PALESTINE CHRONICLE ‘President Lula is Persona Non Grata in Israel’ – Israeli Foreign Minister February 19, 2024 Blog, News

 PALESTINE CHRONICLE

‘President Lula is Persona Non Grata in Israel’ – Israeli Foreign Minister

February 19, 2024 Blog, News

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Image: Palestine Chronicle)

By Palestine Chronicle Staff  

Israel says Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is persona non grata and not welcome in Israel, until he retracts his remarks likening Tel Aviv’s attack on Gaza to Hitler’s campaign to eradicate Jews in Nazi Germany. 

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz has declared Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva persona non grata over his comparison of Tel Aviv’s war on Gaza with Adolf Hitler’s campaign to exterminate Jews in Nazi Germany.  

Katz reportedly summoned the Brazilian ambassador,  Federico Mayer, to a Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem on Monday for a reprimand over the remarks, according to The Times of Israel. 

The paper adds that Katz said: “In my name, and in the name of all Israeli citizens, tell President Lula that he is persona non grata in Israel until he retracts his statements.” 

He also said that Israel “will not forget and we will not forgive.”

Lula told reporters in Addis Ababa where he was taking part in the African Union summit on Sunday, that “what’s happening in the Gaza Strip isn’t a war, it’s a genocide.”

“It’s not a war of soldiers against soldiers. It’s a war between a highly prepared army and women and children,” the Brazilian President added.

“What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people hasn’t happened at any other moment in history. Actually, it has happened: when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also reportedly said the Brazilian leader had “crossed a red line.”

The Times of Israel further reports that Netanyahu said in a statement that “The words of the President of Brazil are shameful and alarming,” adding that it’s a “trivialization of the Holocaust and an attempt to harm the Jewish people and Israel’s right to defend itself.”

Supportive of Palestine

Lula has been, throughout the years, supportive of Palestine.  

In 2010, as a president, he spoke of his dream of seeing “an independent and free Palestine” during a visit to the occupied West Bank. 

He also refused to visit the grave of Theodor Herzl, the father of Israel’s Zionist ideology. Instead, he visited Yasser Arafat’s tomb in Ramallah.

Although he condemned Hamas’ military operation on October 7, he has since then vocally criticized Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

More than 29,000 Killed

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 29,092 Palestinians have been killed, and 69,028 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7.

Moreover, at least 7,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip. 

Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.

The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.

(Palestine Chronicle)