Palestine as seen from Latin America
- Moderator Arely Medina
- *
Receipt: October 24, 2024
Acceptance: November 11, 2024
is a sociologist graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, Master in Social Sciences and PhD in Social Sciences from the same university. D. in Social Sciences from the same university. conicet. He teaches at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad del Salvador.
holds a degree in International Relations from the School of Political and Social Sciences of the University of California, Berkeley. unamM.A. in Asian and African Studies with a specialization in the Middle East from El Colegio de México. Her recent publications include the article "The strengthening of authoritarianism in Saudi Arabia: the logic of two-level games under the de facto neo-patrimonial government of Muhammad bin Salman" in the journal Arabic Studies Shelf. Her research interests include Palestinian popular art, cultural diplomacy and creative economy in the Middle East and women's struggles in Palestine.
holds a PhD in Social Sciences (flaccidArgentina). Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad Arturo Prat, Chile. Director of Otros Cruces.
Introduction
Historically, Palestine has been traversed by colonialist dynamics: expansionism, systematic violence, Zionist ideology and epistemicide. These dynamics have been accompanied by a web of practices that seek to sustain themselves in discourses that combine the political interests of Western hegemonies with theological and religious overtones. The partition of Palestine in 1947 as a resolution for the Jewish people after World War II, but as an imposition for the Palestinian people, was constructed with an occupation of 56% of the territory for the nascent state of Israel. This colonization was gradually justified with ideas such as that of Theodor Herzl (2004) in his book El Estado judíowhere he proposes that Palestine, being the biblical land, is the territory destined for the Jewish people. In addition, the spirit of protectionism towards the Jews, seen as victims of the Holocaust, has developed, paradoxically, Zionist attitudes, that is to say, ethno-cultural nationalist attitudes that promote and encourage the legitimization of the State of Israel. It has also allowed the justification of the territorial advance of the State of Israel, in such a way that, at the beginning of the 20th century, it was possible to justify its territorial advance. xxi occupation reached 85% of the territory.
In response to this, the Palestinian resistance is not only inside the occupied territory, but also outside it, where there is a palestinity as an orientation symbol of generalized rejection of coloniality and oppression of peoples. In recent months, to be precise since October 2023, following the territorial advance of the Israeli armed forces in what remains of the Palestinian territory, we have seen countless mobilizations unfold in the public space and on social networks on the situation of Palestine, whether in favor of this people or against it, intensifying pro-Palestinian, Zionist, anti-Semitic and even Islamophobic notions.
These mobilizations reveal the use of the political ideology that shaped Zionism, a colonizing instrument for the settlement of the territory of historic Palestine, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of this people and a discourse of hatred. This ideology is crystallized, for example, in Christian Zionism and political practices in different countries, as well as in mobilizations of civil society, organized academics and religious groups that may be for or against this ideology.
Latin America has not been left out of the diversity of actions and pronouncements. While some Latin American countries - Cuba with Miguel Díaz Canel, Brazil with Lula da Silva, Bolivia with Luis Arce, Chile with Gabriel Boric, Colombia with Gustavo Petro and Venezuela with Nicolás Maduro - have spoken out strongly against and some have taken diplomatic actions such as disapproving the occupation of Palestine, the rest of the countries have only called for a ceasefire, inclined at first to condemn the initial actions of Hamas and some have even supported Israel. It has been the civilian population: students, teachers, religious groups such as Muslims, who have organized to take to the streets, universities and social networks to call for humanitarian law, to speak out against Israel's genocidal actions and to encourage universities to break relations with this State. To this has been added a decrease in the indifference of Latin American states with a series of statements in social networks against the military escalation, the displacement of families and the violation of international law.
To get some perspectives from Latin America, we invite experts from Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Argentina to reflect on the current situation of Israel's occupation of Palestine and the deployment of actions in the area.
What is your opinion regarding the current situation between Israel and Palestine as seen from Latin America?
We believe that the opinion on the Israeli occupation in Palestine from Latin America has not been heterogeneous, but varies according to the social and political groups. Although in Latin America we consume American and European cultural products that can produce pro-Zionist narratives, some countries such as Colombia or Brazil have joined a critical view of the occupation and solidarity with the Palestinian people. This is probably due to the fact that in Asia, Africa and Latin America we have experienced colonization processes that have resulted in massacres, land dispossession, marginalization and discrimination of people based on their ethnicity and skin color. This common past, as well as a growing interest in learning about the situation in Palestine, has led, among other things, to people deciding to support and show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. At the popular level, Axios (2024) reported that "40% of the population in Latin America supported Palestine while only 16% said that the United States should continue to support Israel".
