Anti-Israel activists will use any opportunity to present Israel as guilty by association with states that engage in controversial behavior. The South American state of Chile is currently experiencing violent street protests that have led to 15 reported deaths so far.
What has this got to do with Israel?
Plenty, according to The Independent.
Who is Benjamin Zinevich?
But firstly, who is Benjamin Zinevich, the author of the opinion piece?
Is he an academic? An expert on Israel-Chile relations?
No.
The Independent fails to provide any bio for Zinevich but a simple Google search reveals that he is an undergraduate student New York University where he is a prominent anti-Israel activist and member of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization, described by the Anti-Defamation League as “a network of pro-Palestinian student groups across the US which disseminate anti-Israel propaganda often laced with inflammatory and at times combative rhetoric. They are a leading campus organizer of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israel, and specialize in using confrontational tactics such as disrupting student-run pro-Israel events, and constructing mock “apartheid walls” and distributing fake “eviction notices” to dramatize what they consider Israeli abuses of Palestinians.”
Zinevich most recently co-sponsored a resolution on his own NYU campus calling for a boycott of the school’s own study abroad program in Tel Aviv.
Zinevich’s bio page on The Independent is empty. In the interests of transparency, shouldn’t The Independent disclose the background of the contributor?
Related reading: Defining Bias: Lack of Transparency
Israel “should be noted in particular”
Writing in The Independent, Zinevich says:
While the [Chilean] military enforces brutality towards civilians not seen since the dictatorship that ended in the early 1990s, it is important to highlight the international connections to such brutality. The state of Israel’s tactical and resource-based military support in the past and present for Chile should be noted in particular.
Why should this alleged military support be “noted in particular?”
The Global Arms Trade: A Handbook notes that since 2005, Chile has taken possession of weaponry from the USA, Netherlands, UK, Switzerland, Germany, France and Spain, as well as Israel.
There is no credible reason that Israel should be “noted in particular” other than the hateful agenda of Zinevich and The Independent.
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Tenuous linkages
Zinevich writes:
Today, the armed forces of both Chile and Israel make no attempts to hide their alliances, citing on the Chilean Embassy to Israel’s website the aims of “increasing the bonds with…Israel, in order to make knowledge, training and experiences exchange possible.” Chile and Israel signed an agreement in 2018 which spoke of encouraging further “cooperation in military education, training and doctrine” during Israeli General Yaacov Barak’s visit to Chile that year.
Indeed, there is no reason to hide alliances between countries that have diplomatic relations, particularly two democracies. The language used above on the Chilean Embassy to Israel’s website is what one would expect to find on any foreign embassy website promoting positive ties.
Zinevich would have ignored other examples of positive Israel-Chile cooperation such as senior officials of Magen David Adom, Israel’s national emergency and blood-services network, helping the Providencia municipality in the Chilean capital city of Santiago to train municipal security personnel as first responders in medical emergencies.
We then arrive at the tenuous linkage that Zinevich is trying to promote:
In recent years, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has seemingly used a tactic of maiming Palestinian protesters rather than lethally shooting them. For more than a year now, Palestinian civilians have marched towards the Gaza wall in protest of Israeli occupation, and theIDF has shot nearly 60 per cent of these 10,511 civilians in the lower limbs, with more than 90 per cent of casualties coming from live ammunition.
During the past week, these Israeli tactics have been used on Chilean civilians on multiple reported occasions. One woman has beenshot in the thigh and was reported in critical condition due to excessive bleeding. In another, a 23-year-old manwas shot in the leg before a military vehicle crushed him to death.
These similar tactics are no coincidence, and are internationally a part of what activist groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace have named“the deadly exchange”.
Zinevich also happens to be a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization the ADL describes as “a radical anti-Israel activist group that advocates for a complete economic, cultural and academic boycott of the state of Israel. JVP rejects the view that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragic dispute over land which has been perpetuated by a cycle of violence, fear, and distrust on both sides, in favor of the belief that Israeli policies and actions are motivated by deeply rooted Jewish racial chauvinism and religious supremacism.”
It appears that Zinevich has taken the components of JVP’s “The Deadly Exchange” campaign and applied it to Chile. According to Miriam F. Elman of Syracuse University, The Deadly Exchange is antisemitic, and falsely blames Israel and its Jewish American supporters for fueling discriminatory policing practices against minority communities in America and militarizing the approach to crime and public protests. Writing in Fathom Journal, Elman says:
At its root, the campaign traffics in antisemitic tropes about Jewish power in order to accuse Israel and Jewish American organisations of conspiring against American people of colour. The campaign racialises the Middle East conflict by setting up Israel and its Jewish American supporters as enemies that directly threaten American (and Palestinian) ‘black and brown bodies.’
Zinevich has simply swapped American ‘black and brown bodies’ for Chilean “working class and Indigenous groups, such as the Mapuche, [which] have experiences centuries of colonial-based oppression.”
Thus we see that Zinevich’s entire hypothesis is based on nothing more than his own ideologically driven bigotry.
How sad that The Independent, most likely also driven by its anti-Israel agenda, has given Zinevich a platform for his hate.
Please send your considered comments to The Independent via its online complaints form.
