Chile’s Palestinian diaspora resists state realignment with Israel amid erasure of historical solidarity and settler-colonial legacies
Original framing: “Palestinians in Chile push back over new president's pivot toward Israel” — Middle East Eye
The original framing omits the Palestinian community’s long-standing political and cultural presence in Chile, including their contributions to labor unions, leftist movements, and anti-dictatorship struggles. It ignores the historical parallels between Israel’s settler-colonial project and Chile’s own violent displacement of Mapuche communities, as well as the role of Israeli arms sales in Latin American militarization. The narrative also erases the voices of Chilean Jews who oppose the pivot, and the ways Israeli security cooperation entrenches authoritarianism in the region.
High structural omission detected in mainstream coverage.
The narrative is produced by Middle East Eye, a UK-based outlet with a progressive but still Western-centric lens, amplifying diasporic voices while centering elite policy debates. The framing serves the interests of Chile’s political class—historically aligned with U.S. imperialism and now seeking to reposition Chile as a ‘stable’ partner for Western capital—while obscuring the complicity of Chilean elites in global apartheid systems. It also reinforces a binary of ‘pro-Israel’ vs. ‘pro-Palestine’ that flattens the complexities of Palestinian identity and resistance in Latin America.
Chile’s Palestinian community arrived in waves from Ottoman Palestine, fleeing persecution and economic hardship, and became integral to the country’s labor movement and leftist politics. The 1973 U.S.-backed coup against Salvador Allende marked a turning point, as Pinochet’s regime aligned with Israel and the U.S. to suppress dissent, including Palestinian solidarity networks. This historical continuity—from Ottoman-era displacement to Cold War militarization—reveals how settler-colonial violence is exported and repurposed across contexts, often under the guise of ‘stability’ and ‘development.’
Chile’s Palestinian community, the largest outside the Arab world, is not merely reacting to a foreign policy shift but resisting a state realignment that erases 120 years of diasporic history and solidarity with Indigenous struggles.