Polish President Andrzej Duda’s decision to skip the Fifth World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem next week, which top world leaders will attend, highlights the crisis in Polish-Israeli ties.
Caroline B. Glick, ISRAEL HAYOM
Next Thursday is supposed to mark another diplomatic triumph for Israeli diplomacy. On January 23, the Fifth World Holocaust Forum will convene at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz death camp. According to Yad Vashem and the World Holocaust Forum, 45 heads of state will travel to Jerusalem for the conference as President Reuven Rivlin’s guests.
But unless something changes in the next few days, the event won’t be a diplomatic triumph. The conference, titled, “Remembering the Holocaust, Fighting Anti-Semitism,” will mark the end of the golden era of Israeli diplomacy.
This isn’t the fault of the guests. They are an impressive lot. Along with Rivlin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US Vice President Mike Pence, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prince Charles, French President Emmanuel Macron and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier are scheduled to deliver remarks at the event.
The problem is with who won’t be at the event. Polish President Andrzej Duda announced last week that he will not be attending. Duda’s decision doesn’t owe to lack of interest. He made no effort to hide how it important he felt it would be to attend the conference. Indeed, as Israel Hayom reported this last week, Duda was so eager to come that he was willing to leave the World Economic Forum early to fly to Jerusalem just for the conference.
And it isn’t that Netanyahu didn’t want him to come. Netanyahu wants very much for Duda to come because Israel has a profound interest in Duda’s attendance.
Were Duda to participate in the event at Yad Vashem conference, his presence would mark the end of the two-year crisis in Polish-Israeli ties. The crisis was precipitated in January 2018 with the Polish parliament’s passage of a law that criminalized criticism of Polish collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Lawbreakers were subject to up to three years imprisonment.
The law was widely reviled as a bid to rewrite the history of the Holocaust. Its passage provoked a massive outcry in the Jewish world. Israel joined the protests. A crisis in Polish-Israel relations ensued. It took months of delicate and complicated diplomacy led by Netanyahu and his Polish counterpart Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to figure out a way out of the dispute. In June 2018 the Polish parliament amended the law and revoked the possibility of imprisonment for transgressors.
The crisis appeared resolved. Israel and Poland resumed their close bilateral relations, much to both sides’ satisfaction and benefit.
Poland is the most powerful member of the European Union’s Visegrad bloc which includes four formerly Communist central European states – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. The governments of the Visegrad member nations are among Israel’s steadiest allies in the EU.
Led by Poland, the four governments successfully torpedoed several anti-Israel decisions in Brussels. For instance, in May 2018, the Visegrad bloc rejected a draft resolution condemning the US for opening its embassy in Jerusalem. In February 2019, together with the US, Poland hosted Netanyahu and Arab leaders at an international security conference in Warsaw that focused on the threat Iran poses to international security.
A week after the conference in Warsaw, the Visegrad bloc was scheduled to convene in Jerusalem – another diplomatic triumph.
But days before the summit was set to begin, following a Supreme Court decision prohibiting Netanyahu from continuing to serve as foreign minister, Netanyahu appointed Israel Katz to serve in his stead. On his first day in his new job, the veteran Minister of Transportation with little diplomatic experience managed to undo all of Netanyahu’s and Morawiecki’s painstaking efforts to resolve the crisis. In one fell swoop, Katz reinstated and deepened it.
In a media interview, Katz quoted late prime minister Yitzhak Shamir who said that Poles drink anti-Semitism in their mothers’ milk. The Polish government, predictably, was apoplectic. Morawiecki swiftly canceled Poland’s participation at the Jerusalem summit.
Last March, Hungary opened a diplomatic trade office in Jerusalem. Members of the Visegrad bloc have said privately that they are willing to open embassies in Jerusalem. They have also expressed willingness to call for the EU to abandon the nuclear deal with Iran. But no Visegrad bloc members are willing to take such major steps without Poland.
