Chileans for Gaza

Chileans for Gaza

While the largest diasporic population of Palestinians in the world contains strong political disagreements, they have made Chile a stalwart opponent of the war in Gaza.

Floating above the reddening Andes, the ball looked like a moon. On an evening in late February, the Chilean soccer team Club Deportivo Palestino was hosting Portuguesa, a Venezuelan team, in the pan–South American Copa Libertadores. A flag waving above the field superimposed Club Palestino’s red, black, white, and green crest on the red, white, and blue Chilean flag.

On the field, the club wore the Palestinian flag-motif jerseys that have become a regular sight around the world at marches in support of the people of Gaza. In the press box, Hassan Zerán, host of a postgame analysis show on the Raices Árabes video channel, told me that for fans of the club, “football is a cause.” He also said that I should watch out for Iván Román, the club’s promising seventeen-year-old defenseman.

In Venezuela, “Tino-Tino” had won the first game of the teams’ double-header matchup 2-1. Now in their home country, in front of their fans, they scored early, with a deflected shot by striker Junior Marabel that slowly dribbled past the Portuguesa goalkeeper. Then, in the second half, young Román corralled a corner kick, pulling the ball across his body left to right and burying a low driven shot between the goalie and near post. The players ran to the corner to celebrate, and their young star wept with the weight of the moment. Despite a late goal by Portuguesa, the game was over: Palestino was through to the cup’s third round.

Club Palestino is a good if unspectacular soccer team. It has also become a symbol for a global diaspora watching Israel’s war in Gaza unfold with horror. After the game, I asked the club’s gruff Argentine manager Pablo Sánchez about the significance of their strong performance in this moment. “A lot of teams normally play for the people in their city,” he said. “Palestino can reach people far away and include them. When you arrive to the club, its people—the great majority, the functionaries, the directors, the owners—are of the community, and live out everything that’s implicated in being Palestinian.”

What exactly does it mean to be Palestinian in the Andes? Chileans like to say that the country has the largest diasporic population of Palestinians outside of the Middle East, estimated at around half a million people. Palestinian-Chileans are well represented by a constellation of institutions, many coordinated by the umbrella organization Comunidad Palestina de Chile. There is the first division soccer team, of course. The community also enjoys a leafy social club in Las Condes, one of Santiago’s ritziest neighborhoods. The Grupo Interparliamentario Chileno-Palestino, the largest binational parliamentary group in Chile’s congress, includes representatives spanning the political spectrum, from communists to the hard right. The private Colegio Árabe teaches schoolchildren in Santiago. And so on.

The prevalence and mainstream representation of Palestinian-Chileans helps explain the country’s orientation toward Israel over the past eight months. In October, President Gabriel Boric—who some on the Latin American left have at times found overly friendly to U.S. foreign policy goals—recalled his ambassador to Israel, decrying Israeli violations of international law. In January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed above 24,000, Chile petitioned the International Criminal Court alongside Mexico to investigate possible Israeli war crimes. In March, Boric disinvited Israeli companies from the International Air and Space Fair (FIDAE), a biannual arms convention hosted by the Chilean air force.

The early Palestinians who crossed the Atlantic to Chile were subjects of the Ottoman Empire; many came to the Americas as merchants at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth alongside Syrian and Lebanese emigrants. Most were Orthodox Christians who were “despised by the Turks,” as Palestinian-Chilean author Lina Meruane writes in her memoir Becoming Palestine:

They were considered emissaries of the West, European agents, protected by adversary nations. They left . . . bearing a paradoxically Ottoman passport that allowed them to flee from that empire, from military service in war times where they would have been cannon fodder. Those that could escaped from the death sentence bearing a contradiction: to carry forever the nickname of “Turks.”

The arrivals fanned out across their new homeland. An old Chilean saying has it that “In every town in Chile there is a priest, a policeman, and a Palestinian.”

