A deep historical irony of anti-Zionism: lessons from Poland

Some sections of the pro-Palestine protest movement have taunted Jews with cries of “Go back to Poland” or “Go back to Russia”.

This dismissal of Jews' right to be in Israel has a particular irony if you understand the history of Poland and Russia, where Jews were often told to “Go to Palestine”.

The contemporary anti-Zionist movement frequently denies the Jewish indigenous connection to Israel. Historically, on the other hand, antisemites have sought to emphasise that very connection, implying Israel/Palestine is the only place where Jews belong.

I was startled when I first came across the way Jews had been told to leave Europe for Palestine during the Holocaust. In a 1948 Polish report ‘Hitlerite Crimes in Jaroslaw’ survivor Alexander Lubasz testified that as the town’s 7,000 Jews were forced across the San River by the Nazis , they were met with a mocking inscription scrawled in chalk on the bridge railings: “Kierunek do Palestyny” (Directions to Palestine).

I thought this was remarkable and perhaps unique, but I could not have been more mistaken. Phrases such as ” Żydzi do Palestyny!” (Jews [go] to Palestine!) occur repeatedly in the history of East European antisemitism.

The examples I found span well over a century. The earliest was an1884 extended work of verse “The Return of the Jews to Palestine” (the noun return deserves attention), a violent antisemitic fantasy by the renowned Polish-Kashubian writer Hieronim Derdowski.The most recent occurred in 2009, when a woman in Krakow received a suspended sentence for telling two Jewish women “Heil Hitler, Jews go to Palestine”.

In the “Memory Books” that contain the elegy for Polish Jewry, the phrase is recalled again and again: by a Jewish refugee who attempted to return to Warsaw after World War I; by a non-Jewish resistance fighter who aided Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ; by a Holocaust survivor in Pabianice in early 1939.

Some incidents are staggeringly cruel. A Holocaust survivor who survived the war posing as a Catholic Pole records that ethnic Poles taunted Jews being transported to death camps: with abuse that include both "Jews to Palestine!" and "Jews to the oven!"

After World War Two, hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews returned to Poland only to be met by mass antisemitic violence from their Polish neighbours, as murderously antisemitic nationalist partisans fought the Communists for control of the country. “Jews to Palestine” was part of the language of these often deadly attacks.

The murder of Dawid Grassgrün, who returned to Nowy Targ in southern Poland in 1945 only to be shot dead in his home on 10 February 1946, is unusually well-documented and contains rare primary material attached to the Polish partisans, giving some insight into the mental universe of these murderers. Following Grassgrün’s murder, a series of leaflets were distributed around the area to warn other Jews against returning. The hatred in the pamphlet Żydzi i Zydziątka (literally “Jews and Little Jews”) is ferocious but to modern eyes the vision of where Jews belong is telling:

Flee yids, while there’s still time,
Palestine is your country,
Or we’ll take you all to the woods,
Where there’ll be blissful paradise.
It’s the end of the golden freedom,
Time to [follow] Gras[s]grün,
Run, as we have a great urge to beat you, murder and shoot you..

By the astoundingly cynical anti-Zionist purge of 1968 in Poland, which finally ended a millennium of organised Jewish life in Poland, “Jews to Palestine” had mutated into “Zionists to Israel”.

Much current discourse on Israel/Palestine rests upon the supposed Israeli colonist/Palestinian indigeneous binary. This is a crass misunderstanding of the refugee exoduses that created modern Israel and ignores the profound connection of Jews to Israel.

It also fails to acknowledge the truth that Jews have nowhere else they belong.

Poland was once a diverse, multinational state, and I would never claim that Jews had no right to live in Poland (or any other country). However, while millions of Jews once lived in Poland, they were never considered Poles.

Calls to send Jews in Israel “back to where they came from” abuse the concept of indigeneity, because for minorities, recognition of “indigeneity” depends on the whims of the dominant population. Israel is the only that has ever found a place for Jews.

Ben Wexler’s outstanding essay “The Eternal Settler” coins the term “decolonial antisemitism”, which is instructive in decoding the absurd spectacle of self-described progressives shouting “go back to where you came from” at Jews. "Decolonisation" may be a fairly recent and frequently abused buzzword, but it is a variation on a theme that has characterised antisemitic persecution throughout the ages. The terminology has changed but the message has not: We are the native sons of the land. Jews are the weeds that poison the soil.

In a superb essay, Phoebe Maltz Bovy asks the provocative question: Where, on planet Earth, would a Jew not be considered a settler?

How do Jews fit within our paradigm of indigeneity? Where exactly can they “go back to”, and where do Jews deserve self-determination, safety and belonging? For some, then and now, the answer appears to be “nowhere”.