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Anti-Zionism and the Expulsion of Jews from Poland in 1968

Sept. 19 2016

In 1968, the Polish Communist party unleashed a wave of “anti-Zionist” propaganda, expelled Jews en masse from the party and from the military, and effectively forced many out of the country. This attack on the Jews was a product of the Eastern bloc’s turn against Israel in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, latent anti-Semitism, internal dynamics of the Polish and Soviet governments, and the Polish regime’s attempt to redirect popular unrest away from itself and onto the Jews. Simon Gansinger writes:

The assault on the Jews teemed with declarations against “anti-Semitism.” At countless rallies, people carried signs that read “Anti-Semitism—No! Anti-Zionism—Yes!” Yet of the 8,300 members expelled from the Communist party, nearly all were Jewish. Almost 9,000 Jews lost their jobs and hundreds were thrown out of their apartments. The regime allowed Jewish citizens to leave the country under two conditions: they must revoke their citizenship, and they must declare Israel as the country of their destination. Thereby the regime legitimized the purge in the most cynical fashion: why would these people go to Israel if they hadn’t been Zionists all along? . . .

After Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, the member states of the Warsaw Pact, with the exception of Romania, cut diplomatic ties with Israel. The developments in Poland, however, soon took a peculiar course. On June 19, 1967, one week after the suspension of diplomatic relations with Israel, Władysław Gomułka, [the de-facto head of state], made a remarkable comment on the Polish dimensions of the events in the Middle East. Some Polish Jews, he was sorry to hear, sympathized with the enemies of socialism, the “Israeli aggressors,” thereby forfeiting their claim to be loyal Polish citizens. These people were not just morally reprehensible; they also constituted a potential “fifth column” in the country, which had to be eradicated before it could gain strength.

The significance of Gomułka’s “fifth column” remark can hardly be overestimated. The term invoked a well-organized Zionist conspiracy whose center was to be found in the Jewish community, which in 1967 counted no more than 30,000 members out of a Polish population of 32 million.

Read more at Fathom

More about: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Communism, History & Ideas, Polish Jewry, Six-Day War

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic