#Human ​Rights

[xtruss]

What Does Latin America Think About the Israel-Hamas War?

Many Countries are Spurning Apartheid Isra-hell. But the Region’s Middle East Stance Has Always Been Nuanced.

— January 29, 2024 | By Patricia Garip | Foreign Policy

Members of the Palestinian community in Chile participate in a car caravan on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People in Santiago on November 29, 2023. Javier Torres/AFP Via Getty Images

Last November, at the start of a soccer game in Chile’s domestic league, a team called Palestino strode onto the pitch wearing keffiyehs, the iconic Palestinian scarf. Just over a month earlier, the Palestinian militant group Hamas had attacked Israel, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking more than 200 hostage. Israel’s military response in the Gaza Strip has since intensified and reverberated across the Middle East.

For many in Latin America, the gesture of solidarity by Palestino, a club founded a century ago by Palestinian immigrants in Chile, exemplified how resonant the Palestinian cause is in the region—where many people have recent memories of their own military subjugation and Indigenous dispossession.

That often translates into foreign policy: Like most of the world, Latin American countries voted overwhelmingly last year in favor of two United Nations General Assembly resolutions seeking to pause Israel’s war, which by now has killed more than 26,000 Palestinians and displaced 90 percent of Gaza’s more than 2 million residents. (Both resolutions were rejected by the United States.)

Now, key Latin American countries are spurning Israel for its war conduct while also condemning Hamas for its attack. In early January, Brazil and Colombia endorsed South Africa’s genocide claim against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), as well as Pretoria’s petition for provisional measures to stop the war and ease Gaza’s humanitarian crisis. On Jan. 18, Chile and Mexico presented a referral to the International Criminal Court to reinforce its investigation into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel. These actions have put Latin America at sharp odds with the United States and some European nations.

LATIN AMERICA HAS A LONG HISTORY of sympathy for Palestine. During the Cold War, leftist movements battling repressive U.S.-backed dictatorships were natural allies of Palestinian liberation groups. Latin American and Palestinian exiles and refugees mixed in places such as East Germany and Cuba. The Palestine Liberation Organization trained the Sandinistas in Nicaragua as well as other rebel groups.

But then as now, nuance characterized Latin America’s approach toward the Middle East. Some leftists in the region, including Jewish activists, strongly identified with Zionist Israel’s socialist roots and viewed so-called “Turcos”—Palestinians and other Levantine Arabs who arrived decades earlier on Ottoman passports—with suspicion. Among the private enterprises targeted for state seizure under former Chilean President Salvador Allende were Palestinian-owned textile factories and a bank.

As the Cold War ended, Israel sought greater acceptance in Latin America. It courted the region’s Christian evangelicals and fragile governments in need of military equipment. That courtship only went so far. In the past year, Israel has veered solidly to the right, while much of Latin America has recently lurched to the left.

“A lot of young people in Latin American governments today … come from a background of activism in left-wing movements that identify with the Palestinian struggle,” said Alex Main, the international policy director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

This shift is evident in Colombia, a country that the Biden administration designated a major non-NATO ally. Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing president, who took office in 2022, regularly criticizes Israel and the United States despite decades of military cooperation with both countries that was established by his conservative and centrist predecessors.

In October 2023, when Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to deny food, water, fuel, and electricity to Gaza and compared Hamas fighters to “animals,” Petro drew a comparison to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews—earning a rebuke from Washington and an Israeli pledge “to stop security exports to Colombia.”

So far, there is no evidence that this has happened, said Wilder Alejandro Sánchez, the president of defense consultancy Second Floor Strategies in Washington; “I think Colombia’s Defense Ministry is hoping the media forgets the scandal so it can conduct business as usual with Israel,” he told Foreign Policy. But with Petro in office and Israel’s war in Gaza grinding on, that could prove difficult.

Other countries’ official postures have seesawed over time. In Argentina, the inauguration of new libertarian President Javier Milei—who harbors a deep affinity for Judaism and Israel—reflected a shift away from the stance of his leftist predecessor, whose government supported the first proposed U.N. cease-fire resolution before leaving office.

Argentina, home to Latin America’s largest Jewish community, has more emotional bonds to Israel than many of its neighbors. These intensified after a 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that the U.S. government blamed on Iran-backed Hezbollah. (U.S. federal prosecutors recently charged a member of the group with helping plan the attack.) Some Argentinians are among the hostages remaining in Gaza.

But the Palestinians evoke sympathy here, too. In an Oct. 17, 2023, open letter to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, Argentinian Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel accused Israel of genocide, called on the U.N. to create a humanitarian corridor into Gaza, and urged Hamas to release the hostages. In neighboring Uruguay, former President Pepe Mujica—another influential voice on the left—said that “Hamas wasn’t created by the Holy Spirit,” alluding to the ways in which Israeli policy helped fuel the rise of the group as a strategy to divide Palestinians. He also blamed fanaticism on both sides for crushing hopes for a Palestinian state.

