Two-day talks with an Israeli delegation on the resumption of trips by Israeli youth to our country will begin in Warsaw on 20 July. The negotiations will be held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

It should be recalled that in mid-June, Israeli Foreign Minister Jair Lapid announced that educational trips for Israeli teenagers to Poland organised this summer would be cancelled.

As deputy head of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs Marcin Przydacz said at the time, “the resumption of Jewish youth trips to Poland should be regulated by an appropriate intergovernmental agreement”. Today, the bone of contention is the presence of armed Israeli security,” he explained.

A month ago, the Israeli portal The Times of Israel reported that the Polish authorities refused to allow Shin Bet agents protecting the tours to carry weapons on Polish territory, unlike in previous years, forcing the Ministry of Education in Tel-Aviv to cancel the trips.

Tours to Holocaust memorials have for the past 30 years been organised according to a scenario developed back in the 1990s, although they were not regulated by any agreement or contract. They were suspended two years ago because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and before the outbreak of the pandemic, around 40,000 Israeli schoolchildren took part in the tours every year.

A few days ago, in an interview with the Rzeczpospolita daily, the new Israeli ambassador to Warsaw, Yaakov Livne, asserted that he had come to Poland with a very clear message. ‘We want relations between Israel and Poland to get back on track, that is, to the state they were in before the series of crises that began in 2018’, he said.

Adrian Andrzejewski