nakedcapitalism | On Sunday (October 15), the Deputy Director General for Latin America at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Jonathan Peled, summoned the Colombian ambassador, Margarita Manjarez, to “deliver a reprimand” over Petro’s “hostile and antisemitic statements against the State of Israel made last week.” According to the Israeli press release, Petro’s statements “constitute support for the horrific acts of Hamas terrorists, inflame antisemitism, harm representatives of the State of Israel, and threaten the safety of the Jewish community in Colombia.”
Petro has refused to back down despite concerted pressure from Israel, the US, the Jewish community and Colombia’s political and media establishment. Last week, the US “strongly condemn[ed]” President Petro’s statements and “call[ed] on him to condemn Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, for its barbaric murder of Israeli men, women and children,” all to no avail: Petro continues to lambast Israel while refusing to condemn Hamas.
On Saturday, he even stated that “Hamas was created by Mossad to divide the Palestinian people and have an excuse to punish them” — a claim that was widely ridiculed by Colombian media and politicians despite having more than a grain of truth to it. As the Wall Street Journal reported in its 2009 article, How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas, “Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged [Hamas] as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah.”
In 2019, Netanyahu himself told his fellow Likud members in the Knesset:
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.
The Israeli ambassador, Dagan, responded to Petro’s tweet with a sarcastic jibe that partly backfired — at least among those aware of the role Israel has played in arming and training Colombia’s paramilitary groups (more on that later):
It is true, Mr. President Gustavo Petro, as you wrote in this tweet, indeed #Hamas is an invention of the Mossad. However, I would like to share additional information with you from our intelligence services, which are among the best in the world: The Elders of Zion founded the Clan del Golfo. There are still Jews, with large, aquiline noses, who command the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.
Tel Aviv’s next step was to suspend all “security exports” to Colombia in response to its president’s “anti-Semitic” statements. Outside of the US, Israel is the Colombian military’s main weapons supplier. But if the move was supposed to bring Petro back into line, it had, if anything, the opposite effect. Petro’s immediate response was the following statement (translation and comments in parenthesis by yours truly), which includes accusations of Israeli involvement in atrocities during Colombia’s dirty wars:
If we have to suspend foreign relations with Israel, we will suspend them. We do not support genocides.
You do not insult the Colombian president.
I call on Latin America to show real solidarity with Colombia. And if it is not capable, it will be history that will have the last word, as it did in the great Chaco war.
Neither the Yair Kleins nor the Raifal Eithans (NC: two people we will discuss later on) will be able to say what the history of peace in Colombia is like. They unleashed massacres and genocide in Colombia.
To the people of Israel, I ask them to help bring about peace in Colombia and… in Palestine and the world.
That was on Sunday. On Monday, Petro followed through with his threat — though it was Colombia’s foreign minister, Álvaro Leyva Durán, who actually carried it out, albeit not very smoothly or for very long.
X Diplomacy
After posting a tweet lambasting the Israeli ambassador for his “mindless boorishness” toward Colombia’s president, Leyva Durán suggested that Dagan should “apologise and leave”. Within minutes, the story had gone viral: Colombia, until recently widely considered the “Israel of South America,” had expelled Israel’s ambassador. An hour later, Leyva Durán tweeted: “No sensible person can applaud this scorched earth policy no matter where it comes from. It violates the dignity of the human person. Kills innocents.”
But two hours later, the foreign minister pulled a bizarre 180 degree turn, stating, again on Twitter/X, that he had not actually ordered Dagan’s expulsion after all but was instead merely insisting that respect be shown for Colombia’s president. An hour later, he tweeted: “Relations with Israel will be maintained if this country so wishes. Our constitutional principles teach us and command us to respect international law. Something that must be two-way. Respectful relations between States will always be welcome.”
It was, if nothing else, an embarrassing illustration of the dangers of conducting high-stakes international diplomacy on social media platforms. It is not clear why the Petro government made such a dramatic climbdown — and what’s more, on the most public of global stages — but I will try to hazard a guess.
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