Letter from Brasília
The Other WarEvacuating civilians from a war zone and what diplomats do while the bombs fall.
Sergio Eduardo Moreira Lima
Substack, mar 02, 2026
https://substack.com/home/post/p-189533142
Moments after an Israeli air strike destroyed several buildings in Dahia. Beirut, Lebanon. August, 2006. © Paolo Pellegrin | Magnum Photos
As I write, American and Israeli warplanes are striking targets across Iran. Tehran is burning. Iranian military is retaliating against US bases across the Gulf, in Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates.
There are, no doubt, civilian casualties. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, over 500 people have been killed across Iran. More than 130 cities are under attack. The Iranian authorities claim a girls' school has been struck. The Doomsday Clock, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been advancing closer and closer to midnight, has ticked forward. Fears of a wider conflict grow: Hezbollah has launched rockets and drones at Israel in retaliation for Khamenei's killing, and Israel has begun striking across Lebanon.
I know what is happening right now in embassies across the region, because I have lived it. Not the missiles. The other war. The one that never makes the news. The phone calls at three in the morning. The negotiations with a government that is simultaneously your host and may become the source of the danger. The weight of thousands of lives on your decisions, made in exhaustion and fear, with no guarantee that any of it will work.
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Buses in the Bekaa Valley
I was Brazil’s ambassador to Israel from 2003 to 2007. In my first year, I was also accredited to Palestine. I arranged the opening of our office in Ramallah before a separate representative took over. It was, as anyone who has tried it knows, an impossible dual brief.
When I arrived in 2003, it was just before the Iraq war broke out. Because Israel was a potential target for Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles, we worked with Brasília to prepare contingency plans to evacuate the Brazilian community if needed. We had to identify the leaders of our community quietly, without scaring people and revealing that we had a plan, because we did not know for sure what was coming. The anti-missile systems were being deployed everywhere. The Iron Dome was being developed then in cooperation with the Americans. We prepared for the worst, and the worst, that time, did not come.
It came later. In the summer of 2006, just as I was preparing to leave for my next posting in Norway, war broke out between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel invaded Lebanon. And the problem was no longer Brazilians in Israel. It was Brazilians in Lebanon.
To understand why there were thousands of Brazilians in the Bekaa Valley, you have to understand the depth of the connection between Brazil and Lebanon. In the nineteenth century, Brazilian Emperor Pedro II travelled to the Middle East and was captivated by what he found. His letters from Beirut survive to this day. The ties he fostered meant that whenever instability struck the Ottoman Empire, Syrian and Lebanese people came to Brazil. They prospered in São Paulo. Their success attracted more. Today, Brazil has the largest Lebanese diaspora in the world, larger than the population of Lebanon itself. We have had a president of Lebanese descent, Michel Temer. Brazilian Congress is known for the lobbying of Jewish and Sírio-Lebanese members. These groups believe that Brazil can make a difference. At least, have the diplomatic and historical credentials to do so. In 1947, Oswaldo Aranha’s presidency of the United Nations General Assembly was important for the creation of Israel. When Israeli bombs fell on the Bekaa Valley, they hurt people carrying Brazilian passports, people with grandchildren in São Paulo.
We had to get them out. Most were concentrated near the frontier with Syria. Brazil had established a provisional consular office in the Bekaa Valley. The shortest route to leave the conflict area was into Syria, half an hour across the border. Everyone wanted this solution. My colleague, the Brazilian ambassador in Beirut, understood it was a dangerous choice. I told the Foreign Minister that Israel’s Air Force had warned the military attaché: if buses cross into Syria, they will be targets. We suspected that they believed Hezbollah would infiltrate the convoy.
So we negotiated a route through Turkey instead, more than ten hours through unstable territory. Brazilian flags were put on the roofs of the buses. We shared the names of every passenger and the GPS coordinates of every vehicle with the Israeli government. And then, through the night, from midnight until five or six in the morning, I sat in the Residence in Herzliya Pituach, close to Tel Aviv, on the phone to the Israeli authorities, to our ambassador in Beirut, to the Brazilian Office in the Bekaa Valley, and with the Foreign Ministry in Brasília, all at once, waiting to learn whether the convoy would make it through safely.
