Jump to content

Go back to Poland

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Citation bot (talk | contribs) at 01:39, 13 May 2025 (Alter: pages, title, template type. Add: newspaper, magazine. Removed parameters. Formatted dashes. Some additions/deletions were parameter name changes. | Use this bot. Report bugs. | Suggested by Folkezoft | #UCB_toolbar). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Go Back to Poland[1] is an anti-Israel and antisemitic slogan. It is often heard at pro-Palestine protests in Europe and North America during the Gaza war.

Historical Context

Palestinian Nationalism

Many Jews who immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, and then to Israel, are of Eastern European origin. However, most Jews in Israel are from—or descendants of—Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, and are Mizrahi or Sephardic.[2] The Global Investment firm CCLEX estimates that about 90% of Israelis lack a second citizenship.[3] About 80% of the Jews in Israel were born in Israel, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics.[4] Nonetheless, the view that most Israeli Jews are foreigners and should be ethnically cleansed from a future Palestinian state has been a cornerstone of Palestinian nationalism since its inception.[5]

In the mid-1930s, the Husseini and Nashashibi families were vying for leadership of the Palestinian National movement. According to historian Benny Morris "the two parties were at one in their objectives—a Palestine ruled solely by the Arabs, perhaps with a Jewish minority."[6] In 1937, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the head of the Arab Higher Committee indicated his goal to remove Jews from a future Palestinian Arab state to the Peel Commission.[7]

The Palestinian National Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) asseverates the goal of "destroy[ing] the Zionist and imperialist presence," stipulating, however, that the Jews who were exempt from this excision were those "who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion." This date normally corresponds to 1917 or 1882; what is to be done with the remaining 2.5 million Israeli Jews whose families immigrated since then is left unexplained in the text of the Charter.[8] The political goal of the PLO, like virtually all other Palestinian nationalist organizations, has been to replace Israel with a Palestinian state, and remove some large part of the Jewish population within its borders.[9] This view was seconded by the chief spokesman of Hezbollah, who reported that their goal "is to liberate the 1948 borders of Palestine," and the Jews who survive "can go back to Germany, or wherever they came from."[10] Hamas, an Islamist political party in control of Gaza and enjoys a plurality of support in the West Bank,[11] is explicit in their goal of expelling or exterminating Jews in Israel.[12]

Christian Europe

Historian Robin Douglas traces back the origin of the sentiment embodied in the slogan "go back to Poland" to nineteenth-century Protestantism. Jews were seen as exiles and inauthentically European. With the wave Jewish immigration to Western Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, the arriving Jews were again seen as both foreigners and also colonizers of Western Europe. By the 1930s, "go back to Palestine" had become a popular antisemitic insult.[13]

Usage

The slogan "go back to Poland" has been used as an attack against Jews since at least the nineteenth century. In 1938, British politician Robert Bower told London-born Jewish member of parliament Emanuel Shinwell to "go back to Poland."[14]

In June 2010, Helen Thomas, former dean of the White House press corps, retired from her Hearst position after remarking that Israeli Jews should "return" to Poland, Germany, and America.[15]

The slogan "go back to Poland" became especially widespread on anti-Gaza war protests on university campus protests after October 7 2023.[13][16][17] In November 2023, the slogan was yelled at Jewish students at Queens College, City University of New York.[18] The slogan was also directed towards students at protests at Columbia University,[19][20] at Stanford University,[21][22] and at University College London.[23] In June 2024, protestors at UCLA told a Chabad Rabbi to "go back to Poland or Ukraine" and "go back to Europe."[24]

In Canada, Université de Montréal professor Yanise Arab was suspended after shouting "Go back to Poland, sharmouta! (whore)" during a protest in November 2023.[25] Canadian Member of Parliament Anthony Housefather reported "Go back to Poland" being chanted at university encampments in 2024,[26] and videos showed the expression being chanted at protests in Toronto.[27]

Analysis

Robin Douglas asserts that the slogan is an antisemitic call that should be viewed within the broader historical context of Jews being "alien in Europe" and being externally assigned their own "moral and political visions."[13] Douglas and lawyer Nathan Lewin[28] both contend that the slogans are a continuation of the calls for Jews to move to Palestine[29] during the Nazi period.

