Donald Tusk and his foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, have received stern backlash from Israel and the U.S. after publishing controversial statements on aid getting into Gaza.
The prime minister’s post on Sunday started well, insisting that Poland is “on Israel’s side in its confrontation with Islamic terrorism.” But within the same sentence, he accused members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of causing “hunger and the death of mothers and children” in Gaza before appearing to go on to conflate this administration with the Nazis.
This [hunger and death] must be obvious to nations that together went through the hell of World War II.
Israel’s foreign ministry hit back, urging Tusk to “remember the lesson of ‘Never Again,’” which it said “applies to our era’s new Nazis and their collaborators, Hamas.” Officials also stressed that Israel is acting within international law.
Unfortunately, Poland Prime Minister @donaldtusk is linking his timely condemnation of Hamas with an unacceptable reference to politicians, accompanied by a reminder of the horrible days of World War II. The Prime Minister of Poland should remember the lesson of “Never Again.”… pic.twitter.com/43atQZdT9Z
Sikorski had previously implied that this last claim was false, pointing to “starving children in Gaza” and warning that “even when acting in self-defense, [Israel] is not exempt from respecting international law.”
On this occasion, the U.S. rebuked the minister through Tom Rose, Donald Trump’s nominee for the next ambassador to Poland. Rose stressed that
Israel has provided more humanitarian aid to its mortal enemy than any combatant in the history of warfare—and it does so under tremendous pressure and at great risk to its own flesh and blood—not because it is required to, but because it is a Jewish state committed to basic moral standards.
Dear Mr. Minister, Your question underscores just how morally unprecedented this situation is. As you well know, history offers no precedent where a terrorist group wages war for the explicit annihilation of a sovereign state, embeds itself among civilians, and then relies on… https://t.co/dCyDSA9e5P
World leaders have paid much less attention to the failure of the United Nations to get aid into the right hands in Gaza, with the agency’s own data revealing that close to 90% of its food trucks are being “intercepted” in the strip.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
