Brazil and the Palestine Question

The first contacts between Brazil and Palestine began in the late nineteenth century when Palestinian immigrants arrived in Brazil from Bethlehem and nearby villages and established themselves as peddlers selling a variety of goods, including the popular Christian prayer cards. In 1876, Dom Pedro II was the first head of state of any country in the American continent to visit Palestine as part of a tour that included Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. His motivations were scientific and religious; he was both a Catholic and a man of letters who knew the Arabic language. His visit motivated Arab immigration but did not establish further relations, and throughout the first half of the twentieth century there was virtually no official Brazilian interest in Palestine.

Palestinian immigrants continued to arrive in small numbers during the interwar period and primarily settled in northeastern cities like Recife, Natal, and Fortaleza. A second, slightly larger wave followed the 1948 Nakba; these immigrants were mostly Muslim, arrived from various regions, and settled in the southern and central states of Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná, Goiás, and Mato Grosso. The Palestinian diaspora was quite small as compared to the larger diasporas of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants, but nevertheless participated in the overall Arab cultural activities and publications. Of the 48,326 Arab immigrants who settled in Brazil from 1908 to 1941, possibly 2 to 3 percent were Palestinian. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Palestinian Federation (FEPAL) of Brazil estimated that roughly 200,000 Palestinians and their descendants lived in Brazil, out of approximately 11–12 million Arab (mainly Lebanese and Syrian) immigrants and their descendents in Brazil.

Low Priority

On 29 November 1947, Brazil voted in favor of the partition of Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly, even though Raul Fernandes, the Brazilian foreign minister at the time, had indicated to Oswaldo Aranha, the head of the Brazilian delegation and president of the Second UN General Assembly (UNGA), “the neutrality we must adopt in a dispute in which our interest is so remote.”

Aranha was an influential diplomat, and the decision to favor partition came at a moment of growing Brazilian alignment with the United States. The majority of Latin American countries represented at the UNGA voted in favor of partition. In fact, Latin America represented more than one-third of the countries that voted for the partition of Palestine (13 out of the 33 votes). In December 1948, Brazil voted in favor of UNGA Resolution 194 granting Palestinian refugees the right of return, and in May 1949, Brazil abstained from UNGA Resolution 273, which approved the admission of Israel to the United Nations, even though Brazil had recognized the State of Israel in January that same year.

The Principle of “Equidistance”

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Brazil had no official relations with Palestinian leaders or civil society. Palestinian nationalist leader and author Akram Zuaiter visited Brazil after the Nakba to gather support for the Palestinian cause; in general, Brazilians were sympathetic but not very engaged.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brazil adopted a more autonomous foreign policy, less aligned to US interests, and consolidated the principle of “equidistance” in regard to the Israel–Palestine conflict. This translated into growing support for Palestinian rights while maintaining bilateral commercial and diplomatic relations with Israel. Ever since the 1960s, the policy of equidistance has been the guiding principle of the Brazilian position on the Israel–Palestine conflict, with rare exceptions, albeit large variations depending on the government in place and with growing contradictions as Israeli apartheid deepened and the occupation entrenched itself over the Palestinian people.

Growing Engagement after the Wars of 1967 and 1973

In the 1970s, under the military dictatorship regime (1964–1985), Brazil became highly dependent on oil from the Middle East, mainly from Iraq, and underwent what is considered a pragmatic pro–Arab shift in foreign policy (“responsible pragmatism”). In 1974, at the opening of the 29th session of the UNGA, Foreign Minister Azeredo da Silveira declared that the war of 1967 had been a “war of conquest,” and shortly after, at the Plenary meeting of 22 November, Brazil “unmistakably favoured the recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, including its rights to self-determination and sovereignty.” However, at the same Plenary Meeting, Brazil refrained from voting on draft resolution A/L.741, which became UNGA Resolution 3236 granting the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, national independence and sovereignty” and the right of return, allegedly because it was circulated only the previous night. According to Ambassador Frazão, “this did not allow my delegation sufficient time to obtain from the Brazilian Government the necessary instructions on a matter of such importance.” That same day Brazil voted in favor of Resolution 3237, which approved the observer status for the PLO at the UNGA.

In 1975, the PLO was authorized to appoint a representative in the capital Brasilia, and Brazil voted in favor of Resolution 3379, which declared that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Allegedly, the move was part of President Ernesto Geisel's (1974–1979) emphasis on ascertaining Brazil’s autonomy in face of the United States, and not caving to “undue public pressure from the US, including by its ambassador in Brazil.” In 1981, at his opening speech at the UNGA, Foreign Minister Ramiro Saraiva Guerreiro criticized Israel’s move to annex East Jerusalem (Basic Law of July 1980); and in 1982, President Figueiredo (1979–1985) strongly criticized the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacres committed against the Palestinians of Sabra and Shatila.

