“Israel is not behaving like the tyrants of history. It is acting well within the bounds of international law,” wrote Tom Rose, the nominee for U.S. ambassador to Poland, on Sunday on X. The diplomat was responding to comments by Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, who had called on Israel to respect international law.
“History offers no precedent”
The American diplomat was reacting to Sikorski’s post on X, which featured a clip from his interview with the Onet portal. In the interview, the Polish minister stated that “even when Israel is acting in self-defense, it is not exempt from respecting international law.” “Starving children in Gaza don’t know what Hamas is,” Sikorski emphasized.
“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 that very state to supply it with food, water, and fuel,” Rose stated, adding that “that is exactly what Israel has done – often under duress, often at great cost and risk to its own soldiers, and almost always without reciprocity.”
“Israel is not behaving like the tyrants of history”
“Israel is not behaving like the tyrants of history. It is acting well within the bounds of international law even when its enemies flout its every precept. 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,” Rose wrote.
The diplomat also posed a rhetorical question: “Should Ukraine send convoys of aid while under fire to feed Russian civilians in occupied Donbas or Crimea? Would Poland? These would be absurd demands – for Poland, for Ukraine, for any country fighting a defensive was, yet Israel faces them daily,” Rose concluded.