Lula declared ‘persona non grata’ over Gaza remarks
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s comparison of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza to the Holocaust has unleashed a diplomatic firestorm, with Brazil recalling its ambassador on Monday and Israel declaring Lula “persona non grata.”
The row erupted the day before, when Lula said the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip “isn’t a war, it’s a genocide,” and compared it to “when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Lula had “crossed a red line,” and Foreign Minister Israel Katz said the Brazilian leader is “persona non grata in the state of Israel so long as he doesn’t retract his remarks and apologize.”
Katz summoned Brazil’s envoy Frederico Meyer for a meeting at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem on Monday.
In a tit-for-tat move, Brasília’s Foreign Ministry then said it had also summoned Israeli Ambassador Daniel Zonshine for a meeting later that day and recalled Meyer from Tel Aviv for consultations.
A diplomatic source said Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira and Zonshine had a “harsh, but appropriate” conversation, as the former “demonstrated dissatisfaction” with the treatment of Meyer and Lula in Jerusalem over the situation.
That included Meyer being forced to listen to a statement in Hebrew “without an interpreter, without knowing what was being said,” the source added.
Veteran leftist Lula, 78, is a prominent voice for the Global South and his country currently holds the rotating presidency of the Group of 20 (G20).
His comments came as Brazil prepares to host a G20 foreign ministers’ meeting Wednesday and Thursday when top diplomats, including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, gather in the southeastern city of Rio de Janeiro, with the divisive Gaza conflict high on the agenda.
The war started on October 7 when Hamas launched unprecedented attacks on southern Israel that left about 1,160 people dead, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) tally of official Israeli figures.
Hamas militants also took about 250 hostages, 130 of whom remain in Gaza, including 30 presumed dead.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 29,092 people, mostly women and children, according to the latest count by the Hamas-run territory’s Health Ministry.
In the aftermath of Hamas’ attacks, Lula condemned these as a “terrorist” act. But he has since grown vocally critical of Israel’s response.
He has faced backlash at home for his latest comments on the conflict, which came during a news conference on the sidelines of an African Union summit in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa.
The Brazil-Israel Institute called his statements “vulgar,” warning that they risked “fueling antisemitism.”
The Israelite Confederation of Brazil called them a “perverse distortion of reality [that] offends the memory of Holocaust victims and their descendants.”
Hitler’s Germany systematically exterminated 6 million Jews during the Holocaust — an estimated one-third of the believers of Judaism worldwide.
After World War 2, the newly founded state of Israel took in hundreds of thousands of survivors.
Lula’s conservative opponents also pounced on his remarks, which outraged many in the powerful Evangelical Christian community, which is staunchly pro-Israel.
“Lula not only showed his ignorance of history, he [also] showed the world the hatred in his heart against the state of Israel,” lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, posted on X, formerly Twitter.
Political allies, meanwhile, rushed to Lula’s defense. First lady Rosangela “Janja” da Silva, a longtime member of his Workers’ Party, said his comments “defended ... women and children, who represent the majority of victims” in the conflict.
“His statements referred to the genocidal [Israeli] government, not the Jewish people,” she wrote on X.