How Poland and Israel parted ways over a weekend

THREE DAYS are a very long time in Israeli-Polish relations.

Last Thursday, Benjamin Netanyahu was an honoured guest at a Warsaw summit, hobnobbing with Arab foreign ministers and US Vice President Mike Pence.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, the host, was prepared to wait outside for over an hour until his Israeli counterpart came to meet him.

Ostensibly two like-minded nationalist politicians, the two signed a joint declaration last year minimising the role Polish citizens had played in the mass murder of their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust.

Mr Netanyahu and Mr Morawiecki parted on Thursday, assuming they would see each other again days later at the Visegrád Group summit scheduled to take place in Jerusalem. It was to be a proud moment for the Israeli leader, who had been trying to get the leaders of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to allow him to host one of their meetings.

But then one offhand remark derailed it all.

Last Thursday, briefing the Israeli media pack, Mr Netanyahu was asked how he viewed the Polish law that allows legal action against those who “defamed” the Polish nation’s conduct during the Second World War.

His exact wording is disputed — did he say just “Poles” or “the Poles”? — but the rest of his answer is not: “Poles collaborated with the Nazis and I don’t know anyone who was ever sued for such a statement.”

His intention had been to dismiss concerns over the law but it had the opposite effect in Poland, where the Polish war record is an intensely political issue.

The defamation law is a symptom of that and there was no way Mr Morawiecki could now come to Israel. But after a conciliatory phone call with Mr Netanyahu, he agreed to send a representative.

Then, on Sunday, when Israel’s new Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz was asked about the incident, he doubled down. Of course the Poles collaborated with the Nazis, the son of Holocaust survivors said, reminding his interviewers that Likud’s late leader Yitzhak Shamir had famously said “the Poles drink antisemitism in their mothers’ milk”.

That was it. The Polish government, which had helped arrange the Visegrád Group summit in Jerusalem, was now boycotting it. There is even talk An alliance divided: Mateusz Morawiecki and Benjamin Netanyahu

of downgrading the level of the two countries’ diplomatic relations.

It turns out that history is stronger than politics, at least when the twin traumas of the Jewish and Polish people are concerned.

Six million Polish citizens were murdered during the war, half of them Jewish. Millions more Jews from other countries were deported to death camps on Polish soil.

The Polish government insists we emphasise at this point that they were “German camps”. Over the past seven decades, both nations have joscal

tled for recognition of their tragedy.

The Poles feel to this day that the Jewish Holocaust has overshadowed the millions of non-Jewish Poles murdered. Jews remember that, usually, their Polish neighbours were at best indifferent to their fate and in many cases were active collaborators.

It is a clash of historical narratives that will outlast the careers of two prime ministers who convinced themselves, for a short while, that their shared political and diplomatic interests could allow them to whitewash at least some of the past crimes.

It turns out history is stronger than politics