A Stanford University report on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias calls the slogan "go back to Brooklyn", which was heard during campus protests, "part of the broader antisemitic lexicon."[22] Professor Philipp Lenhard considers the slogan to be a form of "postcolonial antisemitism," which expresses the wish that Jews would "please disappear, preferably to the land of Auschwitz and Kielce."[30] A similar view is taken by Professor James R. Russell, who argued that those chanting "go back to Poland" do not "mean a café in the Glowny Rynek in Krakow or the quiet reading room of the Polin Museum in Warsaw. They mean Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau."[31]

Author Seth Greenland described the "go back to Poland" slogan as "grotesque and willfully misinformed."[32]

See Also

Go back to where you came from

References

  1. ^ Alternative toponyms used in the slogan include: America (Frank 2010), Brooklyn (Douglas 2024), Germany (Walker 2024), Ukraine, or Europe (Starr 2024).
  2. ^ Mitchell, Travis (8 March 2016). "Identity". Pew Research Center.
  3. ^ "Israel". Dual Citizenship.
  4. ^ "Press Release: 65th Independence Day" (PDF). Central Bureau of Statistics. Retrieved 12 May 2025.
  5. ^ Morris 2013: "The Palestinian national movement started life with a vision and goal of a Palestinian Muslim Arab-majority state in all of Palestine—a one-state “solution”—and continues to espouse and aim to establish such a state down to the present day. Moreover, and as a corollary, al-Husseini, the Palestinian national leader during the 1930s and 1940s; the PLO, which led the national movement from the 1960s to Arafat’s death in November 2004; and Hamas today—all sought and seek to vastly reduce the number of Jewish inhabitants in the country, in other words, to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Al-Husseini and the PLO explicitly declared the aim of limiting Palestinian citizenship to those Jews who had lived in Palestine permanently before 1917 (or, in an-other version, to limit it to those fifty thousand-odd Jews and their descendants). This goal was spelled out clearly in the Palestinian National Charter and in other documents. Hamas has been publicly more reserved on this issue, but its intentions are clear.
    "The Palestinian vision was never, as described by various Palestinian spokesmen in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to Western journalists, of a “secular, democratic Palestine” (it certainly sounded more palatable than, say, the “destruction of Israel,” which was the goal it was meant to paper over or camouflage). Indeed, “a secular democratic Palestine” had never been the goal of Fatah or the so-called moderate groups that dominated the PLO between the 1960s and the 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power."
  6. ^ Morris 2013, p. 101
  7. ^ Peel Commission 1937: "But it must be remembered that those Jewish minorities elsewhere are relatively very small and that the Jewish minority in Palestine is already regarded by the Arabs as too big. On this point the following questions put to the Mufti of Jerusalem and his replies should be noted:
    "Q. Does His Eminence think that this country can assimilate and digest the 400,000 Jews now in the country?
    "A. No.
    "Q. Some of them would have to be removed by a process kindly or painful as the case may be?
    "A. We must leave all this to the future.
    "We are not questioning the sincerity or the humanity of the Mufti’s intentions and those of his colleagues; but we cannot forget what recently happened, despite treaty provisions and explicit assurances, to the Assyrian minority in ‘Iraq; nor can we forget that the hatred of the Arab politician for the National Home has never been concealed and that it has now permeated the Arab population as a whole."
  8. ^ Morris 2013, p. 113: "Hence, only Jews who had lived in the country permanently before 1917 (or 1882) would be considered citizens of post-Zionist Palestine. Of course, by 1968 few of Israel’s 2.5 million Jews had been permanent residents of Palestine before 1917 (or 1882). What was to be done with those still living from among the millions of post-1882 or post-1917 immigrants and their descendants was not explained."
  9. ^
