Lapid: IDF reservist narrowly escaping arrest in Brazil shows government failure to manage foreign relations

The fact that an IDF reservist who survived the Nova festival massacre recently only narrowly escaped arrest for alleged war crimes while traveling in South America highlight’s the government’s absolute failure to manage foreign relations and public diplomacy during the war, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid charges.

Following a complaint by the Belgium-based anti-Israel Hind Rajab Foundation, a Brazilian federal court over the weekend ordered police to investigate whether an IDF soldier who was traveling in the country was responsible for “war crimes” in Gaza.

“He is not the first. There have been previous cases in Thailand, Norway, and other places,” Lapid tells reporters during his Yesh Atid party’s weekly faction meeting in the Knesset.

“A few hours later, the Australian Ice Hockey Association announced that it was canceling a tournament so that it would not have to invite the Israeli team to Australia. This is happening after the violent pogrom in Amsterdam, where Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were attacked, after Slovenia began a movement to boycott Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest, after 97% of Moroccan residents expressed support for the October 7 massacre. After Spain unilaterally announced recognition of a Palestinian state,” Lapid continues.

Lapid blames this “antisemitism” on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, calling it “the most terrible, most absolute, and above all the most unnecessary failure of Israeli foreign policy in all the years of the state.”

The government is “destroying our standing in the world to the core, and its answer to every disaster is for Trump to come and save us.”

“Donald Trump is a great lover of Israel, but he won’t manage our foreign relations or Israeli public diplomacy for us,” Lapid says.

“This failure could have been prevented. Maybe not completely, but certainly correct management could have prevented the complete collapse that we are seeing,” Lapid claims, arguing that if the government had established a state commission of inquiry it could have headed off arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant at the Hague as well as against “arrest warrants and investigations against Israeli officers and soldiers who are fighting to protect us.”

Lapid says that at the same time, the government should have prevented ministers from making statements with international implications: “They shouldn’t suggest dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza on the radio, and they shouldn’t talk on television about starving children.”