The sudden divisions between Israel and Poland show how history can overwhelm politics and diplomacy, Anshel Pfeffer says
February 19, 2019 07:26
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, one of his main European allies, and the host, was prepared to wait outside, for over an hour, until the Israeli prime minister came out to meet him.
Ostensibly two like-minded nationalist politicians, they even 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 be seeing each other again very soon at the Visegrád Group summit scheduled to take place in Jerusalem.
It was to be a proud moment for the Israeli prime minister, who had been trying to get the leaders of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to allow him to host one of their joint meetings.
But then one offhand remark derailed it all.
Last Thursday evening, in the traditional briefing for the Israeli traveling media pack at the end of an overseas visit, Mr Netanyahu was asked how he viewed a particular Polish law that allows those who “defamed” the Polish nation’s conduct during the war to be sued.
The 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 once reported, it had the opposite effect on the Polish hosts.
Poland’s war record is an intensely political issue in today’s Poland and the defamation law is a symptom of that situation. There was no way Mr Morawiecki could come now to Israel, but after a conciliatory phone-call with Mr Netanyahu, he agreed to send his foreign minister instead..
But on Sunday, when Israel’s newly appointed 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 that “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 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 Second World War, half of them Jewish. Millions more Jews from other countries were deported to death camps on Polish soil.
The Polish government insists that we emphasise at this point that those were “German camps”. Over the past seven decades, both nations have jostled 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, yes, in many cases were active collaborators.
It is a clash of historical narratives that will continue after the careers of the two prime ministers who convinced themselves that for a short while their shared political and diplomatic interests could allow them to whitewash at least some of the past crimes.
