... When Poland joined the European Union, Weiss, a former Israeli ambassador to Poland, remembers that the Polish foreign minister phoned to assure him that the Polish voice would be “decent,” Weiss says, “and it really is.”

Since then, political cooperation has been close, while business ties have boomed. Israeli businessmen, who have made investments in Poland globally amounting to some $2 billion, say the climate they encounter in the country is very encouraging. Poland also is buying weapons from Israel and maintains close military and security ties with Jerusalem.

“We don’t talk in public about those things. We just do them,” says a former Polish ambassador to Israel, Maciej Kozlowski.

These policies, supported by all of Poland’s governments, left or right, also have the support of the country’s media, which are markedly more objective about Israel than their Western European counterparts.

The main Polish daily newspapers, for example, played up the recent Amnesty International report accusing Hezbollah of war crimes in the recent fighting in Lebanon, while Western European papers were less interested. Seminars about Israel at Polish universities attract students genuinely interested in learning about the country, not the PLO sympathizers you’d expect in Paris or Rome...