On Israel´s war...

I was talking to a family member over Skype the other day and was asked how the media was covering the war in Lebanon. I said that it was very different than the coverage in the U.S.—the Brazilian newspapers had taken a decidedly anti-Israeli standpoint, something which they probably would have done anyway but was exacerbated by the deaths of seven Brazilians during the first days of the conflict.

I also noted that I was hearing very different interpretations from some Jewish people here in São Paulo. “Look what they’re doing to Israel!” someone said to me last week. “Do you see?” I initially took her at face value—I interpreted her comment as being about Hezbollah. As time has passed, however, I came to wonder. The night before this woman made that comment to me, a Lebanese man who is living in Brazil (but is not a citizen) was going off on Israel and a mutual friend put her arm around him and said, “Calm down. Everyone knows that Israel is wrong.”

So this brings up an important question in my mind: is the pro-Israel/anti-Israel polemic that you see in the U.S. coming to Brazil? The two groups have always functioned fairly well in Brazil by maintaining the appearance of “Convivência”—the ability to live side by side. I think this has been helped along both by Brazilian (and Luso-Brazilian) cultural expectations but also by the fact that around half of the Sirio-Lebanese immigrants to Brazil were Christians and therefore the Sirio-Lebanese ethnic identity is as tied to being from a specific ethnicity as being Arab or Muslim. What happens, however, when this breaks down? Increasingly, I am noticing that a politically active intellectual left opposes Israel wholesale and I hear a rather absurd number of anti-Semitic comments. Some Jews, meanwhile, are turning their anger and frustration toward Arabs or Muslims. I have also seen this in the U.S. over the last few years and, again, it worries me. It worries me that for some Jews, criticism of Israeli political policy is seen as anti-Semitism and it worries me that many people on the political left have become so anti-Israel that they have, in fact, become anti-Semitic and insensitive to Zionism. Or perhaps more accurately, they were always anti-Semitic but it has suddenly become politically acceptable to express this publicly.

So I was looking at a newspaper online yesterday and I began to wonder what the New York Times was saying. I took two screenshots, one last night and one this morning. The Folha was most interested in the bombing of the U.N. post and the U.S. veto of a condemnation of Israel’s activities while the Times was interested in Israeli losses.