One country stands out in regional reaction to Hamas attack

One country stands out in regional reaction to Hamas attack

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发布日期: 2023年10月13日
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Thank you for reading LatinNews' chosen article from the Latin American Weekly Report, produced since 1967 - 12 October 2023

The attack on Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas in the early hours of 7 October and the brutal and indiscriminate carnage that ensued received the unequivocal condemnation of the vast majority of countries in Latin America. There were some exceptions, in Venezuela and Nicaragua, for instance, but these could have been anticipated - unlike the response of Colombia. President Gustavo Petro’s stream of incendiary tweets disavowed his foreign ministry; fuelled a fierce exchange with the Israeli ambassador to Colombia and the World Jewish Congress; and risked both tarnishing his government’s international image and self-inflicted domestic political damage.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expressed his “rejection” of the “terrorist attacks” perpetrated by Hamas on Israel and announced an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), in his country’s capacity as rotating president, for 8 October. Brazil’s foreign ministry reiterated these comments the following day. It stressed that during the UNSC meeting, Brazil had called for “maximum restraint to prevent escalation with unpredictable consequences for international peace and security”, while reaffirming its commitment to a two-state solution, “with an economically viable Palestinian State, living in peace and security with Israel, within mutually agreed and internationally recognized borders”.

The government of Chile, which is home to the largest community of Palestinian descent outside of the Middle East, expressed its solidarity with the Israeli people and categorically condemned the attacks by Hamas. President Gabriel Boric’s sympathy for the cause of the Palestinian people is well-known. In a speech last December, Boric received some blowback when he said that they were “suffering an illegal occupation, which is resisting and is seeing its rights and dignity violated on a daily basis”.

The reaction of the left-wing governments in Brazil and Chile demonstrated that condemning the atrocities committed by Hamas while simultaneously upholding the legitimate claim of the Palestinian people to statehood are not mutually incompatible views. This statesmanlike response was conspicuous by its absence from Colombia’s left-wing government.

The initial reaction of Colombia’s foreign ministry was in keeping with the country’s historical position and consistent with the response of much of the rest of the region. It condemned “with vehemence the terrorism and attacks on civilians” in Israel, while expressing support for “dialogue where the Palestinian state is recognised”.

President Petro then proceeded to undercut his foreign ministry, with a series of tweets (and selective retweets) that failed to condemn Hamas for its brutal attacks, while fiercely condemning Israeli human rights abuses and comparing the actions of the Israeli government with Nazism. Responding to a statement by Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for instance, announcing a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip and its 2.3m people, in a fight against “animals”, Petro tweeted: “This is what the Nazis said of the Jews…hate speech [which] if it continues will only bring a holocaust”.

Petro then doubled down on his comments, accusing “a good part of the Colombian press” that had taken him to task for them, of espousing “the propaganda of international Zionism that supports the Israeli extreme right in power and that rejects a peaceful solution to the 75-year conflict”: “I am going to make another historical comparison. Gaza today appears as destroyed or more so than the Warsaw ghetto after it was destroyed by Nazi barbarity in response to the Jewish and socialist insurrection in that concentration camp.”

Israel’s ambassador to Bogotá, Gali Dagan, urged Petro on social media to condemn a “terrorist attack against innocent civilians”. Petro responded by saying that “terrorism is to kill innocent children, whether it be in Colombia or in Palestine”. When Dagan then invited Petro to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Petro said that he had already been there and what he saw was “being copied in Gaza”.

The World Jewish Congress accused Petro of having “insulted the 6m victims of the Holocaust and the Jewish people”, adding that he had “completely ignored the hundreds of people killed and kidnapped [by Hamas]” and that his comments were “shameful for you and your country”. Dani Dayan, an Argentine-born Israeli businessman and chairman of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, said Petro had either not seen or refused to see anything at all in Auschwitz, adding that “You have the dubious honour of being the only global leader outside of Iran to trivialise in this way – in reality denying – the Holocaust”.

Petro’s predilection for social media is axiomatic but it has never been so controversial and potentially damaging as now. Colombia’s foreign policy on this issue has essentially been reduced to Petro’s twitter finger. By elevating his own personal opinion over Colombia’s historic position on the conflict, assuming the role of an activist rather than a statesman, Petro undermined the foreign ministry, which took down its statement and replaced it with one that was far less forceful in its criticism of the attacks, and he damaged the country’s international credibility.

Petro’s comments could also cost him domestic political support, alienating moderates whose support his left wing Pacto Histórico coalition is seeking in regional elections on 22 October. Carolina Sanín, a pro-Petro author and academic, turned on him on social media for his comments, which she described as “a diplomatic embarrassment unlike anything we have endured”, adding that “the really serious thing is that we have discovered that we are being governed by a crazy man”.