    • Sayigh 1997: "The outlines of Fateh's political thinking took shape as these various strands came together. Its ultimate goal was clear: to liberate the whole of Palestine and destroy the foundations of what it termed a colonialist, Zionist occupation state and society. In short, Fateh sought to destroy Israel as an economic, political, and military entity and restore Palestine as it still existed in the mind of most Palestinians, the homeland that was before 1948. There was little difference between Fateh and any other Palestinian group in this respect (with the solitary exception of the communists).
      "Here was little room for the Jews in this outlook. The original Jewish community in Palestine, that pre-dated the British mandate, could remain but would do so under unequivocally Arab sovereignty. The majority of the Israeli population were an 'alien human assembly', however."
    • Ross 2005: "The PLO has its own policy of denial and rejection. Its charter called for the eradication of the Zionist entity (i.e., Israel); the departure from Palestine of all the Jews who arrived after the Balfour Declaration; and the creation of a binational democratic state in which Palestinians would be the decisive majority and Jews a distinct minority."
  10. ^ Goldberg, Jeffrey (6 October 2002). "In the Party of God". The New Yorker. Vol. New Yorker.
  11. ^ "Press Release: Public Opinion Poll No (93)". www.pcpsr.org. Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. 17 September 2024.
  12. ^ Hamas 1988: "Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: 'The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.' (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem)."
  13. ^ a b c Douglas, Robin (2024). Hirsh, David; Freedman, Rosa (eds.). Where Are Jews at Home?. London New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. pp. 37–43. ISBN 9781003497295.
  14. ^ "Shinwell Slaps M.P. in Commons for Taunt, 'go Back to Poland'". 5 April 1938. Archived from the original on 3 May 2014.
  15. ^ James, Frank (7 June 2010). "Helen Thomas 'Retires' After Anti-Israeli Jew Remarks". NPR.
  16. ^ Bickerton, James (15 June 2024). "Jewish students told "go back to Poland" at campus rallies". Newsweek. Newsweek.
  17. ^ "Opinion: How to confront antisemitism, deal with protests — and respect free speech". Washington Post. 29 April 2024.
  18. ^ Walker, Jackson (21 June 2024). "NYC college officials attended anti-Israel lecture school slammed as 'abhorrent'". CBS Austin.
  19. ^ Heath, Elliot (October 23, 2024). "A year of protests at Columbia". Columbia Daily Spectator. Columbia Spectator.
  20. ^ Ferré-Sadurní, Luis; Edmonds, Colbi; Cruz, Liset (22 April 2024). "Some Jewish Students Are Targeted as Protests Continue at Columbia". The New York Times.
  21. ^ Diamond, Larry; Koseff, Jeffrey. "How Stanford can do away with campus antisemitism". Washington Post.
  22. ^ a b Diamond, Larry; Koseff, Jeff; Brest, Paul; Einav, Shirit; Gurwitz, Emily; Hahn-Tapper, Laurie; Kirschner, Jessica; Levav, Jonathan; Levine, Emily J.; Rosten, Rachel; Stone, Jeffrey; Smith, Gaby. ""It's in the Air": Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias at Stanford, and How to Address It" (PDF). Stanford University.
  23. ^ Bolton, Will; Barton, Alex (5 May 2024). "Pro-Palestine demonstrators 'spat and spewed anti-Semitic remarks' at counter-protesters". The Telegraph.
  24. ^ Starr, Michael (11 June 2024). "UCLA Chabad rabbi assaulted, told to go back to Poland". The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com. Jerusalem Post.
  25. ^ Lowrie, Morgan (November 10, 2023). "Université de Montréal suspends lecturer filmed at Israel-Hamas protest | Globalnews.ca". Global News. Global News. The Canadian Press.
  26. ^ Riga, Andy (May 27, 2024). "Antisemitism is a 'significant problem' on campus, McGill and Concordia admit". Montreal Gazette.
  27. ^ "Globe editorial: When protests become acts of intimidation". The Globe and Mail. 5 January 2024.
  28. ^ Lewin, Nathan. "Opinion: 'Go Back to Poland!' Resonates With Me". WSJ.
  29. ^ "Norway - Photograph". Holocaust Encyclopedia.; Malul, Chen (30 January 2019). "Hate in Nazi Germany as Photographed from the Back of a Motorcycle". The Librarians. National Library of Israel.
  30. ^ Lenhard, Philipp (1 December 2024). ""Go Back to Poland!" Der Zionismus, Palästina und das Paradigma des Siedlerkolonialismus". Historische Zeitschrift. 319 (3): 585–600. doi:10.1515/hzhz-2024-0035.
  31. ^ Russell, James R. "The Blogs: "Go back to Poland"". blogs.timesofisrael.com.
  32. ^ Greenland, Seth (6 May 2024). "Opinion: Have we learned nothing? The protester's taunt, 'Go back to Poland,' is grotesque". Los Angeles Times.

Bibliography

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Go_back_to_Poland&oldid=1290138362"