Police stand behind barriers around the Israeli Embassy in Warsaw on January 31, 2018, after a local governor, citing security concerns, banned traffic in the area in order to prevent a planned protest by far-right groups. (AFP Photo)
JERUSALEM, Feb. 1 (Xinhua) -- Israeli officials reacted with outrage on Thursday morning to a vote in the Polish senate backing a bill to ban mentions of Polish accomplice with crimes during the Holocaust.
The controversial bill was approved by the senate overnight and is now pending the final approval of Poland's president.
Israeli officials reacted angrily. The Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz demanded that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will immediately recall the Israeli ambassador to Poland for consultation.
In a statement, Katz said the law constitutes "a denial of Poland's part in the Holocaust of the Jews."
"In the balance between diplomatic considerations and moral considerations, there must be a clear decision: perpetuating the memory of the victims of the Holocaust above any other consideration," Katz said.
Tzipi Livni, Israel's former foreign minister and a lawmaker with the Zionist Union, said the vote was "an unacceptable conduct and a spit in Israel's face."
The new legislation proposes to jail or fain a person who blames Poland or the Poles for Nazi crimes against humanity which were committed in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. The bill also prohibits phrases such as "Polish death camps."
The approval of the bill by the Polish parliament in January has already strained the relations between Israel and Poland, and was denounced by the United States State Department as a violation of freedom of speech.
About six million Jews were killed by the Nazis in World War II, many of them in the death camp of Auschwitz and other death camps in Poland.
On Sunday, in the wake of a looming diplomatic crisis, Netanyahu and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki talked over the phone and decided to try to get an agreed wording of the law, according to the Israeli Prime Minister's Office.
In a statement, the Office said that Netanyahu and Morawiecki "agreed to begin an immediate dialogue between teams from both countries to try to reach understandings on the legislation," the statement read. The chief manager of the Israeli foreign office was named to head the Israeli team, but the vote at the senate was carried out before the start of the negotiations.
