venezuela 2009

 

 

There are probably fewer than 15,000 Jews remaining in Venezuela − down from 20,000 before Chavez came to power − 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.

            Since 2006 the Jewish community in Venezuela has been experiencing an increase in antisemitism emanating from the government and its supporters (see ASW 2008/9). The months of January and February 2009 were marked by particular aggressiveness on the part of circles close to the government and of Chavez himself, whose declarations against the State of Israel were extremely offensive. On January 30, 15 persons desecrated and vandalized the Mariperez synagogue in Caracas. On February 26, the Beit Shmuel synagogue in Caracas was attacked; the perpetrators of these incidents remain unknown.

            During this period Chavez expelled the Israeli ambassador and urged the Jewish community of Venezuela, “which speaks so much about the Holocaust,” to condemn the State of Israel. His call was repeated by foreign affairs minister Nicolas Maduro, during a visit to a mosque in Caracas, and by various pro-government publications, such as Aporrea. On January 20, for example, an article in Aporrea titled: “How to Help Palestinians against the Artificial State of Israel,” by Emilio Silva, a professor from the Universidad Bolivariana, advocated boycotting the local Jewish community. Silva also claimed that the Jews were “doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to them in the past.”

            The intensity of anti-Israel agitation, coupled with antisemitic messages, both explicit and implicit, declined gradually after the war. However, accusations of Jewish community backing of Israeli policy continued and pro-government circles demanded that it declare support for delegitimizing Zionism.

            The impact of this antisemitic agitation became evident on June 16, when some one hundred students, professors and staff from the Bolivarian University of Venezuela in Caracas marched to the National Assembly in order to demand a law regulating the country’s universities. Although their cause was unrelated to Israel and the Jews, when the marchers passed the Tiferet Israel synagogue they painted anti-Israel and antisemitic slogans on its walls, such as “Zionists, get out of our country,” “You are usurers, you should pay for the economic crisis,” “Fascists, get out of Venezuela” and “Down with Zionism.” The walls were covered completely with swastikas, some equated with the Star of David.

            Demonization of Israel and particularly its portrayal as a Nazi state are principal motifs in anti-Zionist incitement. On March 8, for example, the pro-government newspaper Vea claimed that Zionists were “the voice of destructive global imperialism” and “they copy the methods [of the Nazis] and go even further in murder and massacre, killing thousands of people [Palestinian] men, woman, children, innocent people… the Zionists are the new Nazis of these times.” Similarly, the newspaper maintained on May 28 that “the catastrophic events of the Holocaust… were used by the Zionists as a pretext to justify their crimes against defenseless people. The term Holocaust was stolen by the Jews in order to give it the connotation of a Jewish holocaust…. The Holocaust was a Nazi crime against [all] European people. Zionism used the crimes committed by Nazi Germany against Ashkenazi Jews to justify genocide of the Palestinian people.”

            Colombia and Honduras were accused of being the “new Israel on the continent” because of their “pro-Americanism.” Chavez, in his weekly broadcast to the nation on the TV program “Alo presidente” (July 2), claimed that Honduras was like Israel, which employed violence against the Palestinians every time it sought the backing of the US. Similarly, on July 27, he said in the interview program “Dando y Dando” (Giving and Giving), on Venezuelan National Television (VTV): “The Honduras crisis is not solved, so they [the US] are building a base in Colombia in order to create a kind of Israel in South America, and from Colombia they carry out their aggression against Ecuador.”