Speaking at an African Union summit in Ethiopia on Sunday, February 18, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva delivered a scathing condemnation of Israel's genocide in Gaza that compares only to the Holocaust.
» What’s happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people hasn’t happened at any other moment in history. Actually, it has happened: when Hitler decided to kill the Jews. It’s not a war of soldiers against soldiers. It’s a war between a highly prepared army, and women and children. «
By that day Israel’s assault on
Gaza had killed at least 28,858 people, mostly women and children,
according to Palestinian authorities. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predictably dismissed Lula’s Holocaust parallel as “antisemitic, disgraceful and grave,” while Foreign Minister Israel Katz announced that Jerusalem “will not forget nor forgive” the alleged “serious anti-Semitic attack” and that Lula is “a persona non grata in Israel” until he takes back his comments. But Lula refused
to bow down. On Monday, Brazil expelled the Israeli ambassador and
recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv, thus ending all diplomatic
relations with Israel.
The irony is that Lula da Silva’s statement only confirms what Israeli politicians have been saying out loud over the past four months, and whose genocidal statements were cited as damning evidence at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide hearing last month. Israeli officials and top generals themselves have openly called for genocide in Gaza, pledging to turn the besieged strip into Auschwitz and Dresden, and even celebrating such atrocities.
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