Petro’s comments allowed the right-wing opposition in Colombia to portray him as a radical left-winger cut from the same cloth as Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. “To call the Jewish people Nazis for defending themselves against this attack is disgraceful,” Petro’s predecessor, Iván Duque (2018-2022), of the right-wing Centro Democrático (CD), said on 9 October. “Only those who have justified terrorism can stay silent in the face of the terrorism of Hamas,” he added.

The opposition contended that Petro’s reaction was akin to that of the Venezuelan government. If anything, this was actually less inflammatory. In an official communiqué in which it did not condemn the attacks by Hamas, Venezuela’s government called for “genuine negotiation” between Israel and the Palestinians, saying that “this escalation is the result of the impossibility of the Palestinian people finding in multilateral international legality a space to assert their historic rights”.

The statement, which was shared by Venezuela’s foreign minister, Yván Gil, urged a swift resolution to the violence “in the entirety of the Palestinian territory” and for Israel to abide by UNSC Resolution 2334, which states that “the establishment of settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967…had no legal validity, constituting a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the vision of two States living side-by-side in peace and security”.

President Maduro, for his part, opted for a response that had more in common with Colombian magical realism, saying during his television programme ‘Con Maduro +’ that Jesus Christ was “a Palestinian boy” who was “crucified [and] unjustly condemned by the Spanish empire” before being “resurrected to immortal life as a Palestinian spirit”.

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López Obrador under fire over Israel stance

One other reaction, while far less noteworthy than President Petro’s, which stirred up controversy was that of Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was accused of ambivalence by the political opposition and Israeli diplomats.

This is not the first time that López Obrador’s professed foreign policy of non-intervention and neutrality has sparked controversy, not least given that it tends to be applied somewhat selectively. The president’s position is providing another point on which the political opposition, which very much has its eyes on the 2024 presidential race, can criticise his government.

Speaking in Mexico’s senate on 10 October, Xóchitl Gálvez, the 2024 presidential candidate for the opposition Frente Amplio por México (FAM), criticised the government’s “tepid” response to the Hamas attack. Gálvez said there was “no room for being vague” when dealing with an attack on such a scale against a civilian population. She called on the government to establish a forceful position condemning the attack as terrorism.

While Mexico’s foreign ministry (SRE) issued a statement condemning the attack as an act of terrorism, López Obrador has avoided defining it as such. While he has said that his government “regrets” the incident, he said it would not “take sides” due to the principle of non-intervention. He has called on the United Nations to hold an assembly and seek a peaceful solution through dialogue, stating that, “we do not want war…we do not want any human being to die, of any nationality, be they Israeli or Palestinian”.

This refusal to take sides drew a sharp response from Israel’s embassy in Mexico. In an interview with national daily El Universal on 9 October, Israel’s ambassador to Mexico, Einat Kranz Neiger, stated that maintaining a neutral position in relation to the Hamas attack was the equivalent of “supporting terrorism”. The embassy called on the government to forcefully condemn the attack, expressing dissatisfaction with the adopted position.

Israel’s ambassador added, however, that the disagreement would not affect the extradition process of former Mexican diplomat and writer Andrés Roemer, who was arrested in Israel on 2 October. Roemer is wanted in Mexico for alleged sex crimes.

López Obrador has also announced that two planes have been sent to Israel to retrieve some 1,000 Mexicans in the country who have asked to leave. He added that his government was working on locating two Mexicans who have been reported missing in Israel.

Bukele weighs in

One of the most eye-catching responses to the Hamas attack came from El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. “As a Salvadorean of Palestinian descent, I am convinced the best thing that could happen for the Palestinian people would be for Hamas to disappear completely,” Bukele wrote on social media. “Anyone supporting the Palestinian cause is making a big mistake by siding with these criminals…savage beasts who do not represent Palestinians,” he added. He said that supporting Hamas as a Palestinian “would be like the Salvadorean people siding with the MS13 terrorists just because we share ancestry or nationality”.

Paraguay and Argentina react

Paraguay’s President Santiago Pe?a condemned the “cowardly terrorist attacks” by Hamas. Pe?a announced last month that Paraguay would move its embassy from Tel Aviv back to Jerusalem (one of only five countries to have made this shift), prompting Israel to reopen its embassy in Asunción [WR-23-38]. Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández sounded a “general alert” for the Jewish community in Argentina, which at between 300,000 and 400,000 is the most numerous in Latin America. There was a large gathering in central Buenos Aires of the Jewish community on 9 October to condemn the attacks, attended by Patricia Bullrich, the presidential candidate of the right-of-centre opposition coalition Juntos por el Cambio (JxC).

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