Poland-Israel 1944–1968: In the Shadow of the Past and of the Soviet Union by Boíena Szaynok (review)

This well-documented, highly readable book—the English translation of a monograph published in Poland in 2007—gives a comprehensive account of relations between Poland and the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine and its successor, the state of Israel, from the end of World War II until the breach of Polish-Israeli relations in June 1967 and the subsequent “anti-Zionist” campaign in Poland. Based on extensive use of the now opened Polish archives and some Israeli documents made available to the author by the editors of a project that gathered documents on Polish-Israeli relations as well as on the extensive secondary literature, the book gives a clear picture of how the two countries’ relations developed in the quarter of a century from the closing year of World War II through 1968. The book fleshes out our understanding of the relations between Israel and the socialist camp in a significant manner.

Szaynok distinguishes four periods in the evolution of Polish-Israeli relations. The first runs from the end of the war until the second half of 1948. This was a time of bitter political conflict—indeed, near civil war—in Poland and culminated in the imposition on the country, with significant Soviet assistance, of an unpopular and unrepresentative Communist regime in which the key political role was played by the security apparatus. These conflicts were not reflected in attitudes toward the emerging Israeli state. Both the Communists and the non-Communists in what was until early 1947 a coalition government were strongly in favor of the partition of Palestine and the emergence of a Jewish state. In the case of the leadership of the Polish Communists, this reflected Soviet policy, which was dictated primarily by the desire to weaken the influence of Britain and its Arab allies in the Middle East and by the belief that Communist influence would be strong in the emerging Jewish state.

Recent arguments that Soviet leaders were also affected by the pro-Nazi position held during the war by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948 and a key figure in the Arab Higher Committee, receive only slight confirmation in the Polish documents. Commenting on Andrei Gromyko’s speech of 14 May 1947—in which Gromyko said, “the aspirations of a substantial segment of the Jewish nation are linked with Palestine and its future structure”—Juliusz Katz-Suchy, the secretary of the Polish mission at the United Nations (UN) told Mordechai Oren, a left-wing Zionist activist, that Soviet policy was dictated by two factors: (1) awareness of the need to assist the Jewish nation in its tragic situation (the camps), and (2) reluctance to rely on the Arabs alone because of the suspicion that they might constitute an unstable factor and that their leaders were susceptible to imperialism (p. 81).

Even stronger support for Zionist aspirations was offered by the non-Communists who supported the postwar Polish government that was given Western recognition after its enlargement in accordance with the decision of the Yalta conference. This was the case with Olgierd Górka, a prominent prewar expert on minority affairs who was appointed head of the short-lived Bureau of Jewish Affairs established in the Polish Foreign Ministry in February 1946. In March 1947, Górka became consul-general in Jerusalem. Even more pro-Zionist was Ksawery Pruszyñski, a prominent prewar journalist who had thrown in his lot with the new government and who, as a member of the Polish delegation to the UN headed one of the subcommittees of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestine Question. His speeches were strongly criticized by Arab spokesmen as having a “pro-Zionist bias.” In one, describing the geography of Palestine, Pruszyñski observed that “the Jews settled only where the land was worst. They came to those barren sandy hills stretching along the sea coast...