A Future of Walls or Liberation
The Israeli government has developed many technologies and tactics to manage its control of the Palestinian people. It's found an enthusiastic market for them among governments in Latin America.
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The activist slogan “none of us are free until Palestine is free” resonates strongly in certain parts of Latin America. Or perhaps in most of the region. Since the 1970s, the export of Israeli weapons, technologies, counterinsurgency doctrines, and military advisers to many Latin American countries has resulted in the bloody maintenance of brutal oligarchic regimes in the face of popular challenge from below. “Palestine is Israel’s workshop,” writes journalist Antony Loewenstein in his new, must read book The Palestine Laboratory, “a laboratory for the most precise and successful methods of domination.” The commercialization and export of those methods of domination—developed and tested on Palestinians in the Occupied Territories—found willing buyers in Cold War Latin America. They still do, including the “Colossus of the North” and its penchant for Israeli border wall technology and police training.
Climate change, imperial wars, and the US fondness for collective punishment in the form of sanctions continue to generate more and more mass refugee displacement. Global North nations have responded by betting on more apartheid walls, more border police, more surveillance. A rather stark, uncomplicated choice thus emerges: do we side with the wall builders and their apartheid, counterinsurgent technology that kills refugees in places like the Sonoran Desert or the Mediterranean Sea? Or those who yearn to storm and smash walls with their dreams of a more just, free future for all?
In this short primer, I focus on the counterinsurgent wall builders and their bloody legacy in Cold War Latin America, particularly in Central America. At war with their own people, at times cut off from US military and economic aid due to their genocidal policies, some of these murderous regimes turned to Israel and its “battle-tested” technology of oppression. As “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk,” Israel served as a sort of proxy for US interests in the region. It worked with dictatorships and death squads when the US could not.
A former head of the Knesset foreign relations committee succinctly explained why in 1985: “Israel is a pariah state. When people ask us for something, we cannot afford to ask questions about ideology. The only type of regime that Israel would not aid would be one that is anti-American. Also, if we can aid a country that it may be inconvenient for the US to help, we would be cutting off our nose to spite our face not to.”
The people of Central America—“the delicate waist of America,” to borrow from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda—still live with the deadly consequences of the wall builders’ handiwork.
“We think the Israelis would be best because they have the technical experience”
Latin America and Israel possess deep, historic ties. For example, Anastasio Somoza, dictator of Nicaragua, secretly smuggled weapons to Zionist militias during the late 1930s and 40s that they used in attacks on Palestinians and the British. At the United Nations in 1947-1948, the region overwhelmingly voted as a regional bloc (with the exception of Cuba) to support the establishment of the state of Israel. Indeed, diplomats from Guatemala and Uruguay “provided much of the final form of the UNSCOP partition plan.” Journalist Victor Perera remembered as a child when diplomat Jorge García Granados—one of the three authors of the partition plan—came to his Guatemalan synagogue “praising Israeli kibbutzim, a concept that he hoped could be adopted to Guatemala’s rural areas.” Ironically, the journalist noted, it would be the genocidal Guatemalan military that implemented that rural model decades later as a form of counterinsurgent population control.
For both Latin American-Israeli ties and the latter’s domestic arms industry, 1967 represented a key turning point. In spite of consistent support for Israel at the UN from many of the region’s governments during the 1950s-70s, the streets and countryside in Latin America began to forge forceful critiques after the Six-Day War—and in response to what historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin refers to as the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) multi-faceted “global offensive.” Domestically, the war—and subsequent arms embargoes enacted by its principal benefactor, France—convinced the Israeli government to rapidly organize a constellation of state and “privately” owned defense companies into a heavily subsidized military industrial complex.
By the 1970s, this complex occupied a central place in the broader Israeli economy as a lucrative export sector. The sale of weapons around the world helped mitigate a consistent “negative balance of trade and declining balance of payments.” Defense company officials touted their Uzis, Galils, Tadiran surveillance computer systems, and Arava planes as “battle or field tested”—most especially on Palestinians in the Occupied Territories or Lebanon. The violent imperatives of settler colonialism became a comparative advantage.
