For episode 206, Dana is joined by Pablo Abufom, translator, scientist, and organizer with the Coordinadora Por Palestina in Chile. We talk about the largest Palestinian diaspora population outside the Middle East, the limits of ethnic and national affinities, and what it means to organize against the backdrop of American hegemony.
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Transcriptions: Transcriptions are done by Antidote Zine and will be published on The Fire These Times’ transcript archive.
Credits:
Dana El Kurd (host), Elia Ayoub (producer, episode design), Rap and Revenge (Music), Wenyi Geng (TFTT theme design), Hisham Rifai (FTP theme design) and Molly Crabapple (FTP team profile pics).
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
The duality of being both Chileans and Palestinians means they have to minimize their Palestinianness in Chile and maximize it in Palestine—but with the wealth and the resources that they have as Chileans. It’s a mess in terms of social and political analysis.
Dana El Kurd: Today we’re joined by Pablo Abufom. He’s a third-generation Palestinian-Chilean, and wears many hats: he’s a philosopher by training, also a biologist by training, a translator, co-founder of a new Palestinian-Chilean press, Al-Naar Press, and an activist with Coordinadora por Palestina in Chile.
We’re going to be discussing the Palestinian-Chilean community, activism in that community, and what we can learn from the Palestinian-Chilean experience (and more recent activism) about organizing under the American hegemonic sphere.
Thank you for being here, Pablo.
Pablo Abufom: Hey Dana, thank you for having me, it’s really a pleasure.
DK: Tell us a little more about who you are and how you came to Palestinian organizing. Maybe I’ll just give context for listeners: I’ve been doing field work in Chile on-and-off, and hope to do more in the near future. I met Pablo there because I was working on activism on Palestine, and was really fascinated by the perspective that Pablo and Coordinadora por Palestina had on the issue.
I’ll throw it back to you—let us know how you got to this issue.
PA: It’s a rather shared trajectory, for people in the diaspora. But in my case in particular, I was born into a family where my great-grandparents came from Beit Jala in Palestine in the early twentieth century, part of a larger migration from Palestine to South America and Chile in particular, and they decided to settle down in small towns in the valleys of the central part of Chile—which for some resembles the motherland, Beit Jala’s landscape—or smaller cities that were open for new entrepreneurs, merchants, people who were willing to invest and work in commerce.
That made them quickly assimilate into Chilean culture. They were also all Christians; the majority of the Palestinian community in Chile is Christian, either because they were orthodox Christians when they came, or they became Catholics over the decades.
My family was not particularly active in the Palestinian struggle or in Palestinian organizations, but people who were close to the family were. When I was five or six years old, friends of the family were part of the PLO, who were Chileans or Palestinians in Chile, working for the PLO in the Chilean office. I remember being invited, sort of jokingly, when I was six or seven, to the First Intifada.
That has definitely marked my own identity as a Palestinian, in the sense that I understood that being Palestinian is being involved in a struggle—which for me was a very close experience in Chile: we were under dictatorship, around the time the dictatorship was ending, and there were huge processes of change in Chile and in Palestine at the same time. It was the Intifada and the road towards the Oslo Accords, and it was the post-dictatorship period in Chile that came after very relevant negotiations in the civil administration and the military dictatorship.
For many people, it was like the same process. Many Palestinians who were older than me, who were in their twenties and thirties in the late 1980s and 1990s, saw that treason—the PLO’s treason by signing the accords—in the same way they saw the transactions and negotiations between the dictatorship and the new government in the post-dictatorship, who were supposedly center-left or leftist parties. It’s interesting how Chile is marked by a relevant transformation in its internal politics in a way that is very connected to the Palestinian experience. Completely different contexts, trajectories, an so on, but in relevant ways they were similar.
In the context of that historical moment, I was part of a family that was not highly politicized in terms of Palestine—except for my grandmother, who was always talking about Palestine and keeping the memory of not just the cultural element (the cuisine and the music and dance, which as everyone knows is very common in all diasporas) but also in terms of talking to us, their grandkids, about Palestine and the role of the rest of the Arab countries in betraying Palestine and not supporting Palestinian liberation.
