Israel Protests Ecuadorian Diplomat’s Remarks

Israel protested on Sunday a statement made by Ecuador’s ambassador to the U.N. comparing Zionism to Nazism.

“We repudiate with all our strength the persecution and genocide that, in its time, unleashed Nazism against the Hebrew people,” Horacio Sevilla Borja said on International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People at the U.N.. “But I cannot remember anything more similar in our contemporary history than the eviction, persecution and genocide that today imperialism and Zionism do against the Palestinian people.”

Modi Efraim, the Foreign Ministry’s deputy director-general for Latin America, said that Israel “utterly rejects comparisons or comments such as these that are completely detached from reality.”

At the instruction of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Efraim called in the charge d’affaire at the Ecuadorean embassy, Enrique Ponce, to demand a clarification.

He reportedly told Ponce that Sevilla’s speech was full of “inaccuracies and historical distortions, especially the comparison made between the treatment of the Palestinians to the horrors of the Nazi regime.”

Part of the Latin American anti-Israel bloc with Cuba, Ecuador has not sent an ambassador to Israel since it recalled its ambassador from Israel during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza.