Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned his Polish counterpart on Saturday for saying Jews were perpetrators in World War II in addition to Poles and others, just weeks after Warsaw drew criticism with new Holocaust speech legislation.
Poland passed a law this month imposing jail terms on anyone suggesting the country was complicit in the Holocaust, prompting criticism from Israel and the United States.
At the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was asked by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman whether, under the new law, Bergman himself could be penalized for telling a story about his mother who survived the Holocaust and told him that some Poles had collaborated with the Gestapo.
"Of course it's not going to be punishable," the Polish prime minister replied. "[It is] not going to be seen as criminal to say that there were Polish perpetrators, [just] as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukrainian, not only German perpetrators." Morawiecki further stressed that the purpose of the law was to prevent Poland and the Polish people from being slandered as perpetrators of the Holocaust.
Morawiecki said it was unacceptable for people to confuse criminals with victims, classifying Poland as the latter.
Netanyahu, who was also attending the Munich conference, was quick to respond.
"The Polish Prime Minister's remarks here in Munich are outrageous," Netanyahu said. "There is a problem here of an inability to understand history and a lack of sensitivity to the tragedy of our people."
"I intend to speak with him forthwith," he added.
Other officials in Israel, already alarmed by the new Polish legislation, also spoke out against Morawiecki's comment.
"The Polish prime minister'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," Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid wrote on Twitter. He also called for Israel's ambassador to Poland to be recalled.
Labor party leader Avi Gabbay said Morawiecki sounded like every other Holocaust denier.
"The blood of millions of Jews cries from the earth of Poland over this distortion of history and the escape from blame. Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and Poles took an active part in their murder," Gabbay said. "The government of Israel has to be a voice for the millions of murdered and strongly denounce the Polish prime minister's words."
Labor MK Itzik Shmuli, who is pushing for a counter bill in the Israeli parliament aiming to criminalize the denial or minimization of the role of Nazi collaborators, quipped on Twitter that "the next step in Morawiecki's pathetic project to erase the crimes of the Polish people is probably going to be blaming the Jews for their own Holocaust and presenting the Nazis as victims of the circumstances."
MK Nahman Shai (Zionist Union) said, "It's time for the government to take practical steps and make it clear to Poland that the law and its repeated declarations about the Poles and the Holocaust of European Jews border on Holocaust denial. We must demand that this twisted law be changed, and until that happens, recall our ambassador from Warsaw. Today's diplomatic interests are important, but Jewish history is more important."
Colette Avital, the chairwoman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, called the Polish prime minister's remarks "inappropriate."
"It isn't enough for him to rewrite history through legislation, he is now making things worse and smearing the dignity of the victims," Avital said.
The Polish government issued a statement Saturday night saying that Morawiecki's comments were not intended to deny the Holocaust.
"The comments of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki during a discussion in Munich were by no means intended to deny the Holocaust, or charge the Jewish victims of the Holocaust with responsibility for what was a Nazi German perpetrated genocide," Polish government said.
"The words … should be interpreted as a sincere call for open discussion of crimes committed against Jews during the Holocaust, regardless of the nationality of those involved in each crime," the statement also said.