For its part, Poland won’t get in a fight with the Germans, the French and the EU bureaucracy in Brussels for an Israel that it perceives as insulting its national honor.
Following the US targeting of Iran’s terror master Qassem Soleimani two weeks ago, and Iran’s subsequent announcement that it is no longer abiding by the limitations on its nuclear activities dictated by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, (JCPOA), breaking the EU’s unanimity on the JCPOA has become a matter of strategic urgency for Israel.
If Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia were to announce they support reinstating the UN Security Council sanctions on Iran that were suspended with the implementation of the JCPOA in 2015 through the deal’s so-called “snapback” clause, their announcement at this juncture could have profound implications.
Consider the predicament of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. As Johnson seeks to conclude a Brexit agreement with Brussels, he doubtlessly feels compelled to continue to align his Iran policy with the EU’s pro-Iran policy. This is would explain why, just two days after the Iranians detained the British ambassador to Tehran, Johnson chose to remain in the deal and join the French and the Germans in calling for the implementation of the JCPOA’s dispute resolution mechanism to deal with Iran’s noncompliance. The EU-3’s move could lead to the reinstitution of UN sanctions at the Security Council. But that doesn’t seem to be the likeliest outcome or the intention. Rather, the EU-3’s initiative appears to be a cynical gambit to buy time and do nothing.
Johnson followed-up on that minimally significant move with a counter-productive one. He called to renegotiate the JCPOA.
If adopted by the Trump administration, Johnson’s call would effectively throw the ayatollahs a life preserver. Today, the Iranian regime is in the grips of an internal power struggle in the post-Soleimani era. It is faced with a revolutionary protest movement. And it is in the throes of a deep economic crisis induced by the US sanctions.
Nuclear negotiations are just what the ayatollahs’ doctor ordered. They would be protracted and lead nowhere. As the JCPOA made clear, the Iranian regime will never abandon its nuclear program. The only thing that nuclear talks would produce is pressure on the Trump administration to rescind US sanctions on Iran and so enable the regime to survive the current crisis and continue to build its nuclear arsenal.
In the midst of this EU-3’s current pro-Iran campaign, if the Visegrad bloc were to disavow the JCPOA, the pressure would mount on Johnson to align British policy with US policy.
Along these lines, Johnson would feel more compelled to act in accordance with the JCPOA and introduce a resolution at the Security Council to restore the UN sanctions on Iran. If those sanctions are “snapped-back,” (which Iran’s announcement that it is abandoning the JCPOA’s nuclear limitations, should have precipitated automatically), they will strengthen the current dynamic of regime instability, embolden the protesters in the street and discourage commanders in Iran’s armed forces or the Revolutionary Guard Corps from harming them.
This brings us back to Duda and his non-attendance at the Holocaust conference in Jerusalem next week.
For four months Duda asked to be permitted to speak at the conference. Last month those requests turned urgent.
On December 19, in a lecture in Saint Petersburg, Putin harshly attacked pre-war Poland. He accused the Poles of supporting the Nazis on the eve of the war and minimized the significance of the Soviet Union’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during the same period. Putin condemned Polish anti-Semitism in the 1930s, but ignored Soviet anti-Semitism. He failed to mention the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Germany that carved up Poland between the two powers and set the conditions for Germany’s invasion of Poland and the initiation of the genocide of European Jewry.
Israel and the US joined Poland in condemning Putin’s remarks. It was important for Duda to speak at the conference in Jerusalem in order to respond to Putin’s accusations. It was doubly critical for the Poles that Duda be afforded the right to speak because they rightly believe it likely that Putin will use his speech at Yad Vashem to double down on his historical revisionism.
All of Poland’s requests to the conference’s organizers to permit Duda to speak were rejected. Arguing that only the Germans and the allied powers were asked to speak, the organizers failed to take into consideration the damage their refusal would cause to Israel’s bilateral relations with Poland or to Israel’s strategic wider interests.
