Clearly, it’s a complicated situation that requires a thoughtful and yet forceful response. Israeli leaders opted instead to equate the Polish law with Holocaust denial, in an ignorant and foolish display of haughtiness and prejudice.
Ignorant, because it ignores historical facts, and foolish, because it only plays into the hands of the Polish government, which can now legitimize the law by saying it’s standing up in defense of Polish national honor. [...]
Even before we debate a "Polish culpability" for the Holocaust, it should be admitted that the very concept of collective guilt is fraught with danger. No one knows this better than the Jews, whom the Church only cleared of collective guilt for the death of Jesus in 1965. In modernity, no pogrom in Russia was carried out without the preamble of a supposed atrocity by a Jew. Even the Nazis had recourse to one, the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, to "justify" Kristallnacht in 1938, when more than 90 Jews were killed in attacks across Germany. [...]
"Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, opposes the new legislation passed by the Polish parliament, which is liable to blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust. There is no doubt that the term "Polish death camps" is a historical misrepresentation! The extermination camps were set up in Nazi-occupied Poland in order to murder the Jewish people within the framework of the "Final Solution." However, restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people's direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion. Yad Vashem will continue to support research aimed at exposing the complex truth regarding the attitude of the Polish population towards the Jews during the Holocaust."
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