The Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, accused Israel of meddling in the recent presidential elections, which saw the Trump-endorsed, right-wing candidate win by a very slight margin—around 250,000 or 300,000 votes. Far from an isolated incident, this is a recurring pattern in Latin America. What does Israel have to do with elections so far away from its borders?
There are a few answers that I consider plausible; but before presenting them, we need to establish the historical and current context. The former involves an unspoken but undeniable reason why Israel was established by colonial powers in Palestine. The latter concerns the consequences of Iran succeeding in war.
There are several motives that culminated in the establishment of Israel. On the one hand was the Zionist movement, spearheaded by Theodor Herzl and supported by rich banking families. The movement was inspired by European nationalism, which—as it was shaping European nation-states—was not willing to leave space for its Jewish population.
The answer to the European “Jewish Question”—the concern with Jews was a distinctively Western European problem—was to find them a place outside of Europe and hence export their problem somewhere else. So much for “Judeo-Christian Values,” which is a term invented in the mid-20th century precisely to change that perception.
Palestine was an obvious and desired choice for the Zionist movement. They even attempted to purchase land from the Osmanli (Ottoman) Sultan Abdulhamid II, who famously rejected the offer, saying it was not his to sell. They offered to pay a substantial amount of the Osmanli foreign debt, which was crippling the state, so the stakes were high.
But Palestine was not the only choice. Other lands were seriously considered. British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered Herzl land in modern-day Kenya, which the Zionist movement ultimately rejected at the 1905 congress after Herzl’s death. His own preference at first, even above Palestine, was Argentina. In fact, Jewish migrants arrived in Argentina as early as the 1880s on land purchased by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who founded the Jewish Colonial Association.
Argentina was never formally rejected, but it was sidestepped by a preference for Palestine and a combination of factors that made that choice possible—mainly the fall of the Osmanli governance and the Balfour Declaration made by the British in 1917.
After the collapse of the Osmanlis, Western colonial powers divided the Middle East in the famous Sykes-Picot agreement. The division was not only for colonial control, but also to avoid the reemergence of a unified Muslim bloc.
Muslim-majority lands had fallen into division and infighting among several competing Muslim powers before. It was one of the reasons why the Crusaders managed to conquer Jerusalem and hold it until Salahuddin gathered a force and united part of the Muslim world. It was also the reason why the Mongols were able to sweep through them until they were stopped by the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt.
The next power that reestablished unified Muslim rule, as well as the office of the Caliphate, were the Osmanlis. Their collapse could be seen as part of a continuous historical effort by Western powers, including Russia, to throttle Muslim unity as a political bloc. The establishment of Israel has been described by historians and politicians of the region as a “dagger in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.”
Edward Said argued, in The Question of Palestine, that European powers viewed a Jewish state in Palestine as a vital geopolitical asset—a Westernized bulwark to keep the Arab-Islamic world fragmented. Ilan Pappé, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, explicitly frames the creation of Israel as a deliberate, aggressive displacement of the native population, effectively validating the historical Arab view that the state was an externally imposed trauma on the region.
I am oversimplifying the historical narrative to bring out a point that is often overlooked. There are many other factors that played into the division and creation of nation-states, including Arab nationalism, secularization, sectarianism, and resource control—especially oil. However, if we accept the view that part of the rationale for the establishment of Israel by colonial powers was an attempt to drive a wedge into the heart of the Middle East, interesting repercussions emerge that help explain the distant phenomenon of Israel meddling in Colombia and other Latin American countries.
The U.S. was the inheritor of the British Empire and continued its “divide-and-conquer” —or “divide-to-control”— policy. The U.S. offered protection to newly minted Gulf states in order to benefit from their resources and avoid any single power gaining excessive control over them, as, for example, when Saddam Hussein tried to invade Kuwait. At the same time, it maintained a policy of creating chaos in the region for much the same purpose.
Israel, acting as a “bulwark” of the West, benefited tremendously and encouraged those policies. Its survival depends on a chaotic region which renders any power unable to pose a credible threat. Israel imposed a status quo in which—due to U.S. backing—it had free rein to act. Through this, the relationship with the U.S. has become so entangled that at times it is difficult to say who serves the interests of whom.
Iran’s success in the war launched against it by Israel and the U.S. challenges that status quo because it signals the military decline of the U.S. Empire and its ability to dictate policy and protect allies in the region—chief among them, Israel.
The result of the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran will have long-lasting repercussions. U.S. Arab allies will have to review the “oil and dollars for protection” deal. The role of the U.S. in the region, after the disaster in Iraq and the defeats in Afghanistan and Iran, will diminish. The vacuum left by it will have to be filled with a new security architecture, which is already in the works. This does not mean that a unified Muslim front is going to emerge, but that the countries in the region will have to deal with each other on different terms. What role is left for Israel—a country that has made making enemies and spreading chaos a policy, especially after the genocide in Gaza?
It is difficult to imagine or even predict, but I don’t believe that Israel in its current ethnostate form is sustainable in the long term. I don’t believe either that it will disappear, but it will have to morph. The two-state solution for Palestine is a farce that no one in the region—or outside of it, for that matter—really believes in. They may pay lip service to it, but it’s not realistic today, if it ever was. It’s basically state policy now, no matter who governs in Israel, to affirm that it will not happen.
Israel will have to integrate. Not in the short or medium term—during which we will probably see a peak of Israeli ethnonationalism and expansion—but in the long term. History shows that ethnostates are unsustainable. Arab neighbors will have to accept the Israeli population as part of the regional demographic. But there is a significant part of the Israeli population that, not even in the long term, could accept such a scenario.
One option that I consider is the secession of a smaller, extremist Zionist state. This is arguably unlikely (as that is basically current Israel) but not impossible if the majority of the population, pushed by necessity and a weakened state, has to start an integration path. Another option is that these extremists will try to find a new home.
Here is where Latin America enters into the equation. There have been rumors of Milei negotiating land with Netanyahu and of Zionists setting fire to large tracts of the Argentine Patagonia for that purpose. The veracity of those claims is questionable, but not Milei’s government’s support and promotion of Israel in the region through the Isaac Accords.
The short- and medium-term objectives of the Isaac Accords are to court Latin American countries for diplomatic cover and support, military exports, resources, and, perhaps, even for demographic purposes.
Israel’s Latin America agenda fits very well—as if thought out in tandem with the Trump administration’s “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The region has seen the governments of Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Honduras change to right-wing Trump allies. Milei has also won critical elections thanks, in part, to Trump’s endorsement and a credit swap line of $20 billion. Peru might join the club soon. Venezuela is basically a U.S. protectorate. And that is added to already U.S.-aligned countries like El Salvador, Panama, or the Dominican Republic.
The election scandal in Honduras, termed “Hondurasgate,” exposed a deliberate effort by Israel, in collaboration with the U.S. and right-wing governments in the region, to destabilize left-leaning governments. Invariably, all the incoming presidents have expressed their support for Israel even amidst the ongoing genocide. The Colombian President-elect, De La Espriella, has vowed to reestablish diplomatic relations with Israel and take them to “new heights.”
It is possible that as the U.S. retracts its imperial ambitions to “its hemisphere,” so will Israel. If that’s the case, then Israeli meddling in Latin American politics might not be just a diplomatic and geopolitical move, but an exit strategy.
