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When ‘Zionist’ Meant ‘Jew’: Revisiting the 1968 Events in Poland
The 1968 May Day Parade in Warsaw: Participants march down Marszalkowska Street carrying anti-Zionist banners © Taran Photo
THE 1968 STATE SPONSORED anti-Zionist campaign in Poland demonstrates how easily anti-Zionist rhetoric slips into open antisemitism. It is also a striking example of how a supposedly internationalist anti-imperialist movement is prone to hateful manipulation that, in fact, has very little to do with the Middle East.
The language and imagery adopted at that time resurfaces regularly with that utilized by contemporary antisemites. The notion of "Zionism" loses almost all its original meaning, becoming a politically acceptable synonym for all things Jewish. According to this schema, which is strongly rooted in traditional antisemitism, the "Zionists" are accused of conspiring across borders for the benefit of Israel and its US imperial ally, to the detriment of the local population, most notably through their control of the international media. The actions of "Zionists" are frequently compared and equaled to those of the Nazis and, thus conceived, "Zionism" emerges as a purely evil phenomenon akin to historical Nazism.
“The notion of “Zionism” loses almost all its original meaning, becoming a politically acceptable synonym for all things Jewish”
Antisemitism and communist ideology
On the surface, communism was a thoroughly internationalist ideology and movement, opposed to all kinds of ethnic and religious discrimination, including antisemitism. Indeed, many original adherents of the Polish communist movement found it attractive precisely because they saw in it the most consistent and principled response to the antisemitism that was rampant in Polish society in the 1920s and 1930s, openly preached by the Catholic Church and the right-wing Nationalists. According to some estimates, in the 1920s and 1930s around 22-26 percent of the Polish Communist Party's membership was made up of Jews - Jews made up 9 per cent of the entire Polish population [1]. At the same time, the Jewish communists were a marginal group within the wider Jewish community. The clandestine Communist Party remained relatively weak and was dissolved by order of Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator, in 1937. Many of its leaders were subsequently called to Moscow, imprisoned and murdered by the Soviet political police during the mass purges.
When the communists re-emerged as the ruling Polish Workers Party after World War II, the stereotype of "Jewish communists" became even stronger as part of the popular psyche. Jan Gross remarks: "As to the persistence of the zydokomuna (Jewish communism) myth in popular memory, one may attribute it, among other reasons, to an attempt by complicitious Poles to deflect their own guilt over having contributed to the triumph of communism." [2]
In fact, Jewish communists constituted a rather small part of the post-war leadership, and they usually hardly identified themselves as Jews at all. After the Holocaust, the Jewish community in Poland still numbered some 250-400,000. Many of them left the country in subsequent waves of emigration, for example after the Kielce pogrom in 1946 and in 1956, when the emigration regime was liberalized. By 1968 only 25-30,000 Jews lived in Poland.
Meanwhile, sinister currents of institutionalized antisemitism appeared across the communist bloc. Stalin ordered the execution of the leaders of the wartime Jewish Antifascist Committee in the late 1940s and his anti-Jewish obsession reached new heights with the alleged uncovering of a ‘Doctors' Plot' in 1952. Such tendencies were in turn reflected by the other communist regimes, most famously during the trial of Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia in 1952.
In a symbolic rapprochement in Poland, a group of activists of the pre-war fascist National Radical Camp (Oboz Narodowo-Radykalny, ONR) led by Boleslaw Piasecki was allowed to operate legally with their own representation in the Polish parliament in the 1950s. With assistance from the government, Piasecki created and led his new ‘patriotic' organization, the PAX Association, which came to play an active role in 1968. Similar developments emerged in other communist states like Romania, where former members of the antisemitic Iron Guard were allowed to join the Romanian Communist Party. The Polish Nobel prize-winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz wrote of such alliances: "Let it be stated here clearly: the Party/Descends directly from the fascist Right." [3]
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