The diplomatic storm over Donald Trump’s proposed border wall has taken an unexpected twist after Mexico’s foreign minister called on Benjamin Netanyahu to apologize for expressing support for the plan.

The Israeli prime minister used Twitter on Saturday evening to praise Trump’s executive order authorizing construction of the wall – a move which has triggered widespread international condemnation and plunged bilateral relations between the US and Mexico to an unprecedented low.



President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel's southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea 🇮🇱🇺🇸 — Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) January 28, 2017

He was referring to the steel barrier Israel has built along its border with Egypt, mainly to keep out migrants fleeing conflicts in Africa. Israel has also constructed a steel-and-concrete wall along its border with the occupied West Bank, which has been condemned internationally as a land grab.

But his tweet prompted an outraged response from the Mexican government as well as the country’s Jewish community.

In a statement, the Mexican foreign ministry expressed “profound astonishment, rejection and disappointment” over the tweet. “Mexico is a friend of Israel and should be treated as such by its Prime Minister,” the statement said.

On Monday, the foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, told the Televisa network that Mexico was expecting a “clarification” of Netanyahu’s comment. “I think that an apology would be something appropriate in this case,” he said.

Netanyahu’s comments come amid an increasingly bitter dispute over the controversial wall, which was a cornerstone of the new president’s election campaign.

Last week Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, cancelled a meeting with Trump after the US president reasserted campaign pledges to force Mexico to pay for the wall, which Mexico has repeatedly said it will not.

Jewish groups, including the Central Committee of the Jewish Community in Mexico, issued a joint statement “forcefully rejecting” Netanyahu’s position.



Several prominent Mexicans of Jewish origin also sharply criticized the Israeli leader on Twitter.

León Krauze, a respected academic and writer, posted: “As a Mexican Jew, grandchild of immigrants, I am ashamed of this tweet.”

The backlash prompted an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Emmanuel Nahshon, to say on Twitter that Netanyahu had been referring to their “specific security experience” and that Israel was not voicing an opinion on US-Mexican relations.

Meanwhile Dan Shapiro, who served as ambassador to Israel under Obama and still lives in the country, suggested that Netanyahu’s support was motivated by Trump’s promise to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

“Hard to explain this intervention on a hotly debated issue in domestic US politics. Unless this endorsement is Trump’s demand of Netanyahu for something Netanyahu wants,” he wrote on Twitter.

Opposition politician Yair Lapid, said: “It is a needless declaration of war on Mexico and Hispanics and a rupture with the Democrats (including the majority of US Jews). It doesn’t matter what we think of the wall, don’t we have enough troubles of our own?”

Mexico’s Jewish population is estimated to total around 50,000 people, with three-quarters living in the capital. Around half a million Jews live across Latin America, with the largest communities in Argentina and Brazil.

According to reports in the Israeli media, Netanyahu’s interior minister, a founder of the Shas religious party, demanded that the prime minister apologise for his intervention.

“What you did created a mess, both with the Mexican government and with the Jewish community there,” Arye Dery told Netanyahu according to a report in the Haaretz newspaper. “Jews in Mexico even violated Shabbat to draft petitions against you.”