In that context, Palestine was always present for me. But my own process of becoming political, or learning about and getting involved in politics, came through radical leftist politics. I was not highly involved with pro-Palestinian organizing, because in my small town all I saw was people who were interested in ethno-national identity and cultural things, most not really political. A lot of Chilean Palestinians are rich and/or rightwing, so there was no place for me and my political ideas in the Palestinian community that I knew of.
I moved to Santiago, the capital city, and got even more involved in radical leftist politics and social movements, and for a long time for me, the Palestinian struggle was a part of the universal revolutionary struggle against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, but it was not an issue or a space for organizing that I felt called to be part of, particularly.
But with time, with the permanent siege and blockade of Gaza and attacks by Israel, and most definitely after October 7, I felt something had changed in terms of the place the Palestinian struggle would have in the context of the universal struggle for liberation, in a way that was not so clear for me and many others in the past decades—especially in Chile, which for twenty or thirty years had been in a long process of politicization, of student mobilizing and labor mobilizing, and then of course there was the huge popular revolt we had in October 2019.
So there is a lot of work to do, in terms of politics in Chile. Also most of the people I knew who were involved in Palestinian organizing were in places or groups that were exclusively Palestinian—and that made no sense to me. It made no sense to define membership by ethnic affinity.
DK: I want to talk about the Coordinadora, particularly after October 7, and broadly about Chilean politics and the 2019 protests. But before we get into that, we need to scaffold for the listeners: people often don’t know about the Palestinians in Latin America, and in Chile in particular—Palestinians in Chile being the biggest community of Palestinians in Latin America.
PA: Allegedly.
DK: Let’s just claim it—it’s a claim to fame! We can keep pushing the narrative, pushing the myth.
Perhaps you can briefly explain about who the Palestinian Chilean community is and how they got there. We don’t need to get into all the deep history, but it will help explain how they approach the Palestinian issue, and why they approach the Palestinian issue with national or even ethnic affinity as Palestinian Arab, and organize among particular Palestinian groups, often about cultural expressions of their identity.
Who are these people?
PA: The first waves of migration from the Middle East to South America, and the Americas in general, was in the late nineteenth century. At that time, they were in the process of the dissolution, the dismantling of the Ottoman empire and the colonial expansion by Britain into the Middle East. So there was a lot of conflict and confrontation, and crisis of course, that made a lot of people think they should go somewhere else and find a better perspective, mostly for their economic lives.
The idea was to send young Arab men to find something to do in other countries, in particular the Americas, which sounded at the time like the Land of Promise. Going to the US was cheaper—
DK: But the US also had laws saying that brown people couldn’t come, so lots of Arabs ended up in South America.
PA: Right. And they came with their labor force, and some of them with some capital from selling property back in Palestine, and they found societies that were open—not to foreigners, necessarily, and not to Arabs in particular, but to new influxes of capital investment and labor force. And since they were Christians—you know, the thing with being Arab and whiteness is that it’s not as simple as for someone of African descent; it’s not just because of skin color but also because of the idea of Arabs being something between complete barbarians or highly educated people.
Some of the people who came already had commerce experience, so they were able to insert themselves into Chilean society in a way that gave them space working in commerce—either informal commerce, traveling and selling stuff to people in different cities, or establishing themselves in shops and stores. With that economic element, the fact that they were Christians, and the fact that they were willing to integrate and assimilate—and also the fact that by the 1920s, especially after the Citizenship Act of the British Mandate in 1925, there were a lot of Palestinians who were stuck outside Palestine—meant they started building their own community, in every country in Latin America they were living in, with their identity as diasporic Palestinians as the foundation of their collective experience.
So they identify even more heavily as Palestinians due to the fact that they were not able to return to Palestine. This is something Nadim Bawalsa explains in an excellent way in his book Transnational Palestine, which is about the migration to Latin America before 1948. There are several interesting elements: it’s a migration that came in times of imperial crisis, inter-capitalist wars, the dismantling of the Ottoman empire, and the beginning of the Zionist occupation and colonization of Palestine.
So their relationship with Palestine was very nationalistic in the sense that it was based on the dream, the fantasy, the utopia of coming back to a place that you were not able to come back to—you were either not allowed to come back or were not given citizenship. But it was before 1948; it was before the idea that Palestinians are by definition the enemies of Israel, and are defined by that antagonism, and the role international community has in that.
That wave of migration was not as militant in their way of understanding the struggle for Palestine.
