Brazil and Israel signed Israel's first extra-regional trade deal in 2007. Trade hit $1.9 billion in 2024, even as Israel declared Lula persona non grata and both nations withdrew ambassadors.
Brazil and Israel signed the first free trade agreement Israel reached outside its immediate region, a 2007 Mercosur deal that took effect in 2010, and bilateral trade reached $1.9 billion in 2024. That commercial relationship has continued even as the countries' diplomatic ties fell to their lowest point in decades, with Israel declaring Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva persona non grata and both nations operating without full ambassadors since 2024.
How large is trade between Brazil and Israel?
Israel was the first country outside Latin America to establish a free trade agreement with Mercosur, the South American trade bloc including Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, according to Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The agreement was signed in Montevideo in December 2007 and came into effect in Brazil in April 2010, formalizing a trade relationship that predates the deal by decades.
Bilateral trade between the two countries grew from $1.3 billion in 2014 to $1.9 billion in 2024, according to Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, though trade decreased 6.9% in 2024 compared with the prior year. Israel ranked as Brazil's sixth largest trade partner in the Middle East in 2024, behind Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Oman, and Iraq, per the same ministry data.
Brazil's exports to Israel totaled $568.63 million in 2025, led by meat and edible meat offal at $236.2 million, oil seeds and grains at $82.29 million, and coffee, tea, and spices at $49.22 million, according to Trading Economics data drawn from UN Comtrade figures. Israel's exports to Brazil reached $1.15 billion in 2024, dominated by fertilizers at $457.84 million and machinery, nuclear reactors, and boilers at $114.48 million, the same source reported, reflecting a structural trade imbalance in Israel's favor built on Brazil's dependence on Israeli-made agricultural chemicals.
What sectors define Israeli-Brazilian economic cooperation?
Defense contracting, agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, and nanotechnology represent the industries where cooperation between Brazil and Israel could produce the most significant gains, according to a Foreign Policy Association analysis of the relationship. The two economies are complementary, with Israeli firms supplying agricultural technology and defense equipment that Brazil's own industrial base does not fully replicate domestically.
Israel's ICL Group and ADAMA, both major agrochemical and fertilizer producers, operate within an Israeli agtech sector that has drawn less venture investment than Brazil's own agricultural technology sector despite Israel's global reputation for innovation, according to Agritecture's analysis of Israeli agtech funding patterns. That dynamic has pushed Israeli agtech firms to treat large agricultural economies like Brazil as essential export markets and eventual operating partners rather than competitors, since Israel's own limited farmland caps the domestic scale those companies can reach.
Brazil and Israel signed cooperation agreements covering science and technology, aviation, health, internal security, and cybersecurity in 2019, according to Israel's embassy in Brazil, building institutional channels for cooperation that continued operating even as the broader political relationship deteriorated in subsequent years. The Mashav program, run by Israel's embassy in Brazil, provides scholarships for Brazilians to take courses across various fields in Israel, part of a longstanding technical and educational exchange track that has persisted independent of diplomatic tensions.
What caused the diplomatic rift between Brazil and Israel?
Brazilian President Lula compared Israel's military campaign in Gaza to the Holocaust in February 2024, telling reporters that what was happening in Gaza "isn't a war, it's a genocide" and drawing a direct comparison to "when Hitler decided to kill the Jews," according to Inquirer.net's coverage of the remarks. Israel's then-Foreign Minister Israel Katz declared Lula persona non grata in response, and Brazil recalled its ambassador to Israel, Frederico Meyer, later that May, reassigning him to Brazil's permanent mission to the United Nations in Geneva, according to reporting from GlobalSecurity.org.
Israel downgraded its diplomatic relations with Brazil further in August 2025 after Brazil's government did not respond to Israel's request for agrement, formal approval, for its ambassador-designate nominee, Gali Dagan, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The Israeli Foreign Ministry stated that relations would now be conducted at a "lower diplomatic level," citing what it called Brazil's "critical and hostile line" toward Israel since October 7, 2023.
Lula continued escalating his rhetoric through 2025 and into 2026, telling reporters in October 2025 that multilateral institutions "stopped working" and failed to halt the war in Gaza, according to the Times of Israel. He separately condemned what he called Israel's "genocide" in Gaza at a BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro in July 2025, according to Al Jazeera's coverage of the gathering, while also stating that nothing could justify Hamas's October 7, 2023 attacks that killed roughly 1,219 people.
How has the rift affected Brazil's Jewish community?
Brazil's Jewish community, the second largest in Latin America after Argentina, experienced a 1,000% increase in antisemitic attacks since October 7, 2023, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. That surge has occurred within a country historically regarded as one of the least antisemitic in the world, a reputation built over decades of open Jewish religious and communal life, a history documented in The Olam's Latin American Jewish institutional survey.
Miriam Gomes Saraiva, a Brazilian political scientist studying Latin American foreign policy, has noted that Lula's position stems from an ideological framework rooted in the Latin American left's views on justice and sovereignty rather than hostility toward Israel's existence as a state, according to analysis published by Palestine Chronicle contributor Ali Farhat. Farhat noted that Latin American countries, including Brazil, were among those that voted in favor of Israel's establishment at the United Nations, with Brazilian diplomat Oswaldo Aranha having chaired the UN General Assembly session that approved the partition plan for Palestine, according to Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Why has trade continued despite the political freeze?
Trade flows and technical cooperation agreements have continued operating through existing institutional channels even as ambassadorial relations remain unresolved, reflecting a pattern where commercial and scientific ties built over decades prove more durable than short-term political disputes. The 2019 cooperation agreements on cybersecurity, aviation, and health remain the operative framework governing sector-specific collaboration, independent of the ambassadorial vacancy on both sides.
Brazilian business groups in agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, and nanotechnology have detailed plans for expanding operations with Israeli counterparts, according to the Foreign Policy Association's analysis, suggesting commercial actors on both sides continue to see mutual benefit in deepening ties regardless of the state-level freeze. Whether that undercurrent of cooperation persists at current levels, or erodes further if the political relationship does not stabilize, remains an open question tied directly to how long the current ambassadorial vacancy continues.
How we report: Olam stories draw on public filings, company disclosures and named sources, checked by our editors. Read our methodology · Corrections