On the other hand, we also think that from the Global South we have already begun to address "the power to represent" from another way of doing academia and consciousness, where the power of arms and military interventions face not only the armed resistance of Palestinian groups, but also the "power to narrate" these scenarios in an alternative way to that of the conservative media. This multi-directionality of being able to narrate is what allows us to construct grammars and semiotics that break the binary and show diverse ways of describing and understanding the world beyond the historical construction of the demonization of resistance in its diverse modalities.
When the so-called "Arab Spring" occurred, many Latin Americans observed it as a period very similar to what Latin America experienced in the 1990s, when dictatorships were crumbling and that their end might be experiencing political change. We now know that this has not been the case and that we are facing more forms of global violence, in which Palestine is seen as a global symbol of injustice and in which Latin America, without intermediaries, is standing in solidarity with this global injustice.
The Hamas attack left no country indifferent. At the time, diplomatic statements as well as organized civil society groups unanimously condemned the humanitarian horror, and some supported the legitimate right of the State of Israel to defend itself. However, over the course of a year of escalating conflict, these positions have evolved from initial support to severe criticism, although some nations remain allied with Netanyahu's extreme right-wing government, such as the pro-Israel militancy of Guatemala, El Salvador, the Milei government, for example. On the other hand, some countries have hardened their stance, accepting more and more that the situation has gone from defense to revenge, collective punishment and genocide; Colombia and Brazil have suffered the consequences, commercial and diplomatic, for that. This divergence of positions evidences, on the one hand, the varying degrees of influence of Israeli foreign policy in some countries, as well as the decisive interference of the Jewish and Palestinian communities, although the latter presents a greater asymmetry of incidence.
On the other hand, diplomatic positions of support for Israel are echoed in sectors of Christianity (Mori, 2023) that use biblical hermeneutics to exhort society to pray for the Jewish people, always victimized and that legitimize, in the name of the defense of the land of Jesus, the actions of the Israeli government (De Comunicação Conic, n.d.). This position is frequent in the Brazilian religious milieu, which emphasizes in a minor way the devastation caused by the Israeli military occupation and the suffering of the Palestinian people. Obviously, dissonant voices emerge among progressive Christians who recognize the historical complexity of the Israeli colonizing project that, since 1948, has made impossible a Palestinian state (which was stillborn) and has prevented peace in the region (Paiva, 2024).
The situation in the Middle East symbolizes the perverse symptom of modern colonial logic. It evokes a series of terms that were thought to have been overcome after the painful experiences that have marked the last century. xxgenocide, invasion, colonialism, concentration camps, mass murder. Gaza today represents "the return of the repressed" in modernity, the perverse sample of how these effects return, but now from the most contradictory paradox: as necessary acts for the defense and construction of Western principles that, at the time, were raised as a reaction to those same events in the midst of a context of war and genocide, as experienced in the middle of the last century. Here the idea of "collateral damage" is absolutely outdated and annulled: in Gaza, the murder of innocents ceased to be an accidental sequel to be part of an intentional gear (ethnic cleansing), motivated by a theological-religious-political intersection that mixes ancestry and modernity, from a vernacular purity -as claimed by Zionism-, which became the point of origin of what we understand today as the founding principles of modern politics and culture (Slavodsky, 2014: 39-66).
Hence, as the Chilean philosopher Rodrigo Karmy says, "everything is Gaza" (Karmy, 2024). The situation in the Middle East is part of a colonial and geopolitical genealogy, which has its roots in the Latin American region (Panotto, 2024). This context is part of a geopolitical engineering that has been unfolding for decades and that directly intervenes in decision-making bodies, both at the national and regional levels. The defense of the actions of the State of Israel (not only since October 7, 2023, but for a long time) is the symbol par excellence for the legitimization of an exclusionary, colonial and racist policy, which today is part of the Latin American political scenario (Rabinovich, 2024; Hurd, 2025). We see it in very concrete cases of leaders such as Javier Milei in Argentina, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States, presidents who have taken the Zionist flag to frame local and international agendas. But also in broad networks of lobby The political, civil society and religious groups that operate in multilateral organizations, whether they promote this agenda or are financed by Zionist funds for the organization of events and the publication of materials. In other words, the extension of current political conservatism in the region has organic links, both in ideological and institutional terms, with Zionist organizations, networks, political and diplomatic bodies.
