Israeli mayor’s speech canned in Poland

AN Israeli mayor’s Holocaust comments were censored in Poland this week. If anyone was wondering what the controversial new Polish law will mean in practice, this is it.

Eli Dukorsky, mayor of the Israeli city of Kiryat Bialik, is leading a trip of Israelis to Poland, and suddenly found himself needing to submit a speech before delivery and coming under pressure to change it.

He wasn’t prepared to toe the Polish line on Holocaust history – and his own history as the son of a survivor – and so Polish officials pulled out of a joint ceremony they were supposed to he holding with him.

Dukorsky was due to deliver a speech alongside the mayor of his twin town, Radomsko. Then, it dawned on the Radomsko officials that Poland has a new law which means that people who discuss the Holocaust need to watch their backs.

The new law gives custodial sentences to people who describe Nazi camps as “Polish death camps” or who suggest that the Polish nation was complicit in the Shoah.

Radomsko officials insisted on reading his speech before delivery. “They requested that I take out the number of Jews who were killed by Poles during the war,” he said, adding that he agreed.

But this wasn’t enough and he “was requested to remove things that reminded people of the involvement of Polish people during the war era”. He didn’t agree, and Radomsko pulled out of the joint Polish-Israeli ceremony that has been held annually.

This is the new Polish law in action. Some people expected its main relevance to be big high-publicity court cases where people who dare to challenge Poland’s version of history are tried. This may happen, but what we saw this week is a far more immediate – and in a sense even more worrying – impact of the law.

Already, just weeks after the law entered the statute books, a local municipality is so nervous about getting into trouble that it demands to preview a speech by the mayor of its twin town. To approve or alter the version of history that was to be delivered.

And it is too scared to participate given that the changes weren’t made.

The concern of the Polish law isn’t that the odd daring ideologue will challenge the Polish narrative and end up in court, but that municipalities, schools, youth clubs and other pillars of public life will self-censor.

Nobody wants legal headaches, they will say, so best to toe the line. And if this means removing Israeli and/or Jewish voices that were previously given exposure locally, so be it.

The experiences of mayor Dukorsky this week are just a glimpse of what is to come in Poland. This, it would seem, is the new normal.

NATHAN JEFFAY