Do Israel and the Jewish people have an interest in entering into a factual dispute with Poland over the existence of Jews who collaborated with the Nazis, and who according to Israeli law on the prosecution of Nazis and their accomplices, have also been perceived as criminals? Do Israel and the Jewish people have an interest in entering a moral debate with Poland over the difference between the motives of non-Jewish Poles who collaborated with the Nazis and Polish Jews who collaborated with the Nazis? The non-Jews acted out of anti-Semitic hatred and opportunistic greed – and the Jews? Did they only act out of a desire to increase their chances of survival?
Did they really have no other way of contending with the threat of extermination hanging over their heads, for instance, the way in which those who carried out the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or the prisoner revolts at the Sobibor and Treblinka death camps chose to face the threat? After all, the Holocaust was not just a continuum of passivity on the part of the Jews. Of course, those of us who did not experience the horrors of the Holocaust cannot know what we would have done under those same horrific conditions. But does ignoring the existence of Jewish collaborators or treating them as victims not harm the memory of the victims? And in light of all that, does mentioning Christian collaborators with their Jewish counterparts in the same sentence constitute Holocaust denial?
Anything that concerns the Holocaust is sure to invoke our strongest emotions, and that is a good thing. The Polish government has shown great insensitivity to the Jewish people on this issue in recent weeks. Of all of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki's actions over the weekend in Munich, the worst was when he laid a wreath and lit a candle at a memorial for soldiers from the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade, a right-wing militia that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II not just in the fight against a common communist enemy but in the murder of Jews. Here, there can be no room for interpretation. Against the backdrop of the tense atmosphere created by the Polish government's decision to pass legislation criminalizing the attribution of holocaust crimes to the Polish government or the Polish people, which in Israel earned the overstated nickname of the "Holocaust denial law," Morawiecki should have avoided making such a significant gesture, even if it was accompanied by a show of respect to the memorial for Polish slave laborers who died on German soil during World War II.
But does the Israeli reaction to the crisis with Poland not play into the hands of those Polish elements interested in rewriting history? Are there not elements in Israel that have also taken advantage of the conduct of Poland's right-wing nationalist government for their own narrow political needs? Couldn't the escalation of the crisis have been avoided by toning down the accusations and the name-calling? In Poland, there are those, including some of that country's officials, claiming the Israeli hysteria over the legislation is aimed at squeezing Poland on the issue of Jewish reparations, is meant to distract from the corrupt actions of the Israeli government and a desire to maintain a monopoly on the Holocaust. No doubt, the current crisis has let all the anti-Semitic genies, still so pervasive in Polish society, out of the bottle. And yet, among some Israelis, the crisis has also triggered reactions that serve to harm instead of honor the memory of the Holocaust.
An open and factual discussion, and not theatrical gestures and statements, would have done more to clarify the intentions of the Polish government: Is this an attempt to make the historical account more accurate or a desire to rewrite history? In this current situation, the leadership of both countries will need to display a great deal of creativity in order to save Polish-Israeli ties and effectively deal with the remaining problematic aspects of the bilateral relationship.
Maybe there is also room to hope that all those who are now so sensitive to and knowledgeable about the Holocaust when it comes to Poland, will in the future also rise up and mobilize against Holocaust denial among Palestinians and all the other Arab and Islamic nations and the baseless comparisons between Israel and Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, if only to make it clear that their criticism of Poland did not stem from a desire to use the Holocaust for political means.
