The EU’s delegation to Israel has cancelled a diplomatic event in Tel Aviv, after the Israeli government decided to send the extreme-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, as its representative.
The delegation had been due to hold its annual reception to mark Europe Day — which celebrates peace and unity in Europe — on Tuesday. But after a meeting of EU ambassadors on Monday, it said it had decided to call off this year’s event.
“We do not want to offer a platform to someone whose views contradict the values the EU stands for,” the delegation said in a statement, adding that a separate cultural event for the Israeli public would go ahead as planned.
The spat is the latest sign of the extent to which relations between Israel and the EU have soured since Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline new government — widely regarded as the most rightwing in Israeli history — took office last year.
A settler previously convicted of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organisation, Ben-Gvir is one of the most hardline figures in the new government, which unites Netanyahu’s Likud with two ultraorthodox parties and three ultranationalist factions, including Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party.
Until a couple of years ago, Ben-Gvir kept in his house a picture of a Jewish supremacist who gunned down 29 Palestinians in a mosque in Hebron in 1994.
Along with finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, he is also one of the most outspoken proponents of expanding Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. The EU, like most of the international community, considers these settlements illegal.
After the EU announced that it would cancel the event, Ben-Gvir accused the bloc of double standards. “It is a shame that the European Union, which claims to represent the values of democracy and multiculturalism, practices undiplomatic silencing,” he said in a statement.
“Real friends know how to voice criticism and true friends know how to hear it as well.”
Ben-Gvir had confirmed on Sunday that he intended to speak at the event in Tel Aviv, and that he planned to “point out that it is appropriate that the countries not finance projects against [Israeli] soldiers and Israeli residents”.
Steffen Seibert, Germany’s ambassador to Israel and former spokesman for former chancellor Angela Merkel, wrote on Twitter of the decision to cancel the event that “I wish this hadn’t been necessary — but it was.”
Former prime minister Yair Lapid, who heads Israel’s largest opposition party Yesh Atid, accused the new government of mismanaging the country’s foreign relations by selecting Ben-Gvir to represent it at the event.
“The current government is getting us into unnecessary fights and created a crisis with the [EU] just so that Ben-Gvir will once again embarrass in front of the world with an unnecessary speech,” he wrote on Twitter.
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