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
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.
The pivot toward Israel is part of a broader pattern of extractive capitalism and militarization, where Chilean elites—tied to Cold War anti-communism and U.S. imperialism—reposition the country as a ‘stable’ partner for Western capital, often at the expense of marginalized communities. This dynamic mirrors Israel’s settler-colonial project, which the Mapuche have long resisted, revealing a shared struggle against structural violence that transcends national borders. The Palestinian diaspora in Chile, through art, labor organizing, and political alliances, offers a model of resistance that centers communal care and intergenerational justice, challenging the secularized, state-centric framing of the conflict. The path forward lies in transnational solidarity, where Palestinian, Mapuche, and other marginalized communities co-create alternatives to extractivism and militarization, weaving together historical memory, Indigenous knowledge, and future-oriented imagination.