Julian Sayarer is an award-winning author and journalist. He is the author of Türkiye: Cycling Through a Country's First Century and Fifty Miles Wide: Cycling Through Israel and Palestine, among other books. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, The Guardian, the Financial Times and other publications.
In the office of the Palestinian ambassador to Peru, Walid Muaqqat, hang portraits of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. When I met him there last fall, in early October, it was days before Hamas's attack into southern Israel—before Israel retaliated with its devastating assault on Gaza, almost certainly changing the world for Palestinians forever.
When I asked him how it felt to watch the suffering of his people from afar, even before the new horrors of this war, Muaqqat replied with words that have stayed with me, given what has unfolded in Gaza since then. With a dignity undisturbed, but profound sadness nonetheless, Muaqqat said: "Daily they kill a Palestinian, as if they had farms of chickens; one, two, three, four. For them, we are like chickens to kill every day."
For all the usual talk of factional divisions in Palestinian politics, Muaqqat emphasized Palestinian unity under the same Israeli bombs and bullets. He first arrived in Latin America as a young diplomat in the 1970s. As we spoke in his office in Lima, he outlined the Palestinian mission's diplomatic priority at the time: to have Peru open a consulate in Ramallah, in order to spare Peruvian-Palestinians the treacherous journey through occupied territory, through checkpoints and ritual humiliation, to reach a Peruvian embassy in Tel Aviv or even Cairo. Plans for the consulate in Ramallah, Muaqqat told me, had been slated as a priority for Peru's leftist president, Pedro Castillo, only to fall away following his ouster in 2022.
The large Palestinian community in Peru is thought to exceed 30,000, part of a vast Palestinian diaspora across Latin America that some estimates place around 700,000 people. As with any diaspora, though, it is hard to put a precise number on all Latin Americans of Palestinian origin, because for more than a century—accelerated catastrophically by the Nakba in 1948, when some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes by Zionist forces—this diaspora has been growing but also integrating. People have changed names and even religions, just as Argentina's president in the 1990s, Carlos Menem—born to a Syrian family and raised as a Muslim—converted to Christianity. Mahmouds have become Manuels; Arabic has in some cases been forgotten. Some simply still identify as Palestinian but primarily as part of the country—Peru, Chile, Argentina—they have been citizens in for generations.
Beyond politics and geopolitics, Palestine transcends into that realm where change is really won: people's hearts.
- Julian Sayarer
Among the more familiar representatives of the Palestinian cause on the continent, a new one seems to be rising. Last week, Colombia became the latest Latin American country, following Bolivia and Belize, to cut diplomatic ties with Israel over its war in Gaza. "Tomorrow, we will break diplomatic relations with the state of Israel… for having a government, for having a president who is genocidal," President Gustavo Petro said in announcing the move. "If Palestine dies, humanity dies."
Petro's position has been clear for months. Colombia's first leftist president, he told the CELAC Summit of Latin American and Caribbean States in March, of U.S. and European support for Israel and its war in Gaza: "Because they are making a demonstration in front of the whole of humanity, what happens to Palestine can happen to any of you, if you dare to make changes without their permission. That is the first danger for Latin America and the Caribbean that we have to recognize and act upon."
Colombia already had reason to take Palestine personally: Israeli operatives trained the vicious paramilitaries deployed against Colombia's leftist Patriotic Union in the 1980s. The Colombian government for decades has also had close ties with Israel, which has been a key arms and weapons supplier to the Colombian military.
Chile's diaspora community is by far the largest in Latin America. With half a million Palestinians in Chile, it is the largest community of Palestinians outside of Palestine and the cities and refugee camps of neighboring Arab countries. In Argentina, I was told the issue of putting a number on the population is complicated because many Palestinians—along with Lebanese, Syrian and other Arab immigrants—are, confusingly, often simply called "Turcos," because everyone arrived originally under the same Ottoman passports. Arab migration to Latin America goes back some 150 years, with the first major wave from what was then the Ottoman Empire between roughly the 1860s until the start of World War I. New waves of migration followed in 1948 from Palestine, and again from Lebanon throughout its civil war in the late 1970s and 1980s.
It should come as little surprise, then, that the Palestinian movement in Latin America is possessed of deep roots. And the more you learn of it, the more you find it: Ernesto "Che" Guevara made a 1959 visit to Rafah, in Gaza, at the invitation of President Gamal Abdel Nasser during a trip to Egypt. He reported solemnly that he would return to Cuba with news of the Palestinian plight. Sixty-five years later, a visitor to Rafah would be shocked at the scale of the suffering there: more than a million Palestinians forcibly displaced by the Israeli military from the ruins of other parts of Gaza, fearing the next Israeli assault. Guevara's visit was barely a decade after the Nakba, and now 65 years later, Israeli impunity still remains.
The pro-Palestine movement in Latin America is not restricted to Palestinians. Bolivia has no sizable Palestinian population but its support for Palestine—including recognizing the state in 2010—reflects its own deep struggle and commitment for indigenous rights. Brazil, the Latin American superpower, comes to Palestine through socialism but also the understanding of a country that aspires to Global South leadership and knows how central the Palestinian cause is to so much of the world. (Brazil's former right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, by contrast, attempted to marry his embrace of Israel to the enormous Brazilian community of evangelical Christians, with their end-times belief that Jews must be "restored" to Palestine to trigger the bloody final battle of Armageddon, in which Jews and other "non-believers" are subsequently wiped out, hastening the return of Jesus.)
Beyond politics and geopolitics, Palestine also transcends into that realm where change is really won: people's hearts. "You can see that Argentine people see what is happening," Riyad al-Halabi, the Palestinian charge d'affaires to Argentina, told me in Buenos Aires of a fundraising drive for Gaza. "They are moved."
Much of Latin America, like most of the world, not only profoundly disagrees with the assessment of Israel reached by a small club of Western powers, it also demands change for the sake of Palestinians and their rights.
- Julian Sayarer
A few weeks later, we met again at the annual opening of an art exhibition devoted to Palestine, held annually and now attracting works from across the Americas and Europe. This time, the starring role was for Palestinian artist Mohammed el-Haj, his print accompanied by a video message that he recorded after the work was shipped via Ramallah from Gaza. The Israelis have since destroyed his studio in Gaza. Like so many Palestinians in the territory, el-Haj was seeking to raise funds to pay the necessary bribes to leave the besieged territory through the Egyptian border.
At the opening, I also met a young Palestinian-American student from Ramallah, who was studying in the United States but on a class trip to Argentina. She spoke of the increased brutality in the West Bank at her last visit home for Christmas, from Israeli soldiers and settlers alike. We talked about Ghassan Kanafani and the idea of a pen as a rifle. She said that her entire class now understands Palestine, and like me, she was astounded to find her Palestine so well-represented in Buenos Aires.
This Latin American advocacy for Palestine also reveals the extent to which unbridled support for Israel is increasingly confined to the United States and Western Europe, reflecting the history of Zionism as a European colonial project, backed by British imperialism (since replaced by U.S. hegemony). Much of Latin America, like most of the world, not only profoundly disagrees with the assessment reached by this small club of Western powers, it also demands change for the sake of Palestinians and their rights.
At a Chilean roadside restaurant recently, I sat one evening and ate a meal with highway maintenance workers. We watched football highlights together, with the Santiago club Deportivo Palestino—founded by a group of Palestinians back in 1920—having played earlier in the day. The banner around the pitch reads: Palestino mas que equipo todo un pueblo. Palestine is more than a team, it is a whole people.