DK: It’s not an anti-colonial vision or framing of the identity. Which is fascinating, because of course the Zionist movement, and people who are pro-Israel, often will make the claim that Palestinians don’t exist or only exist in opposition to Israel. And this community that began its migration in the 1870s and 1880s from the Ottoman empire, before Palestine existed, still had a Palestinian national sentiment, because Palestinian national sentiment was already developing in Palestine, unrelated to the Zionist movement.
PA: Exactly. It was more connected to being against the Ottoman empire, and then the British—who were the ones who brought the Zionists to Palestine, in a way, or supported that movement.
What’s interesting is that after 1948, the same migration started to change: there were people who were actually fleeing the Nakba becoming refugees in different countries, coming to Chile because they had family or they knew there was a large Palestinian community, and then there were more people who were Muslims, for instance, and also more people who had been involved in the process of fighting against the occupation.
That changed things. You can see it even in the local press that the Palestinian and general Arab community had established in Chile: they had newspapers, weeklies, that served the function of making connections between a community that was diasporic and dispersed in a country that is very large and very sprawled. In the 1950s and 1960s, we start seeing in the press, in journals and magazines, talks about Palestinian liberation, nationalism, and pan-Arabism, and tributes to Gamal Abdel Nasser. There’s a more political moment for Palestinians and Arabs in general in Chile.
In the PLO, they knew they had to have a role in Chile, and there were people connected, especially from the left—but also from the political center. The communists and the radical leftists were members of the PFLP, and the Christian democrats or other people in the center of the political spectrum in Chile were members of Fatah or other centrist groups in Palestine. There’s a correlation between political homes in Chile and in Palestine.
Something super relevant for the Palestinian community in Chile is that those Arabs and Palestinians who were able to make a lot of money and become relevant industrialists in the textile sector or in commerce—or even finance, like founding banks—became a very important part of the fabric of Chilean capitalism, with the particular forms of Chilean capitalism of the 1930s and 1940s in the process of industrialization and state-driven development. So Arabs in Chile found their place, and by the 1960s they had become super-relevant, or even the major capitalists in Chile.
DK: Very much integrated in power.
PA: Yes. In political power, but mostly economic power. So the notion of Palestinians and Arabs in general in Chile being businesspeople is very common. It’s part of the idea that people have about Arabs, which I guess is a prejudice or an idea that is common in other places too.
For instance, at the time of the Popular Unity government, Salvador Allende’s government, the first textile factory that was expropriated by the workers was Palestinian-owned. The Yarur family owned the largest textile manufacturing factory, and had even built a whole neighborhood for their workers, like a factory town. That was the first factory to be occupied and expropriated by the workers. I don’t think it’s just a coincidence or a contingent element in Chilean history, or the history of the Popular Unity government, that the first factory was Palestinian-owned.
For people who might be interested in this, there’s a book by the historian Peter Winn called Weavers of Revolution that is particularly about that process.
Then, when the coup happened in 1973 and there were seventeen-eighteen years of dictatorship, and the influence of neoliberal economic policies on the transformations in Chile—that was a new moment for the Arab and Palestinian community in Chile to become even more powerful. And since the whole project of neoliberal transformations in Chile was about opening borders, focusing the economy on the importation of products and the exportation of raw materials, the Arab capitalists moved very quickly from industry to finance, or general commerce, like owning department stores and stuff like that.
They were very clever in how to stay in power, mostly economic power—but also political power. There were several ministers of the Pinochet cabinet, by the eighties, who were Arabs or even Palestinian. So there is a connection between the wealth of a sector of Palestinian Chileans and the dictatorship. There has always been a very close relationship, with the Chilean state part of capitalist development in Chile, whichever way it takes—the state-driven development, or the neoliberal moment. That’s part of the way they integrated to Chile.
DK: So because of this role they played in building Chile in the various parts of its development, and their integration in and proximity to power, you think that colors their engagement with the Palestinian issue today and how the established Palestinian groups approach the issue of Palestine—which brings us to the organization that you work with and the gap that it fills. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that.
