The sign “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes you free”) is pictured at the main gate of the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz in Oswiecim, Poland. Reuters/Pawel Ulatowski

Israel’s education ministry on Wednesday announced that it was canceling visits to Poland for thousands of Israeli school students over a dispute concerning security arrangements, although Israel’s foreign minister stated that the row also related to Polish policies on Holocaust commemoration.

A statement from the ministry said the heritage tours involving about 7,000 young Israelis had been frozen because of a Polish refusal to allow armed agents of Shin Bet, Israel’s security service, to accompany the students. The statement added that negotiations with the government in Warsaw to resume the trips were ongoing.

A spokesperson for the Polish foreign ministry confirmed that the Israeli government had been told that a “return to the current rules, including the participation of armed Israeli servicemen, is not possible.”

Speaking while on a visit to the Albanian capital, Tirana, the spokesperson, Łukasz Jasina, said that the decision had been taken to preserve Poland’s image as a law-abiding and safe country.

“We cannot afford to have a situation in which Poland may appear as a dangerous country, with citizens whom Israeli youth need to be protected from,” Jasina said. “Also, a situation in which servicemen from another country are carrying weapons on the territory of our country is intolerable.”

However, in a separate briefing with journalist in Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid asserted that the dispute was rooted in the Holocaust commemoration policies of Poland’s nationalist government. In 2018, the Polish parliament passed legislation allowing for civil prosecution of historians who research the collaboration of Polish citizens with the Nazi authorities during the Nazi occupation, while last year a new law effectively closed off restitution claims for Holocaust victims and their families. Relations between Warsaw and Jerusalem nosedived as a result, although some improvement has been registered in the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine.

“The relations between Israel and Poland were harmed because of Polish laws about the Holocaust,” Lapid said. He accused the Polish government of wanting “to mess with the content of the trips and what can or can’t be said to Israeli children visiting.”

In an extensive interview with The Algemeiner last August, a group of prominent historians of the Holocaust in Poland discussed the impact of the legislation on their work.

“A few weeks ago, during the conflict over the restitution legislation, I said on social media, ‘please, remember that the extermination camps were not built for Poles, they were built for Jews,'” one of the participants, Prof. Jan Grabowski, recalled. “This statement resulted in my being reported to the prosecutor’s office by these so-called ‘patriotic elements.’ Alongside this is the fact that the institutions of the Polish state are singing the same tune.”