The Hankyoreh – December 14, 2023
Any Solution to the Current Crisis must Put Palestinians at the Center of Decision-Making
JOHN FEFFER
The greatest horror of the war between Israel and Gaza is that it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Israeli intelligence received a 40-page document a year before the October 7 attack that provided precise details of the plan of the militant Hamas organization to breach the security wall between Israel and Gaza.
Although the document was widely distributed among military and intelligence officials, the Israeli government did not act. It did not send reinforcements to the border. It did not modify the border wall itself. It dismissed the warnings of an intelligence analyst who reported in July on a Hamas training exercise that closely mirrored the details in the 40-page document. And then, two days before the October 7 attack, two Israeli commando companies were redeployed away from the Gaza border to the West Bank.
This extraordinary news has not brought down the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, even though the Israeli leader has long argued that only he and his far right-wing policies keep Israelis safe. By failing to disrupt the plans of Hamas, his government in fact put thousands of Israelis in harm’s way. Then, on October 7, the government dragged its feet inﾠresponse to the attack. And it has jeopardized more Israeli lives—particularly those of the hostages that Hamas took during its incursion—by launching an indiscriminately violent attack against Hamas and Palestinians in general in Gaza.
Whatever popularity Netanyahu had before October 7 has largely disappeared. According to a poll in November, only 4 percent of Israelis trust their prime minister. For some time, Netanyahu has also faced numerous charges of corruption, for which he could receive as much as a 10-year prison sentence. Remaining in office doesn’t provide him with immunity. But Netanyahu’s manipulations of the judicial system, which mobilized public sentiment against him prior to October 7, could help him evade prosecution in the future.
On top of his failure to keep Israeli citizens safe, Netanyahu now faces international condemnation for the ongoing attacks in Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces have killed Hamas fighters and innocent civilians alike. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, over 17,000 Palestinians have died so far in the two-month conflict, with another 6,000 people missing. Almost 70 percent of those who have died are women and children.
The Palestinian death toll is already more than 10 times the number of Israelis killed—1,200—on October 7.
The high death toll in Gaza results from a number of factors. First of all, Israel is dropping enormous bombs on crowded neighborhoods. It has blocked all but a trickle of humanitarian aid from making it into the country, putting an even larger number of Gazans at risk. In the Jabalia refugee camp alone, an estimated 100,000 people face starvation. Hamas, too, has contributed to the high casualty rate by embedding itself in the civilian infrastructure, but that’s no surprise for an organization that combines paramilitary operations with political governance and the provision of social services.
Although the Israeli military has warned Gazans to leave areas under attack, the residents of Gaza have nowhere to go as Israel expands the scope of its operations. The only reasonably safe place would be over the border in Egypt. But the Egyptian government has cooperated with the Israeli authorities by effectively sealing off Gaza. The border closure is a reminder of just how low a priority the Arab world has accorded Palestinians, even as various countries like Saudi Arabia pretend to lobby on behalf of the dispossessed.
Netanyahu faces international condemnation. Calling the Israeli prime minister “the butcher of Gaza,” Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has predicted that Netanyahu will suffer the same fate as Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. The Colombian government has promised to bring formal charges of war crimes against Netanyahu at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Hamas, too, will face charges of war crimes for the horrifying murders on October 7. But Israel, as a state, should face considerably greater penalties for its conduct. True, Israel is not a member of the ICC. But because Palestine became a member in 2015, Israeli actions there are prosecutable in the international body.
Israel claims that, for security purposes, it must eliminate Hamas as a threat. But with its indiscriminate attacks, Israel is radicalizing a new generation of Palestinians who no longer believe in engaging with Israeli authorities.
The United States wants the Palestinian Authority (PA) to replace Hamas as the government in Gaza, with the 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas remaining as the leader. But according to a former PA official, “a staggering 87 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believe that the PA is corrupt, 78 percent want Abbas to resign, and 62 percent believe that the PA is a liability.” Not surprisingly, support for Hamas has significantly increased in the West Bank since the latest war began.