PA: It’s the same way that in other countries in Latin America, there is a layer of Arab capitalists who claim their Palestinian heritage as a favor to their being capitalists in that country. Maybe they say it or feel it, but the way they behave collectively is not as being fundamentally Palestinians fighting for Palestinian liberation or the rebuilding of Palestine. What I’ve seen and think I’ve understood in the past twenty months is that there’s a layer of Arab capitalists in Latin America who see themselves—and this is probably the same in other countries where they have some power, in Europe and the US for instance—as the future owners of the state of Palestine, if it ever comes to happen; they want to be that layer of this other society that they would be part of eventually.
This is how they relate to Palestine. They invest in Palestine; they provide some of that investment in the way of donations to cultural and healthcare [institutions], feeding hungry kids in Gaza or other places. It’s a mix of humanitarian solutions and at the same time they are investing in hotels, in commerce, in development, in factories—in owning property in Palestine. They are building in two steps: being recognized as humanitarian rich people who want to help the poor kids in Palestine, but at the same time being recognized by the PLO and the PA as partners when it comes to funding whatever project they may have.
This is interesting, because it can help us understand why, in many countries in Latin America, there is a clear gap between the rich Palestinians and the rest, or between rightwing Palestinians and the rest. It depends, in each country, on how many people there are and what their distribution is across the income spectrum. But that gap is always there.
And it has a parallel in terms of local politics, which I think is very interesting: rich Palestinians, who tend to be rightwing, see the struggle for Palestinian liberation or the building of a Palestinian state, or the history of contemporary Palestine, as completely and radically different from the history of colonialism in South America. They don’t see any connection between Indigenous struggles in our own colonial republics and the situation in Palestine.
So for them, Palestine is not a universal issue. It’s not part of a larger issue like colonialism, imperialism, capitalism—it’s not a political element within the global context. It’s a kind of Palestinian exceptionalism, which happens in many places. That means there are, on the other hand, leftwing Palestinians, some of whom are sons and daughters of those rich Palestinians who have become politicized to the left or have been involved in BDS activism, and there are a lot of people from the radical left, or the Communist Party, who are Palestinians or are very close to Palestinian struggle and have been involved in Palestinian solidarity for decades.
There has always been a difficulty in building a unified space for all the Palestinian community in Chile. We used to have the Palestinian Federation, that was basically a big-tent organization, or the Union of Palestinian Students; the Federation itself had leadership that was shared between people in the center and people on the left. But in the past five or ten years, it dissolved completely and collapsed into a single entity that in Chile is called the Comunidad Palestina, the Palestinian Community—they take the name of the whole community—and they are the ones recognized by the PLO.
Two of their members became members of the central committee of the PLO some weeks ago, and their work is to represent the Palestinians before the state and the rest of Chilean society. Even though they claim they don’t represent everyone, their actions tell you that they want to make that claim. They want to be the only people who can speak on Palestinians’ behalf, to members of congress, to the government, and internationally. They operate in the circles of power, mostly.
DK: So that’s the landscape in which Palestinian organizing has existed in Chile recently. But then October 7 happened and new organizations emerged, including Coordinadora. What are the gaps that Coordinadora fills?
PA: What happened after October 7 was that since there was not a politicized leadership, and it was mostly about humanitarian, diplomatic, or political action on the legislation level, by October 10 we were seeing everyone everywhere in the world, in big capitals everywhere, there were huge marches, rallies, and demonstrations for Palestine—and in Chile there was nothing happening. For me that was simply shocking, that we were allegedly the largest Palestinian community outside the Middle East, and there was nothing happening.
There are reasons to explain that, but I want to keep that for later. What some of us saw from the organized left—we noted that something had to be done. We noted that the people who were BDS activists or had been involved in student organizing as Palestinians didn’t have a space to launch or call for rallies or demonstrations. So my political organization, Solidaridad—it’s a small political movement from the libertarian left, a critical Marxist and feminist group—explicitly called other groups to organize a rally on October 12.
DK: Non-Palestinian groups?
PA: Non-Palestinian groups: social movements, environmentalist groups, feminist movements, political collectives on the left—but also the Communist Party that is right now part of the ruling coalition. We were trying to involve all actors we felt were willing to mobilize for Palestine.
We saw a lot of interest. Several dozen organizations wanted to be part of that kind of effort. At first it was only calling for a couple of rallies, but then we realized we needed to form something to create a platform for that. That’s when the Coordinadora por Palestina was born. It’s the coordinating committee for Palestine. That meant we were able to fill one gap: taking people—not just Palestinians, but Chileans—to the street. We organized the first big rally or march on November 4.
