The U.S. and British ambassadors to Japan said on Wednesday they would not attend Nagasaki’s annual peace memorial ceremony this week, which marks the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city, because Israel had not been invited.
Among the invitees to the ceremony on Aug. 9, the 79th anniversary of the atomic bomb attack that laid waste to the city, were dignitaries from more than 150 countries and territories. Since 2022, Russia and Belarus have been left off the list because of their invasion of Ukraine.
This year, Israel was omitted as well. The American and British ambassadors said the Nagasaki mayor’s decision not to invite Israel wrongly equated the country’s war against Hamas in Gaza with Russia and Belarus’s actions.
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s self-defense is not morally equivalent,” Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, said in an emailed statement.
Nagasaki’s mayor, Shiro Suzuki, announced his decision last week, saying it was out of concern over security risks and potential disruption.
The move was “not based on political judgment but an intention to conduct the ceremony to console the atomic bomb victims in a peaceful and solemn manner,” Mr. Suzuki said in a news conference.
Israel’s ambassador to Japan, Gilad Cohen, said in response that the mayor’s decision sent the wrong message to the world.
“There is no comparison between Israel, which is being brutally attacked by terrorist organizations, and any other conflict, any attempt to present it otherwise distorts the reality,” Mr. Cohen wrote in a statement posted on social media.
Last month, after Mr. Suzuki had suggested publicly that Israel might be excluded from the ceremony, diplomats representing several countries sent a letter to Nagasaki officials expressing concern over Israel’s omission. “Should Israel be excluded, it would become difficult for us to have high-level participation in this event,” read the letter, which was signed by representatives from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United States and the European Union.
Nagasaki officials said Mr. Suzuki had sent a letter to the Israeli Embassy in June urging an immediate cease-fire, noting the human cost of armed conflict that the citizens of Nagasaki know from its own history. Mr. Suzuki is a child of atomic bomb survivors.
In a phone interview, Mr. Emanuel said the mayor’s explanation — that the decision was out of a security concern — was disingenuous, and he noted that Hiroshima held its own commemoration on Tuesday without disruptions and with Israel’s ambassador in attendance.
“It should have been a time of bringing people together to reflect on the consequences of not only war but the most horrific part of war, which is atomic weapons,” he said. “Unfortunately, because of the mayor’s decision, the message of that ceremony and memorial will be distracted and deflected.”
Mr. Emanuel said he would instead attend a peace ceremony at a temple in Tokyo on Friday to mark the occasion.
Britain’s ambassador to Japan, Julia Longbottom, also declined to attend the event. Not inviting Israel “creates an unfortunate and misleading equivalency with Russia and Belarus — the only other countries not invited to this year’s ceremony,” the British Embassy in Tokyo said in an emailed statement.
Other representatives from the United States and Britain will attend Friday’s event, the embassies said. The Japanese news network TBS reported that the ambassadors of France, Italy, Australia and Canada would also skip Friday’s ceremony.
Hiroshima’s commemoration on Tuesday, which included Israel’s ambassador, was held despite protests from a civic group that gathered more than 25,000 signatures against his invitation.
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