Pressure on Israel to abide by a ceasefire is also increasing. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter in declaring the war in Gaza to be a threat to world peace. The United States and United Kingdom are so far opposing a humanitarian pause in the conflict, but the EU is increasingly on the side of the Arab world in demanding that Israel stop the carnage. Only eight countries—Austria, Czechia, Guatemala, Liberia, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay—joined the United States and Israel in opposing the most recent ceasefire resolution at the UN.
The Netanyahu government, unfortunately, has nothing to lose by continuing its attacks. It can’t sink any lower in the polls, and the vast majority of Israelis support the current effort to destroy Hamas. Although some members of the U.S. Congress want to put conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel and hundreds of synagogues and Jewish groups in the United States have urged the Biden administration to support a ceasefire, the U.S. president shows no signs of abandoning Netanyahu. Israel has faced firestorms of international criticism in the past and, even in the face of U.S. lobbying, refused to modify its policies in the Occupied Territories.
The Biden administration has tried to persuade Netanyahu that his actions in Gaza and failure to support a two-state solution are isolating Israel. In fact, the Biden administration’s policy on Israel is isolating the United States, particularly given the obvious disconnect between Washington’s condemnation of Russian war crimes and silence over Israeli war crimes.
Palestinians, meanwhile, are caught in the crossfire between a desperate Hamas and a determined IDF. A ceasefire, followed by a more durable peace, can save their lives, provide an opportunity to rebuild their neighborhoods, and offer them eventually an opportunity for some degree of self-governance. Right now, ordinary Palestinians are powerless to the point of erasure. Any solution to the current crisis must put Palestinians at the center of decision-making. They must be given the chance to shed their victim status and become architects of their own lives.
https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/english_editorials/1119948.html
The Intercept - December 11, 2023
This Is Not a War Against Hamas
The notion that the war would end if Hamas was overthrown or surrenders is as ahistorical as it is false.
Jeremy Scahill
THE EVENTS OF the past week should obliterate any doubt that the war against the Palestinians of Gaza is a joint U.S.–Israeli operation. On Friday, as the Biden administration stood alone among the nations of the world in vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was busy circumventing congressional review to ram through approval of an “emergency” sale of 13,000 tank rounds to Israel. For weeks, Blinken has been zipping across the Middle East and appearing on scores of television networks in a PR tour aimed at selling the world the notion that the White House is deeply concerned about the fate of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents. “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks, and we want to do everything possible to prevent harm to them,” Blinken declared on November 10. A month later, with the death toll skyrocketing and calls for a ceasefire mounting, Blinken assured the world Israel was implementing new measures to protect civilians and that the U.S. was doing everything it could to encourage Israel to employ a tiny bit more moderation in its widespread killing campaign. Friday’s events decisively flushed those platitudes into a swirling pool of blood.
Over the past two months, Benjamin Netanyahu has argued, including on U.S. news channels, “Our war is your war.” In retrospect, this wasn’t a plea to the White House. Netanyahu was stating a fact. From the moment President Joe Biden spoke to his “great, great friend” Netanyahu on October 7, in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led raids into Israel, the U.S. has not just supplied Israel with additional weapons and intelligence support, it has also offered crucial political cover for the scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory. It is irrelevant what words of concern and caution have flowed from the mouths of administration officials when all of their actions have been aimed at increasing the death and destruction.
The propaganda from the Biden administration has been so extreme at times that even the Israeli military has suggested they tone it down a notch or two. Biden falsely claimed to see images of “terrorists beheading children” and then knowingly relayed that unverified allegation as fact — including over the objections of his advisers — and publicly questioned the death toll of Palestinian civilians. None of this is by accident, nor can it be attributed to the president’s propensity to exaggerate or stumble into gaffes.
Everything we know about Biden’s 50-year history of supporting and facilitating Israel’s worst crimes and abuses leads to one conclusion: Biden wants Israel’s destruction of Gaza — with more than 7,000 children dead — to unfold as it has.
Israel’s Dystopian Game Show
The horrifying nature of the October 7 attacks led by Hamas do not in any way — morally or legally — justify what Israel has done to the civilian population of Gaza, more than 18,000 of whom have died in a 60-day period. Nothing justifies the killing of children on an industrial scale. What the Israeli state is engaged in has far surpassed any basic principles of proportionality or legality. Israel’s own crimes dwarf those of Hamas and the other groups that participated in the October 7 operations. Yet Biden and other U.S. officials continue to defend the indefensible by rolling out their well-worn and twisted notion of Israel’s right to “self-defense.”
