Lula in Addis and What It Tells Us About the Global South
On February 17, 2024, Brazil’s President Lula da Silva (Lula) spoke at the opening of the 37th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Lula’s participation makes all the sense in the world: Brazil has strong historical and cultural ties with Africa, and also is a major investor in several African nations. Moreover, Brazil under Lula, as part of the so-called BRICs club, likes to style itself as a leading member of the “Global South.” Of course, Brazil is an industrial and economic powerhouse that is very much a beneficiary of the current global world order and, economically speaking, a direct competitor to the United States and other G-7 countries. But never mind.
What is striking, however, is the fact that in his speech, he opened by talking about Israel.
The text of Lula’s speech, found on a Brazilian government website as well as the AU’s website, offers fairly anodyne criticism of Israel:
Being a humanist today means condemning the attacks perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli civilians, and demanding the immediate release of all hostages. Being a humanist also demands rejecting Israel's disproportionate response, which has killed almost 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza—the vast majority of them women and children—and caused the forced displacement of over 80% of the population.
I disagree with this characterization, but I’m not shocked. Lula in fact deserves credit for mentioning October 7 and calling for the release of Israeli hostages.
But that’s not what Lula said. In videos of the speech, Lula directly compares Israel’s ground offensive to the Holocaust:
What is happening in Gaza with the Palestinian people has not happened at any other time in history… In fact it happened when Hitler decided to kill the Jews… There is no war going on, it is a genocide.
Lula went on to bemoan the response of “rich countries.” The rich countries are not real humanitarians. This, he argues, is why the Global South needs to assert itself and assert its truer humanitarianism.
The are several alarming aspects to Lula’s words. The first is the very fact that he’s talking about Gaza in a speech to the AU. He leads with it. Why? It’s none of Brazil’s or the AU’s concern, and the carnage in Gaza is small potatoes compared to the humanitarian disasters in Sudan and Tigray. The second, of course, is the Holocaust comparison, which is gross and profoundly ignorant, to say the least. Then there is the notion that this view is what it means to be a humanitarian, and that it is a view that should define the Global South.
What even is the Global South? To all appearances, it is a resentment club. We see in Lula’s words a modern-day example of what Nietzsche described as a transvaluation of values, wherein the weak invert the moral judgment of the strong by reinterpreting the good as evil, and evil as good. Israel is evil. Hamas is good. The Global North, or “the rich,” in his words, by siding with Israel, is complicit in evil, is evil. By implication, for the Global South, the correct stance is “solidarity” with Hamas. This is good. This is what makes the Global South the champion of good.
I may be overstating this. Perhaps Lula simply is cynically pandering to South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, who represents an old-line Marxist and Third Worldist worldview, one that persists in following the Soviet Union’s antisemitic identification of Jewish nationalism with evil and used it as a pretext to persecute Soviet Jews and attempt to efface Jewish culture. In any case, Lula is endorsing and amplifying that worldview and tying it to the Global South’s resistance to the current global world order. The whole thing reeks of antisemitism, and the age-old practice of identifying Jews with evil, as defined by the ideology of the moment. Christians historically did so by condemning Jews for killing Christ and stubbornly rejecting his teachings. Martin Luther for this reason called for violence against Jews; he was neither the first nor the last to do so. Left antisemitism identifies Jews as obstacles to global “progress” because they reject universalism in favor of particularism. This is Voltaire’s legacy. In all these cases, Jews become symbols of all that is bad. Thus Gaza becomes a byword for all that is bad in the world. We see this in the insistence of climate activists like Greta Thunberg that Israel-Palestine has everything to do with “climate justice,” and that destroying Israel is essential for the climate. Or feminist activists…or gay rights activists…etc. etc. In brief, Die Juden sind unser Unglück. We know how this ends.
There is no doubt that antisemitism is useful. In this case, a Brazilian president uses it to establish credibility with African leaders. I’ve been told that the reason why many British Muslims are energized by anti-Jewish hostility is that it unites Muslim communities (Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani) who otherwise might be at each other’s throats. Africans attending the AU summit might find this a convenient way not to talk about African calamities for which Africans solely are responsible such as Sudan, or point fingers at their Ethiopian hosts. Lula talks about democracy, yet how many of the African leaders attending the summit are democratically elected? How many African governments recently have fallen to military coups? Let’s not talk about all that, Lula is saying. Let’s channel our frustrations on Israel. How convenient. How familiar, alas.
It is said, and Lula says this, that the Global South represents the world’s majority. It can also be a mob.
-There are many, many good books about antisemitism. The one I’ve read most recently and wholeheartedly endorse is Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. Buy it here.