Go back to Poland

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

• Antisemitism during the Gaza war
• From the river to the sea
• Go back to where you came from