If we apply that rationale — promoted by both the U.S. and Israel — to the 75 years of history before October 7, how many times throughout that period would the Palestinians have been “justified” in massacring thousands of Israeli children, systematically attacking its hospitals and schools? How many times would they have been acting in “self-defense” as they razed whole neighborhoods to rubble, transforming the apartment buildings Israeli civilians once called home into concrete tombs? This justification only works for Israel because the Palestinians can enact no such destruction upon Israel and its people. It has no army, no navy, no air force, no powerful nation states to provide it with the most modern and lethal military hardware. It does not have hundreds of nuclear weapons. Israel can burn Gaza and its people to the ground because the U.S. facilitates it, politically and militarily.
Despite all the airtime consumed by Blinken and other U.S. officials playing make-believe on the issue of protecting Palestinian civilians, what has unfolded on the ground is nothing less than a corralling of the population of Gaza into an ever-shrinking killing cage. On December 1, Israel released an interactive map of Gaza dividing it into hundreds of numbered zones. On the Israel Defense Forces’ Arabic language website, it encouraged Gaza’s residents to scan a QR code to download the map and to monitor IDF channels to know when they need to evacuate to a different zone to avoid being murdered by Israeli bombs or ground operations. This is nothing short of a dystopian Netflix show produced by Israel in which its participants have no choice to opt out and a wrong guess will get you and your children maimed or killed. On a basic level, it is grotesque to tell an entrapped population that has limited access to food, water, health care, or housing — and whose internet connections have repeatedly been shut down — to go online to download a survival map from a military force that is terrorizing them.
Throughout Blinken’s one-man parade proclaiming that the U.S. had made clear to Israel that it needs to protect civilians, Israel has repeatedly struck areas of Gaza to which it had told residents to flee. In some cases, the IDF sent SMS messages to people just 10 minutes before attacking. One such message read: “The IDF will begin a crushing military attack on your area of residence with the aim of eliminating the terrorist organization Hamas.” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Palestinians were being treated “like human pinballs – ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival.” Blinken attributed the continuously mounting pile of Palestinian corpses to “a gap” between Israel’s stated intent to lessen civilian deaths and its operations. “I think the intent is there,” he said. “But the results are not always manifesting themselves.”
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby got visibly irritated when asked on December 6 about Israel’s widespread killing of civilians. “It is not the Israeli Defense Forces strategy to kill innocent people. It’s happening. I admit that. Each one is a tragedy,” he said. “But it’s not like the Israelis are sitting around every morning and saying ‘Hey, how many more civilians can we kill today?’ ‘Let’s go bomb a school or a hospital or a residential building and just—and cause civilian casualties.’ They’re not doing that.” One problem with Kirby’s rant is that attacks against civilians, schools, and hospitals are exactly what Israel is doing—repeatedly. It is irrelevant what Kirby believes the IDF’s intent to be. For two months, numerous Israeli officials and lawmakers have said that their intent is to collectively strangle the Palestinians of Gaza into submission, death, or flight.
Kirby’s claims are also decimated by the revelations in a recent investigative report by the Israeli media outlets 972 and Local Call. The story, based on interviews with seven Israeli military and intelligence sources, described in detail how Israel knows precisely the number of civilians present in buildings it strikes and at times has knowingly killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians in order to kill a single top Hamas commander. “Nothing happens by accident,” one Israeli source said. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
As Israel ratchets up its killing machine, giving lie to all of Blinken’s pronouncements, it continues to wage a propaganda war that is consistent with its overarching campaign of mass killing. No lie is too obscene to justify the wholesale slaughter of people that Israel’s defense minister has called “human animals.” According to this campaign, there are no Palestinian children, no Palestinian hospitals, no Palestinian schools. The U.N. is Hamas. Journalists are Hamas. The prime ministers of Belgium, Spain, and Ireland are Hamas. Everything and everyone who dissents in the slightest from the genocidal narrative is Hamas.
