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In an interview on Monday, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko compared Israel’s military campaign in Gaza to the Holocaust and invoked a longstanding antisemitic trope about a powerful American “Jewish lobby” controlling U.S. policy in the Middle East.
“Israel must be a little more careful,” Lukashenko told Al Arabiya. “They already have a bad reputation in the world because of the bombing of Gaza. It is a holocaust.”
“Why do we speak about the Holocaust suffered by the Israelis while they themselves have killed so many people?” he added.
Lukashenko then recycled a classic antisemitic trope. “The Israel lobby in the US, the Jewish lobby, is very strong,” he said. “They are rich and powerful people in the United States, and they do have influence.”
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism identifies both Holocaust inversion — turning the genocide of the Jewish people into a weapon against the Jewish state — and myths about Jewish control and influence as forms of antisemitism. Lukashenko invoked both.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry called Lukashenko;s remarks “unacceptable and deeply disturbing.” Belarus was itself the site of Nazi atrocities during World War II, the ministry noted. It said any equation between the mass slaughter of European Jews and Israel’s war against terrorism “must be unequivocally rejected.”
The ministry also rebuked Lukashenko’s conspiracy rhetoric, characterizing it as “vile, outdated” beliefs that belonged in the past.
Lukashenko has faced repeated accusations of antisemitic rhetoric. In June 2024, Israel’s Foreign Ministry condemned him after he claimed that more than half of Belarus’s corruption suspects were Jewish.
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