War rages between Israel and its neighbours. Much of Europe’s public opinion turns against the Jewish state, and antisemitism resurfaces across the continent in force. Political ties with Israel are strained, even severed, with Israel being widely accused of Nazi tactics – and of perpetrating outright genocide. Young progressives and internationalists across Europe succumb to the allure of the Palestinian cause and adopt a pose of terrorist-chic.
In Poland things continue to worsen in the lead-up to commemorating the anniversaries of Auschwitz’s liberation and the Jews’ Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Obstacles are placed before the attendance in Poland of high-ranking Israeli officials, Diaspora organisations begin cancelling their participation at the ceremonies to be held. At the last minute the Polish side relents…
The twist is that I’m describing the period of 1967-68. “March”, as it is known in Poland – or “the antisemitic campaign”. Which is to say the sense of déjà vu since October 7 has been no mistake whatsoever.
* * *
In September 1967 a 36 year-old devout Polish communist, a rising star among journalists, returns to People’s Poland from New York, where he had been covering events at the UN for several years. In fact, he was punitively summoned back to Warsaw by the Press Bureau of the Central Committee for having written a scathing denunciation that June of the Communist Party’s antisemitism, and sending it to his superior at the daily newspaper, Życie Warszawy. Twelve days after his return home, he submits a formal statement to the Press Bureau explaining his actions and their reasons. His statement runs over twenty pages, and includes eleven sections. Below is my translation of that text, whittled down by half – but including all the main points of each of the eleven sections.
These are therefore the very words of Wiesław Górnicki (1931-1996), who authored what is the most important objection tabled in 1967-68 by any communist-party member of note to the antisemitic campaign.
It’s quite another matter that this same Górnicki later fell headlong into cynicism and became a fierce enemy of the Polish workers’ movement Solidarność. Indeed, Górnicki joined General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s inner sanctum, where he was responsible for providing the General with daily intelligence reports, writing his speeches, and – in the final round – spinning the General’s legend as one of Poland’s greatest-ever leaders.
Wiesław Górnicki – Secret
member of ZMP [the Communist Youth League] from 22 July, 1948
member of PZPR [the Polish Communist Party] from 21 February, 1953
Party card number: 0046991
[Home address] Warsaw, ul. Sady Żoliborskie 11 m.17
STATEMENT
Warsaw, 30 September 1967
In connection with the teletype note I sent on 15 June this year from New York to the editorial staff of [the Warsaw daily] Życie Warszawy, I wish … to make the following statement to the Press Bureau of the Central Committee and the relevant party cadres.
1. Let me stress at the outset that the views expressed in this statement are the result of my own careful considerations. I treat them as a question of my party conscience and accept full responsibility for them, since I cannot imagine being a party member without a completely honest and comprehensive moral, emotional and intellectual commitment…
2. My ideological and political posture is no doubt sufficiently well known to the directorate of the Press Bureau, both from the numerous books I have published in recent years and from my journalism on the pages of Życie Warszawy and the Special Bulletin of PAP [the Polish Press Agency] … I come from a Varsovian proletarian family with PPS [Polish Socialist Party] and communist traditions; from the earliest years of my conscious life I have been actively attached to socialism; for 21 years I have taken an energetic part in the cause, first in the youth movement and then in the party. Party membership is a matter of my deepest convictions, traditions, my education and the meaning of my life…
3. I recognise my responsibility for having expressed my views in an open telex and employing wording that can be interpreted as derogatory. I realise that a note sent in this manner might be used by centres hostile to us – and such an attempt was indeed made. However, during the final period of my stay in New York, I put maximum effort into curbing speculation in that realm…
… Even before the outbreak of the Near East crisis, I had begun to notice aspects of our policy with which I could not come to terms. Let me mention, for example, our visa policy, which … in its most vulgar form, often amounts to a general ban on entry visas for foreign citizens of Jewish origin. I was also concerned about specific aspects of our personnel policy and the growing trend in the party that at times is difficult to distinguish from open antisemitism. The extremely categorical stance of our party during the conflict in the Near East, together with the above phenomena I’ve cited, aroused within me opposition and misgivings so serious that I could no longer hide them – nor did I wish to.
