Israel has lambasted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for claiming Adolf Hitler had Jewish origins, saying it was an “unforgivable” ...
Israel has lambasted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
for claiming Adolf Hitler had Jewish origins, saying it was an “unforgivable”
falsehood that debased the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.
Leaders from several Western nations denounced the foreign
minister’s comments and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia
of having forgotten the lessons of World War II.
In a sign of sharply deteriorating relations with Moscow,
the Israeli foreign ministry summoned the Russian ambassador and demanded an
apology.
“Such lies are intended to accuse the Jews themselves of the
most horrific crimes in history that were committed against them,” Israeli
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in a statement. “The use of the Holocaust
of the Jewish people for political purposes must stop immediately.”
Mr Lavrov made the assertion on Italian television on Sunday
when he was asked why Russia said it needed to “denazify” Ukraine if the
country’s president was himself Jewish.
“When they say ‘What sort of nazification is this if we are
Jews’, well I think that Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it means nothing,”
Mr Lavrov told Rete 4 channel, speaking through an Italian interpreter. “For a
long time now we’ve been hearing the wise Jewish people say that the biggest
anti-Semites are the Jews themselves.”
Mr Zelensky, in his nightly video message, noted Moscow had
been silent since Mr Lavrov’s comments.
“This means that the Russian leadership has forgotten all
the lessons of World War II” he said. “Or perhaps they have never learned those
lessons.”
U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken weighed in later on
the comments by his Russian counterpart saying it was “incumbent on the world
to speak out against such vile, dangerous rhetoric.”
The German government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix
Klein, said Mr Lavrov’s remarks mocked the victims of Nazism and “shamelessly
confront not only Jews but the entire international public with open
anti-Semitism.”
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi called the top Russian
diplomat’s comments obscene, while Canada’s Justin Trudeau expressed disbelief.
Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the
six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, said the Russian minister was
spreading “an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.”
The identity of one of Hitler’s grandfathers is not known
but there has been some speculation, never backed up by any evidence, that he
might have been a Jew.
There was no immediate response to requests for comment from
the Russian embassy to Israel or from Mr Lavrov in Moscow.
Israeli Foreign Ministry Yair Lapid, whose grandfather died
in the Holocaust, said accusing Jews of being anti-Semites was “the basest
level of racism.” He dismissed Mr Lavrov’s assertion that pro-Nazi elements
held sway over the Ukrainian government and military.
“The Ukrainians aren’t Nazis. Only the Nazis were Nazis and
only they dealt with the systematic destruction of the Jewish people,” Mr Lapid
told the YNet news website.
Israel has expressed support for Ukraine following the
Russian invasion in February. But wary of straining relations with Russia, a
powerbroker in neighbouring Syria, it initially avoided direct criticism of
Moscow and has not enforced formal sanctions on Russian oligarchs.
However, relations have grown more strained, with Mr Lapid
last month accusing Russia of committing war crimes in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian president has also run into flak in Israel by
looking to draw analogies between the conflict in his country and World War II.
In an address to the Israeli parliament in March, Mr
Zelensky compared the Russian offensive in Ukraine to Nazi Germany’s plan to
murder all Jews within its reach during World War II.
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