Israel on Monday denounced Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for suggesting Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had Jewish roots and demanded an apology from Moscow.
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said the Russian ambassador will be summoned for “a tough conversation” about the comments, which Lavrov made on Sunday in an interview with Italian television.
“It’s an unforgivable and scandalous statement, a terrible historic mistake, and we expect an apology,” Lapid told news website YNet.
During his interview with Italian channel Rete 4, Lavrov was asked how Russia could claim it needed to “denazify” Ukraine when the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was Jewish.
“When they say ‘what kind of nazification is this if we are Jews’, well, I think Hitler also had Jewish origins, so that doesn’t mean anything,” said Lavrov, speaking through an Italian interpreter.
“We have long heard the wise Jewish people say that the greatest anti-Semites are the Jews themselves,” he added.
Dani Dayan, president of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, called Lavrov’s comments “an insult and a severe blow to the victims of true Nazism.”
Speaking on Israel’s Kan radio, Dayan said Lavrov was spreading “an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory with no basis in fact”.
Source: CNN Brasil
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