Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, May 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/Pool

Israel announced on Monday it was downgrading diplomatic relations with Brazil after Brasília rejected its proposed ambassador, marking the latest escalation in tensions between the two countries.

“After Brazil, unusually, refrained from replying to Ambassador [Gali] Dagan’s request for agrément, Israel withdrew the request, and relations between the countries are now being conducted at a lower diplomatic level,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“The Foreign Ministry continues to maintain deep ties with Israel’s many circles of friends in Brazil,” the statement read.

Israeli authorities also noted Brazil’s “critical and hostile line toward Israel” since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Last year, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accused Jerusalem of committing “genocide” in Gaza, claiming the only historical parallel was “when Hitler decided to kill the Jews,” after which Israeli authorities declared him a “persona non grata.”

Since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, the Brazilian government has positioned itself among Israel’s harshest critics, joining countries that seek to undermine its defensive military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

Last year, Brazil recalled its ambassador to Israel and has not named a successor.

The South American country has also recently withdrawn from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a global coalition of nations committed to fighting antisemitism and preserving the memory of the Holocaust.

The Brazilian Israelite Confederation (CONIB), the country’s leading Jewish organization, sharply condemned the move, noting it comes “amid a sharp rise in cases of antisemitism and hatred against Jews worldwide.”

According to CONIB, the measure “represents a moral and diplomatic setback, weakens Brazil’s international commitment to preserving the memory of the Holocaust, and paves the way for the undermining of global efforts in combating antisemitism.”

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz also condemned the move, denouncing Brazil’s growing hostility toward Jerusalem in a social media post on Tuesday.

“[Lula] has now revealed himself as an outspoken antisemite and Hamas supporter by pulling Brazil out of the IHRA, the international body established to fight antisemitism and hatred toward Israel, aligning the country with regimes such as Iran, which openly denies the Holocaust and threatens the existence of the Jewish state,” Katz wrote in a post on X.

“As Israel’s Defense Minister, I affirm: we will defend ourselves against the ‘axis of evil’ of radical Islam, even without the help of Lula and his allies,” the Israeli defense chief continued.

“It is a shame for the wonderful Brazilian people and for the many friends of Israel in Brazil that this is their president. Better days for the relationship between our countries will still come.”

Quando o presidente do Brasil, Lula @LulaOficial, desrespeitou a memória do Holocausto durante meu mandato como Ministro das Relações Exteriores, declarei-o persona non grata em Israel até que pedisse desculpas.
Agora ele revelou sua verdadeira face como antissemita declarado e… pic.twitter.com/O0rzmTYqPA

— ישראל כ”ץ Israel Katz (@Israel_katz) August 26, 2025

Last month, Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira confirmed that Brazil would join South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, accusing the country of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.

Hatem Bazian, founder of American Muslims for Palestine and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Photo: Screenshot

A professor at the University of California, Berkeley who has also established himself as one of America’s most influential Islamist activists promoted an antisemitic conspiracy theory in a lecture earlier this month at a California mosque, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer at UC Berkeley, co-founded Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that has become notorious for intimidating Jews on university campuses, as well as American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a nonprofit he now chairs which has sponsored a series of anti-Israel protests following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described AMP as being “at the core of the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist movement in the United States.”

On Aug. 15, Bazian expressed the antisemitic conspiracism which has undergirded the Islamist movement since the 1928 founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Ismailia, Egypt by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna, with a stated goal of implementing Islamic law around the world.

“He [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] wants to make Gaza the Riviera, with Mr. Trump – he’s not satisfied with that. He’s not satisfied with annexing the West Bank, which Trump and the US administration is already giving on. He’s not satisfied with the Golan Heights. He’s not satisfied that he has already taken the Sharm El-Sheikh area,” Bazian stated during a lecture at the Muslim Community of Folsom, California.

“Netanyahu says: ‘I want Jordan.’ He wants Greater Israel, he wants Jordan, he wants Lebanon, and he wants Egypt – the Pyramids – because he wants maybe, if tourists are coming, maybe he will charge people to go up to the Pyramids,” Bazian continued in remarks flagged by MEMRI.

Bazian claimed that Netanyahu “wants Egypt and he wants Saudi Arabia, because the Mecca and Medina area – he says it is part of Greater Israel. He said this on the news, in an interview.” The UC Berkeley professor then added, “Now, all of the Arabs who are committed to the Abraham Accords, who do tawaf in the White House – they were just like saying: ‘We thought we were partners.’ They didn’t know that they were on the menu.”

The Abraham Accords were a series of US-brokered peace agreements that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries.

The United Arab Emirates, a leading driver in the Abraham Accords, regards the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, designating it as such in November 2014, and named the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) as components within its global influence network.

The longtime organizer of anti-Israel activism also accused Jews of exploiting antisemitism to make money.

“The whole monetization and weaponization of antisemitism is no longer working,” Bazian said. “I do believe that Zionism no longer has a standing globally. Now, between the end of Zionism as an ideology and as a genocidal policy versus the liberation of Palestine – it might take a number of years.”

According to MEMRI, in a YouTube video published on May 9, 2024, Bazian expressed his belief that Israel is a colonial project.