And then we filled another gap, which is connecting Chilean social movements and political groups with the Palestinian solidarity movement in an active way—not just them putting out statements or showing up at demonstrations called by Palestinian groups, but getting them actively involved in the Palestinian solidarity scene or movement.
Those two have been very relevant in building a shared sense of what the place of the Palestinian struggle is in today’s international politics. It gave space for some people who had been in solidarity with Palestine for a long time, being part of campaigns and going out to the streets in 2014, 2018, 2021—in every moment that Israel would bomb Gaza or try and destroy a neighborhood in the West Bank, there were people mobilizing, but they were not part of a shared space with common debate and common ideas and objectives (in this case calling the Chilean government to break ties with Israel and calling for BDS action).
It was very important to do that, because we provided a space, a platform for that kind of solidarity. Then we started seeing that a lot of individuals, not just groups or movements, who have always felt solidarity with Palestine, have recognized it’s an oppressed people and know that we as Chileans experience times of oppression, or that the Mapuche experience oppression permanently—those individuals also wanted to join.
This is different from other Palestinian groups that are made up, only or mostly, of Palestinians.
DK: They don’t make those connections to other issues in Chile—the Indigenous struggle in Chile, or international issues.
PA: They don’t want to make those connections. It’s not just that they don’t see them. They avoid them explicitly. It’s like, we’re trying to organize a rally or an event, and people are talking and giving out statements, and they’ll say: But please don’t talk about other political issues that have nothing to do with Palestine. How can it be unrelated, if it’s basically the same process?
From the perspective of a not-entirely-post-colonial country in Latin America like Chile, what we are seeing in Palestine is the twenty-first century version of the same kind of settler-colonialism that created our own society. We’re seeing it in real time on our cellphones—not in two or three hundred years, but in less than a century, and we’re seeing it with modern technology. If everything follows the same course, what we will end up seeing is Israel becoming the only state in the entire territory from the river to the sea, and the Palestinians becoming a minority subordinated completely to that state.
This is exactly what happened in Latin American countries that were colonized by the Spanish, or in the US or any other settler-colonial society. If you don’t see that connection, then the question is (you can be an idiot—that’s a thing—but it doesn’t take you very far if that’s your line of argument): what are the collective interests that motivate that guide or drive that kind of thinking? I think this has to do with class, and it has to do with power politics, and the role that they claim for themselves, as Palestinians in the diaspora, in an eventual state of Palestine.
What are the kinds of actions and connections they are willing to do? They are the capitalists in Chile, so they don’t want Indigenous liberation in Chile, because that would mean the expropriation of land, the transformation of the political dynamics in Chile, a change in the racial dynamics in Chile. The duality of being both Chileans and Palestinians means they have to minimize their Palestinianness in Chile and maximize it in Palestine—but with the wealth and the resources that they have as Chileans.
So it’s a mess in terms of social and political analysis. But if we don’t introduce the class element in the analysis, we only see confusion. It’s just an egomaniacal struggle.
DK: It’s some sort of cognitive dissonance on their part, but unless you understand the class dimension of this, you’re missing the point, the limits of diaspora.
PA: This is also something that happens in Palestine, the role of the PA—it has to do with a class element, and the reproduction of that position in society. At the same time, every national liberation movement has dealt with this problem of one nation and several classes, so to speak. You can think of any anti-colonial movement, and it’s basically the same.
It’s one thing when you’re in Angola or in Algeria and you’re on the left, in the working class struggling for both national liberation and socialism, and at the same time struggling side-by-side with bourgeois nationalists against the French, and then have to deal with the whole problem of class in your society. It’s completely different when you have to deal with those issues in the diaspora, when you’re not there where the confrontation between those class positions is immediately and urgently relevant.
It’s a good and a bad thing. It’s a bad thing because we have to accept there’s no way the Chilean Palestinian movement can be effective in its goals without somehow sitting at the table with fascists—who are Palestinians, some of them. They claim the legacies of the dictatorship, and are completely racist with everyone else, and think they are rich because Chileans are lazy and they are hard workers. But it’s good because it teaches you how to navigate the problem of national interests and class interests.
It’s a good lesson especially for the left—because they don’t care. Rightwing Palestinians can do without us; they have enough power to do their thing. But sometimes they need the rabble. They need the people for social support. When they need people in the streets, they start looking at us.
