Gaza Operation Sparks Latin American Rebuke

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, 4 Aug 2014

The Star – TRANSCEND Media Service

Although far from unanimous, Latin American opposition to Israel’s deadly incursion in Gaza seems to mark a new spirit of independence in the region, but it is unlikely to have an immediate effect on Israel.

Palestinians in the Chilean capital of Santiago protest against Israel’s ongoing incursion in Gaza. Numbering as many as 500,000, Chile’s Palestinian community is said to be the largest outside the Arab world.
santiagotimes.cl

Five Latin American governments have withdrawn their ambassadors from Israel in recent days, in protest against that country’s ongoing ground and air assault in Gaza.

Aimed at stopping militant organizations in the narrow Palestinian territory from firing rockets at towns in southern Israel, the military operation has already killed some 1,400 Gazans, most of them civilians, and appears likely to continue for some time.

Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Peru have all recalled their top envoys from Tel Aviv.

At least two other Latin American countries – Bolivia and Venezuela – would be doing the same, except that they can’t.

Both Caracas and La Paz suspended diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009, after the Israel Defense Forces launched Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, a military campaign that claimed about 1,400 Palestinian lives and had much the same avowed purpose as the current incursion.

Nicaragua took the same measure in 2010, protesting Israel’s attack on a sea-borne flotilla of peace activists that year. For its part, Cuba broke off relations with Israel in 1973.

S. American countries that cut relations with Israel over Gaza slaughter of innocent civilians.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is calling the present Israeli campaign a “massacre,” but her tough words were rejected by Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, who dismissed South America’s most populous country as “a diplomatic dwarf.”

The Latin protest against Israel’s Gaza incursion is hardly unanimous. Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico – all among the region’s larger and more powerful countries – have yet to take diplomatic or other steps against Israel.

Even so, it would have been difficult only a decade ago to imagine Latin Americans mounting any sort of coordinated stand against Israeli action, particularly considering Israel’s intimate ties to the United States, a global superpower that has long dominated political affairs south of the Rio Grande.

George Ciccariello-Maher, a Latin America expert at Philadelphia’s Drexel University, is calling the emerging independence a reflection of “the powerful transformation Latin America has undergone in the past decade.”

As for Gaza, the horrors just keep mounting, the horrors and the dead.

Go to Original – thestar.com

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