Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old left-wing lawmaker who has been sharply critical of Israel and Chilean Jews who support it, was elected president of Chile in a landslide victory this weekend.
Boric, who came to fame as a student leader, won with 56 percent of the vote, 12 points over his conservative rival, José Antonio Kast.
The election left many Chilean Jews feeling uneasy because they had to choose between Boric, who has encouraged Chilean Jews to lobby for Israeli territorial concessions, and Kast, whose father likely was a Nazi and who has defended the legacy of Augusto Pinochet, the head of Chile’s military dictatorship that killed thousands of dissidents in the 1970s.
Most Jews seemed to be siding with Kast, telling the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last month that their community was experiencing “a feeling of siege.” Of the 111 Chileans living in Israel who voted from abroad, 73 cast their ballots for Kast, compared to just 33 for Boric, according to Chile’s national elections database.
In his victory speech, Boric promised to “firmly fight against the privileges of a few” as he seeks to advance his vision for Chile’s future.
The official group representing Chile’s roughly 18,000 Jews has a complicated relationship with Boric. In 2019, it sent him a Rosh Hashanah gift along with a note expressing a desire for a “more inclusive, respectful society with more solidarity.”
“I appreciate the gesture but they could start by asking Israel to return the illegally occupied Palestinian territory,” Boric wrote after posting a picture of the gift to Twitter.
Boric’s criticism of Israel is longstanding. As a lawmaker, he supported a bill proposing to boycott Israeli goods from the Golan, West Bank settlements, and areas of Jerusalem that came under in Israeli control in 1967.
And during the campaign, many members of the community expressed concern over that, along with what they said was a pattern of demanding that local Jews condemn Israeli policy.
“We are of course willing to accept reasonable criticism about Israel, but what we hear from Boric is that Israel is a ‘genocidal’ and ‘murderous’ state,” Gabriel Zaliasnik, a prominent member of Chile’s Jewish community, told Israel’s Haaretz daily last week. “To make matters worse, he blames our Jewish community for Israel’s actions.”
Some Chilean Jews fear Boric intends 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 has called the Jewish Community of Chile the “Zionist Community of Chile,” and Chilean Jews have called him an antisemite. Jadue has denied the charge, arguing that he himself is a Semite, as he is Arab.
Contacted this past summer by the Jewish Community of Chile for comment about Jadue, Boric answered that he would reply when community leaders “oppose the Israeli policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” according to the letter, signed by some of Chile’s most prominent Jewish women.
HD Editor’s Note: Why Is This News Biblically Relevant?
Former US Sec. of State Mike Pompeo on a recent trip to Israel urged that the “future of our nations demands a more forceful assertion of the truth,” specifically addressing the antisemitic lie that Israel is an “occupier.”
“The future of our nations demands a more forceful assertion of the truth. In Israel’s case, it specifically involves confronting a false narrative. That is the very beating heart of modern antisemitism. That beating heart is the lie. It is the lie that the State of Israel is an illegal occupier in the land of Israel,” Pompeo explained. “The lie of occupation provides Israel’s enemies a means to explain away all types of aggression and violence as merely resistance to the occupation. Just listen to what they have to say in the public rhetoric.”
“Given the negative connotation of the term occupier, antisemitic groups around the world use the word as often as possible in their messaging, as they carry out acts of cultural, political, and economic warfare upon Israel and its supporters,” he asserted. “This then leads to the term’s casual repetition by the media and its eventual use by policymakers as well. This presents a real risk. It is clear then that promoting the common misrepresentation of the Jewish state of Israel as an occupier in the land of Israel has become the primary antisemitic canard of the present generation.”
The treatment of Israel and the Jewish people is very important from a Biblical perspective. In Genesis 12:3, God not only calls all the nations of the world to bless Israel, but He also presents a warning to those nations and people that choose to curse them: “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
A further warning is presented to nations who advocate for the dividing of the land God gave to the Jewish People. In Zechariah 12, the Bible says that all countries which seek to divide Israel’s capital, Jerusalem, will themselves be “cut in pieces”:
Zecharaiah 12:3, 9 KJV – “And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it… And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.”
