JERUSALEM: An off-hand comment by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Warsaw about Poland and the Holocaust looks to overshadow a summit of central European leaders this week in Israel.
Poland’s abrupt decision to downgrade its participation in the upcoming Visegrad conference suddenly cast a pall over the gathering, which Netanyahu has touted as a major milestone in his outreach to emerging democracies in eastern Europe and his broader goal of countering the criticism Israel typically faces in international forums.
The crisis was sparked last week when Netanyahu told reporters that “Poles cooperated with the Nazis.” The seemingly innocuous comment infuriated his Polish hosts, who reject suggestions that their country collaborated with Hitler.
Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, announced Sunday that he would be skipping this week’s Visegrad summit, a gathering with fellow prime ministers from Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Tuesday’s meeting in Jerusalem is the first time the gathering is being held outside of Europe.
But lost in the diplomatic uproar was that Netanyahu was actually defending his close alliance with Poland and other eastern European leaders when he made his comments.
Historians and domestic critics have accused Netanyahu of cozying up too tightly to nationalistic leaders who have promoted a distorted image of the Holocaust and turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism associated with them.
Morawiecki himself last year equated Polish perpetrators of the Holocaust to supposed “Jewish perpetrators.” Netanyahu has recently hosted leaders of Lithuania, Ukraine and other countries who have engaged in selective World War II-era commemorations that play down their countries’ culpability while making heroes out of anti-Soviet nationalists involved in the mass killing of Jews.
In response to a question from The Associated Press during his two-day visit to Warsaw, Netanyahu said he raises the issue of historical revisionism with the various leaders. He rejected the notion he was a partner to diminishing anyone’s complicity in the genocide of Jews in World War II.
“I know the history. I don’t starch it and I don’t whitewash it. In Lithuania, in particular, there were some horrible things. No one is concealing that,” said Netanyahu, the son of a historian. “This whole idea that we diminish history — we don’t distort, and we don’t hide, and no one has any interest in that, on the contrary.”
In the same briefing with his traveling press corps, Netanyahu tried to deflect prominent criticism by Israeli historians of the deal he struck with Polish leaders over their country’s controversial Holocaust speech law, which criminalized blaming the Polish nation for crimes committed against Jews during World War II.
Israeli officials saw it as an attempt by Poland to suppress discussion of the well-documented killing of Jews by Poles during and after the wartime German occupation.
“Poles collaborated with the Nazis and I don’t know anyone who was ever sued for such a statement,” Netanyahu told the reporters.
However, some media outlets reported him saying “THE Poles,” which set off an angry rebuke in Warsaw, including a summoning of the Israeli ambassador for clarifications. Netanyahu’s office said he was misquoted and blamed the misunderstanding on an editing error in an Israeli newspaper.
The Polish government nonetheless said it considered that response insufficient and threatened to withdraw from the conference.
Netanyahu’s office then reiterated that he “spoke of Poles and not the Polish people or the country of Poland.” That only got him in hotter water at home for seemingly catering to the Polish obsession over his wording.
“The prime minister of the Jewish state is selling out the memory of the Holocaust for a dubious alliance with an anti-Semitic leader,” said Tamar Zandberg, leader of the opposition Meretz party.
The summit is expected to go forth this week in Jerusalem even without Morawiecki, with Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz replacing him.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is expected to attend, is another such leader who has trod into the sensitive terrain of World War II conduct. He has lavished praise on Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s World War II-era ruler, who introduced anti-Semitic laws and collaborated with the Nazis. Orban also has backed a state-funded museum that experts say plays down the role of Hungarian collaborators and also used anti-Semitic imagery in a campaign against the liberal American-Hungarian billionaire George Soros.
When pressed by the AP, though, Netanyahu came to his ally’s defense.
“His response was the most direct, saying ‘we are not willing to accept this,’” Netanyahu responded. “He (Orban) attacked Horthy at some point. They are going the furthest here.”
Netanyahu also addressed his warm welcome in January to President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, whose parliament had just designated the birthday of Ukrainian wartime collaborator Stepan Bandera a national holiday.
Bandera’s forces fought alongside the Nazis and were implicated in the murder of thousands of Jews. The same day Poroshenko was visiting Israel, another memorial was being erected in Kiev for Symon Petliura, whose troops are linked to pogroms that killed as many as 50,000 Jews after World War I.
Netanyahu said he was not aware of that specifically but that he had some discussions with Poroshenko on the larger issue.
“I spoke to him too. I speak to them all. It’s not that we can’t raise the issue. We raise it freely,” he insisted.
Still, he then quickly shifted attention toward the contemporary anti-Semitism from the “anarchist left” and Muslim communities.
“I think the mass of anti-Semitism today in Europe is what is happening in western Europe,” Netanyahu said. “What is happening in Britain is astounding. This is the new phenomenon. There is the anti-Semitism of the right that hasn’t changed. That existed and still exists.”
