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Israel says hopes for changes to Polish Holocaust law
6:52 CAT | 06 Feb 2018
Israel said on Tuesday it still hoped for amendments to a controversial Holocaust bill signed into law earlier in the day by Polish President Andrzej Duda.
Duda said the legislation, which has ignited tensions with Israel, the United States and Ukraine, would however be sent to Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal for it to rule whether it conforms to guarantees on freedom of speech.
Israel’s foreign ministry said in a statement that it noted that fact and hoped “clarifications and amendments” would be forthcoming.
“We hope that within the allotted time until the court’s deliberations are concluded, we will manage to agree on changes and corrections,” it said.
“Israel continues to communicate with the Polish authorities and has expressed its reservations regarding the new Polish law.”
The legislation sets fines or a maximum three-year jail term for anyone describing Nazi German death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau as being Polish, simply due to their location in Poland.
It would also make it a crime to accuse the Polish state of complicity in the Holocaust.
Israel has expressed concern that the law could see Holocaust survivors prosecuted for their testimony should it concern allegations that individual Poles killed Jews or gave them up to the Germans.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared last week that “we have no tolerance for the distortion of the truth and rewriting history or denying the Holocaust”.
His education minister, Naftali Bennett, said on Monday that Polish authorities had cancelled his forthcoming visit to Warsaw over the diplomatic spat.
“The government of Poland cancelled my visit because I mentioned the crimes of its people. I am honoured,” he wrote in a statement.
“I accepted an invitation to a dialogue based on truth,” said Bennett, head of the far-right Jewish Home party. “The Polish government chose to avoid this truth.”
However, the From the Depths NGO which works in the field of Holocaust education and organised the Warsaw event said it and not the government had cancelled Bennett’s participation.
“The Polish government did not cancel his trip,” founder Jonny Daniels told AFP on Tuesday.
“One of the main points of bringing the minister of education of Israel was to have a dialogue and to come to an understanding between our two countries,” he said.
But he said that he decided to disinvite Bennett after he made “pretty strong remarks” to members of his party on Monday.
The minister was quoted by a spokesman as saying that while there were thousands of Poles who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis, there were too many who actively participated in “degrading and killing Jews.”
“We thought it against the interest of calming the situation down,” Daniels said. “We decided to postpone the trip.”
Source: AFP
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