BRASILIA (Dispatches) – Two of the largest federations of trade unions for oil workers in Brazil have called on the government to impose an energy embargo on the Zionist regime.
The National Federation of Oil Workers and the Single Federation of Oil Workers sent a joint letter to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and key ministers in the Brazilian government, urging them to take more concrete action against the Zionist regime’s “genocide” in Gaza.
Referring to comments made by Lula in February, the federations said that Brazil needs to go beyond public rhetoric and implement an energy embargo against the occupying regime in accordance with its international legal obligations to prevent the “ongoing Nakba” - meaning ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic and referring to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 when the Zionist regime came into being.
In February, President Lula, while he was attending the African Union Summit in Ethiopia, accused the occupying regime of committing “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza and compared its war on Gaza with Nazi Germany’s extermination of Jews.
The letter highlighted that 2.7mn barrels of crude oil were exported from Brazil to Israel in 2024 alone, representing a significant portion of Israel’s military fuel supply, and Brazil had a global responsibility to avoid complicity in war crimes, as articulated by legal experts and international judicial bodies.
The letter cited action taken by other countries, such as Colombia’s suspension of coal exports to Israel, and global grassroots campaigns such as #BlockTheBoat, where dockworkers around the world have refused to load Israeli ships and cargo and transport arms to the Zionist regime.
In the United States, Block the Boat was organized by the Arab Resource and Organizing Center in San Francisco.
In addition to the immediate suspension of oil exports to Israel, the federations urge the Brazilian government to suspend projects with Israeli energy companies, and support United Nations-led sanctions and measures to hold Israel to account.
Meanwhile, Ireland’s Tanaiste, or deputy prime minister, Simon Harris, defended the government’s position on Thursday that the Zionist regime is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, Irish broadcaster RTE reported.
“We are the first government in the European Union (EU) to say what Israel is doing is genocide. It is genocide,” Harris told an opposition lawmaker during a heated exchange in parliament, known as the Dáil.
That lawmaker, Catherine Connolly, an Independent, accused the government of not doing enough to punish Israel for its 19-month-long war on Gaza, which has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians, more than half of them children, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
“I’m disgusted and sickened, sickened - watching children dying on our television screens and every day I come to work and work with all the people in here to do our best to show leadership at a time of horrific conflict,” Harris said.
“We’re working to support the people of Palestine and the only chamber I ever go into in the entire world where people don’t acknowledge that Ireland, the government, the people of Ireland, are standing with the people of Palestine, standing up for human rights, standing up for international law, is here when you get up and distort - with your ideology - the actions of this government.”