4. I believe that the Poles as a people, the Polish state in its new political shape and the Polish party as a whole have special duties and unique responsibilities when it comes to national issues… In the century still underway our country has been the arena of particularly aggressive nationalist forces, and the fomenting of feuds against this background was part of the permanent arsenal of the bourgeoisie, the Catholic Church and the small-town rabble. In my view our propaganda continues to be nebulous and to say too little when it comes to the shameful oppression of Ukrainians and Byelorussians in the Second Polish Republic [1918-1939]; about the organised forms of ONR [National Radical Camp] antisemitism; about the unprecedented forced Polonisation of the Lemkos; about the annexation of Zaolzie [from Czechoslovakia in 1938] and the persecution of the Czech minority; about the adoption [in the second half of the 1930s] by the Sanacja state leadership of the antisemitic slogans of the extreme rightist National Democracy party; about the criminal errors of our own nationality policy in Masuria, Silesia and Pomerania. … Unfortunately, we Poles have a terrible and largely deserved reputation in the world when it comes to our attitude, as a people, toward national minorities, and it is a matter of at least the next quarter century before this opinion changes.
Polish communists were virtually the only force (if we don’t count the feeble milieux of the leftist-liberal intelligentsia in the late 1930s) that had the courage to oppose Polish nationalism in all its manifestations this century… I regard this as one of the noblest pages of our ideological pedigree, and I regret that it is spoken of so little and in such an unattractive way in our propaganda… I further believe that … the Polish party should avoid at all cost even the shadow of nationalism, that it should place internationalism at the forefront of its educational ideals, especially as regards the younger generation… More and more often I sense in my own party attitudes, narratives and a mood that I deem incompatible with the dignity of a communist, with the basic tenets of Marxism, and with progressivism in its broadest meaning. I oppose these attitudes at every opportunity and will continue to do so in the future. Respect for other nations and tolerance of their distinctiveness are fundamental to the entire communist movement, but in Poland they additionally possess a distinct moral and political dimension.
5. In this context … the so-called Jewish problem in Poland carries special weight. For over five centuries Poland was the area of the greatest concentration of Jews in Europe, but except for a brief period in the 14th century, the Jews never enjoyed full civil rights or guaranteed security. Here in Poland there were pogroms [in the immediate wake of WWI] and [the antisemitic right’s] raids on the towns of Przytyk and Myślenice [in 1936], bench ghettos, numerus clausus and numerus nullus; it was here, on our soil, that the “final solution of the Jewish question” took place. Relatively strong nationalist-fascist movements operated in the interwar years. Their proclamations of the slogan of the physical extermination of the Jews or their forced deportation met with the passivity or approval of large sections of society…
Polish culture assimilated thousands of Jews, and we can only be grateful to them for priceless contributions to our own culture, science and art. Poland … has always been a multinational, multicultural organism; I see this as a tradition particularly worthy of continuation and being passed on to the younger generation. The first dictionary of the Polish language was compiled by a Polonised German; the foremost epic poem of Polish literature begins with the words “O, Lithuania, my homeland”; the Jewish bankers Kronenberg and Rotwand are as much to be credited for the [early 19th-century] development of the Congress Kingdom as Prince Drucki-Lubecki; [Ksawery] Pruszyński’s memorable short story “Father Ułas” [1948] poignantly shows how attached to the independent Polish state were the Ukrainians, though persecuted and pacified by the police. They were free of the nationalist fury of the OUN [the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists]…
I do not view such cases as remote, historical matters, devoid of relevance to today’s political problems at home… As a Pole, as a communist … I believe that internationalism – that most beautiful and humanistic countenance of socialism – should (without excluding, of course, Poland’s distinctive national interest) be the basic moral and political compass for the party member. This applies especially to the most painful and most sensitive matter in our country: the Jewish question.…
Hence … the Polish party should exercise special, unique caution … in order, on the one hand, not to resuscitate society’s otherwise defunct nationalist and antisemitic tendencies, and, on the other hand, not to reinforce in world opinion (the real significance of which must truly not be underestimated) the stereotype of the Poles as a nation of nationalists and antisemites… I think one of the tasks of our party in the international arena is not only to strengthen our position in terms of economic and military potential, but also to show concern for what the average foreigner really thinks about Poland and Poles…
6. … My views on the Jewish question do not pertain in their entirety to Israel. I presented my view of the class character of that country, along with a sharp criticism of the illusions surrounding the kibbutzim and a harsh assessment of Israeli nationalism in my book The Promised Land [1960]… Neither then nor today have I harboured any doubts about the capitalist nature of the country, the theocratic terror of the chauvinists or the fundamental ties of the Israeli leadership to the United States…
Nonetheless, in my judgement our position toward Israel … already long before the 1956 and 1967 aggressions, was not entirely internationalist. What is true is that the early stage of Jewish colonisation in Palestine was the result of Zionist movements; what is not true is that Israel as such is an artificial creation of imperialism. The socialist countries – Poland among them, and the USSR in particular – conducted intensive efforts in 1947-1948 on behalf of the creation of a separate Jewish state and the partition of Palestine, and specifically invoked the tragedy of the European Jews… The point, however, is not abstract morality, but rather that the attempt to misconstrue historical facts from the ever so recent past causes the domestic reader to lose trust in us, and this undermines the credibility of our positions on a range of otherwise straightforward issues.