I was exhausted. But the exhaustion was nothing compared to the fear and responsibility. We knew that other convoys, including United Nations vehicles, had been hit. The stakes could not have been higher.
But the Brazilian nationals were spared. About two thousand people, driven ten hours through the dark with flags on the roof, because a negotiation conducted in good faith held.
Dizengoff Square
I tell this story today because it illustrates something that the footage of missiles cannot show: that diplomacy is not the absence of action. It is the hardest kind of action there is.
During my years in Israel, I tried to build rather than merely observe. We organized a celebration of Brazilian Independence Day, the 7th of September, in Dizengoff Square in central Tel Aviv. Twenty thousand people came, at a time when bombings were a regular occurrence. The Israeli authorities provided security. The Hebrew press covered it widely. I was told nothing like it had ever been done before: a foreign ambassador filling the centre of Tel Aviv with a celebration, in the middle of a crisis.
We cultivated relationships across the divide. I met with Ariel Sharon. With Yasser Arafat. I built a close friendship with Shimon Peres, who, when we left, wrote that I had “kept my finger closely on Israel’s pulse, sensitive to its moods, watching its developments, sharing in its pain.” We acquired paintings by Brazilian-Israeli artists for the embassy. We worked, always, to reflect the full complexity of the region. Not to take sides, but to build bridges.
When we left Israel in October 2006, I published a book, A Time for Change, compiling my writings from the posting. Peres wrote that between the Iraq war at the start of my tenure and the Hezbollah war at the end, I had gained “a first hand experience of a region in turmoil, but on a quest for peace.”
That quest, as of this morning, is in serious danger.
The Failure of Good Faith
When I heard the news over the weekend, my first thoughts were for the Iranian People, and the Brazilian community in Iran, in Israel, across the region. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued guidance immediately. This is what we do: we protect our citizens. It is the most basic function of the state.
But behind that practical concern lies something that troubles me more deeply. It is the failure, once again, to create peace between peoples. True peace exists when there is dialogue, when there is cooperation, when trust is built over time. If you impose your will on others through brute force, you do not create peace. You perpetuate conflict.
What troubles me most is the sequencing. Talks between the United States and Iran were underway in Geneva only days ago. And now there are bombs. When diplomacy and force follow one another so closely, trust collapses. Negotiation depends on the presumption that dialogue is not simply a prelude to escalation. If that presumption disappears, the space for diplomacy shrinks dramatically.
One hopes that discussions were pursued sincerely, even amid deep mistrust. But when talks are followed almost immediately by strikes, the perception, fair or not, is that dialogue was instrumental rather than genuine. And once that perception takes hold, future negotiations become harder, riskier, and more fragile.
I watched Netanyahu closely during my years in Israel. He was a shrewd politician. Even then, 2003, 2004, 2005, he was already insisting that Iran was the existential threat, the nuclear danger that justified everything. It was his mantra then, and it is his mantra now. The settler movement, the wars in Lebanon and Gaza, and now this strike on Iran: they belong to the same logic. The vision of a Greater Israel that has driven Likud from the beginning. An Israeli friend once showed me a map comparing the original thirteen American colonies to the present-day United States, and said: this is our future too. Expansion by whatever means necessary.
The Iranian regime is a brutal oppressive theocracy. But, according to international law, President Trump should not bomb Iran, kill its authorities and tell the Iranian people to “take over your government.” I will not speculate on what this language means to Americans. I can tell you what it means to a Brazilian diplomat: it is the message of force dressed as liberation. We have heard it before, many times, in many places.
The Brazilian School
Our school, the Brazilian diplomatic tradition, is one of law, peace, and dialogue. It has a basis in our history. Brazil shares borders with ten countries, and every one of those frontiers was settled by negotiation, not war, through the application of principles drawn from Roman law, argued by skilled diplomats and lawyers. The result is a degree of stability in South America that you will hardly find in any comparable situation where one nation borders so many others.
