Israeli-polish friendship may be dying

Given that both Israel and Poland have reconciled with Germany after the Second World War, it is puzzling that it is so difficult for them to reconcile with each other.

What should have been a diplomatic triumph for Israel this week became a fiasco instead, largely because a new foreign minister ripped open old wounds about Polish conduct during the Holocaust.

The potential triumph was a planned summit. The Visegrád Group (V4) is an alliance of four central European countries — Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic — that have been meeting since 1991 to advance cultural, economic, political and military cooperation. All four members joined the EU in 2004, but represent a different foreign policy voice than that which dominates Brussels.

In particular, the V4 takes a rather friendlier line toward Israel than the default settings of EU diplomats.

In recent years in particular, as more nationalist governments have come to power in Poland and Hungary, relations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-of-centre government in Israel have become much stronger. So much so that the annual V4 summit was to take place in Jerusalem on Tuesday.

Last week, Netanyahu was in Warsaw for an international meeting about Iran organized by the Trump administration. While there, Netanyahu was asked about a much criticized — even by Poland’s friends — “Holocaust Law” passed in 2017 that made it a crime to speak of “Polish death camps” instead of “Nazi death camps” or to otherwise assign culpability to Poland for what Nazi Germany did during the years Poland was occupied in the Second World War.

This issue of Polish antiSemitism in that period is enormously sensitive in Poland, where six million died during the war. Three million of those were Polish Jews. The other three million were not Jewish. The priority that international attention rightly gives to the Holocaust has long rankled some Polish nationalists, who consider that it underplays the hatred and brutality that Poles also suffered from Nazi Germany.

The 2017 law was a clumsy attempt to reflect that, and instead inflamed international Jewish opinion, which accused Poland of trying to minimize the Holocaust in general, and the role of Poles in particular.

Netanyahu knew all of this background when he took a question last Thursday on the issue and replied saying that it was a well-known fact that “the Poles” collaborated with the Nazis. The Jerusalem Post exacerbated the situation by initially mis- reporting that Netanyahu had said “the Polish nation.” That was quickly corrected, but the reaction in Warsaw was fierce, with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki cancelling his participation in this week’s V4 summit in Jerusalem.

Netanyahu’s office clarified that he was speaking of some Poles, not the entire nation. Damage was unnecessarily done by his carelessness, but the V4 summit would continue, though with a less senior Polish presence in the person of the foreign minister.

Then on Sunday, Netanyahu appointed Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, a very senior Likud party figure, as interim foreign minister until a permanent minister is appointed after the April 9 election.

Katz might be very interim indeed, given that on the very same day of his appointment he gave a television interview on the subject.

“I am the son of Holocaust survivors, we will never forgive and never forget, and there were many Poles who collaborated with the Nazis,” Katz said.

It was belligerent, especially toward a now-friendly country, and “never forgive, never forget” is not optimal diplomatic language.

But he did not stop there, deciding instead to rehearse a quotation that was incendiary when it was made 30 years ago by former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.

“Shamir said that every Pole suckled anti-semitism with his mother’s milk,” Katz added. “Nobody will tell us how to express our stance and how to honour the dead.”

With that, Poland withdrew from the summit altogether, and the V4 Jerusalem meeting was cancelled, replaced with bilateral meetings with Israel by the other three countries.

So instead of an opportunity to highlight how he had won allies at the sub-eu level, Netanyahu’s new foreign minister instead demonstrated how needlessly aggressive attacks — on friends, no less — compromise Israeli diplomacy.

More than that, the whole affair demonstrated that reconciliation is only possible when the aggrieved decide to cease putting grievances — even legitimate ones — in the face of the other. That is not forgetting, and not even forgiving in its deepest sense, but it is required if there are to be advances on the path to reconciliation.

That was clearly understood by World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder, who lamented the appalling Israeli diplomatic fiasco.

“As someone who has been deeply engaged in promoting Polish-jewish understanding for over three decades, I can only decry the deterioration in relations between Israel and Poland,” Lauder said.

“It is unfortunate for both Jews and Poles that obnoxious and offensive stereotypes that have caused so much pain and suffering on both sides over the years continue to circulate. Such language should have no place in civilized discourse. How sad to think that decades of co-operation and goodwill are now in jeopardy.”

Reconciliation is likely better left to such figures of civil society. It is too important a task for politics.

THE PRIME MINISTER IS A GREAT BELIEVER IN APOLOGIES. — KELLY MCPARLAND

NEEDLESSLY AGGRESSIVE ATTACKS ... COMPROMISE ISRAELI DIPLOMACY.