How Latin America’s anti-Zionist Jews are standing against Israel’s war in Palestine

In Argentina, the Latin American country with the largest Jewish community, Judies X Palestina (Jews for Palestine) has been active since 2021 but gained momentum during the current conflict. (Supplied)
Short Url
Updated 11 April 2024
Follow

How Latin America’s anti-Zionist Jews are standing against Israel’s war in Palestine

  • Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina have the largest Jewish populations in Latin America
  • Israel’s heavy-handed tactics have severely divided Latin America’s Jewish community

SAO PAULO: The war in Gaza has generated unprecedented reactions in Latin America, with the consolidation of broad pro-Palestine coalitions.

As part of such movements, countries such as Brazil, Argentina and Mexico have seen the emergence of anti-Zionist Jewish groups, formed by activists who reject their Zionist upbringing.

In Argentina, the Latin American country with the largest Jewish community — estimated at 200,000 at least — Judies X Palestina (Jews for Palestine) has been active since 2021 but gained momentum during the current conflict.




In Argentina, the Latin American country with the largest Jewish community, Judies X Palestina (Jews for Palestine) has been active since 2021 but gained momentum during the current conflict. (Supplied)

“There are few anti-Zionist voices in Argentina. Most journalists who used to criticize Israel have been silenced by the Zionist lobby in the media,” group member Ivan Zeta told Arab News, adding that the power of Zionist institutions is high in Argentina so many pro-Palestine Jews are obliged to use aliases to avoid persecution, as he has done.

“The current government (led by right-wing President Javier Milei) is totally aligned with Israel.”

Although he was born and raised as a Roman Catholic, Milei has been studying the Torah, and declared on several occasions his intention to convert to Judaism. His first international trip as Argentina’s president was to Israel.




Argentina's President Javier Milei (R) embraces Israel's President Isaac Herzog during a tour around Kibbutz Nir Oz — one the places targeted by Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip during the October 7, 2023 attacks — in southern Israel on February 8, 2024. (AFP)

Zeta said the 2001 economic crisis led many Argentinian Jews to move to Israel. That process further strengthened ties between Argentina’s Jewish community and Israel.

“We know people who used to criticize Israel’s stance on the Palestinians, but due to the fact that they have relatives there, they feared for their families on Oct. 7 (when Hamas attacked Israel) and have partially accepted the idea that Israelis are the victims now,” said Zeta, who has family members who live in Israel.

A distant cousin of his is among the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas.

“That doesn’t affect me in a direct way because I don’t know her, but part of my family supports a stronger Israeli offensive against Gazans because of her kidnap, and I had conflicts with them,” Zeta said.

INNUMBERS

• 60,000 Jews living in Mexico.

• 200,000+ Jews living in Argentina.

• 120,000+ Jews living in Brazil.

Family quarrels are common for most members of Judies X Palestina. Some of them even had to cut ties with all their relatives after taking a pro-Palestinian stance.

Their colleagues try to help them and give them psychological support, Zeta said, adding that verbal abuse is common on social media as well.




Demonstrators take part in a rally in support for the Palestinian people in front of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, on October 9, 2023, after Israel imposed a total siege on the Gaza Strip. (AFP)

The group — formed by more than 50 activists, mostly from Buenos Aires — has been enthusiastically welcomed by other pro-Palestine movements, most of them composed of people of Arab descent and left-wingers.

“They’re grateful for our presence. With us there, marching side by side with them, there are less accusations of antisemitism against them,” Zeta said.

In Brazil, a group called Vozes Judaicas por Libertacao (Jewish Voices for Liberation), formed in 2014, has been galvanized since the start of the current conflict.




Protesters carry posters from Coletivo Vozes Judaicas pela Libertação at the last pro-Palestine event in São Paulo, Brazil. (X: @ajuliaarara)

“Those initial members met again during pro-Palestine marches at the end of 2023. We’re now well-organized, with weekly meetings and several activities,” member Daniela Fajer told Arab News.

About 30 Brazilian Jews are directly involved in the network, mostly in Sao Paulo. In Rio de Janeiro, there is another anti-Zionist Jewish movement.

“Since we released a statement in defense of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (who was condemned by Zionists after he criticized Israel’s military operations and compared the mass killing of Palestinians to the Holocaust), more and more people have been interested in joining us,” Fajer said.




Palestinians check the destruction in the aftermath of an Israeli strike the previous night in the Jabalia camp for Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, on November 1, 2023. (AFP/File)

Vozes Judaicas is part of Sao Paulo’s Front in Defense of the Palestinian People, and helps the committee organize pro-Palestine marches and public activities.