Earlier this week, Israel Hayom reported that at a meeting Duda held with representatives of Polish Jewish groups, Shevach Weiss, the former Israeli ambassador to Poland, former Speaker of the Knesset and chairman of Yad Vashem blamed the decision to deny Duda’s requests on Moshe Kantor. Kantor is a Russian Jewish businessman and philanthropist and President of the European Jewish Congress. Kantor is also the founder and president of the World Holocaust Foundation.
Weiss said, “The conference was organized by Mr. Kantor and he organized it like a merchant. But you can’t trade in history. You can’t do that.”
Senior officials in Washington involved in the dispute take issue with Weiss’s claim. It’s possible, they say, that Kantor lobbied for Duda to be barred from speaking. But the decision wasn’t Kantor’s to make. President Rivlin chose to deny Duda’s requests.
Rivlin, they charge, denied Duda’s requests not only against Netanyahu’s wishes but despite the Trump administration’s requests that he be permitted to speak. The administration views both Israel and Poland as key allies and is keen to see an improvement in their bilateral relations. They are hopeful that Rivlin will have a change of heart and belatedly approve Duda’s request.
For the past decade, Netanyahu conducted Israel’s foreign relations almost entirely on his own. Netanyahu knew not to base his actions on populist rallying cries or emotions. Instead, Netanyahu focused on identifying and cultivating common interests with other countries. Owing to his actions, Israel’s diplomatic position is stronger today than it has ever been. Key global powers and countries worldwide view Israel as a partner and ally because of Netanyahu’s respect for their interests and willingness to work with them. Israel, for its part, has only benefited from Netanyahu’s skillful stewardship of its foreign affairs.
Today, there are many nations that wish to work with Israel to advance common goals. Israel’s closest ally – America – believes it has an interest in improved Israeli-Polish relations. But now that Netanyahu is no longer alone in the ring, we are beginning to see what the post-Netanyahu future holds in store for us. Unless Rivlin changes his mind, next week will not be a triumph of Israeli diplomacy. It will be a missed opportunity of strategic proportions.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
I disagree. The only posts here not based on facts (or presenting information that is not true as in the case of Bulgaria) are, unfortunately, yours.
I also don’t understand your stubborn and irrational defense of Poland based entirely on debatable general statements, and why you are hurting for Duda probably more than he is hurting for himself.
Polish Jews and Jews in general are not haters.
The majority of Polish Jews utterly refused to listen to Zhabotinsky in the 30s accusing him of trying to drive a wedge between them and their Polish friends because he warned them that if they don’t leave, they will all perish. They laughed at him (and even called him names) and said that Poland is a democratic country where there are Jews in the Sejm (the Polish parliament)! The Orthodox said “Po lin!” (a play on words “Polin” means Poland in Yiddish, “Po lin” in Hebrew means “Here we stay”). They believed that the real Jewish state will be possible only when Moshiach comes, in the meantime they should be safe in Poland.
It is not the case of irrationally hating one nationality or even hating someone. There is no other country in the world that served as a killing field for 3 million Jews while the locals, basically, went on with their lives without a protest (yes, I know, they suffered, it was wartime) – and it’s a FACT.
They also were pointing out Jews for a kilo of sugar, digging for jewelry and gold teeth left from the dead bodies, killing their Jewish prewar friends for their money or apartments and their Jewish employers for their businesses, moving into the Jewish houses now empty of the deported Jews, etc., etc. These are all FACTS, these are not my fantasies.
And now they insist that all they did was suffer and that all the war crimes in Poland were committed by the German occupiers, and after the war Poland was “occupied” by the horrible Soviets, and that for these reasons Poland should now be treated the same as the Allies.
Baloney!
Polish Jews who lived in Poland (most died three million) do not agree with Adam nor do the researchers of the Holocaust.
