Go back to Poland

Go Back to Poland^[a] is a slogan directed at Israelis and Jewish people. Instances of the slogan generated criticism and accusations of antisemitism when they were heard at pro-Palestine protests in Europe and North America during the Gaza war.^[1][2]

Historical context

Historian Robin Douglas traces the origin of the sentiment embodied in the slogan "go back to Poland" back to nineteenth-century Protestantism, when Jews were seen as exiles and unauthentically European. With the wave of Jewish immigration to Western Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, the arrivin 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.^[3]

Within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

In the Palestinian discourse, the idea of Zionism as settler colonialism emerged in the 1960s during the decolonization of Africa and the Middle East, and re-emerged in Israeli academia in the 1990s led by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, particularly the New Historians, who refuted some of Israel's foundational mythos and considered the Nakba to be ongoing.^[4][5][6] It is through this framework^{[improper synthesis?]} that some Palestinians have demanded Israelis who migrated to the region of Palestine (alternatively the Land of Israel) to return to their "land of origin".^[3]

Usage

In 1938, British politician Robert Bower told London-born Jewish member of parliament Emanuel Shinwell to "go back to Poland."^[7]

In 2000, a Jewish student at UC Irvine was told to "go back to Russia."^[8] The same slogan was alleged in a lawsuit to have been used against a 2002 pro-Israel rally at San Francisco State University.^[9][10]

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.^[11]

Gaza war university protests

See also: 2024 pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses

The slogan "go back to Poland" was heard at anti-Gaza war protests on university campus protests after the October 7 attacks.^[3][12][13] In November 2023, the slogan was yelled at Jewish students at Queens College, City University of New York.^[14] In Canada, Université de Montréal professor Yanise Arab was suspended after shouting "Go back to Poland, sharmouta! (whore)" during a protest in November 2023.^[15] The slogan was also directed towards students at protests at Columbia University,^[16][17][18] at Stanford University,^[19][20] and at University College London.^[21] In June 2024, protestors at UCLA told a Chabad Rabbi to "go back to Poland or Ukraine" and "go back to Europe."^{[22][better source needed]} Canadian Member of Parliament Anthony Housefather reported "Go back to Poland" being chanted at university encampments in 2024,^[23] and videos showed the expression being chanted at protests in Toronto.^[24]

Analysis

In 2016, Rusi Jaspal analyzed the statements and sentiment in the Iranian press that Israeli Jews "should go back to their origins." Jaspal writes that these statements are meant to delegitimize any historical Jewish connection to Israel, in opposition to the Palestinian Arabs. He says that the description of Israelis as "Ashkenazi Zionist Jews from Europe," despite most Israelis being of non-European origin, is meant to cast Israel as a racist occupation rooted in European colonialist policies.^[25]

In his 2024 book Where Are Jews at Home?, 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."^[3] Douglas and lawyer Nathan Lewin^[26] both contend that the slogans are a continuation of the calls for Jews to move to Palestine^[27] during the Nazi era. Lewin reflects on contemporary antisemitic rhetoric, drawing a historical parallel to his father's experience in 1937 Łódź, where he was told to “Go to Palestine.” Lewin argues that both expressions function as exclusionary attacks rooted in enduring antisemitism, then directed at Jews living in Europe, now at Jews supporting or living in Israel.^[26]

A 2024 report from the Jewish Advisory Committee at Stanford University called the slogan "go back to Brooklyn", which was heard during campus protests, "part of the broader antisemitic lexicon."^[20] Professor Philipp Lenhard [de] considers the slogan to be a form of "postcolonial antisemitism," which expresses the wish that Jews would "disappear, preferably to the land of Auschwitz and Kielce."^[28] A similar view was taken by Professor James R. Russell in a 2024 Times of Israel blog post, where he argued that those chanting "go back to Poland" were specifically referring to the Treblinka and Auschwitz concentration camps.^[29]

Author Seth Greenland described the phrase as "grotesque and willfully misinformed."^[30] According to trauma therapists Miri Bar-Halpern and Jaclyn Wolfman, the phrase is an instance of "exclu[sion] as a form of traumatic invalidation [...] sending the message that Jews do not belong and are unwanted."^[31]

Within the Arab-Israeli conflict

In 2016, Rusi Jaspal analyzed the statements and sentiment in the Iranian press that Israeli Jews "should go back to their origins." Jaspal writes that these statements are meant to delegitimize any historical Jewish connection to Israel, in opposition to the native Palestinians. He says that the description of Israelis as "Ashkenazi Zionist Jews from Europe," despite most Israelis being of non-European origin, is meant to cast Israel as a racist occupation rooted in European colonialist policies.^[25]

In her 2022 book, Sina Arnold contends that the left-wing use of the slogan against non-Israeli Jews is part of a trend of Jews being negatively associated with Israel, and being blamed for Israeli policy. She cites a case of a 2015 Black Lives Matter anti-gentrification rally outside a marijuana dispensary in Seattle, where the Jewish owner was told to "go back to Germany" and "let them Nazis get on you again." The owner was identified in a speech given outside as an Israeli who served in the Israel Defense Forces. The owner, however, was an American who had never visited Israel, and whose family had lived in the neighbourhood for multiple generations.^[32]

Jo-Ann Mort of The Guardian called the usage of the phrase in the context of Israel ironic, pointing to the fact that the majority of the Jewish population in Israel are the children or grandchildren of those who made aliyah to Israel, namely from Europe and the MENA region. She also pointed to Mizrahi Jews, who lived in the Middle East and North Africa before the establishment of the state, outnumbering Ashkenazi Jews in Israel as well as the presence of Indian Jews and Ethiopian Jews in Israel, most of whom never lived in Europe.^[33]

See also

• From the river to the sea
• Go back to where you came from
• Perpetual foreigner
• Rootless cosmopolitan
• Zionism as settler colonialism

Notes

1. Alternative toponyms used in the slogan include: America (James 2010), Brooklyn (Douglas 2024), Germany (Walker 2024), Ukraine, Europe (Starr 2024), or Russia (Marcus 2015).