These edifying trends were aborted by a tragic concatenation of events. When historians such as Jan Grabowski made it their calling to highlight Polish complicity in the Holocaust, (Many Polish citizens' antisemtism was blatant, many took over their Jewish neighbors homes and were even filmed digging up bodies outside death camps to steal gold teeth, and in addtion there was the 1946 Kielce pogrom, after WWII, in which Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians killed 42 Jews who returned to their former homes. ed.) nefarious consequences soon followed:
1) Blame for the Holocaust was deflected away from the Germans, which in turn led even literate leaders like President Obama to speak about “Polish death camps“.
2) The reputation of the Polish nation, slated for destruction by Nazi Germany after Jews and Gypsies, was tarnished.
3) These trends pushed the Polish government to advance legislation calling for the prosecution of historians and journalists who blamed the Polish state and the Polish nation for the Holocaust. This legislation, albeit historically legitimate given that the Polish government-in-exile during World War II never collaborated with the Nazis and actually did more than the Roosevelt administration or Churchill’s government to sabotage the Holocaust, raised international furore and anger in Israel: Academic and journalistic elites, already upset that the Polish government is national-conservative rather than liberal-progressive, argued that historical research about the Holocaust was about to be criminalized in Poland (a patently false claim).
With Yair Lapid as Foreign Minister, Polish-Israeli relations collapsed. Instead of capitalizing on Polish support to secure the suspension of European Union subsidies for Palestinian Arab pay to slay, Lapid decided to denounce Poland’s government for whitewashing antisemitism.
Lapid had a point, but he ignored that unlike other European countries, Poland is not complicit in the murder of Israelis. Instead of, for example, denouncing Germany’s criminal indulgence towards the Ayatollahs‘ genocidal designs, lavish sponsorship of numerous anti-Israel NGOs and massive subsidies to the murderous Palestinian Authority, Lapid assailed an emerging country eager to start a new onward-looking chapter in relations with the Jewish people and the Jewish State.
As a result, Poland stopped welcoming Israeli student delegations, ceased advancing Israeli interests within the European Union and flourishing relations soon reverted to their historical pattern of mutual fear, mistrust and resentment.
It didn’t help that Lapid picked that very moment to push Poland to pay compensation for property Jews lost during the Holocaust. On the contrary, his timing gave the impression that Israel had a financial motivation for its demand that Poland acknowledge its sordid history of antisemitism. i
This antisemitic history is bitterly remembered by most descendants of Polish Jews. Nevertheless, the myopia of demanding regret and compensation from an ally that also suffered greatly under Nazism cannot be overstated.
During the cusp of the crisis in Israeli-Polish relations, I co-authored an article on the popular Polish Rzeczpospolita daily urging the Polish government to demand that Israeli student delegations meet Polish youths and also visit cultural and historical sites that portray positive aspects of Jewish Polish history.
Professional bashers of the Israeli and Polish governments, including Haaretz, denounced the recent bilateral agreement regulating Israeli school visits to Poland. They argued that the introduction of binational youth meetings and visits to Polish historical sites constitute a surrender of Israeli self-respect and betrayal of Holocaust memory. Much care must be taken to prevent that by laying the facts of Polish antisemitism on the table to these young people.
The hypocrisy of some of these attacks is appalling. To see journalists who day in and out provide antisemites with new arguments, claiming that the recent educational agreement with Poland harms Jewish dignity demonstrates that for some critics of Israel’s government no moral nadir is too low.
Of course, it is desirable and important for Poles, like all other nations, to learn and acknowledge the dark chapters of their history. Nevertheless, to expect a contrition from Poles analogous to that of postwar Germans, ignores the historical chasm between German and Polish power during World War II and the ethical chasm between the atrocities committed by Germans as a nation and the terrible crimes of individual Poles during the Holocaust.
No less importantly, it ignores the fact that today most Poles and Israelis understand each other‘s worldview, values and apprehensions far better than the Western Europeans' Lapid is eager to court.
Rafael Castrois an Italian-Colombian political analyst who graduated from Yale and Hebrew University. He can be reached at [email protected]