Poland summons Israeli ambassador to clarify Netanyahu comments on Poles in Holocaust

  16 February 2019    Read: 1523
Poland summons Israeli ambassador to clarify Netanyahu comments on Poles in Holocaust

Poland summoned Israel's ambassador on Friday and threatened to scupper a summit in Jerusalem after reported comments in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to accuse the Polish nation of complicity in the Nazi Holocaust, Reuters reported.

Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that the prime minister, who was in Warsaw for a U.S.-sponsored Middle East conference, had been misquoted by The Jerusalem Post, which issued a corrected story.

In a later statement, Netanyahu’s office said that in his remarks on the question of Polish collaboration with Nazi occupiers, he had not cast any blanket blame.

Poland, where sensitivities over the issue of its actions during the Holocaust are high, called in Israeli envoy Anna Azari.

The matter of Poland’s conduct during the Holocaust - in which many of the six million Jewish dead were killed in Nazi camps on Polish soil - was at the center of an Israeli-Polish diplomatic dispute last year.

After an outcry in Israel and the United States, Poland’s conservative Law and Justice government backed out of legislation mandating jail terms for anyone suggesting the country had collaborated with the Nazis.


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