Beyond my views on the conflict and its immediate and long-term causes, I consider it important to make references to how the current escalation of the war takes place in a context of construction of new political identities in Argentina, as these processes are interrelated with the events in the Middle East.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is projected, in Argentina, within a context marked by deep political transformations where Israel and Judaism are part of the symbolic and semantic fabric of the right-wing libertarian project. The current President Javier Milei displayed Jewish symbolism during his presidential campaign (in this sense, the parallel with expressions of Christian Zionism in other Latin American countries can be seen), sought to identify himself with Judaism, even affirming his intention to convert to that religion, showed himself close to important organizations of the Jewish community and expressed his unconditional support to the State of Israel, stating that Argentina would abandon its historical position of neutrality in the Meso-Oriental conflict.
It should be noted that this politicization of Jewishness is not completely disruptive. After the attacks on the Israeli embassy and on the amia In the 1990s, Jewishness burst into the public arena and became a political fact. Politics and Judaism could no longer run their separate ways. It should be noted that, although Milei used the symbol of the shofar in his presidential campaign, this symbol had already been placed in the public space through the meetings aimed at claiming justice for the attack on the amia.
Libertarianism has become an identity project aimed at building new subjectivities. A complex project, certainly, in which economic liberalism coexists, and is in tension, with social conservatism. For this right wing under construction, Israel is a focus of identification; thus, it extends the range of its actions to the global scale by proposing itself as the vanguard of a cultural battle against what it defines as "progressivism" or "cultural communism". Therefore, it perceives the events in the Middle East in the key of that same civilizational, cultural and pro-Western battle. In this framework, Israel is admired both for its military capacity and for its performance in the field of advanced technology.
It should be noted that, in the global libertarian camp, there is no established consensus on how to interpret the escalation of violence in Palestine-Israel. While Futerman and Block (2024) argue that Israel's existence and its "right to defense" are akin to the tenets of libertarianism, Hans-Hermann Hoppe (January 2, 2024) takes the opposite side by criticizing Milei himself for his foreign policy.1
How do you observe the performance or reaction of organized civil society, religious groups or Christian-Zionism?
The actions and reactions of organized civil society, as well as those of religious groups and Christian-Zionism, in relation to the situation between Palestine and Israel, have been equally diverse and multifaceted. On the one hand, several organizations in Latin America have expressed their support to the Palestinian people against the Israeli occupation and genocide, for example, the International Alliance of Solidarity with Palestine, the Network of Solidarity with Palestine, among others. In the case of Mexico we have the Mexican Committee of Solidarity with Palestine and the Academic Group for Palestine, which functions as a network of teachers dedicated to organizing solidarity activities with the Palestinian people. It is also necessary to follow up with religious groups that have condemned the occupation, including Jewish communities. It is worth noting that support for Palestine has been expressed in various ways ranging from demonstrations and marches; organization of cultural events and awareness campaigns; collaboration with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel (bds), and joint work with international organizations such as Amnesty International.
On the other hand, it is mainly evangelical and Christian-Zionist religious groups that have shown support for Israel, such as the Zionist Federation of Argentina and the Israelite Association of Chile. These groups are based on theological perspectives, as they justify Israel's actions by promoting the idea that the establishment of the State of Israel is part of a divine plan and that those who compose it are the chosen people. The activities of civil society have been diverse, showing that there is interest and constant dialogue on the situation in Palestine.