“Most members had a Zionist education and visited Israel during school. Most had to break up with Zionist relatives. I only talk to half of my family nowadays,” she told Arab News.

Some activists worked as teachers in Jewish schools and lost their jobs due to their criticism of Israel.

The Jewish community has been continuously attacking the group on social media. “They insult us and call us traitors. It’s like we can’t be Jews and anti-Zionist,” Fajer said.




Activists calling for a "Free Palestine" demonstrate in Cali, Colombia, on October 13, 2023, in support of Palestinians amid Israeli air strikes on Gaza in reprisal for a surprise Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. (AFP)

Brazilian journalist Breno Altman knows well how strong Zionist pressure can be. The son of a leftwing anti-Zionist, he saw when his late father’s car was set on fire in 1982 during a protest against the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinian refugees.

“My father was leading a demonstration when that attack happened. The criminals were never identified, but we suspected they were far-right Zionists,” Altman told Arab News.

Since October, he has been continuously denouncing Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. The website he founded years ago, Opera Mundi, is hosted by a major Brazilian news portal and disseminates critical views about the Israeli operation — something that the South American country’s press generally fails to do.


READ MORE:

How pro-Palestine digital activists in Latin America are offering an uncensored view on Gaza

Latin American Muslims criticize regional interfaith leaders over stand on Gaza war

Are Latin American countries forming a pro-Palestinian bloc?

How Latin America’s Indigenous groups are showing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza


Altman has been subjected to a hate campaign, and is being sued by a Jewish institution in Brazil for his comments. He has also received threats on social media, including death threats.

“I filed a police report about a threat discovered by a news website. They said they wanted to cut off my fingers and break my teeth,” Altman said.




Journalist Breno Altman (4th from right) is pictured with members of the Articulação Judaica de Esquerda  (Jewish Left Articulation) during an event on April 6 at the Sarau Palestine in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The event also featured the participation of congresswoman Jandira Feghali. (X: @AJEOficial)

Nevertheless, he thinks that more and more people, including Jews, are aware of the “genocide perpetrated in Gaza and of the problems of Zionism.”

He added: “The groups of anti-Zionist Jews are still a minority, but they’ve been able to successfully express their dissenting stances on social media.”

Altman recently published a book called “Contra o Sionismo: Retrato de uma Doutrina Colonial e Racista” (“Against Zionism: A Portrait of a Colonial and Racist Doctrine”), and has been traveling to launch it in a number of cities.

“Many students are attending the events. Some Jews told me things like, ‘I used to be a Zionist, but I changed my mind after seeing your comments,’” he said.




Demonstrators carry the Venezuelan and Palestinian flags during a rally in support of Palestinians in Valencia, Carabobo state, Venezuela, on October 13, 2023. (AFP)

In Mexico, where around 60,000 Jews live, the Zionist movement is not as strong as it is in Brazil and Argentina, Enrique Rajchenberg, a member of Jews for Palestine in Mexico, told Arab News. Nonetheless, he said, he and his colleagues face insults and threats.

Many anti-Zionist Jews are part of pro-Palestine collectives in Mexican universities, and academic movements have been very active in promoting marches, conferences and cultural activities, Rajchenberg said, adding: “We organize talks with students and labor unions.”

Jews for Palestine demands that all university presidents in the country cut ties with academic institutions in Israel




Mexican citizens take part in a demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy in Mexico City on October 12, 2023, to show their support to Palestinians and against Israel's military operations in Gaza. (AFP)

The group is also asking Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and other progressive counterparts in Latin America, to cancel any military collaboration with Israel.

“Lopez Obrador is among the Latin American progressive leaders with the weakest stances on the genocide in Gaza,” Rajchenberg said.

“Mexico has strong economic ties with the US, and strong condemnation of Israel would certainly create problems for him.”

The new Jewish anti-Zionist movements in Latin America have been seeking and establishing connections with each other and with similar groups worldwide. “Our goal now is to create a Latin American network of anti-Zionist organizations,” Zeta said.
 

