“Israel’s ties with the EU are under unprecedented stress at this point in time,” Hugh Lovatt, a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the Berlin-based European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) think tank, told CNN.

In a statement Tuesday, Netanyahu said that “it was not a UN decision… but the victory that was achieved in the War of Independence with the blood of our heroic fighters” that created the State of Israel, adding that many of those fighters “were Holocaust survivors, including from the Vichy regime in France.”

Netanyahu added that the UN has “in recent decades… approved hundreds of antisemitic decisions” against Israel, with the purpose of denying the Jewish state the “right to exist and its ability to defend itself.”

Israel has repeatedly accused the UN, and Guterres, of antisemitism and this week designated the UN chief as persona non grata and banned him from entering Israel. The EU’s Borrell condemned the decision, calling the accusations of antisemitism against Guterres “slanderous.”