Concern over Chile’s new president

GABRIEL Boric, a 35-year-old left-wing lawmaker who has been sharply critical of Israel and Chilean Jews who support it, was elected president of Chile in a landslide victory this weekend.

Boric, who came to fame as a student leader, won with 56 per cent of the vote, 12 per cent over his conservative rival, José Antonio Kast, a right-wing pro-Israel

politician.

The election left many Chilean Jews feeling uneasy because they had to choose between Boric, who has encouraged Chilean Jews to lobby for Israeli territorial concessions, and Kast, a right-wing pro-Israel politician whose father likely was a Nazi and who has defended the legacy of Augusto Pinochet, the head of Chile’s military dictatorship that killed thousands of dissidents in the 1970s.

Most Jews seemed to be siding with Kast, saying that their community was experiencing “a feeling of siege”.

Of the 111 Chileans living in Israel who voted from abroad, 73 cast their ballots for Kast, compared to just 33 for Boric, according to Chile’s national elections database.

The Jewish Community of Chile congratulated Boric in a short statement, wishing him and his government “much success” and praising the transparency of the country’s elections. It concluded, “We will continue to work for a democratic, diverse Chile where minorities are respected.”

The official group representing Chile’s 18,000 Jews has a complicated relationship with Boric. In 2019, it sent him a Rosh Hashanah gift along with a note expressing a desire for a “more inclusive, respectful society with more solidarity”.

“I appreciate the gesture but they could start by asking Israel to return the illegally-occupied Palestinian territory,” Boric wrote after posting a picture of the gift to Twitter.

Boric’s criticism of Israel is longstanding. As a lawmaker, he supported a bill proposing to boycott Israeli goods from the Golan, West Bank settlements and areas of Jerusalem that came under Israeli control in 1967. Some Chilean Jews fear Boric intends to promote his supporter Daniel Jadue, a major communist of Palestinian descent who has declined to explain why his high school yearbook lists him as a “an antisemite” who will “clean the city of Jews”.

He has called the Jewish Community of Chile the “Zionist Community of Chile”.

Jadue has denied being an antisemite, arguing that he himself is a “semite because he’s an Arab”.

Contacted by the Jewish Community of Chile for a comment about Jadue, Boric reportedly answered he would reply when community leaders “oppose the Israeli policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.

JTA