My last word in our prolonged dialogue about Poland and the Holocaust. For me, it demonstrates the human capacity for hatred of people of one nationality, religion, ethnic group, tribe, etc. , based not on facts but on irrational emotions.
There is no factual or rational basis for the widespread Jewish hatred of Poles, or why so many Jews blame Poland, more than Germany, for the genocide, or why they hate Poles far more than any of the other peoples occupied by the Germans during World War II.
While Polish people are hardly perfect, it is just not true that Jews were in general treated worse by Poles than by people in other diaspora countries. If that had been the case, it would not explain why there were more Jews living in Poland than in any other European country in 1939, or how the Jewish population of Poland incresed from a few hundred in the 13th century, whn a Polish king first granted the Jews a “Charter” to live in Poland, to 3 and a half million in 1939. The Jewish population never increased nearly that much in any other Europen country. Populations tend to increase when people are treated reasonably well by their government and neighbors. But not otherwise. Many European countries forced Jews to live in ghettoes. Poland never did. Many European Jews prohibited Jews from working in certain occupations and businesses. Poland never did.
Jews were restricted as to where they could live in many European countries, such as Germany, Italy, France, and Russia. No such restrictions were imposed on Jews by Poland.
There is no evidence that during the second world war that most Poles assisted the Germans in murdering their Jewish neighbors. Even the largest estimates of the number of Jews who were killed by non-Jewish Polish citizens , or turned over by them to the German murderers, comes to only about 1.5 per cent of the entire non-Jewish population of Poland. And many of these collaborators were ethnic Ukrainians or Belorussians, not ethnic Poles.
A desperate struggle to survive during the cruel German occupation occurred in Poland. The Germans had slated “only” half of the non-Jewish Polish population for extermination, a, and the rest for permanent enslavement, unlike the Jews whom the Germans slated for total extermination. These German policies meant that it was inevitable that some Poles would do anything the Germans demanded of them in return for enough money or food rations from the occupation police to enable them and their children to survive. Under such a cruel and ruthless regime, probably crueler than in any of the other German-occupied countries, it was inevitable that some Poles would inform on their Jewish neighbors, even if there had not been a single antisemite in Poland.
It is beyond dispute that the Polish government in exile in London did what it could to rescue the Jews of Poland, but received no cooperation from the British and American governments, who were content to see the Jews murdered throughout Europe.
Since there is no rational basis for the hate that many Jews have for Poland and Polish people today, the the motivations for this hatred are not truly different from the motivations of the Nazis and millions of other antisemites through the ages– the pleasure that so many human beings seem to feel at having someone they can hate and blame for their troubles, without any risk or perceived risk to themselves.
This atteaction to hatred and hateful behavior, even when this behavior is confined to verbal abuse, does not offer much hope for the long-term survival of the human race. We will probably exterminate each other, just as our ancient ascestors probably exterminated all of the other human and pre-human “hominin” species over the past million-plus years. Human beings have strong aggressive impulses. I find it disappointing that even many of my own people have such destructive human impulses although thank God we rarely indulge them except by verbal abuse, not aggressive physical violence as so many othe rpeoples do.
@ Bear Klein:
I remember reading somewhere that Lithuania promptly joined Poland in ignoring the Israeli forum and choosing to attend the event in Poland instead.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
Yes, I understand as the Polish spokesman on site that could be your view.
Poles are right and Israel is always wrong. That Rivlin made a personal appeal was overlooked. One can choose to be offended or not.
I think they did not come because it plays to Polish antisemitism and Duda’s party is filled with Nationalists who are antiSemites. Duda told that Jewish President he does not have to bother coming to the Israeli Holocaust Memorial because the rightful one is only in Aushwitz.
The Polish government is certainly never wrong especially in making it illegal to say Poles or Poland had anything to with killing Jews in the Holocaust.
Jpost does not look misleading here was that said:
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
No, I am not a Russian citizen.
Are you Polish? Or a Polish citizen? You deserve a medal from the Polish government for your spirited defense of “Patria cara, Polonia droga”.
