A new wave of right-wing governments are deepening ties with Israel across Latin America, overturning the “pink tide” that drove foreign policy in solidarity with Palestine in the continent for many years.
In few places is this more surprising than Chile, home to the largest Palestinian community outside of the Arab world and North Africa.
President Jose Antonio Kast was elected in December following a campaign centred on countering immigration, bolstering national security and cutbacks on public spending.
An admirer of Chile’s notorious dictator Augusto Pinochet, his rhetoric mirrors that of Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding Javier Milei, El Salvador’s millennial dictator Nayib Bukele, and Donald Trump, whose approach to US hegemony in the Americas has been dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine” by various observers.
Alongside newly-elected leaders in Bolivia, Costa Rica and Honduras, Kast’s adherence to this new right-wing order includes a haste to renew relations with Israel, despite its genocidal war in the occupied Gaza Strip.
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“And that, indeed, is a problem for the Palestinian community in Chile,” said Ricardo Marzuca, a Chilean-Palestinian historian in the Center of Arab Studies at the University of Chile.
A diplomatic reversal
Former President Gabriel Boric was a staunch critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians since October 2023.
His government recalled the Chilean ambassador, withdrew the country’s military and defence attachés from Tel Aviv and joined South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Shortly before leaving office in March, Boric sponsored four UN resolutions opposing Israel’s war crimes in occupied Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights.
He also proposed a bill to prohibit imports from the occupied territories and backed Spain’s proposal to end arms trade with Israel. However, despite his efforts, the bill did not pass, nor did Chile follow the example of the Spanish parliament, which enshrined a comprehensive arms embargo against Israel into law.
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“Boric was arguably the Chilean president who showed the strongest symbolic and political support for Palestine,” said Stephanie Elias Musalem, executive director of the Palestine Information Centre in Santiago. “Yet most of his measures lacked long-term institutional safeguards, making them vulnerable to reversal.”
Then along came Kast, who once described Boric’s approach towards Israel as “irresponsible and markedly ideological”.
Within weeks he had authorised Israeli weapons manufacturers to participate in FIDAE, a military and aerospace fair, thus overturning a ban on Israeli companies that had been implemented by the former government.
On 8 May, during a bilateral meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Costa Rica, Kast confirmed plans to return Chile’s ambassador to Israel within a few weeks. They reportedly also discussed “restoring Israel-Chile relations and further strengthening the bond between the two nations – in areas including agriculture, health, AI and technology.”
The Palestinian Community of Chile categorically condemned the meeting.
“Chile has historically maintained a strong connection to the Palestinian cause,” Elias told Middle East Eye. Even former centre-right President Sebastian Pinera recognised the State of Palestine in 2011 and became the first Chilean leader to visit Ramallah on an official state visit.
That said, “let’s not forget that Chile has maintained a strong material relationship with Israel since the 1970s,” said Elias.
In 1976, following US restrictions on military aid and arms sales to Chile due to human rights concerns, Israel became one of the country’s main military suppliers.
Decades later, despite his rhetorical commitment to “a real, secure and permanent peace”, Pinera expanded economic, technological, security and defence ties with Israel, with trade totalling $281m in 2018.
This has always been “a core contradiction,” Elias said.
The president’s men
Another indicator of Kast’s deepening ties to Israel is the company he keeps.
Eitan Bloch is an international advisor on the second floor of La Moneda, the official office of the president. At only 32 years old, the Argentine is well-connected to Zionist circles in Chile, previously serving at the Israeli embassy.
In December, he joined a delegation of Chilean senators to Israel, led by the Jewish Community of Chile (CJCH), where they met Herzog and various experts in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.
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“The second floor is made up of the president’s most trusted people,” explained Elias. As such, “Bloch is considered one of the key architects behind the administration for foreign policy.”
Kast has also appointed Gabriel Zaliasnik, a self-declared Zionist, as Chile’s ambassador to Israel. “I cannot conceive of a Jew not being one,” he said during an interview in 2020.
