Israel is this week supposed to be hosting a meeting of the four Visegrad Group countries, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, except that, thanks to an extraordinary spat, the Poles will no longer be there.

The row started when the Jerusalem Post quoted Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu as saying that the Polish nation had cooperated with the Nazis in the extermination of the country’s three million Jews. The reaction from Warsaw was hardly surprising. Polish premier Mateusz Morawiecki cancelled his flight to Israel to attend the Visegrad meeting. Netanyahu’s people appeared to try and row back on his comment insisting that he had been misquoted and had not used the word “nation”. The Jerusalem Post subsequently withdrew the quote, though it is not entirely clear that they accepted that their reporter had got it wrong.

In any event, the Israeli ambassador to Poland was called in by the Warsaw government and given a dressing down. Thereafter, what might have been merely a diplomatic bruising turned into an open wound when Netanyahu’s new foreign minister Yisrael Katz said that he believed that Poles suckled anti-Semitism “with their mother’s milk”.

This might be remarkable stuff from any country’s top foreign official but Katz clearly had no problem with launching out in this way. “In diplomacy you try not to offend, but nobody will change the historical truth ... Poles collaborated with the Nazis, definitely”.

It is, of course, not just a question of the words used by both these Israeli politicians, but their timing on the eve of a conference that the Israelis presumably consider important. First Netanyahu appears to insult the Polish government, then claims he was misreported. Yet hardly had this retraction been made than Katz fires off a fresh accusation of anti-Semitism aimed at the whole Polish nation. To any objective observer this looks more like a conspiracy than an error. The Netanyahu government has taken it upon itself to characterize Poland as racist. This is quite extraordinary.

But the roots of this libel are not actually that hard to divine. A year ago, Warsaw made it illegal to accuse the Polish state of involvement in the Nazi Holocaust. The offense carried up to three years imprisonment. There were widespread protests, in Poland itself and also, of course, in Israel. The legislation was ill-conceived, if only because, as the Morawiecki government itself pointed out this week, after the Germans and Russians had invaded and divided up Poland in 1939, there was no Polish state that could have been guilty of anti-Semitism. It is equally true that throughout countries conquered by the Nazis, including France, Holland and Norway, there were racists prepared to step forward and join in the rounding up and butchery of Jews, Gypsies, the mentally ill and anyone else Hitler and his thugs considered inferior or undesirable. But Israeli Zionists have never pointed the same accusing finger at France, Holland or Norway as they do now at Poland.

Visegrad countries once had thriving Jewish as well as German communities. The consequences of Nazi savagery destroyed such demographics. Hosting this week’s meeting might have been designed to underline and profit from these historic links. Therefore, choosing the eve of the gathering to call out one member of the Group as a nation of endemic Jew-haters borders on the deranged.