Israel\u2019s foreign minister, Israel Katz, on Monday accused Brazil\u2019s President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva of \u201ca serious anti-Semitic attack\u201d and declared him an unwelcome person after Lula compared Israel\u2019s recent operations in Gaza to the Holocaust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa on Sunday, Lula said that \u201cwhat is happening in the Gaza Strip and with the Palestinian people\u201d has a single precedent: \u201cwhen Hitler decided to kill the Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lula\u2019s declaration was swiftly confronted by the Israeli government, including an outraged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said that \u201ccomparing Israel to the Nazi Holocaust and Hitler is crossing a red line.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Brazilian Israelite Confederation (Conib), the country\u2019s main Jewish organization, also repudiated Lula\u2019s remarks, saying in a statement that Lula\u2019s \u201cperverse distortion of reality\u201d had \u201coffended the memory of Holocaust victims and their descendants.\u201d The president of Conib, Claudio Lottenberg, said in an interview that Lula \u201cencouraged hate speech.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The conflict escalated further as Mr. Katz summoned Brazil\u2019s ambassador in Tel Aviv for an unusual reprimand at the Yad Vashem, Israel\u2019s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. They toured the memorial together and in front of the cameras, and Mr. Katz showed Ambassador Frederico Meyer the names of his grandparents who were killed in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Brazil answered by calling Mr. Meyer back to Brazil for consultations \u2014 an expression of disagreement \u2014 and by summoning Israeli Ambassador Daniel Zonshine for a meeting at the office of the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Rio de Janeiro, which will host a G20 ministerial summit later this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Daniel Buarque, executive editor of Interesse Nacional, an online magazine about Brazilian diplomacy, Lula\u2019s behavior is a high-risk, high-reward diplomatic move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(Source: The Brazilian Report)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Israel\u2019s foreign minister, Israel Katz, on Monday accused Brazil\u2019s President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva of \u201ca serious anti-Semitic attack\u201d and declared him an unwelcome person after Lula compared Israel\u2019s recent operations in Gaza to the Holocaust. At the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa on Sunday, Lula said that \u201cwhat is happening in the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":8889,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[184,307,172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-issues","category-main-news","category-172"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8888"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8891,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8888\/revisions\/8891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}