.Israeli soldiers stand behind a Palestinian protestor holding a flag of Brazil, who recognized an independent Palestinian state. Ramalah, Dec. 2010. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)"Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic policy." Not always so valid an observation, this one by Henry Kissinger, contentious recipient of the Nobel peace prize, allows us to analyse an episode of undoubted impact on the state of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition: the appointment in March of Daniel Dayan as Israeli consul in the US, after failing to have him accredited as ambassador to Brasilia.
In 1947 Brazil had led at the United Nations (UN) the Latin American majority favourable to the idea of partitioning Palestine and creating two states, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish. But the rest of the region’s major countries and other Latin American states such as Argentina, Mexico and others, did not accompany Brazil on this occasion. Rejecting the territorial loss, among other losses, that the creation of Israel implied, the Arab world and the Palestinian leadership of the 1940s tried to prevent it. Their military defeat first resulted in the Jewish appropriation of lands corresponding to the Palestinian state, and in 1967 the Israeli occupation of all of that state that had never come to be.
