Once Again, Poland’s Attempt to Whitewash History Clashes with Its Alliance with Israel

While in Poland last week for the international conference on Middle Eastern security, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech at the Warsaw Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Responding to a question from a journalist, he stated that “Poles had cooperated with the Nazis; . . . there is no argument about this.” The Polish government responded in pique, declaring that its foreign minister, rather than its president, would now be attending the Visegrad summit scheduled to begin in Jerusalem on Monday. But then Israel’s newly appointed foreign minister, in an interview with Israeli television, quoted the former prime minister Yitzḥak Shamir’s inflammatory comment that Poles “imbibe anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk.” Now the summit has been called off altogether. The editors of the Jerusalem Post comment:

These [diplomatic] crises will continue so long as Poland’s government insists on whitewashing history. . . . The state-run Auschwitz Museum, for example, recently tweeted that,“talking about complicity between the [Nazi] occupiers and local civilian population in the history of Auschwitz is false,” despite massive evidence to the contrary in Poland and other Nazi-occupied lands.

Warsaw would do better if it stopped trying to cover up the role of many Poles in aiding the Nazis in their plot to exterminate the Jewish people. Over 90 percent of Polish Jews perished in the Holocaust. . . . The historian Jan Grabowski found that two of three Jews who asked Polish Gentiles for refuge were murdered, and that Polish [collaborationist] “Blue Police” slaughtered Jews who hid from the Nazis. There were pogroms before the German occupation; many Jews who survived the Holocaust and sought to return to their homes were murdered.

Jews should not allow these attempts at laundering history to stand. It’s also unclear how this benefits Poland. [Warsaw’s efforts to ban certain statements about Polish collaboration with the Nazis] have ironically drawn greater attention to the Holocaust in Poland and the role Polish people played in it.

Israeli-Polish ties are important. Netanyahu’s strategy of working with the EU countries that are more pro-Israel, such as the Visegrad states [of Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic], is a smart one—after all, the EU is our largest trading partner. But Israel should not and cannot let Poland get away with distorting the most tragic chapter in Jewish history.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Europe and Israel, Holocaust, Israel & Zionism, Israel diplomacy, Poland

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF