Latin American leader crossed a line with Nazi holocaust charges against Israel | Opinion

It’s not uncommon for Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to make reckless statements about world affairs. But his recent comparison of the Nazi holocaust, which killed more than six million Jews, to Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas is a monumental display of ignorance that promotes antisemitism.

It has made Brazil’s leftist-populist leader come across as a new champion of anti-Jewish racism.

Speaking at the 37th African Union Summit in Ethiopia on Feb. 18, Lula said that “what is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has no parallel in other historical moments.” Then he added, “In fact, it did exist when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”

Israel rightly accused Lula, 78, of trivializing the Holocaust and denying the country its right to self-defense. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Lula “has disgraced the memory of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and demonized the Jewish state like the most virulent antisemite.”

The Israeli government declared Lula “persona non grata” in the country, and summoned the Brazilian ambassador to Israel to the national Holocaust museum in Jerusalem for a reprimand.

The Brazilian government stood by Lula’s statement, and recalled its ambassador to Tel Aviv for consultations. Two days later, the leftist presidents of Colombia and Bolivia expressed their solidarity with Lula’s comments about the “genocide” in Gaza.

To be fair, Lula, unlike the presidents of Colombia and Bolivia, and the dictators of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, has condemned the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack.

An estimated 1,500 Hamas members sneaked into Israel that day, and killed more than 1,200 people, most of them civilians, including grandparents, babies and 250 youths attending a music festival. The terrorists also took more than 200 hostages back to Gaza, killed many of them in captivity and systematically raped women.

By some measures, it was the deadliest single-day attack on Jews since the 1940s Nazi Holocaust. Hamas had been firing rockets at Israeli cities in previous weeks, and has launched an estimated 12,000 rockets since at Israel’s territory since, Israeli officials say.

But, as much as I hate to agree with Netanyahu and the right-wing extremists who are part of his ruling coalition, Lula’s comparison of the Nazi holocaust with Israel’s military response to the Hamas terrorist attack is outrageous.

You can legitimately criticize, as I have often done, Israel’s policy of allowing settlement expansions in the West Bank. You can also rightly criticize Netanyahu’s foot dragging on international efforts to create a Palestinian state that recognizes Israel’s right to exist. But accusing Israel of pursuing a Nazi-like genocide is absurd.

First, it’s a false comparison. The Nazi holocaust was a systematic policy of rounding up Jews and exterminating them in concentration camps. It was a genocide, which according to the United Nations, is defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Israel has declared war against Hamas, not against the Palestinian people, to protect itself from further attacks by a group whose official aim is to destroy it. Israel doesn’t have an extermination policy against Palestinians.

There are more than 2.1 million Palestinians living in Israel, or about 21% of its population, and their numbers have skyrocketed in recent decades. That’s hardly something that would happen to a population subject to a “genocide.”

There are Palestinians in the Israeli Knesset, or Congress, and in Israel’s supreme court. And as any tourist can witness, all religions are allowed to be practiced in public in Israel, something that can’t be said of all Islamic countries.

Hamas, on the other hand, does have an official policy of seeking the destruction of Israel. Article 6 of Hamas’ 1988 charter says the group “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.” That, as well as the slogan “from the river to the sea,” amounts to the elimination of the Jewish state.

Second, Hamas started this war. Under international law, Israel has the right to defend itself. Israeli troops most likely committed excesses, as in any war, but — unlike Hamas — it doesn’t target civilians. On the contrary, Israel routinely warns Gaza civilians to leave areas where its army is about to attack Hamas combatants in an effort to minimize civilian casualties.

Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists has left more than 28,000 deaths, according to Hamas-controlled Gaza authorities. Israel said two weeks ago that more than 10,000 them are Hamas terrorists, and that Hamas leaders are causing thousands of civilian deaths by hiding in hospitals and schools, and using Gaza civilians as human shields.

Third, Lula made his remarks in, of all places, Ethiopia, where up to 600,000 civilians have died in the Ethiopian government’s war against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in 2021 and 2022., according to the Spanish daily El Pais. That’s many times the amount of non-combatant deaths in Gaza.

But Lula didn’t say a word about the Ethiopian civilians killed in the conflict. In fact, he happily accepted a red carpet welcome from the Ethiopian government. Nor did Lula say anything about the hundreds of thousands of people killed by government troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan or Syria.

Lula’s motivation to make his ridiculous Israel-Nazi comparison may have been aimed at pleasing his leftist base. But he has gone overboard.

By falsely portraying Israel’s counter-offensive in Gaza as a “genocide” and focusing his outrage exclusively on the Jewish state, Lula has discredited himself as an honest broker. What’s more, he has given the Israeli government a good argument to call him an antisemite and a racist.

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