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Is the new Jewish Mexican President good for Israel? No.

She not only de-emphasizes her Jewish identity but during her campaign, she was seen wearing a crucifix.

By Barry Shaw, Israel Institute for Strategic Studies

Mexico voted in a new female Jewish President, but is Claudia Sheinbaum good for Israel?

She celebrates her grandfather, who escaped Lithuania where he was expelled for being “a Jew and a communist.” She praises her mother and father not for raising her as a Jew but for “loving Mexico and its history.”

In November 2023, she married Jesús Tarriba who is not Jewish.

She not only de-emphasizes her Jewish identity, but during her campaign, she was seen wearing a crucifix hanging off a string of Catholic prayer beads.

She is clearly a life-long left-wing Socialist politician and she identifies more with Jews who have been active in political activism than biblical or Israeli Jewish heroes.

In Mexico, 0.1% identify as Jewish. Even so, anti-Semitic political rivals have attacked her both as a Jew and as a foreigner.

In Mexico, Sheinbaum wants to be identified for her politics not her ethnicity, So what are her politics, and how does this clash with her ethnicity?

When Israel was forced to wage a previous war against Hamas in 2009, after being under a constant rocket bombardment and terror incursions from Gaza into Israel, Sheinbaum expressed herself in a letter to the editor of La Jornada, a Mexico City newspaper, she said:

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“Because of my Jewish origin, because of my love for Mexico and because I feel like a citizen of the world, I share with millions the desire for justice, equality, fraternity and peace, and therefore, I can only see with horror the images of the state bombings”.

“No reason justifies the murder of Palestinian civilians. Nothing, nothing, nothing, can justify the murder of a child.”

She was silent about Israeli children.

Following her election on Monday, several pro-Palestinian activists posted images of Sheinbaum wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, and posing with an unidentified man wearing a t-shirt that says Palestine.

Israeli opinion is still out on Sheinbaum, but the evidence that Mexico will move closer to Israel under a Jewish president does not look promising.