It seems to me that you don’t even bother to read my posts but just pick and choose certain points and accuse me of things that I never stated. You just make things up as you go.
BTW, 5 million dead “Polish citizens” include 3 million Jews – now Poland is trading on their dead bodies to elicit sympathy from the world.
Are you here just to keep the conversation going?
It is certainly going nowhere.
@ Bear Klein: The Jerusalem Post article is misleading. That is not unusual for a Jerusalem Post article. If you read the article carefully, it says that President Rivlin offered Duda the opportunity to speak in some other venue than the “mainceremy,” where Putin, the German President, and many other heads of state were invited to speak. Duda would be invited to speak at a dinner for the official guests, or perhaps at a university campus some distance.away from the commemmoration events. That would certainly have discriminated against Poland, the country where somewhere over five million of its citizens, not every single one of them Jews, were murdered by the Nazis.
@ Reader: Reader, if you seriously believe that Germany was not more deeply implicated in the Holocaust than Poland, you are completely out of touch with reality. The Holocaust was conceived, planned, supervised and directed by hundreds of senior German officials, including the German chief of state. Every level of a dozen German state security organizations, collectively known as the S.S were involved in executing this “operation.” Thousands of German state employees participated in the slaughter, often with their own hands. No historian has s denied this .None have suggested that the government of Poland did this.
You are also out of touch with reality if you believe that Stalin did not kill hundreds of thousands of Jews. I cannot remember the names and titles of all the numerous works I have read by professional historians who have documented this at length, some of them Russians, because I have had to return most of them to libraries over the years. But if you really want to learn the facts, you could do worse than to start with Stalin:The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montague. Vintage Press, a division of Random House, 2005. You might learn some actual history if you order it or get it out of the library.
If everyone was implicated in the holocaust, as you claim (I agree with you about this), why do you single out Poland for your venom, and not the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Holland, Belgium, Hungary, Rumania, Slovakia, Norway, most Latin American countries including Cuba,the Palestinian Arabs, Iraq, Portugal, etc. etc., all of whom were implicated in some way in the Holocaust. Why then do you hate only Poland? I suspect you have some grudge against the Poles that is not connected to the Holocaust.
Are you a Russian citizen? I am asking this question in good faith.
@ Adam Dalgliesh@yahoo.com:
(1)
There is nothing in it for Israel and decent people don’t shake the bloody hand of an unrepentant murderer extended to them in “friendship”.
(2)
In my opinion, Israel has NO friends in the world, so there is no point in establishing fake friendships with fake friends, beside regular diplomatic relations.
(3)
The first statement is highly questionable, and Germany has acknowledged its crimes and did a GREAT deal more than Poland to atone for them.
(4)
Just about the whole world was deeply implicated in Holocaust, the point is to make them understand it and not repeat it.
First of all, the country you keep calling Russia, was actually called the Soviet Union, Russia was just one part (the largest) of the union. And, unlike other country, it actually physically fought the German armies for 4 years, and without that Germany now would rule the Earth and there would be no Jews (God forbid).
Second, as I stated in one of my previous posts, Poland (not “Russia”) was the first country to conclude a pact with Germany in 1934, to chop off a region of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and to express the wish to attack the Soviet Union as an ally of Germany.
Third, before signing a pact with Germany, the Soviet Union made an attempt to become allies with France and England against Nazi Germany but the Polish government announced that under no circumstances it will let the Soviet army pass through its territory, even for defense purposes. So, yes, you may have some figuring out to do here.
(5)
Please supply reliable and unbiased references for the numbers you are citing (not Wikipedia).
Those Jews who ended up on the Soviet side remained unmolested by the Nazis and their helpers for 2 more years, and although the deportations and the life in Siberia were very difficult, in the end these measures saved many Polish Jews from certain death. Many died but most didn’t. I personally know some people who were deported and after the war moved to the North and South America. After the end of the war, they were allowed to leave the USSR on their prewar Polish passports.