DK: Everything you’re saying makes me think of the limits of a national project, of pursuing liberation for Palestinians from a purely national liberation perspective. It’s a difficult thing to think about, because this has obviously been the crux of the struggle since its inception.
I want to end on a broader note about broader Chilean politics. We’ve touched on the Palestinian role both during the Allende years as well as during the dictatorship. But there were large-scale protests in 2019 that color the politics of today’s Chile—or maybe, the disappointment of the 2019 movement colors the politics of Chile today. There is a leftist president, Borić, who is finishing out his term—
PA: Allegedly leftist.
DK: By his self-definition. And there is some flavor of a very far right wing coming in. And then there’s Chile as part of Latin America (though a little bit on the periphery so there is some more space for movement), within the American orbit.
As a member of the Coordinadora, and with Coordinadora as part of a larger constellation of leftist organizations in Chile—against this backdrop, what does the broader left hope to achieve?
PA: It’s a big question, but a good one.
When you talk about being within the framework or space-of-operations of American imperialism: last week we had our own version of the State of the Union, the president giving an account of their work and their projections. There is a bill in parliament to prohibit the importation of products that are made in occupied territories in general, that would apply to occupied Palestinian territory. President Borić said they would put some urgency in the legislative process to pass the bill soon, and also announced they wanted to diversify their buying of weapons—he referenced the arms embargo in Spain, that kind of thing.
It was a shitshow in the press: most parts of the rightwing said they are against it; parts of the center and even part of the ruling coalition also said they are against it. But then the president of the senate, in an interview a few days ago, said that the American embassy had called and they wanted to convey the message that that bill against products made in occupied territories, if it were passed, was going to have a cost for Chile—America was going to take its toll on Chile for that approval, if that were to happen.
When you say we are in the sphere of influence and operations of the American empire, it’s that literal. It’s not just Mickey Mouse, it’s not just Hollywood. It’s actual power. This is why not just Chile, but not one Latin American country has been able to break completely with Israel and do something about it. Every Latin American country is dependent on the will of the American empire.
The only way out of that may be a planned, unified action by all Latin American states against Israel and supporting each other to buffer any attack by the US.
DK: In Europe, because of how ludicrous the Trump administration is, there is an interesting moment of divergence—and of course it’s too little too late, a lot of it is lip service, but they are discussing sanctions. They are diverging from American positions in a unified way, or attempting to. Perhaps there is a space of opening, because the Americans are dismantling their own hegemony by their own hand.
PA: In the Coordinadora, one of the main points of our program in the beginning—our goal was to end the attacks and let humanitarian aid enter Gaza, but the last point was about pushing Chile to lead or be part of a Latin American political initiative of unifying to sanction Israel, to create a group. There is the Hague group—they are going to have a meeting next week in Bogotá, in Colombia. It’s so necessary that other countries join, and Chile should join. I don’t think they’re going to do it, because Chile has always been at the service of the US (and it’s not about the government, it’s state policy. It’s like Israel for the US—it’s not something about a particular administration; it’s a long term commitment with them).
In that context, we had a huge revolt in October 2019 where all the grievances and all the levels of precariousness of the Chilean working class, and their experiences of impoverishment and marginalization, all coalesced in a huge movement against the elite for a constitutional change. It was mostly massive rage in the streets—there was not an organized movement. There were some parts that were highly organized, but in general it was an explosion of anger.
The demands of the movement were demands that social movements had been accumulating throughout the past twenty or thirty years: ending the privatized management of healthcare, education, housing, and the pension system—all those demands were part of it. It was the idea that we could change Chile in a non- or post-neoliberal way, a way that breaks with the regime imposed during the dictatorship.
But then we had a constitutional process, so changing the constitution became the main focal point. All those social demands for universal rights were separate, so they came together in a demand for constitutional change, of a constitution that was fraudulently approved during the dictatorship. We had the process; the draft of that new constitutional project was amazing—the most progressive draft constitution in the world. And of course the right wing and the center made sure it was not approved. A lot of people rejected it—they had voted massively for a change in the constitution, but once the process was finished, they voted against.
