VENEZUELA 2007

 

The impression that official antisemitism in Venezuela has intensified was confirmed by the US State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report released in September 2007. Questioning and banalization of the Holocaust, and describing Israel as a genocidal state, appear as part of the anti-Zionist discourse in the official and pro-Chavez media.

 

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

The Jewish population continues to decline as a result of severe instability in the country. There are probably no more than 15,000 Jews remaining, down from 20,000 before the current political and economic crisis, out of a total population of close to 26 million. Most of the Jews live in the capital Caracas, while the second largest community is in Maracaíbo. The Confederación de Asociaciones Israelitas de Venezuela (CAIV) embraces five organizations: Asociación Israelita de Venezuela (Sephardi), Unión Israelita de Caracas (Ashkenazi), the Zionist Organization, B'nai Brith and Organization of Jewish Women. All but one of the 15 synagogues are Orthodox and over 75 percent of school-age children attend Jewish schools. The community publishes the newspaper Nuevo Mundo Israelita and operates a website, www.caiv.org. In recent years poverty levels have soared to 80 percent and the middle and upper middle classes that account for the great majority of the Jewish community have been especially hard hit as their assets are eroded.

 

ANTISEMITIC ACTIVITIES

The growth of antisemitism since 2005-6 corresponds with Venezuela’s tightening of economic and strategic links with the Iranian regime and its increased hostility to the US under the Bush administration. Among official circles close to President Hugo Chavez, antisemitism is part of anti-Zionist rhetoric. Such antisemitism is very hard to confront because it emanates from pro-Chavez officials (such as Tarek William Saab) and the police (see below).

The most virulent expression of official antisemitism was the second police raid (the first was in 2004) on the Hebraica Sport and Cultural Club on Saturday night, December 1, 2007 (see ASW 2004). The DISIP, the political police force, entered the Jewish club, with a judicial warrant issued by a tribunal of the Caracas Metropolitan Area (Tribunal Tercero de Primera Instancia del Circuito Judicial Penal del Area Metropolitana de Caracas) to search for arms, following an anonymous tip. No weapons were found. It should be noted that the raid took place on the night before the referendum when Venezuelans voted on the constitutional reform proposed by Chavez, intended to remove the barriers to his re-election after two terms in office. (The proposal was rejected.) A possible explanation for the timing of the raid was the government’s desire to intimidate the opposition.

According to the US State Department’s annual International Religious Freedom Report for the period July 1, 2006, to June 30, 2007, released in September 2007: "The President, government officials, and government-affiliated media outlets promoted anti-Semitism through numerous anti-Semitic comments that created a spillover effect into mainstream society.” While the statement: “The rise in anti-Semitic vandalism, caricatures, expressions at rallies, intimidation, and physical attacks against Jewish institutions,” mainly related to the period of the Second Lebanon War of summer 2006 and its aftermath, some of these phenomena, especially anti-Zionist and anti-Israel attacks in the official and pro-Chavez media continued in 2007. Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro immediately rejected the claims made in the report, in a press release issued on September 15.

Among anti-Zionist attacks was one by columnist Susana Khalil (see also ASW 2006) in the daily pro-government Diario Vea (Aug. 13). She wrote that "there are people that depict Zionism as an ambiguous thought, but… it is not ambiguous, it is clear, it is fascist thought. Its concepts and its praxis are racist in essence, colonialist and genocidal, a product of a character and a sense of racial superiority. None of these things is outside the history of Europe, the genesis of fascism, Nazism and Zionism…”

Anti-Zionism is often linked to anti-Americanism. For example, on the program “Temas sobre el Tapete” (Issues on the table), broadcast on the official Venezuelan National Radio, on May 9, principal commentator Vladimir Acosta spoke of “channels of Yankee or Zionist propaganda, sometimes also papal propaganda, because there seems to be a combination of Yankee imperialism, Zionism and papalism."

 Opposition journalists and intellectuals often cite the Holocaust as an example of a tragedy that must be avoided when explaining the dangers of totalitarian and dictatorial regimes or problems of discrimination and prejudice. However, questioning and banalization of the Holocaust − questioning the facts about the number of victims, criticizing the emphasis on Jewish suffering at the expense of other people’s suffering − and describing Israel as a genocidal state, appear as part of the anti-Zionist discourse in the official and pro-Chavez media. For example, on the program “La Hojilla [The razor]” broadcast on the official Venezolana de Television (July 9), it was pointed out that today we can speak "not only about the Jewish Holocaust, but also about the holocaust of the Iraqi people, the holocaust of the Palestinians, and the holocaust of the Russians during World War II; those were the ones that suffered the most.” It should be noted that the word “holocaust” is used frequently to depict the tragedy of the Palestinian people. For example, following Israel’s signing of an economic agreement with the states of the Mercosur (an economic alliance between Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Paraguay) in December 2007, columnist Basem Tajeldine claimed in the pro-Chavez daily webpage Aporrea.org online, that the State of Israel and the Jews were responsible for the “holocaust of the Palestinian people."

On May 2, Mario Silva, the director of the abovementioned program “La Hojilla,” attacked Venezuelan Chief Rabbi Pynchas Brenner, claiming that he and other Jews were experts in "manipulating the Holocaust,” when they were unable to justify their acts against the Palestinians. The Holocaust, he said, had become “a terrible business of raising money for the Zionists.” Referring to the six million Jews murdered, he added that “if you say there were less, they kill you."

In regard to the arrival in Venezuela of Dorit Shavit, director of the Latin America Israeli desk at the Israel Foreign Ministry, broadcaster Alberto Nolia said on his radio program "Los papeles de Mandiga [Mandiga's paper]" on the pro-Chavez YVKE Mundial Dial 550AM (Nov., 29): "We’re very unlucky these days, because a persona non-grata arrived in Venezuela... a representative of the genocidal terrorist state of Israel, a country where torture is legal, where people are murdered with much greater competence, cruelty and efficiency than that of the Nazis. In conclusion, [Israel] is a Nazi state governed by a Nazi …"