However, the pragmatic pro-Arab transition had limitations, and in 1988 Brazil did not issue a direct recognition of the State of Palestine, voting instead in favor of UNGA 43/177, acknowledging the proclamation of the State of Palestine in Algiers, while maintaining the observer status that the PLO held since 1974 at the United Nations.

Birth of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the military dictatorship had outlawed popular political representation and severely persecuted social and students’ movements. The birth of a local Palestinian solidarity movement began in the 1980s; it emerged during the struggle against the military dictatorship in its final years and was fueled by the indignation and revolt of the large Arab descendent community against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacres of Sabra and Shatila. In 1982, the Palestinian cultural association Sanaud (We Shall Return) was created, and in the following year the Palestinian flag could be seen flying at the first massive demonstration against the military regime, held in the city of São Paulo. One of the first PLO representatives in Brazil, Farid Suwwan (1979–1989), was very active in articulating local support for the Palestinian movement; he became friends with the future President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was then gaining recognition as a trade union leader in the movement against the dictatorship.

Under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2003), there began a shift of emphasis in foreign policy, with stronger engagement with the Middle East region and growing activism on questions regarding the Middle East in general. This tendency intensified under the first two terms of President Lula da Silva (2003–2011), a result of his personal pro-Palestinian positions and sensitivities and his government’s strategy of autonomy through the diversification of bilateral relations. At the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), Brazil began to vote against the US positions specifically on issues related to Palestine (and not on other topics).

However, the traditional guiding principle of “equidistance” and what was officially referred to as “friendship with both sides” was neither questioned nor abandoned. In practice this meant that from the 1990s to the 2010s, Brazil would not go as far as to compromise its economic or political–diplomatic relations with Israel in order to effectively uphold the political rights of the Palestinian nation or the human rights of the Palestinian people. The Oslo period (1993–2000) reinforced the local policy of “equidistance” and the reframing of the Palestinian cause from national emancipation and liberation, to one of “negotiating peace between two sides.” The second detrimental effect of the Oslo process was that it generated a prolonged period of demobilization of the local Palestinian solidarity movements and organizations born in the early 1980s.

Free Trade Agreements and Commercial Relations

In 2006, the Mercosur bloc was negotiating its first Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Israel, when Israel waged the July war against Lebanon and carried a series of attacks against the Gaza Strip. During one month, major Brazilian social movements and trade unions, and most of the left-wing political parties, demanded that the Brazilian government not sign the Mercosur-Israel FTA. The agreement was put on hold, but the movement against the FTA did not develop into a long-lasting campaign, and it died out almost as soon as the war ended.

The Mercosur-Israel negotiations were quietly resumed, and when the FTA was in fact signed eighteen months later (on 18 December 2007), the attention given to the affair amounted to marginal endnotes in the press. During the ratification process by the Brazilian National Congress, in 2009, members of parliament from the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) were able to introduce a clause that excluded settlement products. On the other hand, the official PLO representation which had built close ties to the PT and to President Lula since the 1980s was happy to act in line with the idea that support given to Israel (which directly contributed to the regime of occupation, to the strangling of Palestinian economy, and ghettoizing of the Palestinian people) could be compensated or counterbalanced by support given to the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian embassy in Brazil, established back in 1998, requested and received a plot of land to build a permanent embassy house, and the Mercosur bloc began negotiations for an FTA with Palestine, which was signed in December 2011 but ratified only by Brazil in 2025.

In 2010, when Brazil recognized the state of Palestine, the first official statistics for bilateral trade with Palestine registered that Brazil exported $15,700,000 mainly in frozen bovine meat and imported from Palestine $79,500 mainly in dried dates.

By December 2025—less than a year after Brazil ratified and implemented the 2011 Mercosur-Palestine FTA—Brazilian exports had reached $63,900,000 mainly in frozen bovine meat, followed by chicken and other meats, coffee, baked goods, sugar, rice, and pharmaceuticals. Imports from Palestine had fallen (probably as a result of the genocide) from $304,000 in 2024 to $158,200 in 2025, mainly in processed fruits such as dates and frozen strawberries, nuts, air pumps, iron fasteners, and wood ornaments.