Battleground: Jerusalem
The biblical battle for the Holy City

Enter


keywords

Trump moves to widen IVF access, risking conservative fury

Updated 4 sec ago
Follow

Trump moves to widen IVF access, risking conservative fury

PALM BEACH, United States: US President Donald Trump moved Tuesday to increase access to in vitro fertilization, a move likely to be welcomed by many Americans but which risks a backlash from conservatives and the religious right.
The Republican leader signed an executive order giving his advisers 90 days to find recommendations for protecting IVF access and “aggressively” reducing out-of-pocket and insurance costs for the treatment.
“My Administration recognizes the importance of family formation, and as a Nation, our public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children,” the order stated.
“Americans need reliable access to IVF and more affordable treatment options,” it continued.
Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, shortly after signing the order, that “I think the women and families, husbands, are very appreciative of it.”
The president — whose billionaire top donor and ally Elon Musk has had several children by IVF — has long held conflicting stances on reproductive rights.
He frequently boasts about appointing Supreme Court justices who ended federal protections for abortion access in 2022, a seismic move that made him a hero to the anti-abortion movement, which has driven conservative voters to the polls for decades.
But he drew fury from that same movement when, during last year’s presidential campaign, he announced that in a second term he would ensure free IVF, and claimed to be the “father of IVF.”
At the time Trump voiced worries that Republicans were out of step with voters on the issue.
Republicans are divided on fertility treatments such as IVF, with many hailing them as a boost to American families.
Others, with strong beliefs that life begins at conception, oppose IVF because the procedure can produce multiple embryos, not all of which get used.
Almost every Senate Republican voted against assuring IVF access in a vote in June last year — including then-Ohio senator JD Vance, now Trump’s vice president.
Reproductive rights activists had feared that the Supreme Court decision on abortion threatened IVF, especially after a court in Alabama last year ruled that frozen embryos could be considered people, leading to several clinics briefly pausing treatments.
Trump’s Democratic rival Kamala Harris had put reproductive rights at the heart of her election platform, warning that Trump’s moves on abortion also jeopardized access to fertility treatments.

The USAID shutdown is upending livelihoods for nonprofit workers, farmers and other Americans

Updated 19 February 2025
Follow

The USAID shutdown is upending livelihoods for nonprofit workers, farmers and other Americans

  • More than 80 percent of companies that have contracts with USAID are American, according to aid data company DevelopmentAid

