Lula’s victory cements the rupture between Brazil and Israel

Following Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory in Sunday’s election (October 25), a deplorable episode of antisemitism took place in Rio de Janeiro: pro-Lula demonstrators set fire to Israeli and American flags, an act that echoes the ongoing rupture between Lula’s Brazil and Israel.

We may well be living through the worst moment in relations between the two countries, surpassing even the era of former president Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945) — whose government maintained an antisemitic immigration policy, documented in the infamous secret circular of the Itamaraty (Brazil’s Foreign Ministry): “Jews are not accepted” — barring thousands of Jews from entering Brazil to escape the Holocaust.

All of us Zionists who love the Holy Land, who have ties to Israel (in my case, academic and professional) and who publicly work in support of it, find ourselves facing the unknown: we do not know the consequences of this victory, nor what a Lula IV government will bring, since the current one has been catastrophic, not to say shameful, in its foreign policy. Above all, the outlook is the worst possible, given the overall context and the track record.

Lula crossed a red line with Israel: besides being declared persona non grata by the Jewish state, he profaned and disrespected the memory of 6 million Jews and their families, equating Israel with the Nazi regime, peddling the fantasy of an imaginary genocide propagated by the global left, and turning terrorism against Israel into narratives of resistance. Lula is the embodiment of this contemporary antisemitism, the same one that fills the streets of Europe and the university campuses of the US.

It is therefore not hard to see why Lula pulled Brazil out of the Holocaust remembrance alliance in 2025. Lula has always been “a dream figure for the European political intellectual”: the native who, like the indigenous peoples catechized by the Jesuits five centuries ago, was turned into an interlocutor who utters only politically correct sounds and serves the interests of Europe’s progressive ideological establishment.

Lula’s foreign policy is defined by hostility toward the world’s leading democracies and by association with dictatorial, tyrannical and jihadist regimes. On top of the crises and scandals in domestic politics, the country is going through a diplomatic dark age. Lula refuses to designate Brazil’s criminal factions as terrorist groups and to join the Shield of the Americas, a security partnership between the United States and Latin American countries to combat narcoterrorism in the region.

Last week, I wrote an article titled Brazil Has Become Fertile Ground for Hezbollah. In it, I addressed the asymmetric challenge of global magnitude that Brazil faces: the systematic penetration of Hezbollah-linked networks into its socioeconomic and institutional fabric, under the tutelage of the Iranian regime, a longtime partner of Lula. The combination of porous borders, exploitable socioeconomic vulnerabilities and a permissive financial system creates the ideal environment for the terrorist group’s projection of power.

Ultimately, beyond the rupture with Israel, Lula has systematically contributed to the rise of antisemitism in Brazil; now, with another term ahead, all signs point to a scenario that is even worse and unprecedented.

Of one thing I am certain: nothing and no one can break our love for, and our alliance with, Israel…

Shema Yisrael שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל