Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has ordered the return of Brazil’s ambassador to Israel, Frederico Meyer. The measure was taken after Israel reprimanded Brazil for Lula’s speech on Sunday February 18 wherein he compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to Adolf Hitler’s persecution of Jews. Following the speech, Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz called Meyer to a meeting at the Holocaust Museum and gave him a tour of the monument.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil released a note informing that Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira has called Frederico Meyer for consultations and that he will return to Brazil tomorrow. In the note, the ministry also reports that the Brazilian minister has summoned Israel’s ambassador to Brazil, Daniel Zonshine, to appear this Monday at the Itamaraty Palace in Rio de Janeiro, where Mauro Vieira is for the G20 meeting.
With Meyer’s return to Brazil, the embassy in Israel will be headed by a chargé d’affaires. Before the Brazilian ambassador’s return was announced, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz declared Lula, a “persona non grata” in the country.
“The comparison of Brazilian President Lula between Israel’s just war against Hamas, and the actions of Hitler and the Nazis, who destroyed 6 million Jews, is a serious anti-Semitic attack that desecrates the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust. We will not forgive and we will not forget—in my name and in the name of the citizens of Israel, I informed President Lula that he is an unwelcome personality in Israel until he apologizes and retracts his words,” said the minister on his official X account.
The term persona non grata (“unwelcome person”) is a legal instrument used in international relations to indicate that a foreign official is no longer welcome in a country. The nomenclature was described in Article 9 of the Vienna Convention, a treaty signed in 1961 that regulates the rules of diplomatic relations to be followed by countries and to which Brazil adhered.
In theory, this definition would only apply to the diplomatic corps of a foreign country and not to a head of state. The decision, which in practice could prevent Lula from traveling to the Zionist state because he is not considered welcome there, was considered absurd by the Planalto Palace’s international affairs advisor, Celso Amorim, who commented on the matter to the newspaper Globo when he arrived at the Palace.
According to Globo, the Israeli reaction has caused discomfort in Brazilian diplomacy, which believes that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to take political advantage of the episode amid the crisis of popularity he is facing in his own country.
“Redline”
In his statement to journalists on February 18, before leaving Ethiopia back to Brazil, Lula compared the massacre of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to the persecution carried out by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
“What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people does not exist at any other historic moment. Actually, it did exist: when Hitler decided to kill the Jews,” said the Brazilian president. In the same day, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, criticized Lula’s statement and said he had crossed a “redline”.
“The words of the president of Brazil are shameful and serious. This is about trivializing the Holocaust and trying to harm the Jewish people and Israel’s right to defend itself. Comparing Israel to the Nazi Holocaust and Hitler is crossing a red line. Israel fights for its defense and securing its future until complete victory and it does so while upholding international law,” Netanyahu posted on his official X account on Sunday.
Lula’s statement was made amid a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on suspicion of promoting genocide in Gaza. The case was filed by South Africa and is supported by Brazil. At the end of January, the Court ordered Israel to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and to ensure that its forces do not promote genocide in the region. The decision is not yet a judgment on the merits of the accusations, which is likely to take years, but it represents a symbolic defeat for Israel.
This article is based on reports from Brasil de Fato.