Israel has quite understandably grown accustomed to many Western media outlets accepting its lies — no matter how outrageous or vile — when they are told about Palestinians. But even news outlets with a long track record of promoting Israel’s narrative unchecked have inched toward incredulity. Not because they have had a change of conscience, but because the Israeli propaganda is so farcical that it would be embarrassing to pretend it is otherwise.
Israeli forces have distributed multiple images and videos in recent days of Palestinian men stripped to their underwear — sometimes wearing blindfolds — and claimed they are all Hamas terrorists surrendering. These claims, too, fell apart under the most minimal scrutiny: Some of the men have been identified as journalists, shop owners, U.N. employees. In one particularly ridiculous piece of propaganda, a video filmed by IDF soldiers and distributed online depicted naked Palestinian captives laying down their alleged rifles.
Government spokesperson Mark Regev defended the practice of stripping detainees. “Remember, it’s the Middle East and it’s warmer here. Especially during the day when it’s sunny, to be asked to take off your shirt might not be pleasant, but it’s not the end of the world,” Regev told Sky News. “We are looking for people who would have concealed weapons, especially suicide bombers with explosive vests.” Regev was asked about this clear violation of the Geneva Conventions’s prohibition against publishing videos of prisoners of war. “I’m not familiar with that level of international law,” he said, adding (as though it matters) that he did not believe the videos were distributed by official Israeli government channels. “These are military aged men who were arrested in a combat zone,” he said.
Despite Israeli claims of mass surrenders by Hamas fighters, Haaretz reported that “of the hundreds of Palestinian detainees photographed handcuffed in the Gaza Strip in recent days, about 10 to 15 percent are Hamas operatives or are identified with the organization,” according to Israeli security sources. Israel has produced no evidence to support its claim that even this alleged small pool of the stripped prisoners were Hamas guerrillas.
So what we have here is both a violation of the Geneva Conventions and an immoral production in which Palestinian civilians are forced at gunpoint to play Hamas fighters in an Israeli propaganda movie.
No Path of Resistance
It has become indisputably clear over these past two months that there are not actually two sides to this horror show. Without question, the perpetrators who meted out the horrors against Israeli civilians on October 7 should be held accountable. But that is not what this collective killing operation is about. And journalists should stop pretending it is.
Any analysis of the Israeli state’s terror campaign against the people of Gaza cannot begin with the events of October 7. An honest examination of the current situation must view October 7 in the context of Israel’s 75-year war against the Palestinians and the past two decades of transforming Gaza first into an open-air prison and now into a killing cage. Under threat of being labeled antisemitic, Israel and its defenders demand acceptance of Israel’s official rationale for its irrational actions as legitimate, even if they are demonstrably false or they seek to justify war crimes. “You look at Israel today. It’s a state that has reached such a degree of irrational, rabid lunacy that its government routinely accuses its closest allies of supporting terrorism,” the Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani recently told Intercepted. “It is a state that has become thoroughly incapable of any form of inhibition.”
Israel has imposed, by lethal force, a rule that Palestinians have no legitimate rights of any form of resistance. When they have organized nonviolent demonstrations, they have been attacked and killed. That was the case in 2018-2019 when Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed protesters during the Great March of Return, killing 223 and wounding more than 8,000 others. Israeli snipers later boasted about shooting dozens of protesters in the knee during the weekly Friday demonstrations. When Palestinians fight back against apartheid soldiers, they are killed or sent into military tribunals. Children who throw rocks at tanks or soldiers are labeled terrorists and subjected to abuse and violations of basic rights — that is, if they are not summarily shot dead. Palestinians live their lives stripped of any context or any recourse to address the grave injustices imposed on them.
You cannot discuss the crimes of Hamas or Islamic jihad or any other armed resistance factions without first addressing the question of why these groups exist and have support. One aspect of this should certainly probe Netanyahu’s own role — extending back to at least 2012 — in propping up Hamas and facilitating the flow of money to the group. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud comrades in 2019.
