Israel Foreign Minister Lieberman announced he would ignore her after Sweden became Europe’s 1st country to recognize Palestine as a state.
By i24news
Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstroem has postponed indefinitely a planned visit to Israel. Although no reason was provided, Israeli media speculated the decision was the result of a snub by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who announced he would not meet with her because her government had recognized the Palestinian Authority as a Palestinian state.
Israel recalled its ambassador to Stockholm, Isaac Bachmann, in response to the decision adopted in October by Sweden’s new government, but has since sent him back to his post.
“The foreign minister has decided to postpone her visit to Israel and Palestine. Instead of next week it will take place later. No date is yet decided,” Margot Wallstroem’s spokesman Erik Boman told AFP.
According to Swedish media, the main purpose of the trip had been to honor the memory of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Budapest Jews from being sent to concentration camps by issuing them Swedish papers in 1944-1945.
Sweden was the first major European nation to recognize Palestine.
On Monday, speaking in Jerusalem, Lieberman accused some European politicians of anti-Semitism by comparing their statements to appeasement of Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II.
“Some European nations’ conduct is reminiscent of 1938, just before the Munich Agreement … The conduct by countries like Sweden and Ireland is reminiscent of how [European powers] abandoned Czechoslovakia to its fate. Now they are making all kinds of excuses to abandon Israel”, he said.
“Sometimes, you are just amazed by the amount of lies, fabrications, and the distortion of reality you find in the records of meetings held by European parliaments. It’s like another chapter in ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.”
The protocols are a fake Jewish “manifesto” for world domination circulated by 1930s Germany as justification for its purges.
View original i24news publication at: http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/europe/57000-150107-swedish-fm-cancels-israel-visit