Nadia El Yousfi's Controversial Statement Sparks Reaction from Israeli Ambassador - Full Coverage and Reactions

2023-12-20 13:19:42

The intervention of Nadia El Yousfi, senator and deputy from Brussels PS, in committee in the Senate on Monday, caused a lot of reaction. She affirmed “that there were rabbis in Israel who called for the rape of Palestinian women”, arousing the indignation of the Israeli ambassador.

The Committee on Democratic Renewal, Citizenship and International Affairs examined the situation in the Middle East during its meeting on Monday, December 18, 2023. Among the guests interviewed, Idit Rozenzweig-Abu, Ambassador of Israel to the Kingdom of Belgium , Abdalrahim Alfarra, Palestinian ambassador to the Kingdom of Belgium, Hassan Albalawi, the First Advisor of the Palestinian mission to the European Union, Marc Lassaoui of UNRWA and Anne Lagerwall, professor at ULB.

During her speech, PS senator Nadia El Yousfi did not mince her words with regard to the policy pursued by the Israeli government. On her Facebook page, she even evokes a “genocide” and speaks of “ethnic cleansing” and “state terrorism” underway in the Gaza Strip. The sequence pinned by the Israeli ambassador on the social network X has been viewed nearly 97,000 times at the time of writing.

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What exactly did she say? We watched the sequence in its entirety. After deploring the civilian victims on both sides, she denounced the “hate speech of the Israeli authorities”.

“I would like to remind you that within the Israeli government, the extreme right is very present. There are calls for hatred, calls for the destruction of Gaza, all calls to empty Gaza of its inhabitants. And one of the elements that also shocks me is that we have rabbis who are inspected on site who call in particular for the rape of Palestinian women and so on. I think that on this side, it is important to have all the elements so that we can be as objective as possible,” she explains in the hemicycle.

“I was so shocked that I thought it was a translation error”

A statement which made the Israeli ambassador to Belgium jump, who did not hesitate to reframe the socialist MP. “This is the first time I’ve heard that!” she exclaimed. “I was so shocked that I thought it was a translation error. But no, that’s what she said”

And to continue: “During past discussions in Parliament and the Senate, I had confrontations, difficult discussions, I heard many defamatory accusations, but this is a new low blow.”

It’s unclear what exactly the senator was referring to. Is this fake news? The only possible reference of which we found a trace is a quote from Rabbi Colonel Eyal Karim which dates back to… 2002. He had declared that rape was admissible in times of war to strengthen the morale of the troops, before returning about his comments later, saying they were taken out of context and that rape was unacceptable regardless of context. In 2016, when he was named the new chief rabbi of the Israeli army, his controversial exit resurfaced.

Contacted several times by us, Nadia El Yousfi told us that she would send us her reaction, but at the time of writing these lines, we are still waiting for it.