In Brazil, far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro was an ally of Israel. (Bolsonaro’s evangelical Christian wife sported a T-shirt emblazoned with the Israeli flag to the polls in 2022.) But during Brazil’s October 2023 stint as the rotating president of the U.N. Security Council, Bolsonaro’s leftist successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said Gaza is “not a war. It’s a genocide” and pressed for a cease-fire resolution, only to be rebuffed by the United States.

In Mexico, the outgoing López Obrador administration’s support for the Palestinians has been tempered by its need to maintain cooperation with Washington on bilateral priorities such as immigration. Mexico City is also eager to win extradition from Israel of a Mexican fugitive tied to a 2014 massacre in the state of Guerrero. A handful of smaller Latin American countries transferred their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to curry favor with the United States and Israel, following in the Trump administration’s footsteps.

Still, in Latin America’s equation, “the overall sum of the spectrum does not favor Israel,” said Sarang Shidore, the director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

Flags of “Love For All: Forever Palestine 🇵🇸!”

IN CHILE, PRO-PALESTINIAN ACTIVISM could strain relations with the United States. It wouldn’t be the first time that Santiago stands up to Washington over its Middle East policy. In 2003, Chile refused to endorse a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the U.S. war in Iraq.

This time, in late October 2023, the Chilean government withdrew its ambassador from Tel Aviv, and Colombia and Honduras followed; Bolivia—also run by a left-wing government—cut ties with Israel altogether. As the war continued into the new year, the administration of Chilean President Gabriel Boric endorsed the ICJ’s Jan. 26 order for Israel to prevent acts of genocide and allow more aid into Gaza, as well as for other provisional measures to be taken while the court considers the merits of the genocide claim, a process that will take years.

Half a million Chileans have Palestinian roots, mostly in historically Christian villages around Bethlehem. Prominent Palestinian surnames appear in banking, commerce, politics, sports, and the arts. For more than a decade, Chilean politicians—including Boric, when he was serving in Congress—have traveled to the Palestinian territories and seen firsthand Palestinians’ plight under occupation. Center-right former Chilean President Sebastian Piñera recognized Palestinian statehood in 2011.

Boric has tilted further toward the Palestinians than his predecessors, even refusing to receive the credentials of Israel’s new ambassador in 2022. He recently described Gaza as “worse than Berlin in 1945.” In response, Chile’s Jewish community recently bowed out of participating in the government’s annual Holocaust commemoration. In an interview with Foreign Policy, Carolina Valdivia, Chile’s former deputy foreign minister, questioned Boric’s coherence on human rights given the administration’s tepid action on Cuba and Venezuela. “If human rights is a matter of principle, what about these other cases?” she asked.

But veteran Chilean ambassador Nelson Haddad, who is of Palestinian descent and heads a group of 100 Chilean attorneys that filed a war crimes claim against Israeli leaders at the International Criminal Court last December, backed Boric. “By defending Palestinian rights, the president is respecting a pillar of Chile’s foreign policy, the defense of human rights everywhere,” he told Foreign Policy.

Chile’s Palestinian advocacy is likely to hit a wall soon, however—thanks partly to Washington. In early January, the Chilean Senate’s human rights commission approved a bill banning companies from importing goods produced in Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. The revived proposal for a boycott, one of the world’s first, was derived from a list of more than 100 Israeli businesses tied to settlements that was issued in 2020 by then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights—and former Chilean President—Michelle Bachelet in a response to a 2016 request from the Human Rights Council.

The boycott is not directed at Israel itself, but rather at companies that do business in illegal settlements, and it is consistent with Chile’s overall commitment to human rights, one of the bill’s top supporters, conservative Sen. Sergio Gahona, told Foreign Policy. “We can’t permit companies that violate human rights by producing goods in illegally occupied territories to bring those goods into our country.”

The boycott would be largely symbolic for Chile. But the United States, a top Chilean trading partner, has conveyed its reproach for the bill—and the “global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement for unfairly singling out Israel,” a State Department spokesperson said, adding that “We have made this clear in Chile.”

Whatever happens with the measure, Washington and its European allies will have a harder time quashing perceptions of hypocrisy in Latin America and the global south more broadly. Yale University international law professor Oona Hathaway said that the United States and Europe “talk this great game about the importance of international law, and yet they are only holding some states to account and not others.”

By eroding trust, these inconsistencies could impede a range of Western geopolitical goals. It will be more difficult to win cooperation with Latin America on combatting climate change, redrawing strategic supply chains away from China, and keeping up international pressure on Russia over its war in Ukraine.

In the global south’s view of the latter, Hathaway told Foreign Policy, “picking sides means making an enemy of a very powerful state … so why should countries put themselves at risk for a set of ideals that will just be ignored the next time around?”

Perceived double standards in the West’s treatment of Russia and Israel for alleged human rights violations exemplify the case. One reason that countries in the global south have latched onto the unfolding international legal claims against Israel, Hathaway added, is that they offer an opportunity “to show that there isn’t a double standard, to actually hold Israel to account if, in fact, what it’s doing is in violation of international law.”

— Patricia Garip is a Freelance Journalist based in Chile 🇨🇱.