Polish Parliament member Konrad Berkowicz accused the Jewish state of genocide on Wednesday, comparing it to the Third Reich and displaying an Israeli flag with a swastika in place of a Star of David, while delivering an antisemitism-studded speech at the Sejm, Poland’s parliament building on Tuesday.
“Israel is committing genocide before our eyes with particular cruelty. Israel is the new Third Reich, and its flag should look exactly like this,” he declared, before unfurling the flag.
Berkowicz, 41, is a member of the Confederation Liberty and Independence coalition, an alliance of two far-right parties known simply as the Confederation (Konfederacja). The group won 18 seats in the 2023 parliamentary elections, up from 11 in 2019. Poland’s lower house of parliament contains 460 seats.
He also accused “the Jews” of using “banned” phosphorus bombs to kill children.
While not banned, phosphorus bombs are tightly regulated. The Israel Defense Forces has been accused of using them before, an accusation the Israeli military has declared “unequivocally false.” Nevertheless, Berkowicz accused Israel of killing “dozens of thousands of women and children” using such munitions.
Confederation social-media accounts publicized the speech, among them Sławomir Mentzen, one of the Confederation’s co-chairmen and head of the New Hope Party, who wrote in the description on X: “Israel is the new Third Reich!”
Wlodzimierz Czarzasty, Poland’s Speaker of the Parliament, responded harshly to Berkowicz.
“Such actions constitute a blatant violation of the authority of the Sejm and the rules of parliamentary debate. There is and will be no place in the Polish parliament for symbols and messages referring to an ideology responsible for some of the greatest crimes in human history, as well as for antisemitism,” he said in a statement.
“This behavior is particularly outrageous on Yom Hashoah [Holocaust Remembrance Day], which reminds us of the tragedy of millions of Jewish victims of German Nazism and obliges us to maintain the highest standards of responsibility in public life,” he said.
Czarzasty emphasized that “the instrumental use of Nazi symbolism in public debate constitutes a gross transgression of the boundaries of permissible expression.”