Uproar over Poland comments lingers for Israel’s Netanyahu
Uproar over Poland comments lingers for Israel’s Netanyahu
- Poland’s abrupt decision to downgrade its participation in the upcoming Visegrad conference suddenly cast a pall over the gathering
- The crisis was sparked last week when Netanyahu told reporters that “Poles cooperated with the Nazis”
Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, a haven for journalists during Lebanon’s civil war, shuts down
- The hotel, located in Beirut’s Hamra district, shut down over the weekend
- Officials have not commented on the decision
BEIRUT: During Lebanon’s civil war, the Commodore Hotel in western Beirut’s Hamra district became iconic among the foreign press corps.
For many, it served as an unofficial newsroom where they could file dispatches even when communications systems were down elsewhere. Armed guards at the door provided some sense of protection as sniper fights and shelling were turning the cosmopolitan city to rubble.
The hotel even had its own much-loved mascot: a cheeky parrot at the bar.
The Commodore endured for decades after the 15-year civil war ended in 1990 — until this week, when it closed for good.
The main gate of the nine-story hotel with more than 200 rooms was shuttered Monday. Officials at the Commodore refused to speak to the media about the decision to close.
Although the country’s economy is beginning to recover from a protracted financial crisis that began in 2019, tensions in the region and the aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah war that was halted by a tenuous ceasefire in November 2024 are keeping many tourists away. Lengthy daily electricity cuts force businesses to rely on expensive private generators.
The Commodore is not the first of the crisis-battered country’s once-bustling hotels to shut down in recent years.
But for journalists who lived, worked and filed their dispatches there, its demise hits particularly hard.
“The Commodore was a hub of information — various guerrilla leaders, diplomats, spies and of course scores of journalists circled the bars, cafes and lounges,” said Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent who covered the civil war. “On one occasion (late Palestinian leader) Yasser Arafat himself dropped in to sip coffee with” with the hotel manager’s father, he recalled.
A line to the outside world
At the height of the civil war, when telecommunications were dysfunctional and much of Beirut was cut off from the outside world, it was at the Commodore where journalists found land lines and Telex machines that always worked to send reports to their media organizations around the globe.
Across the front office desk in the wide lobby of the Commodore, there were two teleprinters that carried reports of The Associated Press and Reuters news agencies.
“The Commodore had a certain seedy charm. The rooms were basic, the mattresses lumpy and the meal fare wasn’t spectacular,” said Robert H. Reid, the AP’s former Middle East regional editor, who was among the AP journalists who covered the war. The hotel was across the street from the international agency’s Middle East head office at the time.
“The friendly staff and the camaraderie among the journalist-guests made the Commodore seem more like a social club where you could unwind after a day in one of the world’s most dangerous cities,” Reid said.
Llewellyn remembers that the hotel manager at the time, Yusuf Nazzal, told him in the late 1970s “that it was I who had given him the idea” to open such a hotel in a war zone.
Llewellyn said that during a long chat with Nazzal on a near-empty Middle East Airlines Jumbo flight from London to Beirut in the fall of 1975, he told him that there should be a hotel that would make sure journalists had good communications, “a street-wise and well-connected staff running the desks, the phones, the teletypes.”
During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and a nearly three-month siege of West Beirut by Israeli troops, journalists used the roof of the hotel to film fighter jets striking the city.
The parrot at the bar
One of the best-known characters at the Commodore was Coco the parrot, who was always in a cage near the bar. Patrons were often startled by what they thought was the whiz of an incoming shell, only to discover that it was Coco who made the sound.
AP’s chief Middle East correspondent Terry Anderson was a regular at the hotel before he was kidnapped in Beirut in 1985 and held for seven years, becoming one of the longest-held American hostages in history.
Videos of Anderson released by his kidnappers later showed him wearing a white T-shirt with the words “Hotel Commodore Lebanon.”
With the kidnapping of Anderson and other Western journalists, many foreign media workers left the predominantly-Muslim western part of Beirut, and after that the hotel lost its status as a safe haven for foreign journalists.
Ahmad Shbaro, who worked at different departments of the hotel until 1988, said the main reason behind the Commodore’s success was the presence of armed guards that made journalists feel secure in the middle of Beirut’s chaos as well as functioning telecommunications.
He added that the hotel also offered financial facilities for journalists who ran out of money. They would borrow money from Nazzal and their companies could pay him back by depositing money in his bank account in London.
Shbaro remembers a terrifying day in the late 1970s when the area of the hotel was heavily shelled and two rooms at the Commodore were hit.
“The hotel was full and all of us, staffers and journalists, spent the night at Le Casbah,” a famous nightclub in the basement of the building, he said.
In quieter times, journalists used to spend the night partying by the pool.
“It was a lifeline for the international media in West Beirut, where journalists filed, ate, drank, slept, and hid from air raids, shelling, and other violence,” said former AP correspondent Scheherezade Faramarzi. “It gained both fame and notoriety,” she said, speaking from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
The hotel was built in 1943 and kept functioning until 1987 when it was heavily damaged in fighting between Shiite and Druze militiamen at the time. The old Commodore building was later demolished and a new structure was build with an annex and officially opened again for the public in 1996.
But Coco the parrot was no longer at the bar. The bird went missing during the 1987 fighting. Shbaro said it is believed he was taken by one of the gunmen who stormed the hotel.
