Israel Adopts Warsaw Narrative, Ignores Polish Holocaust Crimes

A joint statement issued on Tuesday, November 22, by the Israeli and Polish governments makes no mention of Polish persecution of Jews during the Holocaust despite the several paragraphs in the statement devoted to Holocaust remembrance.

Polish premier Beaty Szydło and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu during which they signed the joint statement on Tuesday, November 22, in Jerusalem

Polish premier Beaty Szydło and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu during which they signed the joint statement on Tuesday, November 22, in Jerusalem (Photo: Polish PM Press Office)

Critics charge that Poland’s right-wing government has been trying to obliterate any reference to such persecution and other unpleasant facts from the historical record. The joint statement has drawn mixed reviews from historians. Poland did not explicitly promise to stop persecuting researchers who study Polish crimes during the Holocaust, and only agreed to a general statement supporting academic freedom.

Joint List MK Dov Khenin (Hadash), a leading Communist Party of Israel activist who heads the Knesset caucus for Holocaust survivors, criticized PM Benjamin Netanyahu over the agreement. “The Polish government is working to erase this dark chapter from its history, rather than acknowledge and study it. The Israeli government yesterday signed an agreement that legitimizes this. We appreciate the fact that there were many Righteous Gentiles in Poland. That’s also part of Polish history. But there were also people there who participated in crimes,” he said.

In an interview with Haaretz, Dr. Boaz Cohen, head of the Holocaust Studies Program at Western Galilee College, harshly criticized the statement, calling it “a betrayal of everyone who studies the fate of the Jews in Poland,” and especially of “Polish researchers who endanger their social status and more when they expose their people’s crimes.” Poland’s government is advancing legislation that would impose jail sentences on anyone who claims that the Poles collaborated in Nazi crimes, casts doubt on the Poles’ status as victims of the Nazis, or uses the term “Polish death camps.” “It seems as if the Poles wrote the statement and gave it to the Israeli government to sign,” Cohen added. “I don’t believe any Israeli historian saw this statement before it was published.”