“We make our laws ourselves, and... we owe nothing to anyone,” the head of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, Jaroslaw Kaczyński, said on Tuesday in response to Israeli anger over a proposed law that would make it impossible for Jews and others to make claims on property confiscated by the Polish Communist regime after World War II.
At least half of what Kaczyński said is correct: Poland makes its own laws, and the Polish Senate is currently debating the law, which has already passed the lower House of parliament.
But what is equally true is that those laws do have ramifications, and – as new Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has already made clear – this particular law, if the Senate passes it and the president signs it, will have a very chilling effect on Israeli-Polish ties.
Last month Lapid said that this law, which would bar Holocaust restitution claims, is “immoral” and a “disgrace that will not erase the horrors of the memory of the Holocaust.
“It is a horrific injustice and disgrace that harms the rights of Holocaust survivors, their heirs, and members of the Jewish communities that existed in Poland for hundreds of years,” he said. “This is an incomprehensible action. This immoral law will seriously harm relations between the countries.”
This law is the latest installment in tension between Warsaw and Jerusalem over Holocaust-related issues that goes back to 2018 when Poland initiated legislation that would have made it a crime to say that the state had any responsibility for the Holocaust. Three million Jews were killed in Poland during the Holocaust.
Tension flared again a year later when former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was misquoted during a visit to Warsaw as saying “the Poles” collaborated with the Nazis, rather than that “Poles” collaborated with the Nazis.
But what makes this installment different than the last two is that there is a new government in Jerusalem that is less likely than Netanyahu to take a conciliatory posture toward the Poles in a realpolitik calculation to get their diplomatic assistance to fend off an often hostile European Union.
The advent of a new government allows countries to recalibrate their international relations. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett last week endorsed the sale of 50 million cubic meters of water to parched Jordan in an apparent effort to positively reset ties with the Hashemite Kingdom that turned sour under Netanyahu.
Lapid, likewise, has said that he is intent on rebooting ties with Democrats in the US. He is also likely to reset ties with Poland, but this time in the opposite direction.
As an opposition MK in 2018, Lapid was an outspoken critic of Poland’s efforts to pass legislation aimed at washing Poland’s hands of any responsibility for the Holocaust, and he blamed Netanyahu for going too soft on the Poles.
Lapid, whose late father, Tommy Lapid, was a Holocaust survivor, angrily tweeted his condemnation of the law at the time.
“I utterly condemn the new Polish law which tries to deny Polish complicity in the Holocaust,” Lapid wrote on Twitter. “It was conceived in Germany, but hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier. There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that.”
I utterly condemn the new Polish law which tries to deny Polish complicity in the Holocaust. It was conceived in Germany but hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier. There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that.— יאיר לפיד - Yair Lapid (@yairlapid) January 27, 2018
This elicited the following responses on Twitter from the Polish Embassy: “Your unsupportable claims show how badly Holocaust education is needed, even here in Israel.” The embassy also wrote: “The intent of the Polish draft legislation is not to ‘whitewash’ the past, but to protect the truth against such slander.”
Lapid retorted: “I am a son of a Holocaust survivor. My grandmother was murdered in Poland by Germans and Poles. I don’t need Holocaust education from you. We live with the consequences every day in our collective memory. Your embassy should offer an immediate apology.”
Lapid was one of the most outspoken critics of the Poles and accused them of trying to rewrite history.
In June 2018, after Warsaw came under international pressure – especially from the US – it amended the law, garnering praise from Netanyahu, who issued a joint statement with his Polish counterpart. Lapid was less pleased, calling the amendment a “bad joke.”
“This law has to be wiped off of the law books in Poland,” he said. “They should cancel this scandalous law and ask forgiveness from the dead.”
Lapid tweeted at the time that the “joint statement by the Prime Ministers of Israel and Poland is shameful and disrespects the memory of the victims. PM Netanyahu should cancel it immediately. 200,000 Jews were murdered by Poles and the Prime Minister signed a statement that clears them of responsibility.”
At the time, however, Lapid was only an opposition MK, able to freely criticize the government’s policies without having to bear any responsibility for that policy. He did not need to calibrate the relations with Poland, taking into consideration their support as part of a group of former Warsaw Pact countries called the Visegrad Group – which includes Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – which often supports Israel inside the EU and fends off condemnations of Israel originating in the EU headquarters in Brussels.
LAPID’S DECISION to slam the Poles over this latest piece of legislation indicates, however, that just because he has moved from opposition MK to foreign minister and now sees the “whole diplomatic playing field,” he has no intention of changing his tune on these issues and adopting a more conciliatory attitude toward the Poles.
There are two reasons for this: first, because he genuinely believes that what is being done in Poland is an attempt to rewrite history, and secondly because he is taking a different approach toward the EU than Netanyahu.
While Netanyahu broadly saw Brussels as a hostile actor that needed to be neutralized, and the best way to neutralize it was by making sub-alliances inside the EU to get countries to push back against a deeply ingrained anti-Israel attitude coming out of Brussels, Lapid has a different attitude toward Europe.
As he said in a speech he gave in the Foreign Misery immediately after taking office last month, Israel’s situation vis-à-vis the countries of the EU “is not good enough.”
In an apparent reference to the Western European countries, he said “our relationship with too many governments has been neglected and become hostile. Shouting that everyone is antisemitic isn’t a policy or a work plan, even if it sometimes feels right.”
Lapid said that he had already been in contact with EU foreign affairs “czar” Josep Borrell and French President Emmanuel Macron, and that “we all think that it’s time to change, to improve, to deepen the dialogue between Israel and Europe.”
In other words, Lapid wants to pivot toward the liberal democracies inside the EU, and away from those countries – like Hungary and Poland – that may give Israel diplomatic cover, but whose regimes are far from Jeffersonian democracies.
So whereas Netanyahu wanted to smooth over difficulties with the Poles where possible, Lapid comes from a different school of thought and is less interested in currying favor with the sub-alliances that Netanyahu established.
Lapid graciously made it a point on his historic trip to the United Arab Emirates last week to thank Netanyahu for forging the Abraham Accords. You’ll never hear him say anything similar, however, when it comes to how the former prime minister managed the Jewish state’s ties with Poland.