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Haaretz: Let’s Stop Hating Poland
This doesn’t happen every day: one of the most prestigious newspapers in Israel publishes an article that’s exceptionally favorable towards Poland.
The author is the well-known reporter Adar Primor, who recently visited Poland and met the Rzeczpospolita editorial board.
His travels around Poland gave Primor a chance to see what Poles really think of Jews. “The associations are familiar, the stereotypes are well known: Poland is the cradle of anti-Semitism; the land of persecution and pogroms; a nation of murderers and collaborators; the graveyard of the Jewish peopleis how Primor’s article begins.
Then he adds that “intellectual honesty demands a further examination of the issue. First, about history: We tend to forget that the death camps in Poland were set up by the Nazis; that Auschwitz was originally conceived as a destination for Polish prisoners. . . . and in particular that—despite the fact that in occupied Poland, the punishment for anyone who hid a Jew was death (the same went for the family of the one doing the hiding)—about one-third of those named Righteous Among the Nations (some 6,000) were Poles.”
Primor notes that Israel’s diplomats in Warsaw describe present-day Poland as “the most pro-Israeli [country] on the continent.”
According to Primor, anti-Semitism in Poland is “anti-Semitism lite” and, furthermore, is overshadowed by a wave of philo-Semitism. “As hallucinatory as this may sound, it transpires that being a Jew is ‘in’ today in Poland. The media, the elites and the general public show a great deal of interest in everything connected with Israel and Jews.”
In conclusion, Primor asks a rhetorical question: “Has the time come to stop hating Poland?”