But in the broader sense, a sincere examination of why a group such as Hamas gained popularity among Palestinians or why people in Gaza turn to armed struggle must focus on how the oppressed, when stripped of all forms of legitimate resistance, respond to the oppressor. It should be focused on the rights of people living under occupation to assert and defend their self-determination. It should allow Palestinians to have their struggle placed in the context of other historical battles for liberation and independence and not relegated to racist polemics about how all Palestinian acts of resistance constitute terrorism and there are not really any innocents in Gaza. Israel’s president said as much on October 13. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Isaac Herzog declared. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”
The notion that the Palestinians of Gaza could end all of their suffering by overthrowing Hamas is just as ahistorical and false as the oft-repeated claims that the war against Gaza would end if Hamas surrendered and released all Israeli hostages. “Look, this could be over tomorrow,” Blinken said December 10. “If Hamas got out of the way of civilians instead of hiding behind them, if it put down its weapons, if it surrendered.” That, of course, is a crass lie. With or without Hamas, Israel’s war against the Palestinians would endure precisely because of Blinken and his ilk in elite bipartisan U.S. foreign policy circles.
Throughout the years of U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid regime, it has consistently facilitated Israel’s “mowing the grass” in Gaza. This is not a series of periodic assaults on Hamas — it is a cyclical campaign of terror bombings largely aimed at civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Biden administration is not — and Biden personally has never been — an outside observer or a friend encouraging moderation during an otherwise righteous crusade. None of this slaughter would be occurring if Biden valued Palestinian lives over Israel’s false narratives and its bloody ethnonationalist wars of annihilation repackaged as self-defense. We should end the charade that this is an Israeli war against Hamas. We should call it what it is: a joint U.S.–Israeli war against the people of Gaza.
https://theintercept.com/2023/12/11/israel-hamas-war-civilians-biden/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter
Gaza is a Living Hell: UNRWA Commissioner Lazzarini
"The people of Gaza are running out of time and options... They are facing the darkest chapter of their history since 1948," he stated.
by Rahim Volkov
On Wednesday, the three-day Global Refugee Forum 2023 (GRF) kicked off in Geneva with the participation of some 4,000 delegates from 165 countries. Among them is Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
When speaking to attendees at this event, Lazzarini began by highlighting his direct personal experience of what is happening in Gaza as a result of the Israeli bombings.
"I arrived in Geneva last night. Straight from Gaza. My third time since the devastating war started. I have to say, it is a living hell," he says.
"Most of Gaza's population has been forcibly displaced, largely into the southern part of the Strip, Rafah. Rafah is now hosting well over a million people. It used to be home to 280,000 people. It lacks the infrastructure and resources to support such a population."
The UNRWA commissioner highlighted that the Israeli siege is generating an unprecedented humanitarian crisis whose most obvious aspect is the famine.
"The spaces around UNRWA buildings are congested with shelters and desperate, hungry people. Aid can no longer reach those who could not move to the south. There is no more food to buy, even for those who can pay. In the shops, the shelves are empty," Lazzarini said.
"The sight of a truck carrying humanitarian assistance now provokes chaos. People are hungry. They stop the truck and ask for food, and they eat it on the street. I witnessed this firsthand when I entered into Gaza on Monday evening. To call such scenes inhumane is an understatement. Civil order is breaking down."
In addition to all the logistical problems faced in Gaza, the provision of humanitarian assistance is becoming increasingly unsustainable as Israeli aggression affects even international cooperation officials.
"More than 130 UNRWA staff are confirmed killed. Many of our staff, who are themselves displaced, take their children to work with them to ensure that they are safe together or die together," Lazzarini stated.
"There is nowhere to feel safe in Gaza. Civilian infrastructure and UN facilities have not been spared by the shelling. I was horrified by images yesterday of an UNRWA school being blown up in the north of Gaza."
"The people of Gaza are running out of time and options, as they face bombardment, deprivation, and disease in an ever-shrinking space. They are facing the darkest chapter of their history since 1948."
At the GRF 2023 on Wednesday, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said he expected the event to provide an opportunity to "re-commit to some basic actions needed to respond to forced displacement: protecting people forced to flee, sharing the responsibility of those who host them... and striving to tackle the root causes of their flight."
Currently, there are a record 114 million refugees and displaced people in the world, he said, "whom persecution, human rights violations, violence, armed conflict and serious public disorder have forced from their homes."