The intensification of anti-Israel propaganda in the first phase of the conflict in the Near East is something I consider a blatant departure from the principle of internationalism. True, Israel is an operational base of the Americans in the region of the Near East. But just such a base is Siam, participating in the Vietnam War – or Venezuela, constituting the second largest American base for provocations against revolutionary Cuba. I don’t however recall any dramatic ratcheting up of our anti-Siamese or anti-Venezuelan propaganda. Whether consciously or not, we have suddenly forgotten that in addition to Israel’s bourgeoisie and its chauvinists, there is still a working class in that country, along with certain left-wing movements and nearly a million native-born, non-immigrant people for whom Israel is the only homeland and who therefore have as justified a right to live under independence as does a people anywhere. I gravely doubt that we stated our position on these issues sufficiently clearly and unambiguously before the fighting erupted. I am also convinced that the socialist camp made no effort to foster the Israeli left at the time when Israel was still treated by the imperialist countries as a communist agent in the Near East. It ought not be forgotten that Israel is to date the only country in the entire Near East, and even in the area from Algeria to Afghanistan, where there is a legal communist party. For the first four years of the Israel’s existence, right-wing parties were in a distinct minority, and Israel’s communist party initially had a higher percentage of seats in parliament than the communist parties of Italy or France do today. The country’s relentless slide to the right … is a complex process, and one in which the socialist camp is not without fault, if only to mention the split in Israel’s communist and social democratic movements against the backdrop of the Kremlin “Doctors’ plot” [1951-53] and the trial of [Rudolf] Slansky [in Czechoslovakia in 1952]…
A particularly unpleasant and, for me, incomprehensible manifestation of this phenomenon was the speech on 20 July this year of Comrade [Marian] Spychalski [then Defence Minister] at the Academy of the General Staff, where Israel was described as a fascist state. I utterly reject this term; Israel is not a fascist state… Fascism is an unambiguous concept and thus in the mouth of a politician it must not be used as a rhetorical metaphor. Fascism signifies the doctrine of a defined political system, the elimination of all civil liberties, the omnipotence of the secret police, the extermination of certain national groups. While I categorically condemn Israel’s conduct towards the Arab population inside the country and in the occupied territories, I see no grounds for describing Israel as a fascist state… There has to be a measure of common sense here: either we come up with an expanded and emotional definition of fascism to be applied simultaneously against Indonesia, Greece, Israel, Brazil, Haiti, Spain, South. Africa, etc. – or we uphold the classic, scientific analysis of fascism and refrain from wielding the term only against the single, particular case of Israel…
7. On a purely propaganda level, I am filled with deep concern by certain elements of our attitude toward Israel. Here I have in mind, for instance, the frequent use of a purported quote from an Israeli radio station, where the actions of the Israeli Air Force were allegedly compared to those of the Luftwaffe over Poland. The quote is a forgery and comes from an anecdote column in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, which in turn repeated it after someone who had supposedly heard the phrase in Tel Aviv. No other source on the matter exists, and it is just inconceivable that so many political conclusions could be drawn in our country based on … an anecdotes-of-the-day column.
