Legislation in Poland that would outlaw blaming Poles for the Holocaust has prompted swift and furious condemnation from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli lawmakers across the political spectrum.
The measure which passed in the lower house of the Polish Parliament on Friday would make it illegal to suggest Poland bore responsibility for atrocities committed on its soil by Nazi Germany during the occupation in World War II.
“The law is baseless; I strongly oppose it” Netanyahu claimed in a statement on Saturday. “One cannot change history and the Holocaust cannot be denied.”
Netanyahu said he had instructed the Israeli ambassador to Poland to meet with the Polish prime minister and express his disapproval.
The bill which would need approval from Poland’s Senate and the president to become law sets prison penalties for using phrases such as “Polish death camps” to refer to concentration camps set up by the Nazis in Poland.
Yair Lapid leader of a centrist opposition party in Israel claimed on Twitter: “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.”
The Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv responded saying that Lapid’s “unsupportable claims show how badly Holocaust education is needed even here in Israel” and that the legislation was intended “not to ‘whitewash’ the past but to protect the truth against such slander.”
“My grandmother was murdered in Poland by Germans and Poles” responded Lapid. “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.”
