The victory of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil's presidential election last week has won Israel a passionate new friend on the international stage. The world's fifth-most populous nation will now be "coloured in blue and white", an Israeli official said, referring to the colours of Israel's flag.
The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately called to congratulate Bolsonaro, a former army officer with a pronounced nostalgia for his country's 20-year military dictatorship. Critics describe him as a neo-fascist.
According to Israeli media reports, it is "highly probable" that Netanyahu will attend Bolsonaro's inauguration on January 1.
The Brazilian president-elect has already promised that his country will be the third to relocate its embassy to Jerusalem, after the United States and Guatemala. That will further undermine Palestinian hopes for an eventual state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Bolsonaro has told Israel that it can count on Brazil's vote at the United Nations, and has threatened to close the Palestinian embassy in Brasilia.
One might imagine that Netanyahu is simply being pragmatic in cosying up to Bolsonaro, given Brazil's importance. But that would be to ignore an unmistakable trend: Israel has relished the recent emergence of far-right leaders across the Americas and Europe, often to the horror of local Jewish communities.
Bolsonaro has divided Brazil's 100,000 Jews. Some have been impressed by the frequent appearance of Israeli flags at his rallies and his anti-Palestinian stance. But others point out that he regularly expresses hostility to minorities.
They suspect that Bolsonaro covets Israel's military expertise and the votes of tens of millions of fundamentalist Christians in Brazil, who see Israel as central to their apocalyptic, and in many cases antisemitic, beliefs. Not that this worries Netanyahu.
He has been engaged in a similar bromance with Viktor Orban, the ultra-nationalist prime minister of Hungary, who barely veils his Jew-baiting and has eulogised Miklos Horthy, a Hungarian leader who collaborated with the Nazis.
Netanyahu has also courted Poland's far-right prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, even as the latter has fuelled Holocaust revisionism with legislation to outlaw criticism of Poland for its involvement in the Nazi death camps. Millions of Jews were exterminated in such camps.
Israel is cultivating alliances with other ultra-nationalists -- in and out of power -- in the Czech Republic, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria.
The conclusion drawn by Jewish communities abroad is that their well being -- even their safety -- is now a much lower priority than bolstering Israel's diplomatic influence.
That was illustrated starkly last week in the immediate aftermath of a massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue on October 27. Robert Bowers gunned down 11 worshipers in the worst antisemitic attack in US history.
Jewish communities have linked the awakening of the white-nationalist movement to which Bowers belonged to the Trump administration's hostile rhetoric towards immigrants and ethnic minorities.
In Pittsburgh, huge crowds protested as Trump paid a condolence visit to the Tree of Life synagogue, holding banners aloft with slogans such as: "President Hate, leave our state."
Equally hard to ignore is that Israeli leaders, while they regularly denounce US and European left-wingers as Anti-Semites for criticizing Israel over its abuse of Palestinians, have remained studiously silent on Trump's inflammatory statements.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
2