We note that reactions range from justifying the Israeli government for its right to legitimate self-defense, to indignation at the disproportionate response, which has transformed a war into genocide. The first side is supported by conservative right-wing and extreme right-wing politicians and religious leaders, the second is driven by social movements and left-wing political groups. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations held in Brazilian cities expand anti-Zionist coalitions, establish links with other similar groups in Latin America and denounce the various persecutions suffered by their activists in social networks (Campos Lima, 2024). Conservative religious media in Brazil adduce theological devices that push the importance of Israel as the promised land and of the Jewish people as God's chosen people. However, believers do not distinguish between biblical Israel, modern secular Israel and the Israeli government. That is why many evangelicals not only support the Jewish people, but also the actions of the extreme right wing represented by Netanyahu. These believers are the ones who resonate in their social networks the fake news about the dimensions of the conflict (Casséte, 2023), misrepresentations of the diplomatic positions of the Brazilian government (Casséte, 2023b), condemnations of anti-Semitism against anyone who criticizes the policies of the Israeli government, suspicions that the defense of the Palestinian people is anti-Zionist and, therefore, anti-Christian (Capobianco, 2023), and lies about the massacres in the Gaza Strip. Thus, Christian Zionism, as a political strategy of support to the State of Israel, finds an important ally in the religious media and in the evangelical sector, which is growing significantly in the country (Diniz, 2024).
My field of work is Latin American evangelical groups. For some time now, the incidence of Christian Zionism has been traced in the region (Carranza, Campos Machado, Mariz, 2023); the reaction of some of its conservative expressions has not been different from what we have seen on other occasions, in hinge situations or moments of crisis in the Middle East. Immediately millenarian alarms have been raised, which place the post October 7 events in the framework of a predestined eschatology from an erroneous reading of the biblical text, functional to the onto-theological location of Western colonialism in its modern and North American version (the so-called "manifest destiny"). Perhaps a singularity in this context are the effects of some theological frameworks that have strongly intervened in the Latin American evangelical church during the nineties, such as the so-called missiology of the 10/40 window, the "spiritual warfare" or also the so-called "theology of dominion". These theologies, very much in vogue in some conservative mega-churches during the nineties, have prepared the ground for the political-theological support of the State of Israel by many conservative evangelical groups.
Another unique element of this context is related to the change in the type of advocacy of some evangelical groups. In contrast to the 1990s, when we see an action more linked to church leaders and pastors in favor of public recognition of the churches, today we can see a much broader deployment of types of institutionalism and public intervention articulated with Zionist organizations. Thus, when we speak of evangelical support for these agendas, we are not referring only to churches, pastors or denominations, but to regional networks and faith-based organizations composed of professionals linked to the evangelical field, but not necessarily to a particular church, with very specific political agendas. In the same way, they do not respond to a work related to the visibility of ecclesial spaces, but to a commitment to make public their voice from the faith with respect to these specific geopolitical problems.
Of the Latin American countries, Argentina is the one that contains the largest number of Jewish citizens. Zionism has been a definitive mark in the construction of the identity of these citizens (Elkin Laikin, 2014). However, adherence to Zionism did not imply a disengagement with local or regional realities. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, there were interesting dynamics of relationship between Zionism, the New Left and identification with the causes of national liberation in the region (Brodsky, 2015).
For its part, the Arab, Palestinian and anti-Zionist cause used to be mobilized by sectors of the Catholic, nationalist and anti-Semitic right, in conjunction with representatives of the Arab League (Senkman, 1986: 51-56). Those who warned about the Zionist threat in the region and showed solidarity with Arab causes in the fifties and sixties also denounced communist and Castroist penetrations in the country and defended Christian values that they perceived as threatened by Freemasonry and Judaism.
Palestinian immigrants constituted a tiny percentage in relation to the Syrian-Lebanese, so the Palestinian cause was channeled by associations defined as Arab. If we talk about the Palestinian diaspora in Argentina, this was configured around the Federation of Argentine-Palestinian Entities, founded only in the eighties by Chilean-Palestinian exiles. The Federation participates in a sort of constellation of the Palestinian cause that includes Muslim organizations, leftist political parties and human rights associations.
Parallel to the leftistization of the Palestinian cause, there is a trend towards the rightistization of the Zionist cause. By the end of the century xxIn the last few years, the left-wing Zionist movements were already losing relevance. At the same time, the religious-orthodox organizations, in solidarity with the policies of the Likud party, were gaining visibility. At the same time, a right-wing Zionist movement such as Betar, which had gone through a period of deep crisis in the country, has re-emerged and today constitutes a space of socialization for a group of Argentine-Jewish youth who define themselves as right-wing.
