Israel lambasted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday for claiming that Adolf Hitler had Jewish origins, saying it was an \u201cunforgivable\u201d falsehood that debased the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.
In a signal of sharply deteriorating relations with Moscow, the Israeli foreign ministry summoned the Russian ambassador and demanded an apology.
\u201cSuch lies are intended to accuse the Jews themselves of the most horrific crimes in history that were committed against them,\u201d Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in a statement.
\u201cThe use of the Holocaust of the Jewish people for political purposes must stop immediately,\u201d he added. Lavrov made the assertion on Italian television on Sunday when he was asked why Russia said it needed to \u201cdenazify\u201d Ukraine if the country\u2019s own president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was himself Jewish.
\u201cWhen they say \u2018What sort of nazification is this if we are Jews\u2019, well I think that Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it means nothing,\u201d Lavrov told Rete 4 channel, speaking through an Italian interpreter.
\u201cFor a long time now we\u2019ve been hearing the wise Jewish people say that the biggest anti-Semites are the Jews themselves,\u201d he added.
Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel\u2019s memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, said the Russian minister\u2019s remarks were \u201can insult and a severe blow to the victims of the real Nazism\u201d.
Speaking on Kan radio, Dayan said Lavrov was spreading \u201can anti-Semitic conspiracy theory with no basis in fact\u201d.
The identity of one of Hitler\u2019s 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 for comment from the Russian embassy to Israel or from Lavrov in Moscow.
Kyiv condemned Lavrov\u2019s words, saying his \u201cheinous remarks\u201d were offensive to Zelenskiy, to Israel, Ukraine and Jews.
\u201cMore broadly, they demonstrate that today\u2019s Russia is full of hatred towards other nations,\u201d Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter.
Israeli Foreign Ministry Yair Lapid, whose grandfather died in the Holocaust, said that accusing Jews of being anti-Semites was \u201cthe basest level of racism\u201d. He also dismissed Lavrov\u2019s assertion that pro-Nazi elements held sway over the Ukrainian government and military.
\u201cThe Ukrainians aren\u2019t Nazis. Only the Nazis were Nazis and only they dealt with the systematic destruction of the Jewish people,\u201d Lapid told the YNet news website. A German government spokesperson said the idea Hitler had Jewish heritage was \u201cabsurd\u201d propaganda.
Israel has expressed repeated 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 Lapid last month accusing Russia of committing war crimes in Ukraine.
However, the Ukrainian president has also run into flak in Israel by looking to draw analogies between the conflict in his country and World War Two.
In an address to the Israeli parliament in March, Zelenskiy compared the Russian offensive in Ukraine to Nazi Germany\u2019s plan to murder all Jews within its reach during World War Two. Yad Vashem called his comments \u201cirresponsible,\u201d saying they trivialised the historical facts of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Israel lambasted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday for claiming that Adolf Hitler had Jewish origins, saying it was an \u201cunforgivable\u201d falsehood that debased the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.In a signal of sharply deteriorating relations with Moscow, the Israeli foreign ministry summoned the Russian ambassador and demanded an apology.\u201cSuch lies are intended to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":264659,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}