Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Wednesday (June 10th) attacked the Israeli occupation state, likening it to the "Nazi regime", in response to the genocidal war it carried out in the Gaza Strip.
Speaking at a meeting of the UN Security Council, Petro said that tens of thousands of people have been killed in Gaza by Israeli rockets, "They (the Israelis) are raining rockets on people, even children. These figures cannot be hidden, and no political or economic interest can hide this fact."
"That's the real common denominator of what I'm going to say here, which is that we're going back to the Nazi era," he said, according to the Hebrew website Walla.
In May 2024, Petro announced that his country would cut ties with Israel due to the ongoing war in Gaza, and then, Petro told his supporters in Bogotá, who marched in celebration of Labor Day and in support of his social and economic reforms: "We announce tomorrow that we will cut diplomatic relations with the State of Israel because of its government and prime minister who support the genocide," stressing that countries cannot stand idly by in the face of events in Gaza.
The Colombian president has previously called Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir a "real Nazi" following videos circulating showing abuse of Humanitarian Freedom Flotilla activists.
Israeli hysteria after Petro's remarks
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar wrote on the "X" platform: "The outgoing Colombian president is a stain on the forehead of his great nation," as he put it, in response to Petro's remarks.
"This anti-Semite systematically belittles the memory of the Holocaust, he is a communist who destroyed his great country, and will soon be a thing of the past," Sa'ar claimed, referring to the end of Petro's term, as his country is witnessing presidential elections on June 21 in which he will not run.
Israel's U.N. envoy Danny Danon wrote on X: "Nothing justifies his rejection, the U.N. Security Council was not created to be a platform for distorted ideological ideas and to distort the memory of the Holocaust."
Deteriorating relations between Bogotá and Tel Aviv
After decades of close alliance and deep military and intelligence cooperation, the track between the two countries ended in a complete rupture in 2024 with President Gustavo Petro coming to power and Bogotá changing its strategic direction.
During the 1980s and into 2022, the partnership between the two sides reached its peak, with Israel becoming the Colombian military's number one supplier of weapons and military technology, including locally manufactured Kfir and Galil rifles with Israeli license, but the trajectory began to change in 2018 when Colombia formally recognized the state of Palestine in the final days of President Juan Manuel Santos' term, a decision that created a limited lull that subsequent President Iván Duque tried to contain by opening a commercial office in Jerusalem in 2021.
Petro cuts ties with Israel
With Gustavo Petro coming to power in 2022, foreign policy took a completely different turn, with tension culminating during the Israeli aggression on Gaza in October 2023 when Petro refused to condemn the Hamas attack and likened Israeli officials' statements to Nazi rhetoric, prompting Israel to halt its security exports to Bogotá.
In May 2024, Petro announced the complete severance of diplomatic relations, describing the Israeli government as practicing "genocide", closing embassies and diplomatic missions leaving the two countries, and the repercussions did not stop on the political side, as Colombia imposed in August 2024 a ban on the export of coal to Israel as a punitive measure, a ban that continues to affect the Israeli energy sector until 2026, reflecting the depth of the rift that has afflicted a relationship that has been considered one of the strongest Latin-Israeli partnerships for decades.
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