Along with its settler colonial tech, Israel possessed an additional advantage: it sold to almost any country, no questions asked. “We sell to everyone…that is, we don’t sell to our enemies or to the Soviet Bloc,” Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir told the Los Angeles Times in 1981. The list of pariah nations is long: apartheid South Africa, post “Jakarta Method” Indonesia, Iran under the Shah, the viciously anti-semitic Argentine military dictatorship (1976-83) that disappeared 30,000 people, 1980s Zaire under the dictatorial rule of Mobutu Sese Seku, a Haiti terrorized by the Duvaliers, and the Hutu regime in Rwanda while it carried out its 1994 genocide. According to the CIA, Augusto Pinochet’s Chile valued “Israel’s battle-tested equipment.” As Israeli minister of economy Yaakov Meridor argued, “we will say to the Americans: don’t compete with us in Taiwan; don’t compete with us in South Africa; don’t compete with us in the Caribbean or in other places where you can’t sell arms directly. Let us do it…Israel will be your intermediary.”
The list also includes paramilitary death squads, like the Nicaraguan “Contras” who received thousands of AK-47 rifles seized by the Israeli military during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon and training from Israeli advisers. Contra leader Adolfo Calero preferred Israeli assistance because “they have the technical experience.” Carlos Castaño, head of Colombia’s murderous, right-wing paramilitary death squad the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) from the 1990s until his death in 2004, claimed in his autobiography that he had traveled to Israel for extensive military training in the 1980s. “I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis,” he wrote.
“What others regard as ‘dirty work,’” psychologist Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi explained in 1983, “Israelis regard as defensible duty and even, in some cases, an exalted calling.”
“All of a sudden, the methods that proved efficient in Nablus and Hebron begin speaking Spanish”
It was in the killing fields of Central America where Israeli weapons, technology and military advisers demonstrated their most profound and long-lasting counterinsurgent impact. During the 1970s and 80s, a series of dictatorial governments backed by militaries and landed oligarchies unleashed wide-scale repression against their own people. Popular demands for democracy and social justice were met by state terror. This in turn sparked mass political radicalization and, in countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, powerful instances of collective armed struggle. A mix of Liberation Theology and heterodox Marxisms fueled popularly-backed guerrilla organizations.
Facing these revolutionary threats, regimes intensified and expanded their terroristic responses—armed, trained, and supported by the Israeli military industrial complex. These murderous responses at times forced the US government to withhold or suspend military aid during the late 1970s and 80s. So Israel stepped in. The Somoza regime forces that the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinistas) overthrew in 1979 were almost exclusively armed with Israeli weapons (Jimmy Carter had suspended US aid in 1978). From 1975-79 83% of defense imports to El Salvador came from Israel, after the US withheld aid in response to government repression.
This relationship intensified after 1981, when the US Congress prevented Ronald Reagan from extending military aid to the ruling civilian-military junta absent “significant progress” on human rights and democratic reform. Israel provided at least 100 military trainers, computers, weapons, and, as Air Force commander Rafael Bustillo admitted in 1984, napalm. Cut off from US armaments in 1977, Guatemala also received the vast majority of its armaments and military assistance from Israel well into the 1980s. It even got its own munitions and parts factory for Galil assault rifles.
In those Central American killing fields, some military officials voiced another reason why they turned to Israeli arms and methods. When a journalist asked Salvadoran Colonel Sigifredo Ochoa Pérez if his counterinsurgent methods were based on US policy in Vietnam, he answered, “They lost. The Americans know nothing…The Taiwanese and the Israelis do know.” Having received military training in Israel during the mid-1970s, Ochoa Pérez was also influenced by that country’s foreign policy toward its neighbors. Accusing Sandinista Nicaragua of supporting Salvadoran guerrillas, he wanted to enact the “Israeli solution”: the invasion of their neighboring country. “For Ochoa,” Milton Jamail and Margo Gutiérrez wrote, “Nicaragua would become Central America’s Lebanon.”
Central American reactionaries like Ochoa Pérez, journalist George Black argued, admired the 1982 invasion “on so many levels: Israel was a country which used decisive military force to resolve its contradictions, did so in open defiance of world opinion and was able to bend Washington to its will.” Some things haven’t changed.