The construction of a definition on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is invested, in Argentina, by the clothing of political identities. The conservative libertarian right, nowadays in government, mobilizes a pro-Israeli discourse without nuances. The left, on the other hand, turns to the defense of the Palestinian cause and goes so far as to ascribe to a religious language that, in theory, would not be part of its semantic scaffolding. It is striking to hear Trotskyist militants calling for a secular Palestinian state, but with its capital in Jerusalem, thus ascribing to a religious perspective of the construction of the state territory, which causes stinging among many Jews who share the struggles of the left and who feel abandoned by it.
How can we interpret the pro-Palestinian student organization and the reactions of the universities, student body and state intervention (police)?
Various pro-Palestinian student organizations in different universities in Latin America and around the world have openly shown their political and social commitment to the resistance and struggle of the Palestinian people, focusing on the defense of human rights, social justice and the decolonization process. Student actions such as demonstrations, awareness campaigns, encampments, demands to break agreements with Israeli institutions, among other actions, have led institutions around the world to question and/or break agreements with Israeli institutions. For example, the Central University of Venezuela has suspended agreements with these institutions and others are reviewing their agreements, such as El Colegio de México and the unamThe company has also promoted academic free speeches ranging from the search for a cease-fire and the implementation of international laws to boycotts.
One of the arguments that stands out in the debate on the severance of relations with Israel is that the Israeli war industry has been linked to the education sector. In this sense, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem not only deliberately supports the Israeli Defense Forces, but also has academic programs focused on this sector, such as Talpiot, Havatzalot, Tzameret, etc., which form and train future assets, in addition to using technological advances for the military sector (Taraki, 2015).
However, although there have been universities and ngo Israeli students who encourage dialogue and help document Palestinian human rights violations have little impact on the suspension of interventions and repressive actions by police forces inside and outside the West Bank. Despite this, student organizations have demonstrated their conviction to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and to build bridges with the Global South on this path.
The wave of pro-Palestinian student protests that began in the United States also spread to Latin America, characterized by digital activism, camping on campuses, occupying buildings, organizing events, conferences and marches, signing petitions and motions to parliaments as lobbying strategies. The leitmotiv of the demonstrations is the denunciation of the military occupation of Gaza and of the genocidal nature of this intervention and the apartheid Israel. Student demands called for a halt to technological projects and academic relations with Israel, an embargo on trade relations and the severance of diplomatic relations, and a halt to war funding. We watched as university authorities struggled between placing limits on freedom of expression, stopping campus invasion, requesting police intervention to stop "vandalism" or negotiating demands. However, the administrations gave in to some media and local and national politicians, who called for prophylactic measures, under the clamor of not allowing hate speech and anti-Semitism to spread in universities and from them to society. Thus, contraction was imposed: stop the riots immediately, comply with university regulations, protect the buildings, ensure the safety of Jewish students, arrest and intimidate students. In other words: criminalize the student movement. This justified the narrative machinery that "legitimizes" the police intervention, with its repressive apparatus, against student activists accused of anti-Semitism, anti-system, extremism and propagation of hatred. The Brazilian religious media contributed by interpreting the protests as a spiritual battle against the people of God, warning that a discourse of hatred and anti-Semitism dominated the students and offered a positive vision for the government of Israel (Souza, 2024).
There have been no student interventions on the scale of those seen in other countries. Certainly, leftist university groups participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and activities were carried out in solidarity with U.S. students. The Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires (uba), where the Cátedra Libre de Estudios Palestinos operates, was one of the central scenarios of these demonstrations, which were defined, at the same time, as anti-capitalist. However, events related to the Middle East conflict have generated discussions and controversies. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations, in many cases, do not recognize the legitimacy of the existence of the State of Israel. The calls include maps of the whole of British Mandate Palestine covered with Palestinian national colors, accompanied by the legend "Free Palestine from the river to the sea". The use of the concept of "genocide" in academic circles has generated debate. The presentation of the book Palestina: anatomía de un genocidioThe event, held at the National University of Rosario and attended by Jewish civil society actors, was criticized by other students, who were also Jewish. On the other hand, many activities aimed at solidarity with the Palestinian cause have the presence of Muslim religious leaders, thus inserting a religious perspective in the university space.
