Israel on Saturday called on Poland to amend a bill approved this week by Polish lawmakers that would make it illegal to suggest Poland bore any responsibility for crimes against humanity committed by Nazi Germany on its soil.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he instructed his ambassador to meet with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to express Israel's dismay at the bill, which would make using phrases like "Polish death camps" punishable by up to three years in prison.
"The law is baseless; I strongly oppose it. Poland cannot change history and the Holocaust cannot be denied. I have instructed Israel's ambassador to Poland to meet with the Polish prime minister this evening and express to him my strong position against the law," Netanyahu said in a statement.
President Reuven Rivlin, noting that exactly 73 years had passed since the Auschwitz death camp on Polish soil was liberated, quoted a former Polish president's remarks on how history could not be faked and the truth could not be hidden.
"The Jewish people, the State of Israel and the entire world must ensure that the Holocaust is recognized for its horrors and atrocities. Among the Polish people, there were those who aided the Nazis in their crimes. Every crime, every offense, must be condemned. They must be examined and exposed," Rivlin said.
The lower house of the Polish parliament on Friday passed the bill, but it still needs the approval from Poland's Senate and president. However, it marks a dramatic step by the country's current nationalist government to target anyone who tries to undermine its official stance that Poles were heroes during the war, not Nazi collaborators who committed heinous crimes.
Poland's Deputy Justice Minister Patryk Jaki, who authored the bill, also took to Twitter to say the legislation was not directed against Israel.
"Important Israeli politicians and media are attacking us for the bill ... On top of that they claim that Poles are 'co-responsible' for the Holocaust," he said, adding that "this is proof how necessary this bill is."
The Polish government said the bill did not aim to limit freedom to research or discuss the Holocaust or to restrict freedom of artistic activity related to the issue.
Poles have fought for years against the use of phrases like "Polish death camps," which suggest the Polish state was at least partly responsible for the camps where millions of people, mostly Jews, were killed by Nazi Germany. The camps were built and operated by the Nazis after they invaded Poland in 1939.
At Auschwitz, at a ceremony marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israeli Ambassador to Poland Anna Azari abandoned a prepared speech to criticize the bill, saying that "everyone in Israel was revolted by this news."
But Morawiecki, who also spoke at the ceremony, stressed that Poles helped Jews while risking their own lives, noting that some 7,000 had been recognized by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. He further suggested that the Polish sacrifices have not been adequately acknowledged.
"Jews, Poles, and all victims should be guardians of the memory of all who were murdered by German Nazis. Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a Polish name, and Arbeit Macht Frei [work sets you free] is not a Polish phrase," Morawiecki said later on Twitter, referring to the slogan appearing on the gate at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said the deputy Polish ambassador to Israel had been summoned for a clarification.
Netanyahu, who is acting foreign minister, has yet to decide whether to summon Azari back from Warsaw for consultations or take steps against Poland on the matter, a ministry official said.
In a sign of the sensitivities on both sides, Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, the son of a survivor, got into a heated Twitter spat Saturday with the Polish Embassy in Israel.
"I utterly condemn the new Polish law which tries to deny Polish complicity in the Holocaust. It was conceived in Germany but hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier. There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that," Lapid wrote.
That sparked the embassy to respond: "Your unsupportable claims show how badly Holocaust education is needed, even here in Israel."
"My grandmother was murdered in Poland by Germans and Poles," Lapid retorted. "I don't need Holocaust education from you. We live with the consequences every day in our collective memory. Your embassy should offer an immediate apology."
To which the embassy responded: "Shameless."
Today's Poles have been raised on stories of their people's wartime suffering and heroism. Many react viscerally when confronted with the growing body of scholarship about Polish involvement in the killing of Jews.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum said it opposed the bill, even though it said Poland was justified in objecting to the term "Polish death camps," which it called a misrepresentation.
"Restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people's direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion," Yad Vashem said.
For decades, Polish society avoided discussing the killing of Jews by civilians or denied that anti-Semitism motivated the slayings, blaming all atrocities on the Germans.
A turning point was the publication in 2000 of "Neighbors," a book by Polish-American sociologist Jan Tomasz Gross, which explored the murder of Jews by their Polish neighbors in the village of Jedwabne. The book resulted in widespread soul-searching and official state apologies.
But since the conservative and nationalistic Law and Justice party consolidated power in 2015, it has sought to stamp out discussions and research on the topic. It demonized Gross and investigated whether he had slandered Poland by asserting that Poles killed more Jews than they killed Germans during the war.
Holocaust researchers have collected ample evidence of Polish villagers who murdered Jews fleeing the Nazis. According to one scholar at Yad Vashem, of the 160,000 to 250,000 Jews who escaped and sought help from fellow Poles, only 10-20% survived. The rest were rejected, informed upon or killed by rural Poles, Tel Aviv University scholar Havi Dreifuss has found.
Polish government spokeswoman Joanna Kopcinska wrote on Twitter that the legislation aimed "to show the truth about the terrible crimes committed on Poles, Jews, and other nations that were in the 20th century victims of brutal totalitarian regimes - German Nazi regime and Soviet communism."
