Ambassadors from Western countries are to skip a ceremony marking the 79th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki after Israel was snubbed, officials said yesterday.
Nagasaki’s mayor last week said that Israeli Ambassador to Japan Gilad Cohen was not invited to tomorrow’s event in the southern Japanese city because of the risk of possible protests over the Gaza conflict.
The US and British embassies yesterday said that their ambassadors would not take part as a result, and that they would send lower-ranking diplomats.
Photo: AP
Media reports said that Australia, Italy, Canada and the EU, who together with the US, Britain and Germany signed a joint letter to Nagasaki’s mayor last month, would follow suit.
US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel would not attend “after the mayor of Nagasaki politicized the event by not inviting the Israeli ambassador,” an embassy spokesperson told reporters.
Instead, Emanuel would go to a separate event at a temple in Tokyo, the spokesperson said.
The British embassy said that its ambassador, Julia Longbottom, would also not be in Nagasaki, adding that not inviting Israel “creates an unfortunate and misleading equivalency with Russia and Belarus — the only other countries not invited to this year’s ceremony.”
A spokesperson for the French embassy said its second-ranking official would attend.
The “decision not to invite the representative of Israel is regrettable and questionable,” it added.
The EU’s ambassador would not take part “due to his agenda” and the bloc would be represented by a lower-level diplomat, a spokesperson told reporters.
Nagasaki Mayor Shiro Suzuki last week said the decision not to invite Cohen was “not politically motivated,” but based on a desire to “hold the ceremony in a peaceful and somber atmosphere.”
Suzuki in June said that Nagasaki had sent a letter to the Israeli embassy calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.
Cohen, who was invited to and attended a ceremony in Hiroshima on Tuesday last week, said that the Nagasaki decision “sends a wrong message to the world.”
“As a close friend and like-minded nation of Japan, Israel has attended this ceremony for many years to honor the victims and their families,” he wrote on X.
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