The Israeli military reaction to the Hamas attack on October 7, which triggered the current war, continues to set sparks flying in the international sphere.
This Monday, Israel declared the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
persona non grata
and has closed the door to the country until he rectifies the statements this weekend in which he compared what is happening in Gaza with the Holocaust. .
The highest authorities of the State have reacted angrily to what they consider a direct attack on Israel, on Jews in general and on the right to defend themselves.
All, on the same day that the number of Palestinian deaths in the Mediterranean enclave has exceeded 29,000, according to local health authorities.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Israel Katz, summoned the Brazilian ambassador, Federico Meyer, this Monday.
“We will not forget nor forgive.
It is a serious anti-Semitic attack.
In my name and in the name of the citizens of Israel, convey this to President Lula, who is
persona non grata
in Israel until he backs down," said the head of Israeli diplomacy, who chose a symbolic place for the reprimand, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.
“I have brought you to a place that bears witness more than anything to what the Nazis and [Adolf] Hitler did to the Jews, including my family members,” Katz explained.
“The comparison between Israel's legitimate war against Hamas and the atrocities of Hitler and the Nazis is a shame and a serious anti-Semitic attack,” she added.
Israel Katz even showed the ambassador at the Holocaust Museum the names of his grandparents, Israel and Shaprinza Katz, in what is known as the
Book of Names
, which includes, for the moment, almost five million victims.
The diplomatic bomb had exploded on Sunday several thousand kilometers away.
“What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has not happened at any other time in history.
In reality, it has happened: when Hitler decided to kill the Jews,” declared the president of Brazil on Sunday in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia).
“It is not a war, it is a genocide,” he remarked in a video in which he appears speaking during a tour of different African countries.
“It is not a war of soldiers against soldiers.
“It is a war between a very prepared army and women and children,” added the president, also using a serious tone.
Those words already posed a challenge from the first moment for the Government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which was quick to respond to Lula.
“Today [Sunday], the president of Brazil, by comparing Israel's war in Gaza against Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization, to the Holocaust, President Silva has dishonored the memory of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and has demonized the Jewish State as the most virulent anti-Semite.
“He should be ashamed of himself,” commented the president during a speech before officials of Jewish associations.
“We often talk about the history of anti-Semitism, and we say, how are these lies that are hurled against the Jewish people, these extraordinary falsifications, these incredible diatribes that have no basis in fact possible?
How can they be believed by so many?
Well, that is exactly what is happening today in the case of Israel,” added Netanyahu.
The Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, also responded, pointing out that “Israeli soldiers are fighting a cruel terrorist organization whose declared objective is the annihilation of the Jewish State, and advocates the suppression of other religions and communities such as the LGBT community, and continues to brutally hold 134 babies, women and men hostage in the dungeons of Gaza.”
Despite everything, Herzog added in reference to the words of the Brazilian president, “there are still leaders who atrociously accuse the nation-state of the Jewish people of the evil of Hitler's acts,” according to his profile on the social network X.
Lula had met on Saturday in parallel with the African Union summit meeting being held in Ethiopia with the Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Mohamed Shtaye.
Israel's reaction to the attack in which Hamas killed some 1,200 people on October 7, has become the worst war the country has experienced in its 75-year history.
Throughout these more than four months, comparisons with what happened in World War II in the shadow of Nazism have been recurrent.
In the same way that Lula has resorted to this comparison, the Israeli authorities have done so on several occasions in the opposite direction.
The extermination of six million people during World War II fueled the birth of the crime of genocide.
The Holocaust Museum was built on those pillars, where the Brazilian ambassador to Israel was summoned this Monday.
In the shadow of those more than 29,000 Palestinian lives taken by Israeli troops in Gaza, the international community has once again put the term genocide on the table.
The International Court of Justice, based in The Hague, considered at the end of January “plausible” that Israel is committing actions that constitute this international crime.
Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that “Hamas are the new Nazis.”
The war, meanwhile, continues in Gaza.
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