In Guatemala, the importation of Israeli “pacification” tactics, advisers, and technology developed originally in the Occupied Territories proved deepest and most extensive. In the midst of a “quiet genocide” committed against Mayan communities during the early 1980s–scorched earth military campaigns designed with the assistance of Israeli military advisers—rightwing Guatemalans discussed the “Palestinianization” of the country’s indigenous peoples, who comprised more than half of the country’s population. Israeli advisers told Guatemalan military officers to “treat the Indians like the Palestinians—don’t trust any of them.”
This type of treatment led to the eradication of entire indigenous villages, the demolishing of sacred sites, and more than 600 massacres. Some of these massacres—like the one at Dos Erres where elite soldiers raped women and young girls, killed children with sledgehammers, and murdered at least 300 villagers in December 1982—bore evidence of Israeli influence. A 1999 UN Truth Commission Report, Loewenstein reports, discovered “bullet fragments from firearms and pods of Galil rifles, made in Israel.” By 1983, the military had killed more than 100,000 Mayans and forced another 100,000 to flee to Mexico.
In a report on Guatemala from early 1983, as the military waged its genocidal campaign, then-CBS News anchorman Dan Rather succinctly summarized Israel’s competitive edge when it came to the arms business: “Israel has helped [Guatemala] with no questions asked…and they didn’t send down congressmen, human rights activists or priests…they set up their intelligence network, tried and tested on the West Bank and Gaza, simply designed to beat the guerrilla.”
Or as a 2011 promotional video for Israeli defense and security company Global CST put it, after describing a 2008 Colombian military raid into Ecuador that assassinated a senior Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) commander, “all of a sudden, the methods that proved efficient in Nablus and Hebron begin speaking Spanish.”
By the 1990s, that murderous translation contributed to more than half a million deaths, disappearances, and refugees from Central America. In the process, Israel had become the world’s largest exporter of arms per capita. It still is.
The Palestine-Mexico Border: A Conclusion
In a Twitter post dated 14 November 2023, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta—a Plastic and Reconstructive surgeon until recently based at Gaza’s Al Ahli Hospital—described receiving patients with dozens of chest and neck gunshot wounds fired from low-flying Israeli sniper drones. “When it comes to killing,” he posted, “they are so innovative.”
The types of quotidian and genocidal violence needed to uphold Israeli colonial occupation and apartheid may take place in far away Gaza and the West Bank but its technologies will—and already have—come home. The innovation that Dr. Abu Sitta describes is an immensely lucrative one, with willing buyers around the world who desire “battle-tested” repressive technology. I write this a relatively short drive away from the fifty plus Elbit Systems-built surveillance towers that guard the Arizona-Mexico border, possibly alongside Border Patrol agents that have traveled to Israel for training. This is the Palestine-Mexico border: built on top of ongoing US settler colonial projects that continue to strip indigenous communities of their land and sovereignty and maintained with technology violently developed in Gaza and the West Bank. Many within the Tohono O’odham nation did not want those Elbit towers on their land. And yet, there they stand, waging counterinsurgency against refugees.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza will produce new Israeli technologies of repression and containment. New sniper drones, new walls, new bombs, new spyware—all tested on Palestinian communities—will emerge, ready to be sold to governments more interested in counterinsurgency and population control than democratic governance.
As such, the Palestinian struggle for national liberation and self-determination continues to possess a vital global dimension. It does not stop at the walls and militarized borders of Gaza or the West Bank. To support their liberation is, in a sense, to support the liberation of all.
Palestinian liberation is thus intimately connected to our own. This goes beyond solidarity. Perhaps the millions of people who have taken to the streets over the past two-plus months sense this. Palestinian scientist and environmentalist Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh articulated this idea during his August 2023 visit to the Arizona-Mexico border. Journalist Todd Miller describes how, standing under the shadow of an Elbit surveillance tower, Dr. Qumsiyeh spoke of climate change as a “global nakba.” To fight against Elbit towers was to fight against the Global North’s apartheid response to climate change. “They want us to be divided and not a joint struggle,” Dr. Qumsiyeh said. “I don’t like the word solidarity. I’m not in solidarity with Native Americans. Their struggle is my struggle.”
Fucking amazing analysis. Thank you.
Excellent piece. Thank you