Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, a candidate for president of Brazil, said on Monday that if he wins the election next October, then he will move his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
“I will move the embassy to Jerusalem during the first six months of my mandate,” Bolsonaro told JNS during a visit to Israel. “I hope that God will help me and Brazil have another friend of Israel in office.”
Bolsonaro, who visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem and toured Israel’s biblical heartland ahead of a keynote address at a conference on antisemitism in Jerusalem on Jan. 27, pledged his support for the Jewish state in keeping with the staunchly pro-Israel legacy of his father, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
“It is an honor to defend Judeo-Christian values and to show the Jewish people that the Brazilian people support them,” he said.
Bolsonaro said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has been one of the most vociferous critics of Israel in South America, is an antisemite who does not represent the Brazilian people.
Lula, 80, recalled his ambassador to Israel in 2024 in the wake of the Jewish state’s war against Hamas in Gaza, triggered by the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and joined the International Court of Justice case against Israel. He is running for a fourth term in office.
‘No path possible far from God’
Bolsonaro, 44, was accompanied to Israel by his younger brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, 41, also a Brazilian lawmaker.
In a video posted on X following his visit to the Western Wall, the senator wrote: “To save Brazil, there is no possible path far from God.”
Bolsonaro was subsequently hosted by Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria Regional Council, on a tour of the biblical heartland that included a strategic overlook that offers views of the Tel Aviv area, where he again expressed support for the Jewish people.
In the interview, Bolsonaro said the Brazilian election offered a clear-cut choice between Lula—a friend to terrorist groups including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, in addition to mafia and cartels that have made violence and crime rampant in Latin America’s largest nation—and himself, a modern leader who will cut bureaucracy for the future of the state and reduce crime.
U.S. President Donald Trump has spoken out against the prosecution of Bolsonaro’s father—a political ally who was sentenced to 27 years in jail last year for trying to overturn the 2022 Brazilian elections, which he claimed was stolen—and imposed tariffs on Brazil’s economy.
The younger Bolsonaro said that the American leader was trying to “rescue democracy” in the tough terrain of South America.
General elections will be held in Brazil in October.
