Was Polish Anti-Semitism Actually Zionism?

By Gil S. Rubin for Tablet Magazine

Nazis sought to eliminate the Jews from their future racial empire. Poles wanted to create a state for them in Palestine. Historian Timothy Snyder makes the case that in the 1930s the two aims may have converged. But was Poland an ally of the Jews or a pioneer in the art of anti-Semitic politics?

One of the most unusual features of Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth, writes Christopher R. Browning in his New York Review of Books review, is the many pages Snyder devotes to Poland, Zionism, and Palestine. At the center of this story is the short-lived alliance between the Polish government and the Zionist Revisionist Movement during the late 1930s, explored in the book’s first four chapters (the third titled “The Promise of Palestine”) and revisited in the conclusion. After Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s death, the ruling circles in Poland advocated solving the country’s so-called Jewish problem through the emigration of 90 percent of the Jewish population (estimated at about 3 million on the eve of the war). For that purpose, Snyder recounts, the Polish government lent public support to Revisionist Zionist leaders and paramilitary groups and even financed and trained them. Their hope was that these Jews would wage a campaign of resistance and terror against the British mandatory authorities in Palestine and establish a Jewish state open to large-scale Jewish emigration.

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