I also have in mind … the public speech of Comrade … [Kazimierz] Rusinek [then Deputy Minister of Culture], who stated that Nazi war criminals are advisors to the Israeli government (while the second [bloodiest] executioner of Warsaw after Reinefarth, SS obersturmführer Oskar Dirlewanger, is head of government security in Cairo). There is also the obnoxious refrain of our press spouting that the Israeli aggression was planned and directed above all by Bundeswehr officers, while it is perfectly well known that German rocket experts, police advisors hailing from the Gestapo, and the chief doctor of Auschwitz, Dr. Hans Eisele, should be sought in the United Arab Republic [in 1967, just Egypt] and Syria…
The pervasive indignation has led us to the unprecedented situation wherein the Polish communist press was recently using terms virtually identical to those of the neo-Hitlerite, militaristic and irredentist “Deutsche Soldatenzeitung”. That magazine’s 20 July issue includes comparisons of [Moshe] Dayan to Hitler and the statement that Auschwitz was child’s play compared to Israeli atrocities against the Arabs. The 8 September issue, titled “The Brazen Lies of Israeli Propaganda”, accuses Israel of intending to “physically exterminate at least 30 million Arabs”, denies that country’s right to exist and states that the favourable comments toward Israel of the West German bourgeois press are the outcome of a “dangerous Jewification of the German press”…
8. Regarding the issue of Israeli aggression, … there is no … universally accepted legal definition of aggression, and … the working definition proposed by the USSR considers both the initiation of hostilities and the blockade of straits to be aggression. That said, the initiation of hostilities by Israel is a plain fact, in view of which, for propaganda purposes, I do deem it necessary and justified to define Israeli actions as aggression.
Nevertheless, I think that making a fetish of this word and giving it the status of a creedal statement … is just silly and, as a result, harmful. After all … the step that triggered the whole crisis was Nasser’s foolhardy decision to declare a blockade of Aqaba [the Straits of Tiran], taken without having first reached agreement with the USSR and against the interests of the progressive Arab movement.
9. The most serious doubts I have were caused by the decision of the Polish government to break off diplomatic relations with Israel… I consider this step rash and [anticipate that it will] bring considerable detriment to Poland.
The severance of relations is an exceptional act in modern diplomatic practice, as to its gravity, and in fact precedes a declaration of war… This is but the second time in Polish history that relations have been severed, which in and of itself highlights the exceptional proportions [of the Polish decision in June]. The first time this happened was in the 17th century against Turkey, which failed to maintain neutrality during the uprising in Zaporizhzhia [in today’s Ukraine]. Today, however, we have not broken off diplomatic relations with Indonesia, where half a million communists were slaughtered; with Brazil, where political prisoners were dying by the thousands every day; with Greece, from which, despite its indisputably fascist regime, we recalled neither our ambassador nor the numerous Polish experts there; with Pakistan, which was guilty of the most flagrant aggression in 1965. The argument that neither Greece nor Indonesia launched a war can be countered with the example of the United States, which committed blatant and barbaric aggression in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic, but with which we nevertheless maintain normal political and trade relations. Even the unheard-of practices of the Chinese Red Guards against our diplomatic representatives did not prompt so much as the recall of the ambassador from Beijing. At one point we even declared our readiness to establish relations with West Germany – and without the precondition of recognising the borders. Against this backdrop, the rupture of relations with Israel – along with the scandalous brawl, unworthy of a civilised nation at Warsaw’s Okęcie airport during the departure of the Israeli ambassador, something which elicited shock and resentment abroad – raises too many objections for me to remain silent.
Israel is the only non-socialist country that has recognised the definitive nature of our western borders in a formal statement by the government and parliament… About 1/4 of Israel’s population is of Polish descent, and it is chauvinistic blather to say that all of these people feel loathing towards everything Polish. Hebrew boasts the world’s third largest number of translations from Polish literature; Polish theatre and artistic troupes have always been received in Israel with cordiality and strong sentiment. The nationalistic and indeed anti-Polish feelings of certain groups in Israel are more than compensated for by two organisations that defend Poland’s good name and strive to bury mutual resentments from the past. The rupture of relations has led to the cessation of these processes, and it will take at least two decades, and thus the maturation of a whole new generation in Israel, to return to the state of affairs prior to Poland’s severance of relations. If we deem the supreme determinant of our raison d’etat to be the struggle to consolidate the status of the western lands, cold calculation dictates that we should give special treatment to any country that has taken a position favourable to us. Yet as we all know, no Arab state to date has recognised either East Germany or our western borders, while Israel has recognised our borders not only de facto, but also de jure…
