Russian MFA responded to a statement made by Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid demanding an apology to the Jewish people and accusing Tel Aviv of supporting the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine.
Earlier, the head of the Russian foreign ministry said that as a confirmation of the impossibility of support for Nazism by the authorities in Kiev, the West cited the argument about the Jewish origin of Vladimir Zelensky. Lavrov noted that Adolf Hitler also had Jewish roots and "this means absolutely nothing - the wise Jewish people say that the most vicious anti-Semites, as a rule, are Jews".
Lapid called this statement scandalous and said that "Hitler was not a Jew, and Jews did not kill themselves during the Holocaust". Lapid also demanded an apology from the Russian government.
The Russian foreign ministry reminded that history knows tragic examples of cooperation between Jews and Nazis. In particular, some heads of ghettos and "Judenrat" are remembered for particularly heinous crimes.
"In Warsaw, Jakub Leikin spied on Jews and reported everything to the German occupation administration, condemning his compatriots to certain and sometimes painful death, while Chaim Rumkowski offered Lodz Jews to give their children to the Nazis in exchange for keeping adult ghetto residents alive, there are numerous witnesses to his words," the ministry statement reads.
The ministry agreed with the opinion of Tel Aviv University history professor H. Dreyfus, who called the complicity of Jews in the Holocaust a marginal phenomenon, but it is not taboo and can be the subject of research.
The foreign ministry report also cites individual examples of anti-Semitism in Ukraine.
"One of the prominent representatives of Ukraine's Jewish movement, Eduard Dolinsky, not long ago feared the termination of his organization (the Ukrainian Jewish Committee). Torchlight marches with portraits of Stepan Bandera through the streets of Kiev with the slogans "Yude - Get!" (Jews go away) as well as vandals' writings on synagogues speak for themselves," it says.
Yet anti-Semitism is not the only hate ideology that is flourishing in Ukraine. In addition to Russophobia, romophobia is also gaining momentum.
"Last fall, fascists detained four Roma women in Kiev and subjected them to abuse. They sprayed green paint on their faces and left the inscription "Thief" on their foreheads. An equally egregious incident also occurred in the center of the Ukrainian capital. An unknown man met Roma women in the street and, using profanity, told the women to leave Independence Square. Such cases are recorded all the time, but it is another matter that all of them are at best considered as "disorderly conduct," reads the statement of the ministry of foreign affairs.
The ministry stressed that the anti-historical statement of the head of the ministry of foreign affairs of Israel explains a lot about the course of the current Tel Aviv to support the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"
Photo: MFA
Based on materials RIA Novosti