Scratch a Polish antisemite, find an anti-American

Scratch a Polish antisemite, and you will find an anti-American. Scratch a Polish anti-American, and hostility to Israel soon surfaces. In little more than a week, Polish politics has offered three reminders, and only one came from the far Right.

On Oct. 10, a Polish YouTube channel released recordings of Grzegorz Braun, a right-wing member of the European Parliament charged in August with Holocaust denial, calling the office of President Karol Nawrocki a “Judenrat.” Nawrocki is the Polish politician President Donald Trump calls “my friend.” Braun is the man who put out the Hanukkah candles in Poland’s parliament with a fire extinguisher and told a radio host that “Auschwitz with gas chambers is, unfortunately, fake.” In 2020, he told parliament that Poland was under “Jewish-American” trusteeship. In Braun’s worldview, Jews and Americans form a single occupying power.

On Oct. 12, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk posted a video about Pegasus, the spyware Poland’s previous conservative government bought in 2017 and used against, among others, opposition politicians. He called the affair a grave crime against the state. Pegasus, he said, was “an all-encompassing tool of cyber surveillance, produced by an Israeli firm,” and control over it “remained in the hands of Israel and the Israeli firm.” Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice government, he went on, had handed “a foreign state, Israel,” tens of thousands of sensitive records concerning Polish citizens. In the space of a few sentences, an Israeli company had become Israel.

Tusk is no antisemite, but he went further than the government’s own prosecutors. Citing experts from the domestic counterintelligence agency, they found that data sent through Pegasus left Polish territory and that the manufacturer had the technical ability to access surveillance data. The expert opinions, they added, “do not settle whether the manufacturer actually gained access” to material from specific operations. In August, a cyberattack may have exposed the health records of nearly 19 million Poles. That time, the government blamed cybercriminals.

Moscow turned the equation into state propaganda. On Jan. 13, 1953, Pravda announced that the Kremlin’s doctors had been recruited by “a branch-office of American intelligence — the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called ‘Joint.'” Fifteen years later, Poland’s communists ran the same play at home. Party propaganda in 1968 “exposed” American-Zionist plots against Poland, and about 13,000 Polish Jews were driven out of the country.

That party has heirs. Wlodzimierz Czarzasty, the speaker of parliament and leader of the New Left, joined it in 1983 and stayed until it dissolved in 1990. He was a leading figure in Ordynacka, the network of former communist student activists. His past does not prove what he believes today. That history should make him especially careful with such rhetoric.

In July 2025, Czarzasty recorded a video of his own. “I condemn the Israeli government for what it is doing in the Gaza Strip,” he said. He called it “really the killing of a nation” and promised to say so “regardless of who stands behind this government, even the mighty United States.” He took care to add that he meant “the government, not the Jewish people.” His condemnation extended to Israel’s American backers. A week later, his caucus drafted a resolution describing the deliberate starvation of civilians as genocide. It also demanded the release of Israeli hostages and accountability for the organizers of the Oct. 7 attacks.

Razem, a party that left the Left’s parliamentary caucus in 2024 and never joined the government, went further. On Oct. 18, its Warsaw branch emailed newsrooms, mine among them, to announce a campaign to end the capital’s sister-city partnership with Tel Aviv. “We do not accept cooperation with a city that is the command center of the occupying forces, which are doing to Gaza what the Nazis did to Warsaw,” the press release said. The working definition of antisemitism used by the State Department lists “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” among its examples. The tactic has worked before. Last November, a Razem citizens’ initiative came before the council of Sopot, a Baltic resort whose mayor was endorsed by Tusk’s Civic Coalition. A Razem councilor, elected on the mayor’s list alongside Civic Coalition and Left candidates, spoke of “genocide.” Sopot became the first Polish city to end a partnership with an Israeli one, cutting 32 years of ties with Ashkelon.

The Left’s quarrel with Washington extends beyond Israel. I have written in these pages about Czarzasty’s feud with U.S. Ambassador Tom Rose, which began in February, when the speaker refused to back Trump’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. His colleagues have questioned America’s place in Poland’s security. Magdalena Biejat, a deputy speaker of the Senate, said that “Poland’s most important ally is and must remain the European Union.” Anna Maria Zukowska, who leads the Left’s caucus, warned that American weapons could be “remotely blocked.” In April, the New Left told Rose, in English, that “President Donald Trump is the only person damaging Polish-American relations.”

At a Warsaw march for Gaza in October 2023, banners read “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” On Sept. 20, 2025, a march for Gaza set off from the presidential palace, passed the U.S. Embassy, and ended at parliament under the slogan “Gaza–Warsaw: a common cause.” In March, Braun signed the condolence book at Iran’s embassy for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and signed off: “Tehran–Warsaw: a common cause!” Rose answered: “How disgusting.” The slogans differed by one place name.

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None of this has turned Poland’s parliament against America. On May 29, the Sejm marked America’s 250th birthday by 428 votes to none. Czarzasty’s caucus voted yes; all three abstentions came from Braun’s party. But in a September poll by United Surveys for Wirtualna Polska, Braun’s party and Czarzasty’s together drew almost 20%. A seat projection based on the same poll gave Tusk’s Civic Coalition and the New Left a bare majority: 231 of 460. On those numbers, Tusk could not govern without the party that tells Washington’s ambassador that Trump is the problem.

In March, Rose promised that America would not forget who its friends are. It should also remember where the others sit.

Milosz Manasterski is a Polish essayist, political commentator, and CEO of Agencja Informacyjna. A former Middle East correspondent based in the UAE, he writes on Central European political economy, historical memory, and culture for The European Conservative and Brussels Signal. He holds the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta and the UN ECOSOC Medal.

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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]