Israel demands explanation as Ecuador UN envoy compares Zionism to Nazism

An irate Israel this week summoned an Ecuadorean diplomat in Tel Aviv to protest a speech delivered by his country’s envoy to the United Nations that equated Zionism with Nazism.

“We repudiate with all our strength the persecution and genocide that in its time unleashed Nazism against the Hebrew people. 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,” Horacio Sevilla Borja said on Thursday.

Sevilla Borja, speaking at a UN session to mark International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, was quoting from a speech by late Cuban president Fidel Castro at the UN in 1979, according to the Argentine Jewish news service Iton Gadol.

Modi Efraim, the Foreign Ministry’s deputy director-general for Latin America, on Sunday summoned the Ecuadorean embassy’s third secretary Enrique Ponce to complain that the speech was filled with historical falsehoods and inaccuracies, “especially the comparison made between the treatment of the Palestinians to the horrors of the Nazi regime.”

Israel also demanded for “clarification” on the incident from Quito, and Ponce promised to report the matter to his office immediately.

Ecuador has been without an ambassador in Israel since it recalled the envoy during the 50-day war with Hamas in Gaza in 2014.

Meanwhile, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon wrote a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calling on him to condemn Sevilla Borja’s statement and demanded that he apologize, the mission said in a statement Monday.

“The UN cannot treat such despicable words of hate and pure anti-Semitism as business as usual,” Danon wrote. “It should be made crystal clear to all member-states that such antisemitic behavior will not be tolerated at the UN.”