As an 'endangered species', Jews have every legal and moral right to strenuously defend itself.
By David E. Kaplan
When the news broke of Chilean President Gabriel Boric announcing that his country was joining South Africa in its transparently antisemitic pur'suit' of falsely and maliciously accusing Israel at the International Court of Justice of "genocide", it reminded me of a different Chile 14 years earlier, when Chilean miners in 2010, understood more than a Chilean president today in 2024.
Who can forget those 69 days in 2010, when 33 miners defied death and despair as they waited to be rescued in a collapsed mine. Trapped 700 meters (2,300 ft) underground and 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the mine's entrance, more than a billion people watched the miners' rescue and joyous reunion with family members, making it one of the most watched events in television history. So impressed were Israelis with the feat of human survival against all odds - a trait Jews could identify with so profoundly - that Israel invited all 33 miners for a fully-paid 10-day visit to the Holly Land.
Deep Understanding. Grim-faced Chilean miners with their families inside Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in 2011. Having narrowly escaped death deep underground in a collapsed mine, they try process the experience Jews went through during the Holocaust. (Photo: David E. Kaplan)
As then editor of Hilton Israel Magazine, I joined the miners on assignment to cover their visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial Museum. For this group of religious Catholics who knew zilch about Jews - most had never met or seen a Jew or even heard about the Holocaust - their reactions were insightful.
Saved from the jaws of death by a collective world effort of human resource and prayer, it was these same gritty miners that alighted with their wives, girlfriends and children from the bus at a place memorializing where European Jewry many decades earlier had not been so fortunate. Catching them before they entered the stark grey entrance into the gruesomely grey jowls of Yad Vashem, the facial dispositions of these tourists were cheerful, many were smiling. They were neither when I met them an hour-and-a-half later exiting from the 'Hall of Names'. With no cemeteries, no headstones and no traces left to mark the loss of the six million Holocaust victims, the 'Hall of Names' is the Jewish People's memorial to each Jew murdered in the Holocaust.
It was here that I interviewed 54-year-oldforeman, Luis Urzúa, who kept hope alive for his fellow trapped miners and who had - like a brave sea captain - been the last miner to be rescued.
"Having been so close to death in your experience underground, how do you identify with Jews having walked through Yad Vashem?" I asked.
Looking back emotionally at the horror from which he had just exited, he explained:
"There is one big difference. While we may have shared with the Jews in the concentration camps that feeling of always being close to death, we at least enjoyed one luxury that the Jews never had - HOPE. We knew there were people rooting for us, working non-stop to save us."
Heroism and Hope. The writer (left) interviewing outside Yad Vashem's 'Hall of Names" the mine's heroic foreman,Luis Urzúa (right), whose leadership kept the hope alive for Chile's trapped miners over 69 days in 2010. (Photo: David E. Kaplan).
Damn right he was. Three separate drilling rig teams; nearly every Chilean government ministry; the United States' space agency, NASA; and a dozen corporations from around the world cooperated in completing the rescue that was literally willed on by the people all over the world.
Fourteen years later what was the reaction of the Chilean president today to Israel trying to ensure that the genocide perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 does not ever happen again? Gabriel Boric was quick to say the war in Gaza has "no justification" and is "unacceptable." In other words, Jews are legitimate prey and have no legal right to defend themselves.
His reaction should come as no surprise. A bitter critic of Israel, the president in 2019 showed his true colours. When the leadership of Chile's 18,000 Jewish community sent a present - a Rosh Hashanah (New Year) gift along with a note expressing a desire for a "more inclusive, respectful society with more solidarity," Boric responded on Twitter with a picture of the gift with the following wording:
"I appreciate the gesture but they could start by asking Israel to return the illegally occupied Palestinian territory."
Could the Chilean president have been more disgraceful and disdainful? Irrespective of whether one agrees or disagrees with Israel's policies, Boric holds the Jewish population of Chile accountable and hence responsible to take a stand against it!
A Chilly Wind. Chilean president, Gabriel Boric who has joined his country to South Africa's case against Israel at the ICJ, has a history of anti-Israel rhetoric, is a known supporter of BDS and reportedly in 2022 refused to see the new Israel envoy because of its "killing children in Gaza."
And when a number of Chilean Jews raised with Boric his intention to promote his supporter, Daniel Jadue, a member of Chile's Communist Party of Palestinian descent, who has declined to explain why his high school yearbook lists him as "an antisemite" who will "clean the city of Jews," he answered that he would only reply when the Jewish community leaders "oppose the Israeli policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
True Colours. Of Palestinian descent, Daniel Jadue, the mayor of Recoleta, a municipality of Chile's capital Santiago, has called Judaism a "supremacist" religion, comparing it to Nazism. With the whole of Israel draped in Palestinian colours appearing on his wall, he wrote recently that "Being Jewish starts from a conception that has to do with the supremacist conception of being part of a chosen people….. Well, here we are faced with an ideology that I believe is the most Nazi thing I have seen in my life."
This is the leadership in Chile today, following in the disgraceful wake of South Africa.
Is it any wonder on the same day as it appeared in the media of Chile's antisemitic path forward in collusion with South Africa, page 5 in The Jerusalem Post was dedicated to only three articles under the headings:
- Canadian Jewish shool targeted in another shooting
- 18 POLICE HURT: Firebombs thrown at Israel's embassy in Mexico
- Driver tries to ram Jewish students in Brooklyn
Supporting Genocide of Jews. At a recent election campaign rally in Soweto, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa chanted the slogan "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free", a phrase widely interpreted as a call for the eradication of Israel. The president is seen here earlier this year wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf at a football match in Cape Town.(Photo Rodger Bosch/AFP)
Who would have foreseen that following the Covid pandemic that kept a global population for the most part indoors for over 2 years that today it is specifically Jews who remain GLOBALLY vulnerable. The new pandemic of antisemitism is out of control and world leaders, instead of fighting it like they did with the coronavirus are at the forefront - like South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa and Chile's Gabriel Boric - of exacerbating it.
Shame on you both!
True Colours. Of Palestinian descent, Daniel Jadue, the mayor of Recoleta, a municipality of Chile's capital Santiago, has called Judaism a "supremacist" religion, comparing it to Nazism. With the whole of Israel draped in Palestinian colours appearing on his wall, he wrote recently that "Being Jewish starts from a conception that has to do with the supremacist conception of being part of a chosen people….. Well, here we are faced with an ideology that I believe is the most Nazi thing I have seen in my life."
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
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