Poland’s New Holocaust Law Should Be Unacceptable to Israel

Last month, the Polish parliament passed a law, still being debated by the country’s senate, that would effectively cut off any Jewish efforts to reclaim property stolen during the Shoah and its immediate aftermath. Yair Lapid, Israel’s foreign minster and alternate prime minister, has already condemned the legislation. To Ben Cohen, the law is reason for Jerusalem to take severe diplomatic action:

The underlying purpose of the new law is to assert, against the historical record, that neither Poland nor the Poles themselves bear any responsibility whatsoever for the fate of the Jews, who are hypocritically remembered by the same nationalists as “our compatriots,” as though the brutal history of Polish anti-Semitism that long predated the German occupation [of Poland during World War II] never happened.

In getting that message across, senior Polish leaders from Prime Minister Mateusz Marowiecki downwards have played an extraordinarily dishonest game. For all its anti-Communist fervor, the [ruling right-wing party] finds it inconvenient to recognize that what is at issue here is not the German occupation, but the fact that the postwar Soviet-backed regime engaged in a second round of theft by nationalizing the property of the Jews murdered by the Nazis.

[While] many supporters of the Polish government like to argue that were it not for Warsaw’s presence in the EU, Brussels would treat Israel even more shabbily, but that claim is a conceit and nothing more. As the recent conflict between Hamas and Israel demonstrated, governments and political leaders in Germany, Austria, the UK, and other European nations did not require the intervention of the Polish government to express their understanding for Israel’s predicament with an empathy that would have been hard to imagine twenty years ago.

The passage of the restitution law, therefore, necessitates at least a temporary break in ties between the current Polish government and the state of Israel and Jewish groups worldwide.

Read more at JNS

More about: Holocaust restitution, Israel diplomacy, Poland, Yair Lapid

How Congress Can Finish Off Iran

July 18 2025

With the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program damaged, and its regional influence diminished, the U.S. must now prevent it from recovering, and, if possible, weaken it further. Benjamin Baird argues that it can do both through economic means—if Congress does its part:

Legislation that codifies President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policies into law, places sanctions on Iran’s energy sales, and designates the regime’s proxy armies as foreign terrorist organizations will go a long way toward containing Iran’s regime and encouraging its downfall. . . . Congress has already introduced much of the legislation needed to bring the ayatollah to his knees, and committee chairmen need only hold markup hearings to advance these bills and send them to the House and Senate floors.

They should start with the HR 2614—the Maximum Support Act. What the Iranian people truly need to overcome the regime is protection from the state security apparatus.

Next, Congress must get to work dismantling Iran’s proxy army in Iraq. By sanctioning and designating a list of 29 Iran-backed Iraqi militias through the Florida representative Greg Steube’s Iranian Terror Prevention Act, the U.S. can shut down . . . groups like the Badr Organization and Kataib Hizballah, which are part of the Iranian-sponsored armed groups responsible for killing hundreds of American service members.

Those same militias are almost certainly responsible for a series of drone attacks on oilfields in Iraq over the past few days

Read more at National Review

More about: Congress, Iran, U.S. Foreign policy