A former president of the CJCH, an institution that supports the entrenchment of diplomatic relations between Chile and Israel, Zaliasnik has regularly criticised Boric and the so-called “radical left”, arguing that it “embraces Islamic jihadism”.
He also said that Israel’s crimes in Gaza constitute that of “any democracy defending itself against terrorism”.
The Palestinian Community of Chile has criticised the appointment, calling it “a very serious decision, contrary to the national interest, incoherent with Chile’s history of defending international law, and deeply offensive to the hundreds of thousands of Chileans of Palestinian origin”.
Palestinians in Chile
By renewing relations with Israel, Kast also threatens to frustrate a subsect of his own electorate: right-wing Palestinians.
Predominantly Christians from Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour, the first-wave of Palestinian migrants arrived in Chile long before the 1948 Nakba, which saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forcibly expelled from their lands by Zionist militias.
Fleeing economic instability and forced conscription under Ottoman rule, these early migrants often began as peddlers, going on to establish successful businesses, enter politics and establish a cultural legacy that endures to this day.
‘Let’s not forget that Chile has maintained a strong material relationship with Israel since the 1970s’
– Stephanie Elias Musalem, Palestine Information Centre in Santiago
“Just as Chilean society is tremendously diverse, the Palestinian community in Chile is too,” said Marzuca. It spans the political spectrum, from former communist presidential candidate Daniel Jadue on the left to Chilean Ambassador to Mexico, Francisco Chahuán, on the right.
“The point that unites them all is a commitment to the Palestinian cause,” Marzuca told MEE.
Marzuca said that while the left recognises Palestine from “an internationalist perspective which emphasises human rights, the fight against imperialism, and the liberation of all oppressed peoples”, the right is “uncomfortable with discourses that link the Palestinian struggle to the liberation struggles for Indigenous rights in Latin America.”
They hold “a more restricted, exhausted view of Palestinian national liberation with the goal of creating a Palestinian state”, he added.
Nonetheless, Marzuca said, they have “managed to build a cross-party bloc (the Chilean-Palestinian Inter-Parliamentary Committee), made up of members of parliament and senators from both the Chilean left and right who stand in solidarity with Palestine”.
Kast’s support for Israel may thus create “a contradiction for many right-wing sectors of the Palestinian community”.
Abducted activists
Meanwhile, an active community of Chilean-Palestinians are working tirelessly for justice.
Nelson Hadad is a Chilean-Palestinian lawyer representing the four Chilean activists who were illegally intercepted and abducted onboard the Global Sumud Flotilla on 18 May. “We are going to file a criminal complaint with the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity,” he told MEE.
“An illegal detention has been committed in international waters… this cannot go unpunished,” he added.
‘The point that unites the diverse Palestinian community in Chile is a commitment to the Palestinian cause’
– Ricardo Marzuca, Chilean-Palestinian historian
Hadad said the victims were “subjected to torture, interrogated with physical violence, beatings and sexual violence” at a detention centre in Ashdod, Israel.
In response to the abduction, the Chilean government expressed its displeasure to Israel’s ambassador and urged the Israeli government to guarantee the detainees’ rights and secure their immediate release.
Hadad confirmed the assistance of the Chilean government, particularly the Chilean consuls in Tel Aviv and Ankara.
But Macarena Chahuan, a Chilean-Palestinian journalist and activist onboard the Sumud during the first interception on 30 April, did not have the same experience.
“The government did not help me at all,” she told MEE, adding that her return and reception was coordinated entirely by the flotilla’s Chile delegation.
“The government cannot remain silent when Chilean citizens are deprived of their liberties in international waters,” said Maurice Khamis Massu, president of the Palestinian Community of Chile, which publicly condemned the government’s response in both instances as ambiguous and insufficient.
“This is about the obligation of the state to protect its citizens,” he told MEE. After all, “what we defend is not an ideology, but the pillars of our international coexistence: unrestricted respect for international law, international humanitarian law, and human rights.”
In the case of Palestine, “this is not a matter of left or right, but rather a state policy that Chile has firmly maintained for the last 50 years.”
