Prominent Israeli activist Arsen Ostrovsky, who’s also a senior fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, provoked a scandal in Poland. He tweeted on Friday about “how sad” it is that Warsaw will arrest Netanyahu per its international legal commitment to the ICC if he travels to Auschwitz to attend its 80th liberation anniversary event next month. Ostrovsky then added at the end of his post that “Perhaps Poland has not fully learnt lessons of the Holocaust, or their own responsibility…”
It was this last part that provoked Poles to fact-check him since their ethno-national group was the only occupied people that the Nazis threatened to execute for helping Jews during World War II. Many were murdered for this act of charity that they carried out in solidarity with their fellow Jewish citizens. The Polish Underground State even had an entire group, Zegota, dedicated to saving Jews. Even so, some Poles still collaborated with the Nazis, but historian Edward Reid proved that this was only 0.1% of them.
Therein lies the crux of the issue since this statistically insignificant percentage of that ethno-national group has been maliciously misportrayed by some Israeli Jews to collectively blame all Poles for the Holocaust. Former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin even once boasted to local media about telling his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda that “you have to learn what happened in the past. Saying that nothing happened that we were both the victims is not correct.” This is factually false historical revisionism.
Poles were the first victims of the Nazis’ genocides, not Jews, and they were targeted for extermination from the very first day of the invasion after the Nazis had already assembled a list of over 60,000 Poles (the “Special Prosecution Book – Poland”) to murder through “Operation Tannenbaum”. That was part of what’s known as the “Intelligenzaktion”. In fact, the very first prisoners of the infamous Nazi death camp Auschwitz were dissident Poles. By comparison, Jews weren’t targeted for extermination until mid-1941.
Once that happened, they constituted around half of the estimated 6 million Polish citizens who were genocided by the Nazis during World War II, which should unite Poles and Jews through their suffering. Regrettably, some Israeli Jews believe that there exists a hierarchy of victimhood atop which their ethno-national and religious group sits, which is why they dishonestly blame Poles for the Holocaust in order to uphold this false perception that some have exploited to demand socio-economic and political privileges.
Not only does this whitewash the Nazis’ responsibility for the Holocaust, but it also suggests that prior genocides against Jews by Ukrainians during Khmelnitsky’s Rebellion and the Koliszczyzna were justified on the same false standard of collective guilt and punishment. Chabad estimates that the first genocided around 600,000 Jews and destroyed 300 of their communities in what can be described as a proto-Holocaust while the second is infamous for the Uman Massacre in which thousands of Jews were killed.
All Jews were targeted by those Ukrainian genocidaires due to a few of them having been very brutal leaseholders (“arendators”) during the Commonwealth period who took full advantage of the locals. It’s difficult to estimate the percentage of Jews that engaged in such acts, but it was probably equal to or more than the 0.1% of Poles who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. Local Poles were also victimized by these brutal leaseholders, yet most Poles nowadays don’t collectively blame all Jews.
They also don’t blame all Jews for a few of them welcoming the Bolsheviks in 1920, the Soviets in 1939, and then rolling back into Poland on Soviet tanks in 1944 to impose an unpopular communist regime in which Jews were disproportionately represented in its secret police during its most brutal early years. It’s therefore highly immoral for some Israeli Jews to blame all Poles for the Holocaust in which an equally insignificant percentage participated. This double standard even risks fueling anti-Semitism among Poles.
Ostrovsky is the latest Israeli Jew to engage in this vile revisionism in order to uphold false perceptions about a hierarchy of victimhood atop which their ethno-national and religious group sits with all the socio-economic and political privileges that they demand as a result. His compatriots, co-ethnics, and co-religionists should condemn this due to it unwittingly whitewashing the Nazis and justifying the Ukrainians’ earlier genocides of Jews on the same false standard of collective guilt and punishment.
