The description by acting Israeli Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz of Poles as a species of anti-Semitic mammals is unlikely to be studied in the Foreign Ministry’s training programs as a model of diplomatic conduct. One might have expected a seasoned politician eyeing the premiership to express himself more carefully when asked about anti-Semitism in Poland than to cite, as Katz did, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s comment that Poles “suckled anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk.”

Katz, appointed Feb. 17, thus flunked his first diplomatic test — handling a crisis with Warsaw stemming from the alleged misreporting of a statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, about Polish participation in the Holocaust, that caused offense. In doing so, he played into the hands of Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who is running for re-election and courting nationalist voters. Katz’s comment in an interview exacerbated the crisis and led to the last-minute scrapping of the Visegrad summit of central European leaders that had been scheduled to take place in Jerusalem Feb. 19.

Netanyahu had entrusted Katz with watering the diplomatic seeds of friendship with European nationalist leaders that he had planted in recent years. Instead, Katz, with one remark on his first day on the job, dealt a blow to one of Netanyahu’s prized achievements. At a toast ahead of the Jewish New Year with Foreign Ministry staff last September, Netanyahu boasted of “a diplomatic flourishing unprecedented in the history of Israel.” He added that Israel was fighting not only to advance its own interests and the interests of those who cooperate with it, but also “for justice, for the truth.”

Netanyahu, also Israel’s foreign minister at the time of the toast, said Israel was waging a particularly tough battle over justice and truth vis-à-vis the European Union. “Justice,” according to Netanyahu, is the right of the Jewish people, and only of the Jewish people, to the Land of Israel, the entire Land of Israel. His “truth” is that the only nuclear state in the Middle East (according to foreign reports) faces an existential risk of a “second Holocaust.” According to Netanyahu, the state that has set the record in the democratic world for the longest occupation is the victim of the people it occupies. The EU refuses to recognize Netanyahu’s justice and truth and insists on adhering to the nuclear agreement with Iran and to its demand for an end to Israel’s occupation.