Israel Summons Jordan Envoy over 'Anti-Israel' Article

Israel summoned Jordan's ambassador Thursday to protest an "anti-Israeli" article by a former Jordanian foreign minister, in which he based his argument on a Hitler quote, the foreign ministry said.

Spokesman Yigal Palmor said Israel's embassy in Amman also sent the foreign ministry there an official protest over an article published on Monday by Kamel Abu Jaber in The Jordan Times.

In the second paragraph of the article titled "The big Zionist lie and the task ahead", Abu Jaber, foreign minister from 1991 to 1993, uses a quote from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf to make a point about lying -- in "the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility."

"The Zionist big lie about Palestine -- 'a land without a people' -- that the entire Western world adopted, and the biblical, Talmudic myth of the 'chosen people' have been the most important factors behind all the tragedies and atrocities that Palestine and the Palestinians have been subjected to since (...) l897," Abu Jaber wrote.

"We Arabs, Jordanians and Palestinians especially, are victims of a torrent of lies by a few international media magnates that every day enter every room of every household, propagating not only sex and violence but also, above all, the Zionist ideas of the extreme right," he wrote.

Palmor said foreign ministry deputy director general Aviva Raz called in ambassador Walid Obeidat to protest about the piece, "which was in essence anti-Israeli, but basing it on Mein Kampf is definitely a red line, which brought an anti-Semitic spirit to some of the remarks."

In the letter to the Jordanian foreign ministry, Israel says of Abu Jaber that "constructing his arguments on Hitler’s racist and anti-Semitic philosophy is outrageous and offensive not only for Jews, but also for any human being who believes in the basic values of humanity."

Publishing Abu Jaber's piece on Monday, the day Israel remembered the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, was "not by coincidence", the protest letter read, calling for "firm actions against the writer and the newspaper."

Tensions between Israel and Jordan, which signed a peace treaty in 1994, have risen following a series of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security at Jerusalem's flashpoint al-Aqsa mosque compound.

Under the treaty, Jordan is the custodian of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.

Israeli soldiers in March killed a Jordanian judge at a border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan, with the army saying it was investigating the circumstances.