In Poland, where criticising Israel remains taboo, Gaza solidarity rises

Warsaw, Poland – In an attempt to raise awareness about the abuse and humiliation suffered by Palestinians who have been arrested and tortured by Israeli troops, Igor Dobrowolski, a Polish painter and performance artist, dressed up in a purple overall in March and placed a yellow sack over his head.

In a video of the performance posted to Instagram, he is seen kneeling on a concrete floor, his hands zip-tied behind his back. A person beside him in khaki green playing the role of an Israeli soldier holds up a stick with laughing emojis – a nod to the evidence that many are livestreaming potential war crimes on social media.

Dobrowolski is seen urinating in fear, just as Palestinian prisoners did in footage posted earlier by Israeli troops, during which one is heard mockingly saying, “Oh no, what happened? He peed himself.”

Those words echo over the performance by Dobrowolski, who has dedicated his art this past year to the subject of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza – no easy task in a country still grappling with its Holocaust history.

“When you watch films about the Holocaust on TV, they are very serious, the perpetrators are shown as devoid of emotions. But the genocide which is happening today seems very funny to the perpetrators,” said Dobrowolski, referring to the videos uploaded by Israeli soldiers. “I decided to kneel in the middle of all that.”

During the Holocaust, more than three million Jews were killed in Nazi-occupied Poland, and thousands died in pogroms committed by local Poles. Because of the tragic memories, criticising Israel remains taboo.

Before World War II, 10 percent of the Polish population was Jewish, the highest number in Europe. After the Holocaust, few Jews remained in the country, and many of those who stayed fell victim to the 1968 communist purges.

Following the collapse of communism, Poland has maintained diplomatic relations with both Israel and Palestine. While it has not been actively involved in resolving the historic crisis, it supports the idea of a two-state solution.

According to an IBRIS agency poll last May, more than 66 percent of Poles say that Poland should remain neutral in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

But tensions between Poland and Israel arise periodically over Holocaust memory and politics.

In 2018, Poland passed a controversial law, making it illegal to suggest Poland’s complicity in Nazi crimes. One year later, Israel Katz, then-foreign minister, said “Poles imbibe anti-Semitism from their mothers’ milk”.

In 2021, Poland proposed a law to put a statute of limitation of restitution claims regarding Jewish property seized during World War II, which Yair Lapid, foreign minister at the time, described as “immoral and a disgrace”.

Last May, Poland supported a resolution granting Palestine observer state status within the United Nations. Israel’s Ambassador to Poland Yacov Livne warned that the decision would “harm Poland”.

Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, responded that it is “the Polish government, not foreign ambassadors, who will decide what is good for Poland”.

Beyond the diplomatic rows, most Poles consider the Holocaust as the worst tragedy in recent history and find it hard to comprehend that Israelis could be perpetrators of humanitarian crimes.

“In Poland, it is unthinkable to compare anything to the Holocaust and any such comparison sounds controversial. The Holocaust has a very symbolic and personal meaning to people,” Ewa Gorska, a doctoral student of sociology of law focusing on the Middle East, told Al Jazeera.

“Poland and the rest of Europe have never worked through the anti-Semitism which made the Holocaust possible. At the same time, after the creation of Israel, our emotions and prejudices against the Jews were easily transferred onto the Arabs and Muslims in the forms of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.”

Israel’s war in Gaza has killed at least 43,922 Palestinians and wounded 103,898 since October 7, 2023, when an estimated 1,139 people were killed and more than 200 were taken captive during the Hamas-led incursion into southern Israel.

‘If I kept silent, I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror’

During another performance at the Cliche and Wall Space galleries in Warsaw, the Polish capital, Dobrowolski kneeled for seven hours surrounded by mannequins of babies folded in white cloths, symbolising the relentless nature of what a UN agency has called a war on children, given the tens of thousands who have been killed in little more than a year.

During one of his performances, Mahmoud Khalifa, the Palestinian ambassador to Poland, placed a keffiyeh on Dobrowolski’s back and whispered: “Thank you.”

Yara Al Nimer, a Poland-based Palestinian singer who has seen Dobrowolski’s performance, described them as “one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen”.

His work draws criticism as well as praise.

He has previously described the onslaught in Gaza as a “psychopathic reality” and in other works, directly compared the atrocities committed by Israeli troops to those of Nazi war criminals.

At the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp, he raised banners reading “Is ‘never again’ for everyone?” and “Israel exploits Holocaust memory to carry out genocide” in a one-man picket protest.

More than 1.1 million people – the majority of them Jews, but also Poles, and Roma people among others – perished between 1941 and 1945.

In the eyes of many Poles and Jews, he violated a sacred place.

“Some galleries and art collectors [have] commented that I am an anti-Semite,” said Dobrowolski. “I know that raising the issue of the situation in Palestine can be detrimental to my career, that I won’t be able to show my work in museums, and that some auctions will not sell my work. But if I kept silent, I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror. I don’t make excuses.”

According to Gorska, most Polish millennials grew up learning about the wrongs of anti-Semitism, but there was not enough discussion on Holocaust trauma.

This is one of the reasons why some fear commenting on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, she said.

But the younger generation in the pro-Palestinian movement, which includes students who have occupied university buildings in Warsaw and Krakow, no longer share the fears of their older compatriots.

“These are people who care about their language and inclusivity. There is no place for racism or anti-Semitism. It is a completely different sensitivity and another way of understanding the world, which allows them to work through issues that were neglected before,” Gorska said.

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