Israel, Feb 18 (TNS): Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has sharply rebuked his Polish counterpart for saying that Jews were among the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
He said the remarks by Mateusz Morawiecki at the Munich Security Conference were “outrageous”. Netanyahu said they showed “an inability to understand history”. The dispute comes weeks after Israel condemned a new Polish law making it illegal to accuse the Polish nation or state of complicity in Nazi crimes. The legislation was signed into law by President Andrzej Duda but also referred to the country’s highest court to consider its constitutionality. He was responding to an Israeli journalist who asked if anyone who said there were Polish collaborators in the Holocaust would be considered a criminal in Poland under the new law. Morawiecki said It’s extremely important to first understand that, 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 has not publicly responded to Netanyahu’s criticism.