These immigrants identified most strongly with the towns from which they came, according to Cecilia Baeza, a historian of the Palestinian diaspora in the Americas. In the 1920s, this began to change. Club Deportivo Palestino, with its distinctive flag jerseys, was founded at the beginning of that decade. In 1925, the British began issuing passports denoting Palestinian nationality, which meant Palestinians living elsewhere who wished to visit their homeland had to either acquire visas from their new countries or apply for Palestinian passports—an exceedingly difficult process. Where diasporic populations had earlier traveled back and forth with relative ease, this new regime effectively barred many from returning. This shift hardened the distance between diasporic populations and the land they had left, leading to an early surge of nationalist sentiment.

In the decades that followed, schisms emerged within the Palestinian community. While events in the old country spurred national identification, prosperity for some in Chile encouraged a certain level of political quiescence compared with more baldly left-wing solidarity movements. “By the beginning of the 1970s, the Palestinian community in Chile was experiencing growing divisions,” Baeza writes. “Over the decades, the socio-economic gap had widened and, even though they were still looked down upon as Turco nouveaux riches, the newly affluent industrialists had broken into the local bourgeoisies. Meanwhile, there was increasing political polarization between a new generation of left-leaning politicians of Palestinian descent and the industrialists who remained conservative.” Some members of the ritzy Club Social Palestino denounced others to Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing military junta.

The 1982 massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps once again elevated the significance of national identity. Yet outside such galvanizing moments, the tensions of organizing within a polarized community linger.

At Club Social Palestino, I met Kiko Siade—a textile importer and a founder of the Raices Árabes channel—who reflected on the contradictions of political activity since October 7. Outside the club, a billboard read “STOP THE GENOCIDE,” with red paint dripping down a Palestinian flag like blood. Inside, we sat beside white oleanders beneath a pagoda and shared falafel, cucumber, and tomato salad, along with a generous pile of grape leaves.

Siade recounted the horrors of Israel’s war, which he characterized as a genocide carried out by a Nazi state, language common in street protests in Santiago. What happened on October 7 was horrible, he told me, but now, for Gazans, “every day is like an October 7.”  He spent the early portion of our lunch decrying the UN votes at which the great majority of the world voted to back a ceasefire, opposed by Israel and their patrons in the United States. For Siade, the prescription for how Chile might proceed was straightforward: cutting diplomatic ties with Israel. He acknowledged that following through with that plan would be difficult because Israel is a major supplier of weapons, including airplanes, to the Chilean armed forces. Chile’s military-economic ties with Israel’s main supporter, the United States, are likewise close. And “the Palestinians here”—he gestured around the club—“like to go to Las Vegas, Miami, New York. They have big apartments in Miami. . . . I used to have an apartment there.”

Mobilizing the Palestinian-Chilean community is also difficult, Siade said, because “they all love Palestine, but they’re Chilean.” The majority come from families that have lived in South America for generations. Many cultural practices have been lost, including the Arabic language and daily culinary traditions. While Palestinian community institutions remain robust, identification with events in Palestine itself had faded over time.

Since October, however, the Palestinian cause has been resurgent in Chile. According to Kamal Cumsille, professor at the Center of Arabic Studies at the University of Chile, the strong nationalist bent of Chile’s diasporic population stands out even among Palestinian populations in Peru, Honduras, Bolivia, and El Salvador with similar histories of migration. “When a Palestinian in Chile from the third or fourth generation that doesn’t speak Arabic says ‘I’m Palestinian,’ it’s a vindication of a fundamentally political identity.”

While that political identity has remained strong, however, its content is a matter of contest. Cumsille emphasized that traditional institutions fail to capture the breadth of Palestinian-Chilean life: Not only are plenty of Palestinian-Chileans less wealthy, but the community has also recently absorbed a more recent group of migrants who arrived in Chile in 2008 from Iraq, forced to flee yet another war. This group maintains closer ties to Palestine, and where the established community is mostly Christian, these newer arrivals are overwhelmingly Muslim.

Days before my meeting with Cumsille, President Boric had uninvited Israeli arms companies from FIDAE, the arms fair where Chile and neighboring countries’ militaries purchase weapons systems. Boric cited Israeli human rights violations in announcing the decision—an interruption of a previously cooperative military-industrial relationship between the two countries. Critics accused Boric of inserting his personal ideology into foreign policy decisions.

