Israelis decry Polish leader’s remarks
JERUSALEM — Israeli politicians accused Poland’s prime minister of antiSemitism on Saturday for equating Poles who participated in the horrors of the Holocaust to supposed “Jewish perpetrators,” setting off a new chapter in an angry dispute over Poland’s new bill criminalizing the mention of Polish complicity in the Nazi-led genocide.
Yair Lapid, head of the centrist opposition Yesh Atid party, said Israel should recall its ambassador immediately in response to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s comments, which he called “anti-Semitism of the oldest kind.”
“The perpetrators are not the victims. The Jewish state will not allow the murdered to be blamed for their own murder,” said Lapid, the son of a Holocaust survivor.
Labor leader Avi Gabbay said Morawiecki sounded like any other Holocaust denier with the remarks he gave in Munich, Germany, on Saturday.
“The blood of millions of Jews cries from the earth of Poland over the distortion of history and the escape from blame. Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and Poles took an active part in their murder,” Gabbay said. “The government of Israel has to be a voice for the millions of murdered and strongly denounce the Polish prime minister’s words.”
Morawiecki was responding to a question from an Israeli journalist at the Munich Security Conference. Asking about a new Polish law that criminalizes some statements about the Holocaust, the journalist shared a personal story about his parents being reported to the Nazis by Polish neighbors. He asked if he would now be considered a criminal in Poland for relating the story.
“Of course it’s not going to be punishable, not going to be seen as criminal, to say that there were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukrainian, not only German perpetrators,” Morawiecki said.
Polish authorities say they just want to protect Poland from being depicted as a collaborator of the Nazis when the country was Adolf Hitler’s first victim.