The trip that helped shape Lula’s vision of Israel – 10/21/2023 – Power

On the agenda due to the current conflict in the Middle East, the relationship between President Lula (PT) and the Jewish community was strongly influenced by trips he made to Israel.

Less well known, his first visit to the country, 30 years ago, was representative of his style as head of state, according to allies. Furthermore, it included a personal ingredient in the PT member’s vision of the trajectory of the Jewish people.

In July 1993, Lula landed at Tel Aviv airport with his then wife, Marisa Letícia, agronomist and party colleague José Graziano, businessman Oded Grajew and his wife, Mara.

The idea, according to Grajew, was to prepare the PT member to get to know Middle East issues up close one year before the election the following year.

For about a week, the delegation visited a kibbutz, visited the country’s famous trade union center and spoke with Israeli and Palestinian political leaders.

None of them expressed discomfort with the fact that Lula spoke to the other side. Two months later the reason for the tense atmosphere became clear: at that time, negotiations for the Oslo Accords were underway.

Signed in September of that year, they represented the moment of greatest optimism in recent history regarding peace in the region.

At the beginning of July, in turn, the only noise there was on the trip to Israel was within the team that accompanied the delegation, recalls Grajew.

“The interpreter was a right-wing guy who distorted everything. But he didn’t know that I spoke Hebrew”, he says. “I noticed it and brought it to his attention.”

The businessman’s Jewish ancestry, who was born in Tel Aviv and migrated to Brazil at the age of 12, was behind another remarkable moment on the trip.

That’s when they went to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. The institution makes it available to the public to consult a collection with names of Holocaust victims.

Clara Ant, Lula’s advisor and fellow activist, narrates the episode in her book “Quatro Décadas com Lula” (ed. Autêntica), published last year.

“To everyone’s surprise, Oded, who is Jewish, found no mention of his surname in the archives,” he writes. “Lula already came across several people with the surname Silva, and from then on began to take this information as an indicator that he himself may be of Jewish origin.”

The work also states that “Lula, like most Brazilians, was influenced by prejudices against Jews”, but that, as he got to know Jewish people and the history of the Jewish people, he shed these prejudices.

A Sheet Ant states that he was referring to the PT member’s reports that, in the factories, there was a common and mistaken view that Jews were always rich people.

Her book narrates moments of rapprochement and tension between the PT government and representatives of the Jewish community.

Among the first episodes are Lula’s participation in Jewish New Year celebrations and ceremonies in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

The episodes of greatest animosity are linked to the relationship that the PT member had with the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier, in 2009.

According to Ant’s report and also that of advisor and former chancellor Celso Amorim in another book, the PT member complained to the Iranian about his position on the issue. But it wasn’t enough to completely eliminate the discomfort caused.

“President Lula is a friendly person, values ​​good relations with the Jewish community and has respect for Jews”, says Claudio Lottenberg, president of Conib (Israeli Confederation of Brazil).

“But there is a president Lula who is protocol and some positions taken during his leadership are not well regarded by the Jewish community, such as sympathy for Iran, which is a financier of Hamas”, he says.

The year following Ahmadinejad’s arrival, Lula went to Israel again, the first visit by a Brazilian head of state to the country since Dom Pedro II.

The trip had noise surrounding the refusal by Brazilian diplomats to include Lula’s trip to the tomb of Zionist theorist Theodor Herzl in the itinerary, on the grounds that it was not on the agenda.

But a series of nods to Israel were made, such as the laying of flowers in memory of Israeli soldiers killed in regional conflicts and the PT member’s participation in an event with representatives of the Brazilian Jewish community.

“He was very emotional at the Holocaust Museum, it was a historic visit,” says Lottenberg. “The PT is often radical in relation to Israel and borders on anti-Semitism, I don’t see Lula aligned with that.”

Nuances like this became more blurred after the rise of Bolsonarism, due to the polarization and growth of the political influence of evangelicals, closer to Israel.

Part of the Jewish community got involved in Bolsonaro’s campaign, especially in 2018. It was at the Hebraica club in Rio de Janeiro that the then candidate made prejudiced speeches against quilombolas and said that he had “failed” by having a daughter.

On the other hand, there were also sectors of the Jewish community that organized themselves to oppose the former president and defend democracy.

Nothing more natural, says Ant. “We Jews are like any other people. There’s a right, there’s a left, there’s a center, there’s no such thing, there are pacifists and there are warmongers.”

The same diversity of opinion, both in the Jewish community and on the left, appears in the current conflict.

Lula was criticized by some for calling the acts of Hamas terrorist and by others for not directly mentioning the name of the group as the author of the attacks — which he ended up doing this Friday (20), also disapproving Israel’s stance .

“Today, when the program [Bolsa Família] turns 20 years old, I keep remembering that 1,500 children have already died in the Gaza Strip,” he said. “[Crianças] who didn’t ask Hamas to do the crazy act it did, of terrorism, attacking Israel, but they also didn’t ask Israel to react in an insane way and kill them.”