But Chile’s foreign policy has been focused on international law for decades, Cumsille told me—a posture that has transcended differences between governments on the right and the left. Familiar divisions over Palestine are scrambled in Chile: it was former right-wing president Sebastián Piñera who first recognized the Palestine state in 2011. Given their social position, Cumsille says, a large portion of Palestinian-Chileans vote for the right. To court their votes, the right in Chile is more friendly to the Palestinian cause than conservatives elsewhere. The president of the parliamentary group focused on Palestine belongs to a right-wing party.

Cumsille sees the political consensus around Palestine in Chile as a strength of Palestinian organizing. And there has been some vindication of a more institutional approach to Palestinian solidarity since I spoke with Cumsille in March. In the case Chile and Mexico referred to the International Criminal Court, the court’s prosecutor has requested warrants for commission of war crimes for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas officials Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, and Ismail Haniyeh. The warrants leave these officials potentially subject to arrest if they travel to any of the court’s 124 member countries, and they have contributed—along with rebukes from the International Court of Justice—to Israel’s isolation on the world stage.

Still, the big tent of Palestinian solidarity organizing in Chile demands coordination of a wider range of groups than in contexts, like the United States, where Palestinian solidarity is typically a left-wing cause. The process can be fractious. Siham El Masou Atuez, a former student activist, recalled her time with the Unión General de Estudiantes Palestinos from 2014–2016, when—in response to a 2014 bombardment in Gaza—the group endorsed a platform of BDS: boycotting, divesting from, and sanctioning Israel. This brought the student group into more explicit contact with left-wing political parties, and eventually produced a rupture between the student group and the Comunidad Palestina de Chile (CPC)—the central and most powerful organization for Palestinian advocacy. Cumsille, long involved with the BDS campaign in Chile, told me by text that relations between the CPC and BDS organizing groups strained five years ago, during the massive 2019 street protests that rocked the country and brought about a new constitutional convention. Since then, he said, there has been “an effort from new CPC leadership, especially since 2021, to weaken BDS.”

The urgency of the last eight months has spurred young Chileans into more direct organizing efforts outside of traditional channels. Aya, who chose not to give her last name, is an omnipresent leader at street demonstrations in support of Palestine and part of the more recent group of Palestinian migrants. She spoke to me at the Club Social Palestino while painting a banner that read, “They didn’t know that we were seeds,” the letters decorated as watermelon slices. Aya explained that upon leaving Iraq it was a “roulette” to determine her destination country—her aunt was admitted to Chile, for example, her aunt’s partner to the United States. She told me that despite leading protests, she did not affiliate with any particular organization, since affiliation could leave people afraid to speak freely. El Masou Atuez, the former student organizer, agreed. She noted a slew of new Palestinian organizing efforts focused on direct action that had emerged since October to fill the representational void. “If you ask me, I think the CPC should open up more, take a more transparent and democratic form,” she told me. “They’ve opened a bit. But really only a little bit and only now that the issue has become more heated and they’ve been forced to.” As in past eras, attacks in the old country produce new possibilities for solidarity in the diaspora.

The proliferation of affective ties to Palestine, and of multiple visions of how best to support the nation, befit Adam Shatz’s interpretation of “Palestinianism,” a term coined by Edward Said. In opposition to Zionism, the “song of a single people,” Palestinianism encompasses a nation built of “multiple, almost desperate dramas”; it is a counterpoint to racial absolutism and to the apocalyptic nationalism it engenders. Utopian, maybe. But the flexible nationalism of Palestinian-Chileans has survived the community’s absorption into the Chilean halls of power; it is the backdrop to a cultural upwelling of popular support for Palestine and state action to confront Israel. Whether membership in the Chilean elite also places a damper on available forms of solidarity remains to be seen. But there’s a Palestinian in every town in Chile, as the saying goes. The question now is how to organize.

Sammy Feldblum is a geographer and journalist. His academic research focuses on water governance and the political ecology of drought in Chile. He writes across the Southern United States and Latin America about politics, water, the environment, and labor.