Cite reliable evidence about them arming Iran (if they do, they are not the only ones who do so). Poland couldn’t “arm Iran” due to the backwardness of its industry, although I have no doubt it wants to.
Why? (about the speakers).
A simple fact – after the war, the only 2 countries with the largest number of Jews left alive were the US and the Soviet Union.
(6)
I suggested no such thing. With this statement you created a straw man and argued against it.
Well, let’s see, what if Germany agreed to make Poland its ally against the Soviet Union in their fight against “Judeo-Bolshevism” now being “invited in” by the Poles instead of having to rudely invade Poland under false pretenses?
Then there would certainly be no doubt as to who “invited the Germans in and asked them to put their murder camps in their country.”
“Against stupidity, even the gods wage war in vain”–Roman proverb.
Duda skipped event in Jerusalem because he wanted Poland to be focus of Holocaust memorials. After all this is the big Polish business!
Some believe that Poland is not trying to silence discussion of Polish Holocaust Crimes. Then why did they pass legislation to make it a crime to talk about it.
https://time.com/5128341/poland-holocaust-law/
Correction–the high-level Russian speaker at the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem was Putin himself! The German president was also permitted to speak. But the Polish President was not invited to speak. Crazy!
@ Reader: Reader, there is nothing in it for me, but a great deal in it for Israel. Poland has extended its hand in friendship to Israel, but Israel , through its incompetent foreign minister and Yad VaShem staff, has rejected that handshake. Israel doesn’t have a great many friends in the world, and rejecting the few friends that it has doesn’t make sense.
The fact is that the German people and government were much, much, much more deeply implicated in the Holocaust, and at a much higher political level, than the Polish people or government. Yet Israel has accepted the Germans proferred hand of friendship. Russia was also deeply implicated in the Holocaust. Russia’s deal with Germany to divide Poland between them, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, greatly facilitated Germany’s conquest of Poland, and hence the Holocaust.Yet the German head of state was allowed to speak at the Holocaust Memorial ceremony in Jerusalem, and the President of Poland was not. Go figure.
Russia also killed several hundred thousand Jews who were suspected political dissidents between 1936 and 1941. They murdered 40,000 Jewish officers serving in the Polish army, most of them physicians, when they took a large part of the Polish officer corps prisoner in 1939-41. They deported over 100,000 Polish Jews to concentration camps in Siberia during this period. Many of them died in these camps. Russia is now arming Iran and assisting its development of nuclear weapons. Poland is not doing this. Yet a high-level Russian representative (I can’t remember his name) was permitted to address the holocaust conference, while a Polish representative was not allowed to do so. Why?
You suggest that because the Germans murdered most, although not all, of their Jewish victims in Poland, that makes the Poles guilty! As if they invited in the Germans in and asked them to put their murder camps in their country! That is insane reasoning.
“Against stupidity, even the gods wage war in vain”–Roman proverb.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
Yes. And what’s in it for you? Both kinds of things happened. No one denies that some Poles tried to help Jews, and some Germans tried to help Jews, and some Ukrainians tried to help Jews, etc. and that it was dangerous (for example, if the villagers saw that their neighbor bought too much food, they would suspect him of hiding Jews and denounce him to the Germans), expensive (that’s why the majority of Jews who were saved had to contribute money or goods for their upkeep), and often there was simply not enough space or privacy. No one denies that Poland was an occupied country and that non-Jewish Poles also suffered.
But trying to convince everybody that Poland was completely innocent, and all they did was suffered and tried to save Jews and all the war crimes were committed by the German occupiers is just TOO MUCH.
Poland will always remain in history as the largest and most vicious killing field for Jews. It made its bed in WWII, now it has to sleep in it. I guess they didn’t think about the future too much or maybe they were dreaming about a different future when Poland would be happily Judenrein and “free”.