OPPENHEIMER
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 Israel. The country doesn’t have an extermination policy against Palestinians.
More than 2.1 million Palestinians live 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 on 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 an intent to eliminate 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, in an effort to minimize civilian casualties, Israel routinely warns Gaza civilians to leave areas where its army
is about to attack Hamas combatants.
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, it’s ironic that
Lula made his remarks in, of all places, Ethiopia, where up to 600,000 civilians 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 IsraelNazi comparison may have been aimed at pleasing his leftist base. But he has gone overboard.
By falsely portraying Israel’s counteroffensive 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.