To understand the impact of the pro-Palestinian student mobilizations, it is necessary to consider all the factors that come into play. The demands articulated by these instances are very varied: the demand for a cease-fire, the criticism of colonial and imperialist geopolitics, the denunciation of complicity between financing and lobby Zionist, among others. That is to say, the mobilizations assume the situation in Gaza as an event that is not limited to a contingency of current geopolitics, but circumscribes elements of domestic and local politics.
I believe that there are four critical elements that have given rise to strong debates in this scenario: threats to freedom of expression, the instrumentalization of anti-Semitism as a condemnatory narrative, abuses of power by universities to sanction students and professors, and the intervention of the forces of law and order in instances of protest. These four elements are intertwined in a very worrying spiral in a democratic context. The disproportionate and polarized reaction of some university authorities to the pro-Palestinian mobilizations has clearly shown the bias around this issue. Why demand the silencing of this issue and give freedom for the treatment of others that are equally conflictive for society? Here we see the particular sensitivity to this event, the ideological, political, economic and religious feelings and positionings it arouses, which cannot be compared to other cases. The accusation of anti-Semitism has been abused, by confusing in a biased and superficial way the criticism of the ultra-right Zionist State in Israel for its genocidal actions (even recognized by its own officials in several public statements), with a criticism of the Jewish people as a religious segment (Romero, 2024).
In this dynamic, have you observed the deployment of these mobilizations and reactions in your country? What is your opinion of them?
Numerous demonstrations and marches have been organized in Mexico, not only as a response to the bombings in the Gaza Strip during the last year, but also as a result of previous actions of this type. In addition to this, there is a pro-Palestinian tendency within important institutions in the country -at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, El Colegio de Mexico, the Autonomous University of Puebla, the Autonomous Metropolitan University, among others-. Likewise, this trend can be glimpsed in institutions such as the National Museum of World Cultures, the House of Culture of Mexico City and the University Museum of Contemporary Art, where cultural activities, conferences and exhibitions have been organized to promote the discussion of the Israeli occupation in Palestine.
All of the above actions, and those that I am probably overlooking, reflect a commitment to the defense of human rights and social justice in a context in which a people of the Global South suffer the consequences of a system of colonial domination. Likewise, these spaces and actions demonstrate that, in Mexico, unlike even countries such as the United States, France and Germany, there is greater freedom of expression, because while in those countries repressive acts against pro-Palestinian groups have been more violent, in Mexico, although there have been cases of repression, greater freedom has been shown.
The Israel-Hamas-Palestine conflict seems to resonate in Latin American countries as a history made of pieces and without sense, in which biblical Judeo-Christian narratives and continuous wars since 1948 are mixed. The lack of historical knowledge and misinformation unleash passions and polarized positions, reducing the complexity of the conflict to ideological positions of confrontation. Added to these tensions is the conceptual distortion of understanding anti-Semitism as opposition and criticism of the current ultra-right Israeli government, or anti-Zionism as an accusatory category for defending the Palestinian people from imminent extermination. This polarized and disqualifying dynamic of persecution and disinformation was experienced by the research group "Growth of Christian Zionism in Latin America", of which the author of this text is a member, and made evident the great difficulty of discussing the subject academically and publicly. We organized a seminar to share the results of the comparison between Brazilian and Guatemalan Christian Zionism but, when it was disclosed, the rampant tares in social networks and threats to the organizers disqualified the event, as they accused the participants of being defenders of the geopolitics of the current State of Israel, or of being pro-Hamas and terrorists. Faced with so much misunderstanding, the context of intolerance in the country and the difficulty of "disarming the spirits", the team has not been able to organize the seminar until now. However, positive signs have emerged, such as the creation of the Center for Palestinian Studies (cepal) at the University of São Paulo. In the end, although diplomatic efforts fall into dissonant rhetoric between publicly criticizing the atrocities in Gaza and maintaining military and economic ties with Israel, the solidarity of pro-Palestinian activism strives to make the voice of Latin America heard, claiming for Palestine the right of a people to exist.
I do not have an opinion on the demonstrations. Freedom of expression is a pillar of democracy and anyone has the right to express themselves. As in any political process, the different actors produce frameworks of understanding that highlight certain aspects of reality and leave aside others. In a pro-Palestinian mobilization one will find activists who define themselves as Palestinians or Arabs, and therefore have a close, perhaps existential, link to the situation. You will also find Muslims, many of them converts who have no ethnic ties to the Palestinians, but for whom Muslimness is built around solidarity with Palestine. At the same time, it is possible to find activists of political organizations that take the Palestinian cause as an identity reference and postulate solutions that exist, unfortunately, in their imagination. The slogan of a secular, democratic and non-racist Palestine may be beautiful, but there are no relevant social actors on the ground who are proposing this.
