The Global South must Step up on Palestine: The Role of Latin America

Buenos Aires (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Most coverage of the ongoing Israeli wars have fomented a superstitious belief that limits our ability for action: there prevails this idea that the gruesome erasure of Gaza can only be determined by Israel and the White House and by the good will of the Democratic Party’s foreign-policy-makers, and that otherwise this campaign of destruction is utterly unstoppable for the rest of the watching world. But it is really another, ideological, factor that has emerged in global power relations in recent years that has made this genocide thus far possible: the unprecedented complicity of numerous Western allies who endorse the US-Israeli effort while repressing critical speech amongst their citizenries. These participants in the genocide include the leading economies of Europe, Canada, and the wider Western world, as well as former allies of the Palestinians in the Global South—many of whom have vowed to never again question US foreign policy in the 21^st century.

When the PLO was at the height of its powers, and figures like liberation poet Mahmoud Darwish were exiled in Sweden or appearing in Godard movies, European opinionmakers and journalists had more self-confidence and autonomy and dared to repudiate American foreign policy despite living in NATO countries. Just recall the widespread condemnation from the European mainstream towards Ariel Sharon’s 1982 proxy-massacre at the Palestinian Sabra and Shatila camp in Lebanon. Back then, NATO generals were not yet proclaimed authorities on “truth” or “facts’’ or entrusted as the arbiters of so-called “democratic health” as they are in our current authoritarian context. European elites had not yet become intoxicated on the fanfare for ex-president Barack Obama (as they currently are blindly enamored of and aligned with the Harris campaign) and Europeans understood that their ex-colony, the US, was a relatively new and juvenile culture, which attained superpowerdom almost by accident by being the last Western frontier still intact after the second world war.

Part of the Occident’s “old world” cynicism towards the US was simply an autumnal European arrogance towards an ex-colony. But there was also the much wiser and genuine old-world perception of the US being a culture based on naiveté—that “pursuit of happiness”, the idea of “making it” from scratch, the “American dream”, an innocence and optimism that have inspired millions, but which still limit the American vision, often rendering the US commentariat incapable of understanding the complex and tragic histories of much of the world—particularly when it comes to Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the two regions which today endure mayhem under the dominance of a naive American power that proclaims itself the chief harbinger of good in these regions.

Latin America, however, is also guilty of a different kind of excess optimism: the continent famed for producing anti-imperialist heroes appears largely absent from the picture when it comes to real diplomacy on Palestine.

While right wing Latin American leaders like Argentina’s Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele — himself the son of Christian Palestinian immigrants to El Salvador — form part of a global reactionary renaissance that glorifies Israeli violence, the Latin American progressive governments of Lula, Petro and Boric have contented themselves with displays of sentimental rhetoric which amount to little more than appeals to the White House and the West to do more soul-searching (see Lula’s statements on Biden’s lack of sensitivity for Gaza). These leaders have struggled in the world of politics long enough to know that beseeching Antony Blinken to “have a heart” will not end American backing for these massacres. Such pronouncements make successful memes for social media but prove disappointingly insufficient.

“Lulu in Gaza,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Brazil especially, as a pioneering leader of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) bloc, could play a key part in diplomacy by confronting other countries on their inaction—by challenging Egypt and Turkey, for example, on their lack of imagination when it comes to matching bluster with geopolitical deeds: Egypt and Turkey receive altogether roughly 10 billion euros a year from the EU to block refugees from traversing the Mediterranean. If Muslim states in the Mediterranean would refuse to perform their watchdog duties until European countries agreed to a full weapons embargo on Israel and on Sudan, how long would the EU’s fanatical “Zionist” fervor last until they accepted to stop the flow of weapons in exchange for a halt in the flow of desperate rafters from Central Africa?

The lack of concerted geopolitical opposition and cooperation beyond mere words — for in American slang, “talk is cheap”—has emboldened the US and Israel to push through the drastic plans that were on the drawing-board long before October 7th, the machinations of a bloody realpolitik which end up being tantamount to a final solution for the tedium of the Palestine issue. The alternative — enforcing international law — has long been treated as utopian only because of the pusillanimous lack of coordinated pressure toward that end.

Europe has decided that it will engage in self-harming complicity and uncritical submission unto American foreign policy adventures, however reckless.

European countries consistently discard the historic Western commitments to civil liberties when punishing critics of Israel, while continuing to ship weapons to foreign armies at war, all in violation of European law.

Progressive states such as Lula’s Brazil, meanwhile, succumb unto the folly of a superficial, easy anti-Americanism which Edward Said had warned against shortly before his death. Simply highlighting the damaging US role in all this belligerence is not enough to help Palestinians now.

Latin American representatives are in an excellent position to lobby fellow energy-producers in the world — for instance, to demand that countries like the Emirates be less passive, by refusing to cooperate commercially with Israel until an end to the genocide and occupation. Latino officials have instead opted for clichés and the well-known talking points, rather than transnational organizing towards exerting pragmatic, coordinated pressure. Global South countries and civic organizations could invoke laws of Universal Jurisdiction against Israeli war criminals. Some US-Israeli weapons manufacturers rely on Latin America’s minerals. There are multiple fronts for diplomatically pressing Canada and Europe to stop championing Netanyahu’s imagined right to massacre.  The window of time for action, narrower than ever, has not yet been closed or bricked in.