For two months, the Jewish state had nothing to say about the rhetoric of the Kremlin, which claims to lead the war in Ukraine to a “Nazi Junta”. Anxious to maintain its neutrality in this conflict, the Israeli government had not had a single word to denounce this instrumentalization of the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Since 1er May, however, he was forced to react to anti-Semitic remarks deliberately accumulated by the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov.
Questioned Sunday by the Italian media group Mediaset, Mr. Lavrov had to explain why he considered as an heir to Nazism this Ukrainian government whose president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish, like several senior state officials. He resorted to an old assertion, devoid of historical legitimacy, which claims that Adolf Hitler himself had “Jewish blood”. According to him, “It means absolutely nothing. Jewish sages have said that the most ardent anti-Semites are often the Jews themselves.”
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett reacted on Monday by recalling that“no war is comparable to the Holocaust… The use of Jewish genocide as a political tool must stop immediately”. His powerful ally, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, was more direct, denouncing comments “scandalous, unforgivable and a horrific historical error”.
Lesson addressed to Yair Lapid
As of Tuesday, Moscow clarified its thinking: “The current Israeli government supports the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv. » Jews collaborated well with the Nazis in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, insists this long text, published in Russian on the Telegram channel of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But while most did so under duress, Mr. Zelensky in turn would have chosen to “to cover” the “crimes” from “heirs of the executors of his people”.
This lesson is addressed personally to a man, Yaïr Lapid, whose grandfather was a victim of the Holocaust, and whose father was able to leave the Budapest ghetto thanks to Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat arrested by the Red Army in 1945, and disappeared in a Russian jail. For his country, these exchanges mark a turning point. “Now the Jews and Israel are involved: the state will no longer be able to remain silent in the face of this perversion of history. But that doesn’t mean a change in Israeli policy.”believes former MP Ksenia Svetlova, a specialist in Russian influence in the Middle East.
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