He also highlighted the major human catastrophe now unfolding in the Gaza Strip, saying that tragically, there might be more civilian deaths and suffering and also further displacement that threatens the region.
"I cannot open the Global Refugee Forum without first echoing the call of the United Nations secretary general for an immediate and sustained humanitarian ceasefire, the release of hostages and the resumption of a genuine dialogue that once and for all ends the conflict and brings real peace and security to the people of Israel and Palestine," he said.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Gaza-is-a-Living-Hell-UNRWA-Commissioner-Lazzarini-20231214-0003.html?utm_source=planisys&utm_medium=NewsletterIngles&utm_campaign=NewsletterIngles&utm_content=16
Pressenza New York – December 14, 2023
Latin America and the Caribbean stand with Palestine: Israel viewed as a US proxy
The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, with a few notable exceptions, have been critical of Israel’s ongoing campaign of genocide in Gaza. Perhaps more than any other region, they have expressed their solidarity with Palestine. Most recognize that the partnership between US imperialism and Israeli Zionism applies not only to Palestine, but also to Israel’s role as attendant to US domination in this hemisphere.
By Roger D. Harris
President Gabriel Boric of Chile condemned Israeli’s attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. The largest Palestinian population outside of the Middle East (more properly West Asia) resides in Chile. Belize and Peru, likewise, joined the denunciation of Israel. Bolivia, meanwhile, has severed diplomatic relations with Israel, while Honduras and Colombia recalled their ambassadors.
Cuba had cut relations back in 1973 and Venezuela in 2009. Except for Panama, almost all of the region’s states recognize Palestine. Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela all have sent aid to Gaza. Even Argentina, with the largest Jewish population in the region, censured Israel over its violations of international law when hostilities first flared up.
Samuel Moncada, Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations, addressed the General Assembly on November 23: “It is repugnant to see how, despite the cruelty…the government of the United States of America and its satellites aim to justify the unjustifiable.”
Cuba and Iran called for a global coalition to protect the rights of Palestinians on December 4, noting that the world community has failed to stop the US-backed genocide.
A month before the October 7 offensive by Hamas, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia had presciently taken the occasion of the opening of the United Nations session to call for a united world effort at achieving peace in Israel-Palestine (along with Ukraine).
Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador and ironically of Palestinian heritage, stood out in his support of Israel among the regional heads of state. That is, until the militantly pro-Zionist Javier Milei assumed the presidency of Argentina two months after the most recent eruption of aggressions.
Henchman for the hegemon
The head of Colombia publicly criticizing Israel would have been unthinkable until Gustavo Petro won the presidency in 2022. The former M19 guerilla turned center-left politician was the first president from the portside in the entire history of Colombia. Pre-Petro, Colombia was known as Washington’s closest client in the region, the largest recipient of US military aid, and the only NATO global partner in Latin America.
Back in 2013, then Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos reflected on his country’s status as the regional equivalent to the US’s proxy state in the Middle East. He proclaimed that he was proud that Colombia is considered the “Israel of Latin America.” Indeed, Israel had an extensive role as henchman for the US hegemon in Colombia. The right-wing linked Colombian military and paramilitaries had long been closely intermeshed with the Zionist state.
The United Self-Defenses of Colombia (AUC in its Spanish initials), a drug trafficking cartel with a reputed 10,000-20,000 combatants at its peak, was one of the largest paramilitary groups in South America. The AUC was used by the US-allied official Colombian military to do its dirty work against left campesino and worker organizations. AUC militaries were trained by Israeli operatives. Some fifty of its most promising cadre received “scholarships” to Israel. Operating out of Guatemala, the Israeli arms supplier GIRSA sold Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition to the AUC paramilitaries in Colombia.
Another Latin American country with a closely intertwined relationship with Israel was Nicaragua before the Sandinista revolution. During the long US-backed Somoza dictatorship, Israel maintained a “special relationship” with this dynasty of ruthless autocrats. In the last days of the dictatorship, the US cut off arms supplies in response to public revulsion over atrocities committed by Somoza’s forces. Undaunted, Israel continued to supply them with military equipment. Then, when the US instigated the counterinsurgency after the successful Sandinista-led national liberation, Israel again served as supplier of the contras. Paralleling the Somoza-Israel bond were the Sandinista-Palestine ties, which continue to this day.