“We are not the one that have committed pogroms against Jews. History of Muslim, Arab, Christian relations in the East with Jewish population is not European history. Is not the Balfour history. Is not the French history. Is not the German history,” Bazian said. “Zionism was born in Europe because Europe is racist, was racist, continues to be racist, and has not recovered from its racism.”

Bazian described how the Islamists’ battle “for a free Palestine” is at its core “a fight against racism, against Islamophobia, against antisemitism as it has been articulated, and not according to ADL, Netanyahu, Biden, European racism, or anything of that history. So, our change is a change of a different future, a different world. What [inaudible] said, end of colonialism, a dying colonialism. What we are seeing today is a dying colonialism.”

Bazian has previously made comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany and defended Hamas. In 2015, he wrote that Gaza was “an epistemic Warsaw Ghetto but only different Semites are locked up this time around” and that “the Europeans who fought Nazism with arms were labeled ‘terrorist’ by Hitler. Hamas is fighting against the occupation of Palestinian lands and is labeled ‘terrorist.’”

Despite Bazian’s prominent academic stature at UC Berkeley, his activist network has come under legal scrutiny.

On May 9, a circuit judge in Virgnia ordered that AMP disclose its funding sources, following investigative efforts by Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares who said he “has a legal obligation to ensure that charitable organizations operating in Virginia are following the law.”

A second suit from earlier this year alleged that AMP constituted a rebranding of Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which had previously been found liable for $156 million due to its support for Hamas.

The suit stated that AMP comprised “largely the same core leadership as IAP/AMS” and that it “serves the same function and purpose; it holds nearly identical conventions and events with many of the same roster of speakers; it operates a similar ‘chapter’ structure in similar geographic locations; it continues to espouse Hamas’s ideology and political positions; and it continues to facilitate fundraising for groups that funnel money to Hamas.”

Illustrative: A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a bullhorn during a protest at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on March 11, 2025. Photo: Daniel Cole via Reuters Connect

Campus antisemitism at US medical schools is next in line to be examined by the federal government following the announcement on Monday of a major probe to be conducted by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

US lawmakers announced an investigation into three institutions: the University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine, the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.

“This investigation will aid the committee in considering whether potential legislative changes, including legislation to specifically address antisemitism discrimination, are needed, ” education committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) wrote in a letter to Steven Dubinett, dean of UCLA’s Geffen School. “The committee has become aware that Jewish students and faculty have experienced hostility and fear at the hands of peers, colleagues, and administrators at UCLA Med, and it has not been demonstrated that the university has meaningfully responded to address and mitigate this problem.”

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, a Jewish faculty group at UCLA’s medical school, titled Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFrg), first sounded the alarm about antisemitism on the campus in February, issuing an open letter which called attention to a slew of indignities to which they have been subjected since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

The primary agent of anti-Jewish hatred identified by JFrg is the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism (AAAR), a university-created body that has allegedly violated its mission to promote pluralism by lodging defaming accusations at the pro-Israel Jewish community in a series of reports, one of which contained what JFrg described as intolerable distortions of fact.

JFRG’s letter went on to enumerate a litany of falsehoods spread by AAAR, including that Jewish faculty have conspired to undermine academic freedom with “coordinated repression, involving university and non-university actors,” aligned itself with conservative groups, and harmed minority students by opposing “racial justice.”

The letter listed nearly a dozen other incidents previously unknown to the public, including a seminar on “Structural Racism and Health Equity” which categorized Jews as white to disparage both groups and displayed images of “‘capitalists’ with long hooked noses”; a medical group engaging in atrocity-denial, issuing a statement charging that Hamas kidnapped no one on Oct. 7; and an administrator attending an event which glorified self-immolation and whose organizers attacked Jewish faculty as “anti-black racists” for criticizing Hamas.

Walberg said that choosing not to respond to such incidents may have violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and requested a trove of documents from UCLA “related to reports or complaints of antisemitic acts” filed with administrative officials. He asked the same of the UC San Francisco School of Medicine and University of Illinois College of Medicine, where he said Jewish students conceal their Jewish identities from medical workers for fear of being targeted for intentional malpractice and are denied the chance to hold public events to raise awareness of antisemitism.

Antisemitism in university medical schools is fostering noxious environments which deprive Jewish health-care professionals of their civil right to work in spaces free from discrimination and hate, a study published by the StandWithUs Data & Analytics Department in May found.

Titled “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: The Role of Workplace Environment,” the study contained survey data showing that 62.8 percent of Jewish health-care professionals employed by campus-based medical centers reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, it added, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing, the report said, the likelihood of antisemitic activity.

The research was not StandWithUs’ first contribution to the study of antisemitism in medicine. In December, its Data & Analytics Department published a study which found that nearly 40 percent of Jewish American health-care professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims. That study included a survey of 645 Jewish health workers, a substantial number of whom said they were subject to “social and professional isolation.” The problem left over one quarter of the survey cohort, 26.4 percent, fearful of threats to safety.

“Academia today is increasingly cultivating an environment which is hostile to Jews, as well as members of other religious and ethnic groups,” StandWithUs director of data and analytics and study co-author Alexandra Fishman said in May. “Academic institutions should be upholding the integrity of scholarship, prioritizing civil discourse, rather than allowing bias or personal agendas to guide academic culture.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.