Poland, Jews, and Israel

My apologies for taking so long to post, I know I have been negligent, but I thought I would share this fascinating book review from the New York Times about the new book, “Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz” by Jan T. Gross.

The book tells of “how surviving Polish Jews, having escaped the fate of 90 percent of their community — three million people — returned to their homeland to be vilified, terrorized and, in some 1,500 instances, murdered, sometimes in ways as bestial as anything the Nazis had devised.”

Here is an excerpt from the book review:

“With the war over, and to tumultuous applause, a thousand delegates of the Polish Peasants Party actually passed a resolution thanking Hitler for annihilating Polish Jewry and urging that those he’d missed be expelled. Indeed, the mopping up soon began. Returning to their villages and towns, Jews were routinely greeted with remarks like “So, ____? You are still alive.” Their efforts to retrieve property were futile — and, sometimes, fatal. Some Jews met their end on trains — not cattle cars this time, but passenger trains, from which they were thrown off. If the trains weren’t moving fast enough, they were beaten to death.”

“Fear” is a much broader book than Gross’ previous book, “Neighbors,” which focused solely on an episode in 1941 in which Polish inhabitants of the town of Jedwabne brutally clubbed, burned and dismembered the town's 1,600 Jews, killing all but seven. Since then, a government commission in Poland determined that not only did Gross get the story right in the book, but that many other cities had done precisely the same thing.

The connection between the events in Europe after WWII and contemporary politics is obvious, and made even more explicit in the documentary, The Long Way Home (1997). Contrary to the image some have of an army of British-backed Jews invading Palestine in the post-war period with a D-Day landing, the bulk of the people who resettled in Palestine were starving refugees who had no where else to go. The only law any of them ever broke was the sporadic violation of Britain’s ban on immigration to Palestine, passed to appease anxious Arabs who resented the presence of nationalistic Jews on soil that was once Muslim. It was not a colonial enterprise by any sensible definition of the word, nor could it justifiably be called immoral, since the land these Jews settled in was legally purchased and communally maintained.

Of course, the anti-Semitism expressed by the Poles after WWII, and by the Arabs after the spread of Zionism exists today of course, in the veiled form of anti-Zionism or anti-Israel sentiment. This link, expressed in Diana Muir’s article, “Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism: The Link” on the History News Network was actually analyzed by Edward H. Kaplan of Yale, and Charles A. Small of Southern Connecticut State University. In their paper “Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Anti-Semitism in Europe,” Kaplan and Small ask whether individuals expressing strong anti-Israel sentiments are more likely than the general population to also support old-style anti-Semitic slurs. As Muir summarizes,

“The correlation was almost perfect. In a survey of 5,000 Europeans in ten countries, people who believed that the Israeli soldiers “intentionally target Palestinian civilians,” and that “Palestinian suicide bombers who target Israeli civilians” are justified, also believed that “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind,” “Jews have a lot of irritating faults,” and “Jews are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want.”

Please allow me to preempt attacks on this view by stipulating the following obvious claim: Criticizing Israeli policy, Israeli leaders, Israeli military practices, and scrutinizing Israeli society or culture is perfectly legitimate and universally accepted, just as any country may be scrutinized. Holding Israel to impossibly high standards while comparing every Israeli action to the most heinous crimes and regimes in human history, by contract, is neither legitimate nor helpful, particularly while ignoring any human rights violations committed against Israelis by its neighbors. Just as it would be racist to target only Africa or the Middle East for special condemnation while all others are victims of their bestial wrath, so too is it anti-Semitic to target the only Jewish state in the world to repeated condemnations that defy any sense of fairness, logic, or accuracy. One thing is clear however: such criticisms leveled against Israel today would be perfectly understood and agreed upon by the Poles of 1940’s.