Lapid Called Lula's Win a Loss for Netanyahu's Friends, Then Said He's 'Very Unhappy' Lula Won

Israel votes Tuesday. On Monday morning, the man who wants Benjamin Netanyahu's job decided the best news of the weekend came from Brazil.

Yair Lapid, Israel's opposition leader and a former prime minister, looked at Lula da Silva's runoff win over Flávio Bolsonaro and at Aleksandar Vučić's loss in Serbia, and posted a victory lap in Hebrew. "Two more Netanyahu associates lost elections tonight because of high turnout and a people with national pride that was not willing to accept dictates from outside," he wrote. "Tomorrow the people in Israel begin the repair."

Forty-four minutes later, Lapid tried to take half of it back. His second post: "And let it be clear, I am very unhappy with Lula's victory. I'm always for the pro-Israel candidate, that's the most important criterion. But today, being a Netanyahu associate is political damage all over the world. In Israel too."

Read that twice. He's unhappy the anti-Israel candidate won, and he still counts it as a win for his side.

Saar's answer

Foreign Minister Gideon Saar didn't let it slide. He called Lapid a "klumnik," Hebrew slang for a nobody, and went straight at the record. Vučić and Flávio Bolsonaro are "two huge friends of Israel," Saar wrote, not just "Netanyahu associates." Then he laid out who Lula is: a president who "accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, while comparing it to the murder of the Jews in the Holocaust by Hitler," and who "claimed that 12.3 million (!) children were killed in bombings in the war."

He also caught the echo. Lapid's line about a people who won't take "dictates from outside" is Lula's own campaign rhetoric, Saar wrote, and Lapid volunteered "to recite it like a parrot" the same night Flávio refused to recognize the result over what Saar called an "illegal extension of voting hours." Saar's closer: "Turning your back on Israel's friends and fawning over those who work against it is meanness of spirit and a moral low."

Fifteen minutes later, Saar posted the party Lapid had joined. It's a graphic from the Palestinian Arab Federation of Brazil (FEPAL), showing Lula in a keffiyeh. Its Portuguese headline reads: "Congratulations President Lula. Democracy and love defeated hatred and the Israelization of Brazil." Saar told readers to look at the map in the group's logo. It colors in the whole outline of the land, Israel included, as Palestine.

Is Saar's record right? Yes. Here are Lula's own words

Most write-ups of this spat stop at "Saar criticized Lula." Here's what Lula actually said, from the originals.

Feb. 18, 2024, Addis Ababa. At a press conference closing his trip to the African Union summit, Lula defended sending money to UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinians, and said Gaza was not a war but "a genocide." Then: "What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has not existed at any other moment in history. Actually, it did exist, when Hitler decided to kill the Jews" (full transcript and video).

Feb. 19, 2024, Jerusalem. Israel's foreign minister at the time, Israel Katz, summoned Brazil's ambassador to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial. Katz called Lula's comparison "a serious antisemitic attack" and declared him persona non grata in Israel "until he apologizes and takes back his words." No apology came. Nine days later, when Lula told an interviewer "I didn't say Holocaust," Katz answered him on X: Lula had compared Israel's war against Hamas to what Hitler did to the Jews, and offended the memory of six million.

April 3, 2024, Brasília. At a national conference on children's rights, Lula asked the room to raise their hands in tribute to "the almost 12 million 300 thousand children who died in the Gaza Strip, in Israel, bombed in an insane war against humanity" (Lula's remarks). The U.N.'s humanitarian office put Gaza's entire population at about 2.2 million that year. Lula's number was more than five times everyone who lives there. It was a slip of thousands for millions, but it's the kind of slip a man makes when he's rounding toward the worst thing he can say about Israel.

What Lapid skipped about Brazil

Lapid's version is that voters rejected "dictates from outside." He left out the inside job. Brazil's polls closed on schedule Sunday, and one minute later Justice Cristiano Zanin, Lula's former personal lawyer, ordered two more hours of voting nationwide on a request from Lula's own coalition. We laid out that order here. Lula then won about 51.8% to 48.2%, and Flávio says he'll seek to annul the result.

So the candidate Lapid lumped in with Netanyahu is a man who promised, in Saar's telling, to move Brazil's embassy to Jerusalem. The winner is a man Israel declared persona non grata. Picture a coach cheering because the other team's star got hurt, while the rival who just won is on record comparing the coach's own team to Hitler's.

Why it matters Tuesday

Lapid isn't even the front-runner on his own side. The last polls had former army chief Gadi Eisenkot's party in first, with Likud close behind and neither bloc at the 61 seats it takes to govern. Lapid's Yesh Atid is still part of the bloc trying to replace Netanyahu. Israelis now know how he reads a foreign election: what matters most is whether Netanyahu lost, even when Israel's enemy won.

Later Monday, Lapid was telling Israelis to watch out for lies on election day. "We won't let them steal the election," he wrote, promoting a war room his party set up to fight "fake news." Fair enough. The first thing voters should fact-check is which side was celebrating alongside a group whose logo leaves Israel off the map.

The bottom line: Lapid wanted a headline about Netanyahu's friends losing. He got one about whose friends he's willing to cheer.