JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s acting foreign minister has doubled down on his divisive claim that Poles collaborated with the Nazis and “suckled anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk.”
Yisrael Katz said in a live TV interview late Thursday that he did not regret his comment, insisting that “I, as a son of Holocaust survivors … have to tell the truth.”
Katz’s statement incensed Poland last week, prompting its withdrawal from a meeting of European leaders in Jerusalem.
The scrapped summit marked a new low in Polish-Israeli relations, long fraught over how to characterize Polish actions toward its Jewish community during World War II.
In an interview with the daily Haaretz published Friday, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki slammed Katz’s remarks as “nothing short of racism,” likening his words to those of a “radical extremist.”
