bible—so the answer was, Zionism was not colonialist. Palestinian Arabs answered that any Jewish land claim expired long ago, and yes, Zionism was colonialist.

The anti-Zionist Jewish Labor Bund agreed with Palestinian Arabs. The Bund had spent forty years fighting for equal rights in the countries where Jews had lived for generations and felt the establishment of a Jewish nation in the land of Palestine provided one more excuse for antisemites to expel Jews from homes they did not want to leave. In a 1938 open letter, Jewish Labor Bund leader Henryk Erlich publicly contested his father-in-law Simon Dubnov’s support for a Jewish united front, writing:

The Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and make the Arabs second-class citizens….

If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs)…. Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow? Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?

—Quoted by Molly Crabapple in Here Where We Live Is Our Country, 2026.