How Israel Facilitated the Guatemalan Genocide

[Marcus IM]

4. "The jews" and the gov't of Israel are not one and the same.

Another well worn trope.

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From the article Judi Lynn posted ...

Israel’s connection to all this has been extensively researched.

Israel became heavily involved with Guatemala’s military government, especially after US president Jimmy Carter cut off most of US military aid to Guatemala in 1977 due to its notorious record of human rights abuses. Investigative journalist George Black, writing for NACLA, reported that Israel eagerly stepped in for the United States, becoming “Guatemala’s principal supplier. In 1980, the Army was fully re-equipped with Galil rifles [Israeli manufactured] at a cost of $6 million.” In later years, Guatemalan military elites were proud that they had quelled the insurgency largely without US aid. Israel had played a much-valued proxy role for US military suppliers.

In an infamous massacre, one of many, the Israeli connection was clearly present. At the village of Dos Erres on December 6, 1982, Israeli-trained commandos left the village completely burned down, after shooting, torturing, and/or raping over two hundred villagers. A United Nations investigative team reported: “All the ballistic evidence recovered corresponded to bullet fragments from firearms and pods of Galil rifles made in Israel.” This was just in the one village of Dos Erres. The same twelve-volume investigation reports that Israeli-made Galil rifles were used throughout the highlands, while US-made helicopters ferried troops into the highlands for what the report argues were “acts of genocide.”

Alas, it took me too long to learn how many other ways Israel had been involved in Guatemala’s massive state violence. Harvard-trained political scientist Bishara Bahbah in his book Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection (1986) termed Israeli military aid to Guatemala a “special case” within a larger set of Israel’s armament sales to Latin America over the decades. Other works make similar points, such as the study by Milton Jamail and Margo Gutiérrez, It’s No Secret: Israel’s Military Involvement in Central America.

Scholars continue to study Israel’s military contribution to militarizing today’s global order. Israel is adept at marketing itself as a provider of technology for the “pacification” of the global order’s trouble spots. Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper documents this at length in his book War Against the People: Israel, The Palestinians, and Global Pacification (2015). Halper notes that in Guatemala, Israel’s military aid and training were instrumental in setting up forced-settlement “re-adjustment” communities or “model villages” designed to monitor massacre survivors. This was even referred to by Guatemalan military officers as a “Palestinization” of Guatemala’s postmassacre Maya lands, where shock and awe and scorched earth campaigns had left a devastated people. Guatemala-born journalist Victor Perera described the result “a distorted replica of rural Israel.” Ian Almond, who recounted Perera’s description, stated that Israeli-trained Guatemalan colonel Eduardo Wohlers, in charge of the Plan of Assistance to Conflict Areas, admitted that “the model of the kibbutz and moshav is planted firmly in our minds.”