Another fight over Holocaust memory threatens ties between Israel and Poland

SAM SOKOL

Instead, harsh words from Israel’s acting foreign minister opened a diplomatic rift threatening to severely damage Israeli-Polish relations, and the summit was cancelled.

Warsaw decided to pull out of the meeting on Monday, after Yisrael Katz, citing late Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, told Israel’s Channel 13 that Poles “suckle anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk”, causing a national furore in both countries.

Netanyahu has been promoting the meeting of the so-called Visegrad Group – an alliance of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia that represents the nationalist and conservative wing of the European Union – as heralding a nationalist bloc within the EU that supports Israeli policies more strongly than many in the West.

However, he has also come under harsh criticism from domestic critics on both right and left, who have alleged that he has shown an overly solicitous attitude toward Israel’s Eastern and Central European allies. According to this view, Jerusalem has downplayed concerns about anti-Semitism and Holocaust memory in favour of closer engagement.

Poland’s decision to pull out, which effectively cancelled the summit and caused the other Visegrad, or V4, nations to downgrade their diplomatic visits to merely bilateral ones, came after several days of furious denunciations and diplomatic scrambling.

The controversy began last Friday, when the Jerusalem Post reported that Netanyahu, in Warsaw for a conference on the Middle East, accused “the Polish nation” of collaborating with the Nazis. Netanyahu later clarified that he had not implicated the Poles collectively. The Post subsequently amended its story, and it initially appeared that the crisis had been averted.

Katz’s comments on Monday morning, however, revived the diplomatic crisis. “I am a son of Holocaust survivors, and I was even born and grew up in a community made up of Holocaust survivors,” Katz, a senior Likud minister just tapped by Netanyahu as acting foreign minister, said on Sunday. “The memory of the Holocaust is something we cannot compromise about; it is clear and we won’t forget or forgive.

“In diplomacy you try not to offend, but nobody will change historical truth”, Katz continued. “Poles collaborated with the Nazis, definitely. As Yitzhak Shamir said, they suckle anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk.”

Poland’s Ambassador to Israel, Marek Magierowski, tweeted that he was astonished that Katz, who is the child of Holocaust survivors, had uttered “such a shameful and racist remark”. The Polish foreign ministry reprimanded Israel’s Ambassador to Poland, Anna Azari, and is reported to be considering withdrawing Magierowski from Tel Aviv in protest.

By early afternoon in Jerusalem, the summit had been officially cancelled, a stunning reversal of last year, when Netanyahu had appeared to endorse a Polish narrative of the war years, and released a joint statement with his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki, defending Poland’s wartime record. That statement was itself an effort to repair ruptured ties after Jerusalem condemned Poland for a controversial law that made it a crime to hold Poland responsible for Nazi crimes.

The release of the joint statement led to an unprecedented rebuke of the prime minister from the usually apolitical Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Centre. It termed the joint statement “an offense not only to the historical truth, but also to the memory of the heroism of the righteous among the nations.”

Yad Vashem has recognised more than 6 800 Poles as righteous among the nations for having risked their lives to save Jews – far more than in any other country.

Netanyahu’s joint statement with Morawiecki last year also seemed to equate anti-Semitism with animus toward Poles, stating immediately after a condemnation of anti-Semitism that “both governments also express their rejection of anti-Polonism and other negative national stereotypes”. It was later reported in the Polish press that Morawiecki had emphasised that the declaration was the first to put anti-Polonism on the books as a recognised form of discrimination.

“One should read the current Polish reactions to Israeli expressions in this context. Polish officials stated it is racism since for them, Israel confirmed that anti-Polonism and anti-Semitism are similar fundamental hatreds. This is just one problematic practical consequence of the joint declaration,” noted Havi Dreifuss, a historian of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe at Tel Aviv University.

“Yet, one should also note that much of what was said lately in the Israeli media is far from being accurate,” she continued. “The fact that many Poles took part in harming Jews doesn’t mean that all Poles killed Jews. And the Holocaust was first and foremost the product of Nazi Germany and its murderous ideology. Moreover, anti-Semitism was one important motive for Polish readiness to harm Jews, but it was definitely not the only one. Updated research and the vast documentation available exposed how alongside Polish anti-Semitism, Jews were harmed for various reasons, including greed, revenge, terror, and more.”

According to Rafal Pankowski, a Polish academic and the founder of the Never Again Association, in recent days there has been an uptick in anti-Semitic sentiment in Poland that appears to mirror the atmosphere that prevailed last year during the previous diplomatic crisis. During that period, local media engaged in rhetoric viewed by many as anti-Semitic. Pankowski cited recent statements by journalist Rafał A Ziemkiewicz, a host on state television, who tweeted to his 166 000 followers that “the worst of it is that a man cannot even hate Jews in response” because this is what they want.

 Pankowski rejected the equivalence of anti-Semitism and anti-Polonism, saying that he had “never heard about anyone in Israel believing that there is a Polish global plot against the Jewish people, but I’ve heard many times in Poland people [stating] that there is a global Jewish plot against the Polish people.”

While acknowledging the complicity of “a number of Poles” in the Holocaust, the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland responded harshly to Katz’s words, saying that “accusing all Poles of anti-Semitism offends the righteous; it also offends all those who today want to see in them the true representation of Polish society. And it also offends us, Polish Jews, who are a part of that society.”