LAVROV’S NAZI COMMENTS DRAW FIRE FROM ISRAEL
TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel on Monday lashed out at Russia over “unforgivable” comments by its foreign minister about Nazism and antisemitism — including claims that Adolf Hitler was Jewish. Israel, which summoned the Russian ambassador in response, said the remarks blamed Jews for their own murder in the Holocaust.
It was a steep decline in the ties between the two countries at a time when Israel has sought to stake out a cautious position between Russia and Ukraine.
Asked in an interview with an Italian news channel about Russian claims that it invaded Ukraine to “denazify” the country, Sergey Lavrov said that Ukraine could still have Nazi elements even if some figures, including the country’s president, were Jewish.
“So when they say ‘How can Nazification exist if we’re Jewish?’ In my opinion, Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it doesn’t mean absolutely anything. For some time we have
heard from the Jewish people that the biggest antisemites were Jewish,” he said, speaking to the station in Russian, dubbed over by an Italian translation.
In some of the harshest remarks since the start of the war in Ukraine, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called Lavrov’s statement “unforgivable and scandalous and a horrible historical error.”
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Monday that Russia is fooling no one by trying to justify its brutal invasion with a “deranged conspiracy theory” against the Jewish people.
“I have only one word for this: Sickening,” Schumer said in the Senate.
Schumer is the Senate’s first Jewish majority leader.
“You’re fooling no one,” Schumer said. “The crimes of Russia are as plain as day for the world to see.”