WASHINGTON: There’s the executive in a US supply-chain company whose voice breaks while facing the next round of calls telling employees they no longer have jobs.
And a farmer in Missouri who grew up knowing that a world with more hungry people is a world that’s more dangerous.
And a Maryland-based philanthropy, founded by Jews who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe, is shutting down much of its more than 120-year-old mission.
Beyond the impact of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, some 14,000 agency employees and foreign contractors as well as hundreds of thousands of people receiving aid abroad — many American businesses, farms and nonprofits— say the cutoff of US money they are owed has left them struggling to pay workers and cover bills. Some face financial collapse.
US organizations do billions of dollars of business with USAID and the State Department, which oversee more than $60 billion in foreign assistance. More than 80 percent of companies that have contracts with USAID are American, according to aid data company DevelopmentAid.
President Donald Trump stopped payment nearly overnight in a Jan. 20 executive order freezing foreign assistance. The Trump administration accused USAID’s programs of being wasteful and promoting a liberal agenda.
USAID Stop-Work, a group tracking the impact, says USAID contractors have reported that they laid off nearly 13,000 American workers. The group estimates that the actual total is more than four times that.
Here are stories of some Americans whose livelihoods have been upended:
Crop innovation work facing closures
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — a lab that works with processers, food manufacturers and seed and fertilizer companies to expand soybean usage in 31 countries — is set to close in April unless it gets a last-minute reprieve.
Peter Goldsmith, director and principal investigator at the Soybean Innovation Lab, said the group has helped open international markets to US farmers and made the crop more prevalent in Africa.
For Goldsmith, that kind of steady partnership built on trade and US foreign aid offers the best way to wield US influence, he said.
Goldsmith said innovation labs at other land grant universities also are closing. Without them, Goldsmith worries about what will happen in the countries where they worked — what other actors may step in, or whether conflict will result.
“It’s a vacuum,” he said. “And what will fill that vacuum? It will be filled. There’s no doubt about it.”
A refugee mission is imperiled
For nonprofits working to stabilize populations and economies abroad, the United States was not only the biggest humanitarian donor but an inextricable part of the whole machinery of development and humanitarian work.
Among them, HIAS, a Jewish group aiding refugees and potential refugees, is having to shut down “almost all” of its more than 120-year-old mission.
The Maryland-based philanthropy was founded by Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. Its mission in recent decades has broadened to include keeping vulnerable people safe in their home country so they don’t have to flee, said HIAS President Mark Hetfield.
Hetfield said the first Trump administration saw the wisdom of that effort. Hias experienced some of its biggest growth during Trump’s first term as a result.
But now, Trump’s shutdown of foreign assistance severed 60 percent of HIAS’s funding, overnight. The group immediately started furloughs among its 2,000 direct employees, operating in 17 states and 20 countries.
The administration calls it a “suspension,” rather than a termination, Hetfield said. “But we have to stop paying our leases, stop paying our employees.”
“It’s not a suspension,” Hetfield said. “That’s a lie.”
Tracking USAID’s effectiveness may fall by the wayside
Keith Ives, a Marine veteran who fell in love with data, has a small Denver-area nonprofit that brought a numbers-crunching relentlessness to his USAID-funded mission of testing the effectiveness of the agency’s programs.
For Ives’ teams, that’s included weighing and measuring children in Ethiopia who are getting USAID support, testing whether they’re chunkier and taller than kids who aren’t. (On average they are.)
Last week, Ives was planning to tell half his full-time staff of 28 that they would be out of a job at the end of the month. Ives’ Causal Design nonprofit gets 70 percent of its work from USAID.
At first, “it was an obsession over how can I fix this,” said Ives, who described his anxiety in the first days of the cutoff as almost paralyzing. “There must be a magic formula. ... I’m just not thinking hard enough, right?“
Now, Ives goes through all-staff call after call, breaking bad news on the impact of USAID’s shutdown. Being transparent with them, it turned out, was the best he could do.
He looks at the US breaking partnerships and contracts in what had been USAID’s six-decade aim of boosting national security by building alliances and crowding out adversaries.
For the US now, “I think for years to come, when we try to flex, I think people are going to go, ‘Yeah, but like, remember 2025?’” Ives said. “’You could just be gone tomorrow.’”
A supplier faces ruin
It takes expertise, cash flow and hundreds of staff to get USAID-funded food and goods to remote and often ill-regulated places around the globe.
For US companies doing that, the administration’s only follow-up to the stop-work orders it sent out after the money freeze have been termination notices — telling them some contracts are not only paused, but ended.
Almost all of those companies have been kept silent publicly, for fear of drawing the wrath of the Trump administration or endangering any court challenges.
Speaking anonymously for those reasons, an executive of one supply-chain business that delivers everything from hulking equipment to food describes the financial ruin facing those companies.
While describing the next round of layoff calls to be made, the executive, who is letting hundreds of workers go in total, sobs.
Farmers may lose market share
Tom Waters, a seventh-generation farmer who grows corn, soybean and wheat near Orrick, Missouri, thinks about his grandfather when he reads about what is happening with USAID.
“I’ve heard him say a hundred times, ‘People get hungry, they’ll fight,’” Waters said.
Feeding people abroad is how the American farmer stabilizes things across the world, he says. “Because we’re helping them keep people’s bellies full.”
USAID-run food programs have been a dependable customer for US farmers since the Kennedy administration. Legislation mandates US shippers get a share of the business as well.
Even so, American farm sales for USAID humanitarian programs are a fraction of overall US farm exports. And politically, US farmers know that Trump has always taken care to buffer the impact when his tariffs or other moves threaten demand for US farm goods.
US commodity farmers generally sell their harvests to grain silos and co-ops, at a per bushel rate. While the impact on Waters’ farm is not yet clear, farmers worry any time something could hit demand and prices for their crops or give a foreign competitor an opening to snatch away a share of their market permanently.
Still, Waters doesn’t think the uncertainty is eroding support for Trump.
“I really think people, the Trump supporters are really going to have patience with him, and feel like this is what he’s got to do,” he said.


Russian freedom depends on Ukraine winning war: Kasparov

Updated 19 February 2025
Follow

Russian freedom depends on Ukraine winning war: Kasparov

  • “There is no freedom of Russia, no end of the Putin regime, without Ukrainian victory,” the chess grandmaster told a press conference

