Socialist dictator of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being “the Hitler of the 21st Century” in response to Israel’s airstrikes on Friday against Iran, a key ally of his authoritarian regime.

Maduro levied a barrage of accusations against Netanyahu and Israel’s “Nazi-Zionism” on Saturday night during his participation in a workshop of his regime’s “Seven Transformations” governance program, the latest iteration of the Maduro regime’s 2025-2031 socialist plans for Venezuela. According to Maduro, Netanyahu is allegedly carrying out a West-backed plan in the Middle East comparable to the actions carried out in the past by Adolf Hitler across Europe.

“For those who like to talk about religions, this is not a religious conflict. The conflict that has existed since the founding of the State of Israel is a geopolitical conflict,” Maduro claimed — disregarding the decades of openly antisemitic bigotry out of Tehran — “because that State was created to conquer the entire Middle East and Central Asia, and to take away their wealth and colonize those peoples.”

“It is the Zionist project, which they say goes from the Jordan River to the Euphrates and beyond. Europe did to Hitler what the West is doing to Netanyahu,” he continued. “From Venezuela we say it and nobody is going to prevent our voice from sounding here and there, and the peoples of the world to wake up in a conscience.”

The Venezuelan dictator also questioned the legitimacy of Netanyahu’s Jewish heritage and claimed that, unlike the Israeli prime minister, whom he described as originating from a “hodgepodge who comes from Poland,” Jewish blood runs through his veins.

“I am a Christian, but Jewish blood runs through my veins, Sephardic blood, from the authentic Jews of the twelve tribes, those of Moses. Those Jews of the twelve tribes, who are not the ones in charge today in the State of Israel, those who govern today under Netanyahu, are not authentic Jews. He is a hodgepodge who comes from Poland,” Maduro said.

Maduro asserted that Israel’s strikes against Iran stand in violation of the United Nations Charter and claimed that the U.N. is “dying, as nations died before the passing of Hitler, who ended the mechanism of nations that was created, before the UN, Hitler was fed and armed by the British empire.” 

The socialist dictator compared the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran to the events of World War II and accused London, Paris, and Washington of “allowing” Hitler to take over Czechoslovakia, Poland, other countries, and eventually the Soviet Union.

“They encouraged him [Hitler] to destroy the Soviet Union, that beautiful project of socialism that unified all the peoples of Eurasia and that had achieved a historical miracle in educational, cultural, technological, industrial, agricultural development,” Maduro said. “Today, eighty years later, when we celebrate the victory over Nazi-fascism, over the fascist militarism of Japan that invaded all the peoples of Asia, history is repeating itself again.”

“Are they going to continue to encourage the Hitler of the 21st century [Netanyahu] now against the noble and peaceful people of the Islamic Republic of Iran?” he continued.

The Venezuelan dictator, after espousing his accusations, asserted that humanity is experiencing the “first great war of the new world that is being born,” and claimed that, “with Ukraine’s war against Russia and with the massacre of the Palestinian people, they want to frighten the peoples who want development, peace, dignity, justice and equality.” The dictator also called upon the Jewish people of Israel to stop “Benjamin Netanyahu’s madness.”

“Where is this warlike attitude going to lead? Where is so much racism, intolerance, hatred and violence going to lead? Do you think that with missiles and bombs you are going to subdue the will of the peoples of the world? Stop the aggression and the war against the Palestinian people, the people of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran,” Maduro said.

The Maduro regime, which has increased its dependence on Iran in the past years to help offset the collapse of socialism in Venezuela, is one of the Islamic regime’s key anti-U.S. and anti-Israel allies in Latin America. Venezuela was among the first to condemn Israel on Friday after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a series of airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure, deeming the strikes as an “illegitimate, unjustified military aggression in violation of international law.”

In April 2024, the Venezuelan regime justified Iran’s missile and drone assault on Israel by claiming that it was Israel’s “irrationality” that caused the attack. Venezuela has not had any formal diplomatic ties with Israel since early 2009, when late dictator Hugo Chávez unilaterally severed ties between both countries and expelled Israel’s diplomatic mission from Venezuela.

Weeks after succeeding late dictator Hugo Chávez, Maduro first claimed in 2013 that his grandparents were Sephardic Jews who converted to Catholicism and has since then sporadically repeated the claim over the course of his dictatorship.

Maduro originally made the claims of his grandparents’ Jewish ancestry to reject accusations of antisemitism levied by Claudio Epelman, director of the Jewish Latin-American Congress, after Epelman warned in 2013 that Iran’s growing ties with Venezuela and other countries in the region were fueling antisemitism on the continent.

“I’m sorry to hear about the statements made by Claudio Epelman, director of the Latin American Jewish Congress, who I know and have received many times, saying that there’s anti-Semitism in Venezuela and implicating Chávez and me in it,” Maduro told the far-left outlet Aporrea in 2013. “He can accuse me, but he should leave Chávez out of it.”

The Australian outlet the Jewish Independent reported in August that, throughout the past two decades of Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro’s socialist rule in Venezuela, the vast majority of Venezuela’s Jewish community has fled to Israel, the United States, Panama, Colombia, and other regional countries — leaving the country despite the draconian foreign currency control rules established by Chávez in early 2003. Most of the foreign currency controls still exist at press time, even after Maduro had them partially eased in 2018.

The Jewish Independent pointed out in its report that Chávez was keen to accuse Jews and the Israeli Mossad of killing public prosecutor Danilo Anderson, who died in a car bombing in late 2004 under unclear circumstances. Shortly afterwards, Chávez described Jewish people as “the descendants of those who killed Christ had taken possession of all the wealth in the world.” While Anderson’s death was never properly explained, Anderson’s sister Marisela Caraballo Anderson claimed in 2018 that the “murderer is among those who carried the casket” and did not rule out that Anderson may have been killed by the socialist regime because of his involvement in important cases against regime officials.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.