From the PT Governments to the Far Right Bolsonaro

Under the PT governments of Presidents Lula da Silva (2003–2011) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016), Brazil adopted several measures of support for Palestine, such as donations to Gaza and rejecting former settler leader Dany Dayan as the Israeli ambassador to Brazil. One of the most relevant actions by President Lula came in 2010, when Brazil led a wave of Latin American countries in recognizing the State of Palestine on the pre-1967 borders, including East Jerusalem.

The measures of support for Palestine adopted by Presidents Lula da Silva and Rousseff stemmed from Brazil’s traditional support for the two-state solution and against settlement activity and expansion, falling short of adopting boycotts or lifting contracts in order to actually pressure Israel to comply with Palestinian rights under international law. Bilateral economic relations with Israel were maintained, and increased in 2011 when Elbit Systems purchased two Brazilian defense industries (adding Ares and Periscópio to the company Aeroeletrônica purchased in 2001) and settled a contract with the Brazilian Embraer to produce the Hermes 450 system for the Brazilian Air Force.

President Rousseff’s second term ended in April 2016. Her impeachment by a right-wing majority congress opened the way for the first ministerial declaration indicating a pro-Israeli shift in Brazilian foreign policy: in July 2016 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs threatened to revise the previous Brazilian position at UNESCO EX/199 in favor of the preservation of Palestinian historical and religious sites because the decision “did not mention the historical ties of the Jews to Jerusalem” and “referred to Israel as the occupying power.”

But the first profoundly ideological pro–Zionist shift in Brazilian foreign policy came a few years later, under President Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022). His early attempt to transfer the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem failed under swift and efficient pressure from the halal chicken meat industry, which feared the move would damage a very relevant segment of Brazilian exports, not only to Palestine but to the whole Arab and Muslim regions. However, the Brazilian government took other pro–Zionist and openly anti-Palestinian measures, including votes in multilateral fora and increased bilateral military relations with Israel.

The Evangelical Neo-pentecostal Churches in Politics

The election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 indicated that the far right was on the rise in Brazil and promoted the instrumentalization of Zionist symbols and ideology. One of the most important electoral bases for Bolsonaro came from certain segments of the growing Christian Evangelical churches. The national census of 2022 indicated that 26.9 percent of the Brazilian population is Evangelical, mainly of the Pentecostal and Neo-pentecostal branches. The largest and most powerful of the Evangelical Neo-pentecostal churches in Brazil have not only adopted the “theology of prosperity” but tend to be Zionist due to their own traditional messianic beliefs. These two constituencies—20 percent of the voters who constitute the core base of the political far right and the almost 30 percent of the population that belongs to the Evangelical and Neo-pentecostal churches—are not monolithic blocs, but they do overlap: some of the largest Neo-pentecostal churches promote Zionism among the political base of the far right in Brazil.

In other words, Brazilian society today is divided and largely polarized, with partially overlapping far right and Neo-pentecostal sectors which view Israel as part of their own identity. Some of the most powerful Evangelical churches in Brazil instrumentalize Israel and Zionist symbols, and the far right also carries Israeli flags to demonstrations and marches.

President Lula’s Third Term

The 2022 presidential election brought a very tight win for Lula against Bolsonaro, and his third presidential term began the same year as the genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. In October 2023, Lula was one of the first leaders to publicly declare that what was happening was not a war, but a genocide. Brazil presided over the UN Security Council and immediately tried to approve a resolution for a “humanitarian pause,” which failed under US veto.

After safely removing dual citizens from the Gaza Strip, in January 2024 Brazil declared support for the South African case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and slowly began to implement a few concrete actions against the Israeli genocide, although it never went as far as local civil society has demanded. In 2024, Brazil suspended the purchase of thirty-six Elbit howitzers and recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv. Less than a year later, after rejecting the appointment of a new Israeli ambassador to Brazil, bilateral relations were officially downgraded. Finally, in 2025 Brazil joined South Africa's case at the ICJ and left the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), where it had become an observing member under President Bolsonaro.

Civil Society Mobilization against the Genocide

The livestreamed genocide of the Palestinian people has raised unprecedented awareness among different social classes in Brazil that are now more ready than before to recognize the historic injustice committed against the Palestinians. Some of the more effective acts of solidarity with Palestine that had previously been difficult to implement, such as academic boycotts, were adopted. Several major Brazilian universities—Unicamp, Unesp, Fluminense Federal University (UFF), and Federal University of Ceará (UFC)—have cut ties with Israeli educational institutions and universities. The University of São Paulo (USP) canceled an International Fair that would host Israel, under pressure from academia, and its Humanities Faculty canceled the academic cooperation and mobility agreement it had with the University of Haifa. Palestine Solidarity Committees that already existed were revived and others were created. The Center for Palestine Studies CEPal–FFLCH/USP was created at the University of São Paulo in 2024.

