The calculation made by the Brazilian government to not implement a humanitarian visa policy for Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, the scene of the current Israel-Hamas war, was dominated by the argument of avoiding "a new nakba".
Privately, Brazilian diplomatic sources affirm that Brasília will avoid supporting any measure that could provoke mass displacement of the population from the area adjacent to Israel to neighboring nations or other continents.
The idea, according to one of these sources, is that "history advises against" opening loopholes for massive emigration to occur. "Nakba" (catastrophe or disaster in Arabic) is the name given to the forced diaspora of Palestinians in the late 1940s, amidst the independence of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war.
The topic is discussed behind closed doors in Brasília, but is not made public also due to the fact that the Lula government has already caused tensions with Israel by equating the Netanyahu government's response in Gaza to the terrorist attacks by Hamas on October 7.