Brazil fought in both World Wars, the only Latin American country to do so. We developed a close relationship with the United States. Roosevelt wanted Brazil on the Security Council. The United States was the first country to recognize in 1824 our independence, and is a close partner and traditionally Brazil’s largest source of foreign direct investment. Thousands of American companies operate in Brazil. Our relationship is deep and structural. But within that relationship, Brazil has always worked to permeate unilateralism with the principles of law, to build multilateral frameworks that constrain the exercise of raw power.
Look at Europe. A continent that had wars every ten years is now at peace. How do you explain peace between France and Germany? That is what law and a logic of peace and cooperation can build.
I was asked today whether the rules-based order has broken. I do not believe it can. It is under immense strain, but it will hold. The majority of the world, particularly in developing countries, countries whose existence is built on law rather than force, has no alternative but to work toward diplomatic solutions. Our societies, our academies, our people must understand the strength of peace and the strength of law.
War destroys. But what is built through law — civilization, cooperation, principle — endures. It always has. These are stronger foundations than anything force can achieve.
The Call at Three in the Morning
Somewhere right now, in an embassy in Tehran or Doha or Manama, a diplomat is on the phone. Sharing the names of their citizens, drafting an agreement that the military may or may not honour. Placing flags on buses. Negotiating a route through hostile territory. They have little power. No strategic leverage, no missiles, no aircraft carriers. What they have is training, preparation, and the belief that even in the middle of catastrophe, the principles hold. Negotiate in good faith. Share information. Protect civilians. Hold to the law even when the powerful have abandoned it.
In the Bekaa Valley in 2006, a convoy of buses with Brazilian flags on their roofs drove ten hours through the dark and made it through. That happened because diplomacy worked. Not perfectly, but enough. It was a small but important victory — not the kind that makes the news.
In the long run, what is built through law is stronger than that which is destroyed by force. I have believed this my entire career. Whether the world still believes it after this week will determine what comes next.
This essay is the first in the series Letter from Brasília, based on a conversation with Luke Scheybeler recorded on 1 March 2026.
Brasília / London / 2 March 2026
Thanks for reading Letter from Brasília! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Moments after an Israeli air strike destroyed several buildings in Dahia. Beirut, Lebanon. August, 2006. © Paolo Pellegrin | Magnum Photos
As I write, American and Israeli warplanes are striking targets across Iran. Tehran is burning. Iranian military is retaliating against US bases across the Gulf, in Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates.
There are, no doubt, civilian casualties. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, over 500 people have been killed across Iran. More than 130 cities are under attack. The Iranian authorities claim a girls' school has been struck. The Doomsday Clock, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been advancing closer and closer to midnight, has ticked forward. Fears of a wider conflict grow: Hezbollah has launched rockets and drones at Israel in retaliation for Khamenei's killing, and Israel has begun striking across Lebanon.
I know what is happening right now in embassies across the region, because I have lived it. Not the missiles. The other war. The one that never makes the news. The phone calls at three in the morning. The negotiations with a government that is simultaneously your host and may become the source of the danger. The weight of thousands of lives on your decisions, made in exhaustion and fear, with no guarantee that any of it will work.
Thanks for reading Letter from Brasília. Subscribe here:
pralmeida@me.com
password
pralmeida@me.com
Subscribe
Buses in the Bekaa Valley
I was Brazil’s ambassador to Israel from 2003 to 2007. In my first year, I was also accredited to Palestine. I arranged the opening of our office in Ramallah before a separate representative took over. It was, as anyone who has tried it knows, an impossible dual brief.
When I arrived in 2003, it was just before the Iraq war broke out. Because Israel was a potential target for Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles, we worked with Brasília to prepare contingency plans to evacuate the Brazilian community if needed. We had to identify the leaders of our community quietly, without scaring people and revealing that we had a plan, because we did not know for sure what was coming. The anti-missile systems were being deployed everywhere. The Iron Dome was being developed then in cooperation with the Americans. We prepared for the worst, and the worst, that time, did not come.
It came later. In the summer of 2006, just as I was preparing to leave for my next posting in Norway, war broke out between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel invaded Lebanon. And the problem was no longer Brazilians in Israel. It was Brazilians in Lebanon.