10. The slogan of wholesale support “for the Arabs in general” put forward in Poland during the early stages of the conflict I consider to be ideologically mistaken and politically damaging… A feudal satrap, King Faisal [of Saudi Arabia] with his harem of 150 wives and his five thousand slaves is for me no ally and comrade in the struggle for progress in the Middle East. Moreover, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are a much more durable foothold of U.S. imperialism in the region than Israel itself. Nor is Sheikh Ahmad Shukeiri, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, a personality worthy of any support … He’s a reactionary feudal, propped up, in my opinion, by US intelligence…
The case of Shukeiri particularly upset me, because many times during my work in Egypt [1956] I had the opportunity to encounter the insane, barbaric backwardness that this man represents. I also know him personally from the period when he was the so-called representative of the Palestinian Arabs in New York. In the Special Bulletin of 5 March, 1965, I reported extensively on a memorial that Shukeiri submitted to West German revisionist organisations… In this memorial, Shukeiri openly states that the fate of the Arab refugees can only be solved in the same way as the fate of the German refugees, i.e., by force. Furthermore, he points to “international communism and Zionism” as the main culprit behind the criminal displacement of innocent people from indigenous Arab and indigenous German lands. On 30 May this year, Shukeiri stated publicly in Amman that after capturing Tel Aviv, he would allow the native-born Jewish population to remain in Arab Palestine, though he doesn’t think this will be too troublesome a problem, as there won’t be that many of them left alive. I am unable to fathom in the name of just what ideology and what political tactics I am supposed to pass over all this in silence, let alone declare my backing for Arabs akin to Ahmad Shukeiri…
It is obvious to me that, at the present historical stage, support for the national bourgeoisie is a necessity and an important element in the [struggle] against imperialism… [However,] we do not treat conditional support for the Indian or Venezuelan bourgeoisie as a sacred liberation mission, and we do not mobilise our entire population to profess its solidarity at mass rallies for such an aim. It is not clear to me just why endorsement of the national and liberation push among the Arab bourgeoisie … should suddenly be a gauge for the progressiveness of Polish patriotism…
In my appraisal the importance of the conflict in the Near East has been overestimated in our country … regardless of the [Cold War] rivalry between the two systems… Our propaganda’s portrayal of the Arab countries as an oasis of progress and freedom, and Israel as a bloodthirsty entity, thinking only of seizing Arab territories and controlled by Washington like a puppet on strings, is not merely untrue, but ineffective. Again, this is not about some intangible morality … but about the purely pragmatic effectiveness of our propaganda and the successfulness of our diplomacy to consolidate peace.
11. Because the conflict in the Near East has raised the issue of Zionism in our party, I would like to present my point of view … I consider Zionism, like any other form of nationalism, including Polish nationalism, to be a reactionary movement, incompatible with internationalism, irreconcilable with the theoretical premises of Marxism and with membership in the Communist Party…
However, it is my opinion that the concept of Zionism has of late been arbitrarily misused in our party. One cannot equate every hint of sympathy for Israel, or rather for Israelis, with Zionism. The tragic history of European Jews, the forging of new national traits, the resilience of Israelis in the development of a poor and inhospitable land – this must inevitably elicit favourable reactions in various people, regardless of national origin. I myself am an example of such a phenomenon. However this does not … exclude in any way unflagging hostility to Dayan or [Menachem] Begin. One must always carefully distinguish an unacceptable, political display of solidarity with the Israeli bourgeoisie and chauvinists, from the normal and, in fact, highly humanistic sympathy that this country can arouse among the non-Jewish …
The formulation of Comrade [Władysław] Gomułka [the leader of communist Poland] in his 19 June speech, that the citizens of the People’s Republic of Poland should have one homeland is, of course, beyond all discussion for me… I however consider unacceptable for a communist the recent “expansions” of this formulation that are circulating in the party, and which may be summarised most succinctly as the well-known slogan from the past, “Poland for the Poles”… Therefore, I make no secret of the fact that the phrase “fifth column” has prompted serious doubts in me… For it describes an organised diversionary network, one centrally directed and performing acts of deliberate sabotage. The normal consequence of establishing the fact that such a network is indeed operating in Poland would be to launch a series of preventive arrests and trials, and that would of course create a new political situation in the country…
Although I proceed from the assumption that Poland and the Poles are burdened by the grave and perhaps insufficiently erased sins of antisemitism, I have never closed my eyes to the existence of anti-Polish chauvinism amongst certain, admittedly few, Jewish groups. However, I believe that in this intricate and thorny matter, one nationalism must not be fought with another, and that ascribing these problems with overblown proportions unavoidably leads to the ideological demobilisation of the party … and recently also to real human tragedies. I was always taught in the party that a person’s attitude is determined by their class ties, personal integrity, achievements, devotion to ideals, and not by their origin, family abroad or attachment to a culture other than Polish. I believe I shall hold to this conviction…
Source: Marzec ‘68: Między Tragedią a Podłością. Wstęp, Wybór i Opracowanie – Grzegorz Sołtysiak i Józef Stępień; z serii PRL w Dokumentach; Wyd. Profi, Warszawa, 1998, str. 269-292.
