CHiles President Gabriel Boric is not one of the left-wing hardliners in Latin America. As far as the war in Gaza is concerned, however, it is only slightly inferior to the criticism of Israel by its counterparts in Venezuela or Bolivia. Chile was among the first countries to recall their ambassadors from Israel. After meeting with American President Joe Biden at the White House on Thursday, Boric once again criticized Israel’s “disproportionate response” to the Hamas attack. Both must be condemned decisively.
Boric’s positioning is less ideological than one might assume. 13,000 kilometers separate Chile from Palestine. And yet the two countries feel extremely close. Nowhere outside the Arab world do more people with Palestinian roots live than in Chile. An estimated half a million Chileans belong to the Palestinian diaspora. Many have relatives in the Gaza Strip. For example, the fate of Ghassan Sahurie, a 7-year-old Chilean-Palestinian boy who was missing in Gaza for several days, made headlines in Chile. It was finally his uncle, who lives in Chile, who was able to report that the boy had survived and was in hospital.
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