In Chile, where I live, there have been important pro-Palestinian mobilizations. The Palestinian Community of Chile itself, the largest in Latin America, has played a fundamental role. Among the educational institutions, the Committee of Solidarity for Palestine of the University of Chile has been a fundamental nucleus of mobilization, as well as the organization of spaces for dialogue and reflection. Finally, it is worth mentioning a prolific academic production during this period, in which one of the most important referents is the philosopher Rodrigo Karmy, together with an important group of academics both in Chile and in the region (Karmy, 2024; Zerán, Karmy and Slachevsky, 2024).
In addition, a particular element of the Chilean context has been the well-known position of the current government of President Boric on the situation in the Middle East. His government has maintained from the beginning a critical position towards the State of Israel, which has led to moments of political and even diplomatic tension. This position deepened after the events in Gaza, following the line of the United Nations. As of October 7, there was a condemnation of the Hamas terrorist attack and a request to Israel to respond proportionately. However, as the conflict escalated and the abuses of Israel's attack became evident, the government deepened its criticism, to the point of actively participating in the lawsuit against Israel before the International Court and in Boric's request to exclude Israel from the International Air and Space Fair (IAF).fidae) for the current year.
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Moises Garduño holds a degree in International Relations from the School of Political and Social Sciences of the University of California, Berkeley. unamD. in Asian and African Studies from El Colegio de México and Ph. cum laude from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. As a guest researcher, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (ciesas), headquartered in the West, and is a member of the sni at the ii.
Marlene Hernández Morán holds a degree in International Relations from the School of Political and Social Sciences of the University of California, Berkeley. unamM.A. in Asian and African Studies with a specialization in the Middle East from El Colegio de México. Her recent publications include the article "The strengthening of authoritarianism in Saudi Arabia: the logic of two-level games under the de facto neo-patrimonial government of Muhammad bin Salman" in the journal Arabic Studies Shelf. Her research interests include Palestinian popular art, cultural diplomacy and creative economy in the Middle East and women's struggles in Palestine.
Brenda Carranza D. in Social Sciences, professor-researcher of the Graduate Program in Social Sciences at the State University of Campinas-Universidade Estadual de Campinas.pgcs/unicampColetivo Bereia advisor, monitoring of religious media. Current research projects: Expansion of Christian Zionism in the Global South; Conscientious objection, reproductive rights and health professionals; publications on Christian Zionism: Christian Zionism in Latin America and its multiple dimensions (Social Sciences and Religion/2023); Sionismo cristão -verbete (iser/2023); Genealogia do sionismo evangélico no Brasil (Religião&Sociedade/2022); Articulaciones político-religiosas entre Brasil-.useChristian Right and Zionism (Social Sciences and Religion/2021).
Nicolas Panotto holds a PhD in Social Sciences (flaccidArgentina). Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad Arturo Prat, Chile. Director of Otros Cruces.
Damian Setton is a sociologist graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, Master in Social Sciences and PhD in Social Sciences from the same university. D. in Social Sciences from the same university. conicet. He teaches at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad del Salvador.
Marlene Hernández Morán holds a degree in International Relations from the School of Political and Social Sciences of the University of California, Berkeley. unamM.A. in Asian and African Studies with a specialization in the Middle East from El Colegio de México. Her recent publications include the article "The strengthening of authoritarianism in Saudi Arabia: the logic of two-level games under the de facto neo-patrimonial government of Muhammad bin Salman" in the journal Arabic Studies Shelf. Her research interests include Palestinian popular art, cultural diplomacy and creative economy in the Middle East and women's struggles in Palestine.
Arely Medina holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Guadalajara. She holds a Master's degree in Regional Studies and a PhD in Social Sciences, both from El Colegio de Jalisco. As a guest researcher she did a postdoctoral stay at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (ciesas), headquartered in the West, and is a member of the sni level i. She is currently a research professor in the Department of Economic and Administrative Sciences at the University of Guadalajara.
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