GENEVA: Freedom in Russia and the end of President Vladimir Putin’s rule depends on Ukraine winning the war, Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov said Tuesday as Moscow and Washington held talks.
As US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held talks in Saudi Arabia, former chess world champion Kasparov said any outcome that Putin could present as a victory would only extend his grip on power.
“There is no freedom of Russia, no end of the Putin regime, without Ukrainian victory,” the chess grandmaster told a press conference after addressing the annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy conference.
“Even a partial victory; inflicting defeat on Putin will lead to a change in Russia.
“If Putin wins, or presents the outcome as victory,” which could involve “keeping territories and lifting sanctions... he’ll stay there. A dictator is never in danger if he is still on the rise.”
Kasparov, 61, retired from chess in 2005 to focus on political activism and has lived in exile in New York for the past decade. The longtime Putin opponent was added to Russia’s list of “extremists” in March 2024.
Kasparov spoke as many in Europe fear that US President Donald Trump’s overhaul of US policy on Russia will upend Europe’s decades-long security structure.
Kasparov said Trump did “absolutely not” understand the complexity of the conflict, and those around him were too scared to tell him that his geopolitical knowledge was insufficient.
He expected Trump would have to make “massive concessions” to secure his objective of ending the war.
Kasparov said Rubio was “not an idiot — he’s spineless, but he still has brains,” and therefore understands that he can’t deliver “unless they have to give up everything to Putin.”
He said Putin was pretending he was in a strong position but the Russian economy “will probably collapse within the next 12 to 18 months.”
Meanwhile Ukraine could keep fighting if Europe provided the money to buy US weaponry — and “as long as money is being paid, I don’t think he (Trump) cares.”
“If Trump wants to end the war, it’s not difficult: just cut Russian oil exports,” Kasparov added.
The chess great said the West had sorely lacked a collective strategy since Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
Meanwhile “Putin has a very simple idea: stay in power. That’s it. There’s no other idea,” said Kasparov.
“The cause of the war is Putin and his imperial ambitions that will never disappear, because there’s nothing else that can justify him staying in power for life.”
Kasparov said Russia’s biggest problem was not what happens in Putin’s inner circle but that many average citizens still “live in imperial dreams.”
“The Russian empire must go, and the future of Russia may not be in the current borders of Russia. The way I see the future, Russia must return all the occupied territories — Crimea included.”


Florida man charged with attempted murder after shooting two men he thought were ‘Palestinians’

Updated 18 February 2025
Follow

Florida man charged with attempted murder after shooting two men he thought were ‘Palestinians’

  • Brafman, 27, is being held without bond on second-degree murder charges at a county jail in Miami, records show

TALLAHASSEE, Florida: A Florida man has been charged with two counts of attempted murder after opening fire on two men in Miami Beach who he thought were Palestinians.
According to an arrest report, Mordechai Brafman shot at the men 17 times in the “unprovoked” attack, telling officers that while driving his truck, he “saw two Palestinians” and opened fire on their car, thinking he had killed the pair. But the men survived, one suffering a shot to the shoulder and the other grazed by a bullet.
Brafman, 27, is being held without bond on second-degree murder charges at a county jail in Miami, records show. He’s also been ordered to stay away from the victims, an Israeli father and son who were vacationing in South Florida, according to the Miami Herald.
Brafman’s attorney Dustin Tischler has said his client was experiencing a “severe mental health crisis” at the time of the shooting, which caused him to “fear for his life.”
“It is believed that his ability to make sound judgments was significantly compromised,” Tischler said in a statement to The Associated Press, adding that Brafman is seeking “necessary treatment” while cooperating with law enforcement.
The Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, has called for federal hate crime charges against Brafman, saying his alleged bias against Palestinians should warrant the charges regardless of the victims’ ethnicity.
___ Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

 


White House says Elon Musk is not in charge at DOGE, but is advising the president

Updated 18 February 2025
Follow

White House says Elon Musk is not in charge at DOGE, but is advising the president

  • Musk’s exact role could be key in the legal fight over DOGE’s access to government data
  • The Trump administration, on the other hand, says Musk is not a DOGE employee

WASHINGTON: The White House says billionaire Elon Musk is not technically part of the Department of Government Efficiency team that is sweeping through federal agencies, but is rather a senior adviser to President Donald Trump.
Musk’s exact role could be key in the legal fight over DOGE’s access to government data as the Trump administration moves to lay off thousands of federal workers. Defining him as an adviser rather than the administrator in charge of day-to-day operations at DOGE could help the administration push back against a lawsuit arguing Musk has too much power for someone who isn’t elected or Senate-confirmed.
The declaration was filed Monday as the Trump administration fends off the lawsuit from several Democratic states that want to block Musk and the DOGE team from accessing government systems. The litigants say Musk is wielding “virtually unchecked power” in violation of the Constitution.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, says Musk is not a DOGE employee and has “no actual authority to make government decisions himself,” Joshua Fisher, director of the White House Office of Administration, said in court papers. The documents do not name the administrator of DOGE, whose work Musk has championed in posts on his social-media platform X and in a public appearance at the White House.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined Tuesday to say who is leading DOGE. Layoffs are up to individual agency heads rather than DOGE, she said.
The DOGE team has roamed from agency to agency, tapping into computer systems, digging into budgets and searching for waste, fraud and abuse, while lawsuits pile up claiming Trump and DOGE are violating the law. At least two are targeting Musk himself.
Last week, Musk called for the US to “delete entire agencies” from the federal government as part of the push to radically cut spending and restructure its priorities.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan seemed skeptical in a hearing Monday when Justice Department lawyers asserted that Musk has no formal authority.
“I think you stretch too far. I disagree with you there,” Chutkan said.