Between those two elections there was one main difference. The first one—whether you wanted a constitutional change—was a voluntary election; and the second one—to approve or not the actual draft—you were forced to vote. There were four or five million people who didn’t vote in the first one, and they voted in the second referendum. It was that sector of the population that was targeted by rightwing propaganda.
This meant that we shifted from a moment of hope for change to a moment of defeat and hopelessness—with the mediation of the pandemic crisis, which had already shifted the priorities of the Chilean people from constitutional change and universal rights towards my own safety, my own survival, I don’t care about the rest. And we were taken off the streets, so we all became clandestine organizations in the sense that we were hiding in our houses and not able to do stuff in the street.
If you take that element of hopelessness, and the demobilizing effect the defeat of the constitutional change had, with a progressive, so-called leftist government that is the voice of a state policy of Chile in support of a two-state solution in Palestine following pre-1967 borders, it means that you have a demobilized people and a government that is, at least in appearance, “favorable to Palestine.”
This is relevant to the question we asked earlier: why a country with the most Palestinians outside the Middle East wasn’t the most mobilized country in the world. Those two elements, apart from the nature of the Palestinian community in Chile that we have been talking about—those two elements are key: people were already tired, exhausted, disoriented, demobilized, hopeless from the defeat of that whole process of change, and we are not protesting our own state or our own government.
It’s not the same when you’re protesting against the French government, the British government, the US government, who are actively supporting the genocide—whether from the Democrats or the Republicans, you have the entire political spectrum supporting and funding genocide.
DK: If that’s the government, then you’re galvanized more.
PA: Exactly. You have a lot of incentives to mobilize. One is humanitarian principles—you don’t want to see kids getting killed. But then you also have the particular incentive that your own tax money is being used to pay for those bombs and not for your own schools. Your own government is the one saying that all Palestinians are terrorists and should be killed.
People mobilize more when the target of your anger is closer to home; this is something that happens everywhere. When we saw mass mobilizations against the war in Iraq, for instance, in 2003, the biggest rallies were in countries that were involved in the war effort. Like Vietnam: it’s not only about being against the war in general—it was about being against the fact that our kids were being taken by force to die in the trenches. That mobilizes much more people—mothers who don’t want to see their kids killed, in Vietnam or in the trenches in Europe. This is relevant, the material difference, when it comes to seeing, analyzing, and assessing the power of mobilizing in different countries.
DK: There’s a proximity there that can be more effective in the initial stage of mobilizing. If we compare the Palestinian American experience to the Palestinian Chilean experience, obviously there are differences in the diasporas and their integration into power, but despite the fact that the Palestinian American diaspora is overwhelming in its impact on the Palestinian cause, were they able to shift politics meaningfully to end the genocide? No.
That’s the short answer. Of course they shifted politics; Biden didn’t run. There were some impacts. But then you look at the Palestinian Chilean example and it’s a much less mobilized community—but perhaps by virtue of them being integrated into power, and this proximity element, on the margins they seem to have had more general effect on Chilean public opinion.
PA: In Chile it’s both safe and respected if you are for Palestinian liberation. It’s not a risk, like in other countries—in Argentina, the Zionist community is so influential in Argentinian politics and in public opinion that being pro-Palestinian there, or being an anti-Zionist Jew, is very difficult. In Chile it’s super easy to be pro-Palestinian. Everyone is pro-Palestinian. Only the extreme far right is currently defending Israel.
Our protests are in order to get a country, a state, a government, that is already favorable to a Palestinian state, that already recognized Palestine as a state many years ago, to cut diplomatic ties with Israel, to place sanctions, to be stronger in its efforts to push against Israeli genocide. While in Britain, France, and the US, protests are to shift the favorable position for Israel.
There’s a huge difference between those two; we want to make Chile more for Palestine—in the US, you want the US to do nothing for Israel and stop funding it. You’re fighting the bad guys, in a way, which is different than pushing the supposedly good guys. That’s different, it’s always different. That’s why progressive or leftist governments are such a huge challenge for the left: when they get into power and you want to push them to do more, that’s even harder than stopping rightwing governments from doing the bad things they want to do.
DK: When you have left, center-left, or liberal parties in power, it has a demobilizing effect; we saw that with the Obama administration. It fractures or fragments a focused effort, because things become less clear for some people.
Thank you so much for this very informative discussion. We’ll stay in touch, it would be good to revisit.
PA: Thank you Dana, it was great.
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