‘Brazil embassy move to Jerusalem a question of when not if’

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil will definitely move its embassy in Israel to Occupied Jerusalem, with only the date of the transfer to be decided, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday during a visit to Rio de Janeiro.

"It's not a question of 'if' but of 'when'," Netanyahu told members of Rio's Jewish community, his office said in a statement.

He said Brazil's president-elect Jair Bolsonaro assured him of the move in a meeting on Friday. 

He pointed to US President Donald Trump going through with his promise to move his country's embassy and said: "Bolsonaro will also do so."

The issue of the embassy has been hovering over Netanyahu's visit to Brazil, the first-ever by an Israeli prime minister. 

He arrived on Friday and went straight into his meeting with far-right Bolsonaro, who is to be sworn-in in a ceremony in Brasilia on Tuesday, with Netanyahu among the foreign dignitaries attending.

Bolsonaro said in early November he intended to follow Trump's lead in moving his country's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But then he backtracked, saying "it hasn't been decided yet."

Brazil’s important meat producers are worried that an embassy move could threaten $1 billion in exports to Arab countries.

Those countries, and Palestinians, view East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. 

But Israel asserts all of Jerusalem is its capital and is keen to see embassies move there to bolster that claim.

Most countries, however, back Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to settle Jerusalem’s status as part of a wider peace deal.

Following Trump 

Trump broke with that consensus a year ago, and in May this year the US embassy was established in Jerusalem. Guatemala followed suit two days later.

Bolsonaro has said he wants closer ties with the US and Israel, breaking with decades of center-left policies which sought to position Brazil as a Latin American power nurturing relations with all countries.

Netanyahu had told reporters as he flew in to Rio that he was going to raise the embassy topic as a priority when he met Bolsonaro. 

In their discussion Friday, Bolsonaro and Netanyahu talked up their budding “brotherhood” which they said would boost military, economic, technological and agricultural cooperation.

Neither man raised the embassy issue when they spoke to journalists shortly afterward, however. Nor did they post anything on it on their Twitter accounts, despite Bolsonaro in particular being a fervent social media user.

Instead Netanyahu said he had extended an invitation to Bolsonaro to visit Israel, which was accepted.

In the statement Sunday from his office, Netanyahu said Bolsonaro’s trip would happen before March 2019.

On Tuesday, the Israeli prime minister is to meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for talks on the sidelines of Bolsonaro’s inauguration.

Israel and other US allies were caught by surprise by Trump’s abrupt decision this month to pull American troops out of Syria, where they had been fighting remnants of the Daesh group. 

Israel fears the vacuum will allow archfoe Iran to make greater inroads into Syria, where it is allied with President Bashar Assad.

Netanyahu’s Brazil trip came at a sensitive time for the leader, who is manoeuvreing to stay in power despite a slew of corruption allegations.

Israel’s parliament last Wednesday approved his government’s decision to call early elections for April 9.