Unlike the Lebanese and Syrian community in Brazil, the Palestinian community is small and less active in local politics. At the National Congress, since the 1990s the Palestinian issues were traditionally dealt with by different Arab platforms created by successive parliamentarian mandates in Congress. More recently, two Palestinian platforms have been formed mainly by left wing members of Parliament: The Palestinian Solidarity Mixed Parliamentarian Front (Frente Parlamentar Mista de Solidariedade ao Povo Palestino) in 2019–2023; and the informal Parliamentary Front for the Rights of the Palestinian People (Frente Parlamentar pelos Direitos do Povo Palestino) in 2023–2027, whose goal was to organize parliamentary sessions and debates and to articulate communication and meetings with the president’s office, in order to advance civil society demands, and counter the growing attempts by several members of parliament to approve pro-Zionist legislation such as the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which defines criticism of Israel as hate speech.

Two of the most pressing demands made by local civil society and trade unions were left unattended: for Brazil to leave the Mercosur-Israel FTA, and for the total suspension of crude oil sales to Israel. In fact, while Brazil could have left the FTA under non-compliance with Article 2 of the agreement that excludes settlement products from the agreement, the question of oil sales is more controversial. The Brazilian oil company Petrobras has declared that the sales (which amounted to 2.7 million barrels or 3.3 percent of Israeli crude oil consumption in 2024) were not directly from Petrobras to Israel, but to companies which then sold the oil to Israel, meaning that Petrobras did not have control over the destination of the oil that ended up in Israel.

At the grassroots level, Brazilians have participated in the flotilla coordination and direct actions, and demonstrations have occurred regularly, especially during the worst periods of the genocide; students at different universities have held encampments, although smaller than those at universities in the United States. Grassroots mobilizations against Israeli soldiers visiting Brazil on vacation have shaken tourist towns in coastal Bahia and exposed the Israeli soldiers as perpetrators of genocide. The criminal cases presented by Brazilian lawyers at local courts against these soldiers have however failed thus far because universal jurisdiction has not been established by the Brazilian Supreme Court.

Conclusion

After the partition of Palestine, the Brazilian government attempted to maintain its distance from the Israeli–Palestinian issue in part to remain as a territory of immigration and integration. In the 1960s and 1970s, the increase of Brazilian support for Palestinian rights not only responded to the logics of oil dependency, growing engagement with the Middle East region, and the desire to build a more autonomous foreign policy in regard to the US; it also coincided with the growth of the third world movement of the 1970s and 1980s. However, the principle of “equidistance” conflicted with the alleged objective of support for the two-state solution because it ignored the nature of the Israeli impediments to Palestinian self-determination. Support for Israel meant support for the occupying power, which could not be counterbalanced by support for Palestine. While the most pro-Palestinian periods in Brazilian history (the labor governments of Presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff) were welcomed, the Palestinian solidarity movements faulted them at times for what it regarded as rhetorical support, not as effective as it could or should be.

With Bolsonaro, the principle of equidistance disappeared from Brazilian foreign policy, which shifted sharply in the direction of Evangelical Zionism and support for Israel. Brazilian society was polarized between a “left” viewed as supporters of Hamas and of other political parties identified with Palestine; and the far right identified as supporters of Israel. When Lula came back to office in 2023, the shocking reality of genocide caused Brazil to gradually implement more effective actions of support for Palestine, even if they never went as far as civil society solidarity movements have demanded, and never led to a concerted action between Latin American countries, which could have been slightly more effective in protecting Palestine from the Israeli assault. Under President Lula, Brazil refrained from declaring support for UN Security Council Resolution 2803, and while it has welcomed the partial relief in the Israeli assault on Gaza, it has been critical of the whole colonial and neocolonial concept behind the Trump “peace plan.”

It is not an overstatement to note that ordinary Brazilians who have never learned much about Palestine tend to intuitively understand the nature of the Palestinian condition and will sympathize with the Palestinian cause if they have not been previously subject to Zionist propaganda and indoctrination. The reasons for this include the colonial past of both regions; the current dialogue and identifications that occur between local homeless, landless, and indigenous struggles; and sympathy for the Palestinian struggle for self-emancipation.