Israeli officials reacted with fury yesterday after Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov accused Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, of supporting Nazism and asserted that “Hitler also had Jewish blood.”
Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid said Russia’s ambassador to Israel would be formally summoned to explain the comments, which Mr Lapid called “both unforgivable and outrageous”.
He said Israel would demand an apology from the Russian government for employing a discredited anti-Semitic trope: that Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazis’ Third Reich and the perpetrator of the Holocaust, was of Jewish ancestry.
In a statement, Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett said Mr Lavrov’s “words are untrue and their intentions are wrong”.
“The goal of such lies is to accuse the Jews themselves of the most awful crimes in history, which were perpetrated against them, and thereby absolve Israel’s enemies of responsibility,” he said. “The use of the Holocaust of the Jewish people as a political tool must cease immediately.”
Mr Lavrov made the comments in an interview Sunday on Italian television as he sought to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian president Vladimir Putin has said he was compelled to launch a “special military operation” in February in part because, he claimed, Ukraine is dominated and ruled by neo-Nazis.
Pressed on reconciling these “denazification” claims with Mr Zelensky’s Jewish identity, Mr Lavrov dismissed its relevance.
“So what if Zelensky is Jewish,” Lavrov said, according to a translation of his remarks, which he made in Russian.
“The fact does not negate the Nazi elements in Ukraine. I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood.
“Some of the worst anti-Semites are Jews,” Mr Lavrov said.
Outrage at Mr Lavrov’s comments quickly spread across Israel. Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s main Holocaust museum and research centre, decried them as “dangerous” and “a severe blow to the victims of the real Nazism”.
Israeli deputy economy and industry minister Yair Golan said yesterday that Mr Lavrov’s remarks reflect “what the Russian regime truly is – a violent regime that doesn’t hesitate to do away with its rivals from within, to invade a foreign country and to accuse it of reviving Nazism”.
In Ukraine, foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that Lavrov’s words “demonstrate that today’s Russia is full of hatred towards other nations”.
Mr Lavrov’s remarks seemed to harden Israel’s reaction to the Russian invasion, which has been mixed and evolving during the course of the war.
Israel initially denounced the fighting but moderated its direct criticism of Russia out of concerns over its wider security relationship with Moscow. Israel depends on Russian forces to let it carry out unacknowledged airstrikes on Iranian-backed militants inside Syria, according to military analysts.
Mr Bennett, who had good relations with both Mr Putin and Mr Zelensky, also said he wanted to maintain a degree of neutrality to be able to mediate between them, a role he played in the early weeks of the conflict. But as the fighting in Ukraine has continued and the civilian death toll mounts, Israel has become increasingly full-throated in denouncing Russia.
Moscow expressed fury late last month after Mr Lapid voted in the United Nations to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council.
The Russian government did not have an immediate comment on Israel’s request for an apology for Mr Lavrov’s remarks. (© Washington Post)