An Israeli summit with central European leaders has been cancelled amid new tensions over how Polish behaviour during the Holocaust is remembered and characterised.
The cancellation last night came several hours after Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki pulled out of the meeting in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling a conference hosted by the US and Poland that “Poles co-operated with the Nazis” — suggesting some Poles participated in killing Jews during the German occupation of World War II.
Mr Netanyahu was initially quoted by the The Jerusalem Post as saying “the Poles”, which could be taken as blaming the entire Polish nation. His office and the newspaper said he was misquoted due to an editing error.
The Polish government summoned the Israeli ambassador on Friday and said it was not satisfied with the explanation that Mr Netanyahu had been misquoted.
Mr Netanyahu was supposed to meet the leaders of the four central European countries known as the Visegrad Group — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — during the two-day meeting in Israel.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said the summit would now change to bilateral talks between the individual countries.
Read the article in The Australian (AP,AFP).