Israel’s partnership with US imperialism in the region
For the 31st time in November, the UN nearly unanimously condemned the US blockade of Cuba for its devasting effects on civilians and as a violation of the UN Charter. The vote would have been unanimous except for “no” votes cast by the US and Israel along with an abstention from Ukraine. The latter, which is now essentially a US dependency, is a newcomer. But Tel Aviv, on the other hand, has consistently stood with Washington in support of its coercive and illegal economic measures that have created a dire crisis in Cuba.
In fact, Israel has served as Washington’s partner in training reactionary death squads and supplying repressive militaries throughout the region for decades. Al Jazeera reported that Israel has trained, supplied, and advised militaries in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela in addition to Colombia and Nicaragua.
Not only was Israel entangled with the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, but it had a similar relationship to the 29-year Duvalier dynasty in Haiti, selling arms for the dictators’ repressive forces. Ditto for the 35-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, the 17-year Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and the military dictatorships in Argentina and Brazil. Likewise, Israel was the supplier of arms and trainer of death squads in the “dirty” wars in Guatemala and El Salvador. In all these grisly ventures, Tel Aviv was joined at the hip with Washington.
The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) explains that many right-leaning Latin American countries see a “close military relationship with Israel as a political asset in restoring or maintaining military and political ties with Washington.”
When reactionary regimes in the region need coercive muscle for hire, Israel is a prime choice. After right-winger David Noboa won the Ecuadorian presidency last month, he called in Israel to help restore government control of its prison system, which had been taken over by criminal gangs. Israel is also being tapped to design maximum security prisons in Ecuador.
According to Israeli psychologist Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi’s The Israeli Connection, “Israel is generally admired in Latin American military circles for its macho image of firmness, ruthlessness, and efficiency…Latin American military establishment is where most of Israel’s friends are found and where Israel continues to cultivate support.”
Case in point is the far-right Javier Milei, who assumed the presidency of Argentina on December 10. He campaigned on the promise to realign the second largest economy in South America with the US and Israel and away from its largest trading partners Brazil and China. On his first trip abroad after his election victory, Milei went to the US where he made what was described as a pilgrimage to the grave of an ultra-orthodox Jewish rabbi and announced his intention to convertfrom Catholicism to Judaism. The self-described anarcho-capitalist had accused the Argentina-born pope of being a communist and a false prophet.
Palestine’s friends and foes
Support of Israeli Zionism is a unifying issue for the fractious far right in the region, where virulent antisemites buddy up with Jewish nationalists, wrapping themselves – literally as in the case of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro – in the Israeli flag.
When the now disgraced and exiled Juan Guaidó first got the nod from the US to self-declare himself “interim president” of Venezuela in 2019, he staged the announcement on a street corner in Caracas with an Israeli flag flying behind him. Just as the red flag has been adopted as the banner for the left, the pennant of Israeli has become the insignia of the right. That blue and white banner can be seen at right-wing political rallies and at market stands owned by evangelicals throughout the region.
A growing evangelical Christian movement views Israel as a crucial part of their theology of the “end times” and is becoming an influential political force in the electorates of Guatemala (42%), Costa Rica (26%), Brazil (25%), Venezuela (22%), and elsewhere. The evangelicals have yet to exert a significant pro-Zionist political influence in the region. But that potential should not be discounted as events unfold.
On December 12, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a ceasefire in Gaza. Only Guatemala and Paraguay in Latin America voted “nay,” joining the US and Israel, while Uruguay, Argentina, and Panama abstained. The rest of the region united with the world supermajority of 153 nations supporting the resolution.
For now, Latin America and the Caribbean remain a bastion of support for Palestinian freedom. Palestine’s cause is popular with countries striving for independence from the US. Factors contributing to that stance are large Arab diasporas in the region, small pro-Zionist Jewish populations, and no powerful lobbies like AIPAC. For many, the struggle to assert national self-determination under US hegemony finds a kindred affinity with the cause of Palestine.
Roger D. Harris is with the human rights group Task Force on the Americas, founded in 1985.
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