Israel and Poland Must Look Forward, Not Backward

Dov S. Zakheim

Security, Eurasia

It is a shame that demagogues in both countries are doing their best to wreck Israeli-Polish relations.

Polish-Jewish relations are as complex as they are ancient and painful. During much of the Middle Ages, when England, France and various German statelets expelled their Jewish communities, it was Poland, or the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, that took them in. On the other hand, pogroms against Jews became increasingly commonplace after Czarist Russia absorbed eastern Poland in the third and final partition of that country in 1795. In the aftermath of the First World War, the Allies forced the newly independent Polish government to agree to provide special protections to its vulnerable minorities—the so-called Minorities Treaty—especially the Jewish community, which comprised some ten percent of the new state’s population (and accounted for 56 percent of the country’s doctors and about a third of its lawyers and other professionals).

The pogroms did not stop, however. Jews were attacked on the streets and in the universities. Their shops were often boycotted. Moreover, Poland renounced the Minorities Agreement in 1934 when General Jozef Pilsudski signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. Attacks on Jews increased sharply as did economic boycotts. Full-scale pogroms took place in various towns until 1938. At the same time, the government passed increasingly onerous restrictions on Jews: they were offered a very limited number of places at universities under the numerus clausus; if they did attend, they were forced to stand in the back of the lecture hall. They could not hold government jobs, other than serve in the seats reserved for them in the Polish Sejm (Parliament).

The Holocaust resulted in the extermination of Europe’s largest Jewish community, some three million souls. The most notorious concentration and extermination camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, were to be found in Poland. Thousands of Poles cooperated with the Nazis in the destruction of the country’s Jewish population.