Les marranes du xxe siècle

Following the June 1967 War in the Middle East, the Polish communist regime launched an anti-Zionists campaign targeting the country’s Jews. In accordance with the Soviet position on the war, the Polish government severed relation with Israel and attacked Poland’s Jews, accusing them of supporting Israel against the official stance. The campaign intensified after student demonstrations in March 1968. As a result, thousands of Jews immigrated to Israel. This paper tells the story of the Israeli view on the anti-Zionist campaign and the new Polish-Jewish immigrants, or Olim, the Hebrew term. Relying on the Israeli press, the paper aims to reconstruct how mainstream Israel saw Polish Jewish relations and conceived of Polish Jews outraged the Israelis. It shows that Polish Jews, recently expelled from the country they considered home, received little sympathy in Israeli newspapers. The Hebrew press presented them as wayward sons of Israel, as men and women who had chosen the wrong path and betrayed their people. According to this narrative, Polish Jews should have foreseen that antisemitism would raise its head again in Poland. In some ways, the Israeli discourse mirrored the Polish one – in both cases Jews could not escape their natural-born identity and had only one homeland, the state of Israel.