The memorial to the victims of the 1992 Buenos Aires Israeli embassy bombing. Photograph Source: Carlos Zito – CC BY-SA 3.0
During my appointment to Buenos Aires in the worst years of the dictatorship and repression (1976-1980), I learned of this ambiguous distinction embodied by the Israeli Ambassador, Ron Nergard, in the capital of Argentina. When Jewish Argentine citizens were victims of repression (kidnapping, torture, disappearance, murder, fraud, dispossession)[1], many of them for the simple reason of being Jewish, Israeli diplomats were invariably absent from the meetings held with the principal European and American diplomats on the question of violation of human rights. Only Rabbi Marshall Meyer attended those meetings. He was a regular guest at the French embassy. He sought to call the attention of the media and North American organizations (particularly the American Jewish Committee) to the disappearances, fully aware of the powerful and dangerous anti-Semitic currents then flowing through Argentine society (the armed forces, the police, the nationalist and Catholic extreme right). The local Jewish organizations and the Israeli embassy refused to recognize and publicly condemn these currents, even in response to the disappearance of Israeli citizens[2] and the abduction and torture of the owner and editor of the newspaper La Opinion, Jacobo Timerman, father of Argentine Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hector Timerman (2010-2015) during the presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015).
Jacobo Timerman described the long and painful anti-Semitic interrogations he was subjected to in a book published in 1981[3]. The testimony of French people of Jewish origin who disappeared for some time after being arrested at home by armed military and police and freed after being tortured by their captors is categorical: being Jewish is always an aggravating factor[4]. The Israeli Ambassador, Ron Nergard, said that he was not the ambassador of the Jews but the ambassador of Israel and refused to issue visas to Argentine Jews who were considered to be too far left on the political spectrum, and thus the ones in greatest danger, much to the despair of the local representative of the Jewish Agency, Daniel Recanati. Unlike the concern manifested by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion at the upsurge in attacks on the Jewish community in Argentina after a coup d’état unseated Peron in September 1955, prompting the dispatch to Buenos Aires of the chief of the Israeli secret service, Isser Harel, Israeli authorities hardly showed any such solidarity during the repression of many Argentine Jews by the military dictatorship. However, several Israeli citizens were among the disappeared, including the daughter of an officer of the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (DAIA), who was 17 when she was abducted from her home, not to mention the Jewish leaders subject to arbitrary and brutal incarceration (including Amnòn Rudin of the Jewish Agency for Israel, Jaime Pompas, former president of the Jewish Community of Cordoba).
It was not until March 1978 that an Israeli newspaper (the March 29 issue of Haaretz) first mentioned the issue of disappeared Jews in Argentina[5]. When the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs went to Buenos Aires in 1982, he refused to receive a delegation of parents of the disappeared; this happened again in 1984, when the former president of Israel, Yitzhak Navon, came to participate in the 11th congress of the local Jewish organization DAIA (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas). The DAIA, which Jacobo Timerman equates in his memoirs with the Judenrat, reproached the Jewish Movement for Human Rights, led by the rabbis Marshal Meyer and Herman Schiller, for its role in support of the disappearances, seeing its initiatives as constituting a threat to the Jewish community. Shulamit Aloni (1928-2014), former Minister of Education and Culture in Yitzhak Rabin’s government (1992-1993) and member of parliament, told the newspaper Haaretz on May 24, 2006, that she had never succeeded in getting the Knesset to debate the sale of Israeli arms to the Argentine military junta. It is estimated that some 1 billion dollars in Israeli weaponry was sold to Argentina during the dictatorship (1976-1983)[6]. Federal police inspector, Peregrino Fernandez, a repented torturer, revealed during his public confession that the economic adviser of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Herlz Inbar, provided courses in counter-insurrection to the chiefs of staff of the Argentine army during the dictatorship. We cannot rule out that these arms contracts may have reined in any thoughts of intervention – granted that such truly existed – by the Israeli government to aid the Jewish victims of repression by the military junta. It is indubitable, however, that the embargo on arms sales to Argentina imposed by the Carter administration (1977-1981) because of human rights violations prompted Israel and European countries – Germany and France in particular – to satisfy the requests presented by the Argentine military. This no doubt sent an ambiguous message to the junta and weakened the effectiveness of actions by the principal consulates in favor of their disappeared citizens. Israel was clearly not alone in this. These arms sales reinforced the junta’s hold on power at a time when the military leaders found themselves thwarted on the diplomatic level by their paradigm, the United States, who had trained these very military leaders[7].
The main expressions of support and solidarity with the South American Jewish community during the years of military repression came from U.S. Jewish organizations, particularly the American Jewish Committee, which sent a delegation to Buenos Aires in 1979 and 1981. The solidarity committees that came together in Israel in 1977, particularly to promote a boycott of the Soccer World Cup recommended by the writer Marek Halter, were essentially due to the efforts of Argentine exiles. These committees did not receive even the slightest support from rightist parties in Israel, nor from the Israeli communist party, which had been particularly active in the situations in Chile and Uruguay in 1973 and 1974, respectively. Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is invariably reported and denounced by Tel Aviv when it works against Israeli interests.
Marco Aurelio Garcia, a former member of the Brazilian Communist Party, living in exile in Chile and France during the military dictatorship, and one of the founders of the Workers’ Party, one of the mentors of Brazilian diplomacy since 2002, has this to say of Israel:
“Is Israel not a terrorist state when it bombs UN schools and kills dozens of children? If it is not terrorism, it is certainly a war crime. We must cease this hypocritical diplomacy. The Jews must get out of the habit of considering any criticism to be an attack on the existence of Israel. Israel consistently supported the Apartheid regime in South Africa. It provided constant support to the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua and to Salazar in Portugal. Do not come to me now seeking to play the good guys.”[8].
When explosions destroyed the Israeli Embassy on March 17, 1992, and the headquarters of the Argentine Jewish association AMIA on July 18, 1994, causing a total of 114 deaths and 542 injuries, the violent anti-Semitism within the Argentine police forces and army was overlooked. Instead, Israel pointed the finger at Iran and Hezbollah. Once again, the agenda aligns with Israeli interests.
Patrick Howlett-Martin is a diplomat, dual national (French and British). He is the author of Brazil. The Disputed Rise of a Regional Power (2003-2015), Paris, 2016.
Notes.
1.) Some 1,500 Jewish citizens of Argentina were victims of the repression between 1976 and 1980 and since then recorded as disappeared. ↑
2.) Amnon Rudin of the Jewish Agency, Jaime Pompas, former president of the Jewish community of Cordoba, Mauricio Weinstein, son of the president of the Commission on Disappeared Jews created in Buenos Aires in 1978. ↑
3.) Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner without a name, cell without a number, University of Wisconsin Press, 1981. ↑
4.) Testimony of Anita Jarolavsky, arrested on April 29 and freed May 7, 1976, and of Raymond Franck, arrested on May 9 and freed on May 24, 1976. ↑
5.) An Israeli journalist, Marcel Zohar, published a book (in Hebrew) on this question in 1990: Let my people go to hell: treachery in blue and white, Citrin Publishing House, Tel Aviv. ↑
6.) Aharon Kleiman, A Double-Edged Sword. Israeli Defense Exports in the 1990s, (pp. 233-235), 1972. ↑
7.) Between 1950 and 1970 an estimated 2,808 Argentine officers were trained in the United States, mostly at the School of the Americas (then in the Panama Canal zone) and at Fort Benning (Georgia). Two generals in the military junta, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola, were among the trainees. ↑
8.) Interview in the monthly Piaui, N°. 30, 2009. ↑
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