Soleimani VS Herzl: The Bizarre Statue War Between Israel and Hezbollah

Senior Advisor for Public Affairs at the US State Department tweeted a photo of a statue of Theodor Herzl suggesting that Israel had built it in a prompt response to another statue erected a several days prior of former Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani, built in a village to the south of Lebanon.

In his tweet, Khodorkovsky hinted that Israel just built a statue of the father of Zionism responding to a Soleimani statue built and unveiled by Iranian-backed Hezbollah in the Lebanese village of Maroun El Ras, about 40 days after the general's death in a US airstrike. 

But the senior adviser at the US State Department failed to recognize that the statue of the founder of Zionism was unveiled in 2012 at the Mikveh Israel synagogue in Tel Aviv and is called "Herzl meets Emperor Wilhelm II".

Photos of Herzl and Soleimani's statues have gone viral online, sparking many clashing reactions among Lebanese, Iranian, and Israeli commentators.

Translation: "Hezbollah has built a statue for Qasem Soleimani right across the border with Palestine. How can this movement, supposedly resisting against Israeli occupation, celebrate an Iranian murderer who's helped kill and displace tens of thousands of Syrian and Iraqi victims? How can someone be a murderer and a figure of resistance at the same time? Ask the murderer Hassan Nasrallah". 

Herzl was a Jewish Austro-Hungarian journalist and political activist who founded the Zionist Organization during an 1897 conference in Basel, Switzerland.