Telling Jewish people to go back to Poland or other countries from whence they came, as if they do not belong where they live presently, is a frequently utilized anti-Semitic trope.
By Rachel Avraham
Palestinian Media Watch recently reported that PA TV recently announced, “A simple solution is possible for the Israelis and for their sense of insecurity in the region because they are a foreign body planted in this region due to international considerations following World War I and World War II. Let the Pole go back to Poland, the Russian to Russia, the Briton to Britain, and those who came from [North] Africa and from the Arab countries to the Arab countries from which the Jews left. That’s how the Jewish problem can be solved and that’s how they can enjoy stability and peace.”
Palestinian Media Watch declared, “A fundamental part of the PA’s ideology of hate is that Jews will never have peace in Israel because Israel is a colonial implant with no right to exist. The irony of this PA hate-speech is that the PA has been saying for years that the world created the State of Israel to solve its “Jewish problem”.”
For example, Official PA daily columnist Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul wrote: “Who established Israel? The capitalist Western states – the US and Britain and the rest of the European group… They established this illegitimate state to resolve the Jewish problem that gave them no rest.”
Palestinian Media Watch explains Palestinian policy as follows: “It seems the PA wants the world to play ping-pong with the Jews. The Europeans sent their Jews to Israel to solve their “Jewish problem,” and now the PA wants Israel’s Jews back in Poland to solve its “Jewish problem.” According to the PA, the Jews are everyone’s problem everywhere they are, and that is why everyone hates them and wants to be rid of them.”
According to Palestinian Media Watch, “This is such a basic part of PA ideology that Mahmoud Abbas did not hesitate to say it even while speaking to ambassadors at the UN: “Britain and the United States… decided to establish and plant a foreign entity [Israel]… The truth is that these Western countries wanted to get rid of the Jews” [Archive news, YouTube channel, May 15, 2023].”
Palestinian Media Watch continued, “A website of the PA’s ruling Fatah party put this PA hate message into a cartoon, headlined “Get out of my country,” which depicts a dark-skinned Palestinian kicking the buttocks of a light-skinned Israeli and causing him to go flying—apparently, all the way to Poland. The Palestinian Authority most definitely has a Jewish problem—it is called Antisemitism.”
Telling Jewish people to go back to Poland or other countries from whence they came, as if they do not belong where they live presently, is a frequently utilized anti-Semitic trope. A couple of years ago, the New York Post reported that a Wall Street analyst was actually fired for telling a Jewish American to “go back to your country” while he also covered hostage posters with signs accusing Israel of being an “apartheid state” committing “genocide.” However, telling Jews to go back to Poland in particular has historical baggage for the Jewish people.
For over a thousand years, Poland was the most significant home to the Ashkenazi Jewish community worldwide. In 1939, over three million Jews lived in Poland. However, the Holocaust brutally destroyed 90% of the Polish Jewish community, with many of the worst death camps such as Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau located on Polish soil. The Holocaust was the worst genocide in human history, resulting in the massacre of six million innocent Jewish men, women and children.
While the Nazis preserved much of the remnants of Jewish civilization in the Czech Republic so that it could be a museum of the culture that they vanquished, thus making Prague a very attractive tourist destination for Jews as much of the rich Jewish history in the country survived the Holocaust, Poland is no Prague. It was designated by the Nazis to be a mass extermination site. For this reason, Poland is a traumatic place in the Jewish historical collective conscious, with not many places of Jewish significance to visit outside of death camps. For this reason, only Jewish students of the Holocaust and other Jews attracted to dark tourism visit Poland.
Nevertheless, the great historian Bernard Lewis wrote in Semites and Anti-Semites that when the Holocaust was over, about 80,000 Jews who were born in the East European country returned to Poland in 1945, hoping to rebuild their lives that were shattered in the Holocaust in their country of origin. However, Lewis writes that due to anti-Semitism, the Poles refused to accept the Jews back, even after the Nazis were gone: “The first serious anti-Jewish outbreak occurred in Cracow on August 11, 1945. It was followed by others all over Poland, in which some hundreds of returning Jews were murdered by mobs. The worst occurred in the city of Kielce in June 1946, in which dozens of returning Jews were killed by their neighbors.”
“The civil authorities did little to end these murderous outbreaks,” Lewis wrote. “The ecclesiastical authorities refused to denounce the hatred which had caused them. The attitude of the people, the church, and authorities to these events quickly persuaded the remaining Jews that the thousand-year-long history of Jews in Poland had come to an end and that only by going elsewhere could they hope to rebuild their shattered lives. For most of them, elsewhere meant a place where their survival would not be dependent on the goodwill of their neighbors or the protection of some alien authority.” The Holocaust thus is a reminder of why there always should be a State of Israel, and why no one has a right to tell Jews to “go back to Poland.”
Photo from Palestinian Media Watch: https://palwatch.org/page/36965.
