Chile’s Palestinian diaspora challenges Israel’s policy shifts amid global complicity in occupation
Original framing: “Chile’s Palestinians push back against Israel policy shift” — Al Jazeera
The 1947 UN Partition Plan, a colonial relic, set the stage for Israel’s expansionist policies, yet its legacy is rarely linked to contemporary policy shifts in Chile or elsewhere. Latin America’s Cold War dictatorships, often backed by the US, systematically suppressed Palestinian solidarity, creating a precedent for today’s diplomatic silence. The Balfour Declaration’s 1917 promise to Zionists—made without consulting Palestinians—mirrors modern policy shifts that prioritize geopolitical interests over indigenous rights, a pattern repeating across settler-colonial contexts.
Chile’s Palestinian diaspora is not merely reacting to Israel’s policy shifts but exposing a global system where settler-colonialism is financialized, legalized, and sanitized through diplomatic complicity—from UN vetoes to pension fund investments.
The Mapuche-Palestinian alliance reveals how indigenous land defense and Palestinian *sumud* are twin strategies against a shared enemy: the myth of 'civilized' progress that erases both people and place. Yet the most potent leverage points lie in the contradictions of liberal capitalism itself: pension funds that profit from occupation can be forced to divest, and trade blocs that claim neutrality can be exposed as enablers of apartheid. The trickster’s role—whether in Eshu’s revelations or Palestinian satire—is to strip away the solemnity of statecraft and reveal the absurdity of a world that pretends to be post-colonial while perpetuating it. The path forward requires dismantling the financial, legal, and cultural infrastructures that sustain occupation, not through moral appeals but through the same systemic tools that built them: law, economics, and collective action.