Israeli opposition hammers Polish PM for saying Jews also perpetrated Holocaust

Lawmakers from the opposition Zionist Union party strongly criticized Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Saturday for saying that, alongside Poles, “Jewish perpetrators” also bore responsibility for the Holocaust.

“Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki talks like the last of the Holocaust deniers. The blood of millions of Jews cries out from the ground in Poland over the distortion of history and escape from blame,” tweeted party leader Avi Gabbay.

“Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and Poles took an active part in their murder. The Israeli government must be here for the millions murdered and strongly condemn the Polish prime minister’s words,” he said.

Addressing the Munich Security Conference, Morawiecki was rejecting criticism of a new law that criminalizes mentions of Polish state complicity in the Holocaust, when he was asked by an Israeli journalist if sharing his family’s history of persecution in Poland would be outlawed under the new legislation.

“Of course it’s not going to be punishable, [it’s] 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 told Yedioth Ahronoth’s Ronen Bergman.

צפו | ראש ממשלת פולין בתשובה לשאלתו של @ronenbergman: "בשואה היו פושעים פולנים, כמו שהיו פושעים יהודים" • @DorGlick עם הפרטים המלאים והתיעוד >> https://t.co/eFLSq9LWO8 pic.twitter.com/ZCV6j8faw7

— חדשות 13 (@newsisrael13) February 17, 2018

Tzipi Livni, a Zionist Union MK and former foreign minister who was in the audience, said it was “moving to hear Ronen Bergman asking/attacking the Polish prime minister over the law that forbids mentioning the participation of the Polish nation in the Holocaust, as [Bergman] told his family story and received applause from the audience.”

Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, one of the most vocal Israeli critics of the Polish law, said Morawiecki’s statement is “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,” he said, while calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to recall Israel’s ambassador to Warsaw.

The Polish Prime Minister’s statement is antisemitism 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. I again call upon the Prime Minister to immediately recall our Ambassador to Israel.

— יאיר לפיד – Yair Lapid (@yairlapid) February 17, 2018

Zionist Union MK Ksenia Svetlova said Morawiecki’s remark “shows his true face.”

“It should be remembered that according to the most conservative estimate 200,000 Jews in Poland were murdered by Poles,” she tweeted, adding that “the crisis with Poland is only getting worse and there is no room here for compromises.”

“If we don’t stand up for the truth, no will do it for us.”

Fellow Zionist Union MK Itzik Shmuli also criticized the Polish prime minister, saying the next phase in his “pathetic project” would be “blaming the Jews for their own Holocaust.”

probably the next step of Morawiecki’s pathetic project to erasing the crimes of the Polish is going to be blaming the Jews for their own Holocaust and presenting the Nazis as victims of the circumstances.He would have to sue the 6M victims Jews+my state????????before it will happen! https://t.co/wKmDv470Tq

— איציק שמולי (@ishmuli) February 17, 2018

In response to Bergman’s question, Morawiecki said the new law aimed to prevent falsely attributing Nazi crimes in Poland under Nazi occupation to Polish government policy at the time. He said that last year Polish embassies had to respond 260 times to statements referring to “Polish death camps.”

He said the Polish people generally aided their “Jewish brothers and sisters” during the war, and that the lines between Holocaust victims and perpetrators were becoming increasingly blurred.

The legislation prescribes prison time for using phrases such as “Polish death camps” to refer to the killing sites Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland during World War II. Its provisions run wider, however:

“Whoever accuses, publicly and against the facts, the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich… or other crimes against peace and humanity, or war crimes, or otherwise grossly diminishes the actual perpetrators thereof, shall be subject to a fine or a penalty of imprisonment of up to three years,” a translation of a key paragraph of the bill reads.

The legislation sparked outrage in Israel, with some lawmakers accusing the Polish government of outright Holocaust denial.

The dispute has elicited bitter recriminations on both sides. Some Israelis have accused the mostly Catholic Poles of being driven by anti-Semitism and of trying to deny the Holocaust. Poles believe that they are being defamed by being linked to German crimes of which they were one of the largest group of victims.

Israel, along with several international Holocaust organizations and many critics in Poland, argues that the law could have a chilling effect on debating history, harming freedom of expression and leading to a whitewashing of Poland’s wartime history.

Netanyahu has pilloried the law as “distortion of the truth, the rewriting of history, and the denial of the Holocaust.”

Amid the dispute some Polish commentators, including in government-controlled media, have made strong anti-Jewish remarks.

In one instance, the head of a state-run channel suggested referring to Auschwitz as a “Jewish death camp,” in response to an outcry over use of the term “Polish death camp” to describe the Nazi killing site in German-occupied Poland.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.