Poland’s New Restitution Law Isn’t about Property, but Rewriting History

Earlier this month, the Polish president signed into law a bill that makes it impossible for Jews to pursue claims to property stolen during and immediately after World War II. Ben Cohen sums up a recent discussion of the issue among four prominent Polish historians:

[T]he real purpose of the recent reform to the Code of Administrative Procedure—as well as the [law that] allows for civil prosecutions of historians who research . . . Polish collusion with the Nazis—was to help transform the Holocaust from a Jewish trauma into a Polish one. The success of that narrative . . . depends in large part on excluding from historical inquiry the topic of the collusion of elements of the population in Poland, a country with a long history of anti-Semitic agitation, with the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

One of the leading Polish scholars of World War II, Jan Gross, added:

[The defense of the new law] one hears from the right-wing nationalists [is] that the Jews are trying to seize property. This is presented as the expropriation of the Poles, and it becomes a major scandal. At the same time, the Polish government is demanding restitution from the Germans for damages incurred during the Nazi occupation, which they estimate at $850 billion. When this issue is brought up, you hear that the number of Poles killed [in World War II] was six million—that number is not a coincidence. However, the real number is under five million, and that is when we include the three million Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

So the potential scandal which is on the verge of unfolding is when the Jewish community, which rightly considers itself to have been robbed, learns that the Polish regime intends to request compensation from Germany for Jewish property that was destroyed during the war.

Read more at Algemeiner

More about: Holocaust, Holocaust restitution, Poland

Why South Africa Has Led the Legal War against Israel

South Africa filed suit with the International Court of Justice in December accusing Israel of genocide. More recently, it requested that the court order the Jewish state to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip—something which, of course, Israel has been doing since the war began. Indeed, the country’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC) has had a long history of support for the Palestinian cause, but Orde Kittrie suggests that the current government, which is plagued by massive corruption, has more sinister motives for its fixation on accusing Israel of imagined crimes:

ANC-led South Africa has . . . repeatedly supported Hamas. In 2015 and 2018, the ANC and Hamas signed memoranda of understanding pledging cooperation against Israel. The Daily Maverick, a South African newspaper that previously won an international award for exposing ANC corruption, has reported claims that Iran “essentially paid the ANC to litigate against Israel in the ICJ.”

The ANC-led government says it is motivated by humanitarian principle. That’s contradicted by its support for Russia, and by [President Cyril] Ramaphosa’s warmly welcoming a visit in January by Mohamed Dagalo, the leader of the Sudanese-Arab Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia. Ramaphosa’s smiling, hand-holding welcome of Dagalo occurred two months after the RSF’s systematic massacre of hundreds of non-Arab Sudanese refugees in Darfur.

While the ANC has looted its own country and aided America’s enemies, the U.S. is insulating the party from the consequences of its corruption and mismanagement.

In Kittrie’s view, it is “time for Congress and the Biden administration to start helping South Africa’s people hold Ramaphosa accountable.”

Read more at The Hill

More about: International Law, Iran, South Africa