Netanyahu ‘misquoted’ on Poles, Holocaust

WARSAW, POLAND • The Israeli government said Friday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was misquoted by a newspaper on the extremely sensitive issue of Polish behaviour during the Holocaust, seeking to defuse a diplomatic crisis.

However, the Polish government said it considered that response insufficient and expects a clearer explanation. Netanyahu said a day earlier during a visit to Warsaw that “Poles co-operated with the Nazis” — wording suggesting that some Poles during the German occupation of Poland took part in killing Jews.

However, the Jerusalem Post quoted him as saying “the Poles,” which could be taken as blaming the entire Polish nation.

The matter threatened to spark another major spat between the two countries, which clashed last year over a new Polish law that made it illegal to blame the Polish nation for collaboration in the Holocaust.

Poland has even threatened to withdraw from a meeting of Central European leaders that is to take place next week in Israel.

Netanyahu was clearly eager to avoid another potential crisis.

“The Prime Minister’s comments concerning Poland were misquoted by the Jerusalem Post, which quickly issued a correction clarifying that an error had been made in the editing of the article,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

The Polish Foreign Ministry summoned the Israeli ambassador for an explanation. But a deputy foreign minister, Szymon Szynkowski vel Sek, said the explanations given by Israel so far are “unclear” and that Warsaw is still awaiting a clarification.

Poland has expressed an “expectation that the Israeli side will say in a clear way what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meant when he said the words that were quoted by the Israeli media,” Szynkowski vel Sek said.

Later, Netanyahu’s office weighed in with another statement, saying: “Netanyahu spoke of Poles and not the Polish people or the country of Poland. This was misquoted and misrepresented in press reports and was subsequently corrected by the journalist who issued the initial misstatement.”

The Holocaust is still an extremely sensitive subject in Poland, even nearly 80 years after the Second World War.

Nazi Germany subjected the country to a brutal occupation, killing nearly six million citizens, about three million of them Jewish, but almost as many of them Christian Poles.

Poland had an underground resistance movement that fought the Germans and more than 6,800 Poles have been recognized by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, for helping Jews at risk to their own lives, more than from any other country.

However, there was antiSemitism in Poland before the war and some Poles welcomed the removal of the large Jewish population from their society, while some blackmailed Jews or participated in the killings.