First, Elon Musk tweeted something at the very least ungenerous about George Soros. Then David Saranga, director of digital diplomacy at Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said the Twitter owner had tweeted with “an antisemitic flavor.”
Now, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen has weighed in. “There will be no tweets like this again,” he said of Saranga’s post on the social network.
The original tweet from Musk compared George Soros, the 92-year-old Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor, to Marvel Comics villain “Magneto.” Some noted on Twitter that the latter fictional character was intended to be a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, is among those who accused Musk of deliberately comparing Soros to a character with a similar backstory. “As I told Jake Tapper, Elon Musk’s language when talking about George Soros was not an accident. It’s the legacy of ancient conspiracies of nefarious Jews with undue power,” he tweeted. “It’s The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the Internet age. It’s false and flat-out dangerous.”
Cohen reportedly made the comment about the social-media policy of Israel’s Foreign Ministry in an interview with journalist Yinon Magal. The latter tagged Musk on Twitter and wrote that Cohen “did not like at all the tweet against you, sent from the official account of the Israeli Foreign Ministry.”
“He said that this incident was a ‘mishap’ and that ‘something like this will not happen again,’” Magal posted. “According to him, ‘Soros is not someone who needs the protection of the State of Israel.’ Following the tweet, Cohen instructed the ministry’s staff that from now on any tweet with political or state implications shall be approved by him before it goes live.”