(Reuters) – Israel’s foreign minister said on Monday that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is not welcome in Israel until he withdraws his comments comparing the war against Hamas militants in Gaza to the Nazi genocide during World War II.
“We will neither forget nor forgive. This is a serious anti-Semitic attack. On my behalf and on behalf of the citizens of Israel, tell President Lula that he is persona non grata in Israel until he takes back what he said,” Foreign Minister Israel Katz told Brazil’s ambassador, according to a statement from Katz’s office.
Israel has accused Lula of trivializing the Holocaust and offending the Jewish people, and Katz summoned the Brazilian ambassador to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for a reprimand on Monday over Lula’s comments.
The war in Gaza began when the Palestinian militant group Hamas sent fighters into Israel on October 7 last year, killing 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking 253 people hostage, according to Israeli data.
Since then, the Israeli offensive by land and air has devastated most of Gaza, killed more than 29,000 people, also mostly civilians, according to Palestinian authorities, and forced most of the enclave’s 2 million inhabitants to leave their homes.
Israel to reprimand ambassador for Lula’s statements
(DW) The Brazilian president compared Israeli actions against Palestinians in Gaza to Hitler’s genocide of the Jews. Previously, Petista had spoken of “acts of terrorism”. Netanyahu claims that Petista “crossed a red line”.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz has announced that he will summon Brazil’s ambassador to Tel Aviv on Monday (19/02) for a reprimand over comments made by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva about the country’s military conduct in the Gaza Strip. “No one will compromise Israel’s right to defend itself,” the head of the ministry posted on Sunday on the X platform (formerly Twitter).
During an interview at the end of the 37th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Lula drew parallels between the deaths caused by Israel in the Gaza Strip and the Holocaust, when asked about the decision by some countries to suspend financial transfers to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
Arguing that if there was a “mistake” at UNRWA, those responsible should be investigated, but humanitarian aid cannot be suspended, he added that he was “wondering how big the political conscience” and “the heart of solidarity of these people” is, given that “in the Gaza Strip, there is not a war going on, but a genocide; it is not a war between soldiers and soldiers”.
“It’s a war between a highly prepared army and women and children,” he said, adding: “What is happening in the Gaza Strip and with the Palestinian people does not exist at any other time in history. In fact, it did exist: when [Adolf] Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”
“He crossed a red line”
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Brazilian president had “crossed a red line”. “The words of the president of Brazil are shameful and serious. It’s about trivializing the Holocaust and trying to harm the Jewish people and Israel’s right to defend itself,” he wrote on his X account.
He confirmed that he had summoned the Brazilian ambassador to Israel for a stern rebuke.
In a statement, the Israeli Confederation of Brazil (Conib) repudiated what it called Lula’s “unfounded” statements, explaining: “The Nazis exterminated 6 million defenseless Jews in Europe just for being Jewish. Israel, on the other hand, is defending itself against a terrorist group that invaded the country, killed more than a thousand people, carried out mass rapes, burned people alive and defends the elimination of the Jewish state in its founding charter.”
For the organization, the comparison made by Lula would be a “perverse distortion of reality”, and the government “has been adopting an extreme and unbalanced stance in relation to the tragic conflict in the Middle East, abandoning Brazil’s foreign policy tradition of balance and seeking dialogue”.
Lula makes no secret of position in the Middle East
The current war between Tel Aviv and the Islamic extremist group, considered terrorist by Israel, the United States, the European Union (EU) and several Western countries and which controls part of Gaza, was triggered by a Hamas attack on October 7 against southern Israel, which caused more than 1,160 deaths, most of them civilians, according to official Israeli figures, as well as taking around 250 hostages.
In retaliation, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government launched an offensive in the Gaza Strip that has already resulted in 28,775 deaths, also mostly civilians, according to a report released by the Hamas Health Ministry on Friday.
From the outset, Lula has made no secret of the fact that he is critical of the Israelis in this conflict. On October 25, at an event in Brasilia, he compared the military’s actions in Israeli territory to “genocide”. On November 13, he referred to “various acts of terrorism”. In January, Brazil supported South Africa’s petition to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, declaring Israel’s actions against the Palestinians to be genocide.
*** Translated by DEFCONPress FYI Team *** With DW and Reuters