U.S. ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel is reportedly skipping an annual memorial ceremony for the U.S.’s atomic bombing of Nagasaki after organizers of the event decided to exclude the Israeli ambassador from the event due to pressure from activist groups.
The U.S. embassy said that Emanuel would not attend the event because he did not want to “be involved in a politicized event,” bizarrely implying that the event would not be politicized if Israel had a presence at the peace ceremony. Emanuel, a longtime supporter of Israel, will reportedly attend a different ceremony in Tokyo.
Advocates for Palestinian rights noted that the U.S.’s decision to pull out of the event is not only a failure to recognize the U.S.’s own role in the attack that killed, by some estimates, over 70,000 civilians in Nagasaki; it is also a show of how far U.S. foreign policy officials will go to capitulate to Israel while it is actively committing one of the worst atrocities of the 21st century so far.
The August 9 ceremony will commemorate the 79th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki; Hiroshima, where 140,000 were killed, held its ceremony on August 6 and did invite Israel.
Nagasaki Mayor Shiro Suzuki, a descendant of survivors of the bomb, announced his decision not to invite Israeli representatives this week. Suzuki, who has previously called for a ceasefire in Gaza, hinted at this decision in June over concerns that potential protests at the ceremony may interrupt the “peaceful and solemn atmosphere” meant to honor the victims.
The Israeli ambassador to Japan, Gilad Cohen, accused Suzuki of “hijacking this ceremony for his political motivations.”
The U.K. ambassador to Japan is also skipping the Nagasaki event because of Israel’s omission. The U.K. and U.S. sent a letter last month saying that “it would become difficult for us to have high-level participation in this event” if Israel wasn’t invited. Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the European Union also signed the letter.
This highlights a double standard in Western countries’ attitude toward violence and occupation; the exclusion of Russia and Belarus from the event for the past two years due to the invasion of Ukraine has not caused similar boycotts.
The British embassy said in a statement that excluding Israel “creates an unfortunate and misleading equivalency with Russia and Belarus — the only other countries not invited to this year’s ceremony.” Israel’s ambassador also protested the idea that Israel’s assault on Gaza — and escalating violence in the occupied West Bank — is comparable to Russia’s invasion.
Experts have indeed said that the Gaza genocide isn’t equivalent to other conflicts — because humanitarian workers and historians have noted that Israel has created the worst humanitarian crisis ever seen in modern times.
Notably, Israel has released, at minimum, firepower equivalent to five atomic bombs – of the caliber the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima – on Gaza since October 2023. As of April, Israel’s military had dropped 75,000 metric tonnes of explosives on the Gaza Strip, an area less than half the size of Hiroshima, while the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima was estimated at roughly 15,000 tonnes.
Other sources have noted that the number of bombs dropped by Israel has surpassed the firepower of the bombs dropped in Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during World War II.
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