Ruth R. Wisse
WSJ, Jan. 23, 2025
“This war against the Jews isn’t like the last. While Nazism’s racial attack on alleged inferiors could never claim the moral high ground, the inversion that defines Zionism as racism mobilizes worldwide coalitions in institutions that support jihad as anticolonial justice.”
Poland’s Deputy Foreign Minister Władysław Bartoszewski did his countrymen a great disservice last month when he announced that Benjamin Netanyahu would face arrest if he attended the Jan. 27 ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He said membership in the International Criminal Court obligated Poland to respect its warrants for the arrest of Israel’s prime minister and defence minister.
Almost immediately, Prime Minister Donald Tusk and President Andrzej Duda stepped in to guarantee that there would be no arrests. The Polish government declared that ensuring the safe participation of Israeli leaders was “part of showing respect for the Jewish nation, whose millions of daughters and sons became victims of the Holocaust carried out by the Third Reich.” This revised decision reflects less on Israel’s attendance than on the nation Poland chooses to be.
The presence of the notorious Auschwitz death camp in Poland testifies, ironically, to the country’s strong liberal traditions, which had made Jews more welcome there than in the European countries driving them eastward. Polish kings and nobles had periodically encouraged Jews to settle and make themselves useful while following their Torah way of life. The nation nurtured one of the strongest Jewish centers in diaspora history, and as one of its descendants, I honor the country whose Jewish landmarks and cemeteries prove a record of relative tolerance and creative coexistence.
When Nazi Germany embarked on its Final Solution, it built its death camps in Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec and Sobibor, because, like bank robbers who go where the money is, the killers headed to where Jews were already clustered and could most efficiently be destroyed. Of Poland’s 3.474 million Jews in 1939, some 210,000 remained after the war. More than a million Jews were killed at Auschwitz, as were an estimated 70,000 ethnic Poles. …SOURCE