Israel declares Brazilian President persona non-grata for comparing Gaza war with Holocaust

Foreign Minister Israel Katz declared Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva persona non grata on Monday over his comparison of Israel’s war against Hamas to the Holocaust.

Standing at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Katz, the son of Holocaust survivors, told Brazil’s Ambassador Federico Mayer that Israel “will not forget and we will not forgive.”

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

I brought you to a place that testifies more than anything else to what the Nazis and Hitler did to the Jews, including members of my family.

“The comparison between Israel’s just war against Hamas and the atrocities of Hitler and the Nazis is a disgrace and a severe anti-Semitic attack.”

Unusually for a diplomatic reprimand, the two also toured Yad Vashem together, and Katz showed Mayer the names of his grandparents who were killed in the Holocaust in the Book of Names.

Lula went on to assert that “what is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people hasn’t happened at any other moment in history” except one: “When Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”

Israel is fighting a heavily armed terror group in the enclave in response to the deadliest attack on its population in its history. It says civilian casualties are the result of combatants operating from behind the cover of innocents, and that it makes efforts to minimize the deaths of Gazan civilians, including through evacuations of combat zones.

Hamas’s unverified figures, which do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, point to around 29,000 Gazans killed in the war, or slightly over 1% of the Strip’s total estimated population.

Israel says at least 10,000 of those were terror operatives, and that the war would end if Hamas were to release the Israeli hostages it took during its October 7 2023 onslaught, and surrender.

The words of the President of Brazil are shameful and alarming,” he said in a statement. “This is a trivialization of the Holocaust and an attempt to harm the Jewish people and Israel’s right to defend itself.”

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