Search

US ambassador to Poland demands Israel apologize for anti-Polish remarks

“We are too important to each other not to work these things out,” Georgette Mosbacher told reporters on Tuesday.

By World Israel News Staff

U.S. Ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher wrote on her Polish-language Twitter account that comments made by Jerusalem’s acting foreign minister, Yisrael Katz, were “offensive” and out of place between such “close allies as Poland and Israel.”

Her rebuke came in the wake of Katz’s remark Sunday, in an Israeli television interview, that the Poles “suckle anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk.” The discussion was about whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in Warsaw last week, said that “Poles” or “Poland” had collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Following Katz’s faux pas, Poland canceled its participation in a V4 summit in Israel this week. Instead, the leaders of the other Visegrad countries — Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic — attended individual, bilateral talks with Netanyahu.

“I just felt that two strong allies like Israel and Poland, of course they are strong allies of the United States, shouldn’t be using that kind of rhetoric. We are too important to each other not to work these things out,” Mosbacher told reporters, calling on Israel to apologize.

Mosbacher herself created controversy in June when she attributed the rise of anti-Semitism in eastern Europe to Poland’s new Holocaust law, which criminalizes blaming Poland for Nazi war crimes committed on Polish soil. Nominated by President Donald Trump, she made the comment during a nomination hearing before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.