The Jewish community in Chile accused President Gabriel Boric of being “anti-Semite” this Friday after he refused to receive Israel’s ambassador, Gil Artzyeli, at La Moneda and requested a public apology.
“When the problem is with the only Jewish state in the world, the double standard is called anti-Semitism. With these actions, peace is not contributed, quite the contrary, the Jews of Chile are left facing a hostile climate, violent and threatening,” the group said in a statement posted on its social networks, recorded by EFE Agency.
“It is up to the Chilean government to apologize publicly and repair this damage to bilateral relations between Chile and Israel,” they added.
The diplomat had been summoned to deliver his credentials to Boric, but according to the media, the president would have refused the visit after receiving information about the case of a Palestinian teenager who was killed by the Israeli Army during an arrest operation in the occupied West Bank.
“This offends the friendship and collaboration of more than 70 years between the two countries (…) Criticism of the acts of any State can be carried out by different means, but never in this way,” the Jewish community indicated.
A Head of State, they added, “has the responsibility of safeguarding foreign policy and international relations.”
Hours later, the Israeli ambassador was received by the undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, Ximena Fuentes, and explained in statements to the media that the Foreign Ministry had apologized for what had happened “repeatedly.”
“For me it was a not very comfortable incident this morning, but being an Israeli and a Jew, my people have gone through worse things in the last four thousand years and we are going to overcome this incident for the good of Chile and the good of Israel,” Artzyeli stressed.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry announced this Friday that it had summoned Chile’s ambassador, Jorge Carvajal, for a “reprimand conversation” on Sunday and that what happened is “puzzling” and “unprecedented in Chile.”
Chile has had an important Jewish community established for decades, but it is also the country with the largest Palestinian community outside the Arab world, with more than 500,000 people.
