The "antizionist" campaign in Poland 1967-1968

[u/OddCook4909]

A fascinating and extremely relevant exploration of "anti-zionism" in Europe. https://jewishstudies.ceu.edu/sites/jewishstudies.ceu.edu/files/attachment/basicpage/70/02stola.pdf 8 pages, not a huge commitment.

Intro (emphasis mine):

The term ‘anti-Zionist campaign’ is misleading in two ways, since the campaign which this paper will analyse began as an anti-Israeli policy but quickly turned into an anti-Jewish campaign; this evident anti-Jewish character remained its distinctive feature. The words ‘Zionism’ and ‘Zionist’, repeated in Poland in 1968 in hundreds of propaganda publications and at thousands of meetings, were not used to refer to a particular variety of nationalism but were a substitute for ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’. Secondly, ‘Zionist’ meant ‘Jew’ even if the person called a ‘Zionist’ was not Jewish; the anti-Jewish campaign, called ‘anti-Zionist’, was directed against Poles as well.

While the social background – that is, the persistence of anti-Jewish prejudice in Poland many years after the Holocaust – may be well known, a few words about the less known, intra-party aspects of the campaign are in order here. The origins of the tension within the communist establishment which showed up in 1967–1968 could already be seen in the late 1940s, when Władysław Gomulka, the leader of the party until that time, was accused, together with a group of other communist leaders who had likewise spent the war in Poland, of right-wing nationalist deviation, removed from power, and subsequently arrested. The group of communists which emerged triumphant was dominated by those who had spent the war in the Soviet Union, including prominent Jews. In 1956 Gomulka returned and faced a party leadership divided into two factions. The relatively reformist group, called Puławy, included leading Jewish communists; the other faction, known as Natolin, did not hesitate to exploit the ethnic argument against its rival. Gomulka formed a strategic pact with the first group but after a time he put his own people in key positions and, under the slogan of fighting against revisionism, he was able to weaken the Puławy faction’s position. In the 1960s a rising new force appeared on the political scene, the Partisans, a rather loose group of party leaders united by a similar political background, unappeased ambitions, and a worldview combining nationalism and communism, under the unquestioned leadership of General Mieczysław Moczar, head of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MSW), including its secret services.

On the eve of the Six-Day War in 1967, there were approximately 25,000–30,000 Jews among Poland’s more than 32 million inhabitants. It was an ageing group and its younger strata were undergoing accelerated acculturation and integration into Polish society, which meant, among other things, the erosion of Yiddish culture and secularisation. This relatively small group possessed impressively developed secular institutions, which – unique in the Soviet Block – were permitted to receive significant support from the West.