| Submit your comments on this article | |
| Caribbean-Latin America | |
| In Chile, a pro-Palestinian campus occupation turns witch hunt for ‘Zionist' faculty | |
| 2024-06-28 | |
In April, Gladys Briceño removed a Palestinian flag that had been affixed without permission to the façade of a building in a public university where she teaches, near the Chilean capital of Santiago. A musicology lecturer, who is not Jewish but who believes Israel has a right to exist, Briceño did this because she “didn’t think university facilities are the place to fly flags to make statements about controversial geopolitical conflicts,” she told The Times of Israel this week. But in Chile, which has one of the largest Palestinian communities outside the Middle East, this action had major consequences for Briceño’s career and the entire university. The flag removal helped trigger an ongoing campus occupation by anti-Israel activists seeking the dismissal of “Zionist professors,” as they call Briceño and another faculty member, Noemi Grinspun, who is Jewish. Occurring amid an uptick in violent antisemitism in Chile and beyond, the standoff (Spanish-language article) at the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences (UMCE) stands out amid a global wave of anti-Israel campus protests for its targeting of individual lecturers, who feel abandoned by their university administration. The campaign coincides with weeks-long harassment of Chilean Jews at their community centers, a development that recently prompted the heads of Chile’s Jewish schools to tell students not to walk outdoors in their school uniforms for fear this would invite attacks against them. In a list of demands that the organizers of the May 29 occupation submitted to the administration, they wrote that the university should “disconnect” itself from “the Zionist lecturers Gladys Briceño and Noemi Grinspun.” They “inhabit and transgress on our university space, actively teaching hate speech in the classroom and through their social networks,” the organizers wrote. The campaign against Grinspun and Briceño is part of a broader pattern of anti-Israel harassment that escalated on October 7 following the Hamas onslaught on southern Israel that saw some 1,200 people murdered and 251 taken hostage to Gaza. The public outcry against the ensuing war with Hamas has bled over to antisemitism on several notable occasions, according to Ariela Agosin, the president of the Jewish Community of Chile organization, which represents the country’s 20,000-odd Jews. Part of the problem, many Chilean Jews believe, is that protesters feel emboldened by the government led by Gabriel Boric, a far-left politician who became president of Chile in 2021. In 2019, he spurned a Rosh Hashanah gift, a small pot of honey, that the Jewish Community of Chile had sent lawmakers. “I appreciate the gesture but they could start by asking Israel to return the illegally occupied Palestinian territory,” Boric wrote on X (then Twitter) about Chilean Jews, many of whom cited this post as proof that he is antisemitic. Boric is the only Chilean president who has declined to meet with representatives of Chilean Jews, Agosin said. His government has recalled its ambassador to Israel, as have several other Latin American countries after October 7. | |
| Posted by:Skidmark |