Tensions between Poland and Israel have escalated as the Polish president denounced the Israeli ambassador’s comment as “outrageous,” prompting Warsaw to summon him for a meeting.
The incident involved the death of a 35-year-old Polish aid worker, one of seven killed while delivering food in Gaza.
Israel has called it a “mistake” due to misidentification, but Poland is shocked, with the ambassador accusing the “extreme right and left in Poland” of falsely accusing Israel of intentional murder.
He said on social media Tuesday that “anti-Semites will always remain anti-Semites, and Israel will remain a democratic Jewish state that fights for its right to exist. Also for the good of the entire Western world.”
Polish President Andrzej Duda on Thursday called the comment “outrageous” and described the ambassador as “the biggest problem for the state of Israel in relations with Poland.”
Duda said authorities in Israel have spoken about the tragedy “in a very subdued way,” but added, “Unfortunately, their ambassador to Poland is not able to maintain such delicacy and sensitivity, which is unacceptable.”
Prime Minister Donald Tusk, while a political opponent of Duda’s, voiced a similar position.
He said Thursday that the comment had offended Poles and that the ambassador should apologize.
The deputy foreign minister was quoted in the Polish media as saying that Livne was summoned to a meeting on Friday morning.
A day earlier, Tusk published a comment on social media addressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Livne saying: “The vast majority of Poles showed full solidarity with Israel after the Hamas attack. Today you are putting this solidarity to a really hard test. The tragic attack on volunteers and your reaction arouse understandable anger.”
Duda on Thursday also called for Israel to pay “appropriate compensation” to the family of the aid worker, Damian Sobol.
Sobol had been on an aid mission to Gaza for the past six months following work in Ukraine, Morocco and Türkiye.
Polish and Israeli relations have recently been on the mend after several difficult years.
Ties were badly damaged due to disputes over how to remember Polish behavior during the Holocaust when Nazi Germany occupied Poland and carried out the mass murder of Jews.
For eight years until December, Poland had a nationalist government that played down Polish participation in the German killings of Jews and focused largely on Polish aid to Jews. Israel’s government believed that approach amounted to historical distortion.
Israel also objected to a law that limited property restitution claims, something that affected the heirs of Polish Holocaust victims, and recalled its ambassador in 2021 before sending Livne the next year as ties improved.
Duda said that “we agreed to have this representative finally be in Poland in order to facilitate Israel’s relations with Poland,” but that the ambassador now “is making these relations more difficult.”
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