To understand why there were thousands of Brazilians in the Bekaa Valley, you have to understand the depth of the connection between Brazil and Lebanon. In the nineteenth century, Brazilian Emperor Pedro II travelled to the Middle East and was captivated by what he found. His letters from Beirut survive to this day. The ties he fostered meant that whenever instability struck the Ottoman Empire, Syrian and Lebanese people came to Brazil. They prospered in São Paulo. Their success attracted more. Today, Brazil has the largest Lebanese diaspora in the world, larger than the population of Lebanon itself. We have had a president of Lebanese descent, Michel Temer. Brazilian Congress is known for the lobbying of Jewish and Sírio-Lebanese members. These groups believe that Brazil can make a difference. At least, have the diplomatic and historical credentials to do so. In 1947, Oswaldo Aranha’s presidency of the United Nations General Assembly was important for the creation of Israel. When Israeli bombs fell on the Bekaa Valley, they hurt people carrying Brazilian passports, people with grandchildren in São Paulo.
We had to get them out. Most were concentrated near the frontier with Syria. Brazil had established a provisional consular office in the Bekaa Valley. The shortest route to leave the conflict area was into Syria, half an hour across the border. Everyone wanted this solution. My colleague, the Brazilian ambassador in Beirut, understood it was a dangerous choice. I told the Foreign Minister that Israel’s Air Force had warned the military attaché: if buses cross into Syria, they will be targets. We suspected that they believed Hezbollah would infiltrate the convoy.
So we negotiated a route through Turkey instead, more than ten hours through unstable territory. Brazilian flags were put on the roofs of the buses. We shared the names of every passenger and the GPS coordinates of every vehicle with the Israeli government. And then, through the night, from midnight until five or six in the morning, I sat in the Residence in Herzliya Pituach, close to Tel Aviv, on the phone to the Israeli authorities, to our ambassador in Beirut, to the Brazilian Office in the Bekaa Valley, and with the Foreign Ministry in Brasília, all at once, waiting to learn whether the convoy would make it through safely.
I was exhausted. But the exhaustion was nothing compared to the fear and responsibility. We knew that other convoys, including United Nations vehicles, had been hit. The stakes could not have been higher.
But the Brazilian nationals were spared. About two thousand people, driven ten hours through the dark with flags on the roof, because a negotiation conducted in good faith held.
Dizengoff Square
I tell this story today because it illustrates something that the footage of missiles cannot show: that diplomacy is not the absence of action. It is the hardest kind of action there is.
During my years in Israel, I tried to build rather than merely observe. We organized a celebration of Brazilian Independence Day, the 7th of September, in Dizengoff Square in central Tel Aviv. Twenty thousand people came, at a time when bombings were a regular occurrence. The Israeli authorities provided security. The Hebrew press covered it widely. I was told nothing like it had ever been done before: a foreign ambassador filling the centre of Tel Aviv with a celebration, in the middle of a crisis.
We cultivated relationships across the divide. I met with Ariel Sharon. With Yasser Arafat. I built a close friendship with Shimon Peres, who, when we left, wrote that I had “kept my finger closely on Israel’s pulse, sensitive to its moods, watching its developments, sharing in its pain.” We acquired paintings by Brazilian-Israeli artists for the embassy. We worked, always, to reflect the full complexity of the region. Not to take sides, but to build bridges.
When we left Israel in October 2006, I published a book, A Time for Change, compiling my writings from the posting. Peres wrote that between the Iraq war at the start of my tenure and the Hezbollah war at the end, I had gained “a first hand experience of a region in turmoil, but on a quest for peace.”
That quest, as of this morning, is in serious danger.
The Failure of Good Faith
When I heard the news over the weekend, my first thoughts were for the Iranian People, and the Brazilian community in Iran, in Israel, across the region. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued guidance immediately. This is what we do: we protect our citizens. It is the most basic function of the state.
