Poland cannot silence Noa Kirel, or any Israelis, about the Holocaust
Analysis from JPost.com: Never go full Mahmoud Abbas if you don’t want to be accused of Holocaust denial.
When Israeli pop star Noa Kirel came in third place in the Eurovision Song Contest, beyond all the usual comments about being proud and excited, she had one remark that stood out.
“To receive 12 points” - the highest possible score - “from Poland after almost the entire Kirel family was murdered there in the Holocaust is a great achievement,” Kirel told ynet.
This was, arguably, a pretty weird thing to say. It’s true that analyzing the political implications of Eurovision scoring is a longstanding custom in Israel and across Europe, and one can point to the song “Hai” (Alive) by Ofra Haza at the Eurovision in Munich as a statement about the massacre at the Olympics in that city years before. But this seemed to an attempt at shoehorning history into a place where it didn’t belong. Why would Poles be thinking about the Holocaust when scoring a song about unicorns performed in Liverpool?
Rather than shrug this off as an odd statement by a pop star, Poland did what it does anytime someone dares mentioned that a large part of the Holocaust took place in their country, and pitched a fit. Not only was Kirel’s statement labeled a “Eurovision scandal” in news headlines, but the government weighed in.
Poland’s Undersecretary of State Pawel Jablonski tweeted about the issue, saying that “the fact that many people in Israel consider Poland to be a co-perpetrator of German crimes - not their victim - is often the result not so much of bad will as lack of knowledge and incomplete education…One of them was certainly the form of organized trips of Israeli youth to Poland.”
Never mind that Kirel did not say Poland was a co-perpetrator of German crimes. All she said was “almost the entire Kirel family was murdered there in the Holocaust,” which is a fact. Her relatives were murdered in Auschwitz, which is in Poland. Even the narrative that Poland prefers to emphasize, of their own victimhood, acknowledges the same thing that Kirel does: The Nazis murdered millions of people in Poland.
On a totally different note, The JPost Podcast is back! I am now co-hosting with the Post’s new Editor-in-Chief Avi Mayer. It’s out every Thursday here and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all the major platforms.
this son of Polish immigrants heartily thanks you