January 23, 2024

Chile is now essentially a first-world country.  Say what you like about General Augusto Pinochet bringing in the “Chicago Boys,” a group of free-market economists. Good or bad, the general left Chile with a major world-class economy. And Chile ranks as an extraordinarily free nation, ranking freer than the USA.

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So one would think that Chile would take a standard western line on core issues, for example, the present war in Gaza, but you would be wrong.

Chile has a bizarre profile when it comes to the Mideast.

Starting in the late 19th century, Christians in the Holy Land started fleeing to Chile. They were afraid of their sons being drafted into a Muslim-led Ottoman army, to be used as cannon fodder. They primarily came from Beit Safafa in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahur, where Christians predominated at the time. This is no longer so.

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What these Palestinian Christians found was a country with a magnificent Mediterranean climate for thousands of miles, only the tropical far north and the Antarctic far south excepted. It was about thirty times the size of the Holy Land, with the Mediterranean districts alone being ten times larger. Moreover, it was incredibly underpopulated for its size.

If these Palestinians had lost the Holy Land, they had acquired something vastly superior.

No thanks to Chile’s Spanish history, with its Iberian traditions of elites and peons, there was a need for a vibrant mercantile class, and the Palestinian Christians (soon to be called Chilestinos/Chilestinians) prospered. They became Chile’s economic powerhouse. They soon controlled the business district, the Patronato, in the capital.

And these Chilestinos used that power.  In 1947, a mere two generations after their initial arrivals, the Chilean government originally wanted to vote yes to partition the Holy Land in order to create a Jewish state, but the Chilestinian community pressured the government to abstain. One Chilean diplomat resigned over the matter.

[P]resident Videla gave in to the internal pressure of the Arab community (100,000 citizens of Arab descent lived in Chile at that time and were known for their financial and political influence) and instructed his delegation to the UN General Assembly to abstain from voting on the resolution to partition Palestine in 1947. Senator Humberto Alvarez, second-ranking member of this delegation, resigned in protest against that decision. — Jewish Virtual Library  

Now that’s power!