But behind that practical concern lies something that troubles me more deeply. It is the failure, once again, to create peace between peoples. True peace exists when there is dialogue, when there is cooperation, when trust is built over time. If you impose your will on others through brute force, you do not create peace. You perpetuate conflict.
What troubles me most is the sequencing. Talks between the United States and Iran were underway in Geneva only days ago. And now there are bombs. When diplomacy and force follow one another so closely, trust collapses. Negotiation depends on the presumption that dialogue is not simply a prelude to escalation. If that presumption disappears, the space for diplomacy shrinks dramatically.
One hopes that discussions were pursued sincerely, even amid deep mistrust. But when talks are followed almost immediately by strikes, the perception, fair or not, is that dialogue was instrumental rather than genuine. And once that perception takes hold, future negotiations become harder, riskier, and more fragile.
I watched Netanyahu closely during my years in Israel. He was a shrewd politician. Even then, 2003, 2004, 2005, he was already insisting that Iran was the existential threat, the nuclear danger that justified everything. It was his mantra then, and it is his mantra now. The settler movement, the wars in Lebanon and Gaza, and now this strike on Iran: they belong to the same logic. The vision of a Greater Israel that has driven Likud from the beginning. An Israeli friend once showed me a map comparing the original thirteen American colonies to the present-day United States, and said: this is our future too. Expansion by whatever means necessary.
The Iranian regime is a brutal oppressive theocracy. But, according to international law, President Trump should not bomb Iran, kill its authorities and tell the Iranian people to “take over your government.” I will not speculate on what this language means to Americans. I can tell you what it means to a Brazilian diplomat: it is the message of force dressed as liberation. We have heard it before, many times, in many places.
The Brazilian School
Our school, the Brazilian diplomatic tradition, is one of law, peace, and dialogue. It has a basis in our history. Brazil shares borders with ten countries, and every one of those frontiers was settled by negotiation, not war, through the application of principles drawn from Roman law, argued by skilled diplomats and lawyers. The result is a degree of stability in South America that you will hardly find in any comparable situation where one nation borders so many others.
Brazil fought in both World Wars, the only Latin American country to do so. We developed a close relationship with the United States. Roosevelt wanted Brazil on the Security Council. The United States was the first country to recognize in 1824 our independence, and is a close partner and traditionally Brazil’s largest source of foreign direct investment. Thousands of American companies operate in Brazil. Our relationship is deep and structural. But within that relationship, Brazil has always worked to permeate unilateralism with the principles of law, to build multilateral frameworks that constrain the exercise of raw power.
Look at Europe. A continent that had wars every ten years is now at peace. How do you explain peace between France and Germany? That is what law and a logic of peace and cooperation can build.
I was asked today whether the rules-based order has broken. I do not believe it can. It is under immense strain, but it will hold. The majority of the world, particularly in developing countries, countries whose existence is built on law rather than force, has no alternative but to work toward diplomatic solutions. Our societies, our academies, our people must understand the strength of peace and the strength of law.
War destroys. But what is built through law — civilization, cooperation, principle — endures. It always has. These are stronger foundations than anything force can achieve.
The Call at Three in the Morning
Somewhere right now, in an embassy in Tehran or Doha or Manama, a diplomat is on the phone. Sharing the names of their citizens, drafting an agreement that the military may or may not honour. Placing flags on buses. Negotiating a route through hostile territory. They have little power. No strategic leverage, no missiles, no aircraft carriers. What they have is training, preparation, and the belief that even in the middle of catastrophe, the principles hold. Negotiate in good faith. Share information. Protect civilians. Hold to the law even when the powerful have abandoned it.
In the Bekaa Valley in 2006, a convoy of buses with Brazilian flags on their roofs drove ten hours through the dark and made it through. That happened because diplomacy worked. Not perfectly, but enough. It was a small but important victory — not the kind that makes the news.
In the long run, what is built through law is stronger than that which is destroyed by force. I have believed this my entire career. Whether the world still believes it after this week will determine what comes next.
This essay is the first in the series Letter from Brasília, based on a conversation with Luke Scheybeler recorded on 1 March 2026.
Brasília / London / 2 March 2026
Thanks for reading Letter from Brasília! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
