Progressive Argentine Jews and Javier Milei
A sorry tale of how the usually embarrassed and conflicted are suddenly proud of their identities
0.
A number of Jewish Argentines have signed a petition condemning presidential candidate Javier Milei. In my view, they lack the moral standing to do so and the text of the petition is incoherent.
To understand why we must start back in 1994 and the AMIA Massacre, an atrocity little known outside Argentina. It will take a while to set out all the relevant background so bear with me. If you don’t want the background, you can go straight to section 2.
1.
On July 18, 1994, a suicide bomber drove a van packed with explosives into the headquarters of the AMIA Jewish community organization in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The resulting blast killed 85 people and left hundreds injured. All or almost all of those who lost their lives were Jewish. The massacre came just two years after a bomb had destroyed the Israeli Embassy in the same city, an attack which cost 22 people their lives.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was suspected of being behind the bombings right from the start. The AMIA I trial failed to produce any convictions due to abuses by elements of the prosecution team. Following this failure, President Néstor Kirchner set up a new special prosecutor’s office to investigate the AMIA Massacre. It was headed by Alberto Nisman.
Under Kirchner, there was a marked and immediate improvement in the quality of lip service paid to the importance of finding those responsible for the massacre. Kirchner’s sudden conversion to the cause of human rights may also explain that the appointment of Nisman was followed in 2005 by Argentina’s formal recognition before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that it had failed in its duty to protect those murdered in the attack and properly investigate the crime.
In 2006, Nisman formally accused Iran of planning the attack and Hezbollah of carrying it out. He also sought international arrest warrants for a number of senior Iranian officials. After declining to pursue the suspects it believed enjoyed diplomatic immunity, Interpol approved warrants for the arrest of Ahmad Vahidi, Iran’s Deputy Defense Minister at the time; Ali Fallahijan, a former Minister of Intelligence; former government adviser Mohsen Rezaee; Mohsen Rabbani, an attaché at the Iranian Embassy in Buenos Aires at the time of the attack; former diplomat Ahmad Reza Asghari; and Imad Fayez Mughniyeh, who was to die in Syria in 2008. To no one’s surprise, the Iranians indignantly denied any involvement and refused to consider any kind of legal cooperation with Argentine authorities.
In 2010, three years after her election to the presidency, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner replaced the phlegmatic Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana with Héctor Timerman, renowned for his personal loyalty to her. Her husband Néstor died later the same year and in retrospect, it seems that these two events released the President from two considerable restraints on her freedom of action and allowed her to let rip with her “anti-imperialist” instincts.
On January 27, 2013, she confirmed that rumours circulating since 2011 regarding secret negotiations with Iran were essentially correct. Argentina, she said, had cut a deal with Iran to settle the extradition dispute. The two countries were setting up a joint Argentine-Iranian commission comprised of jurists from both nations—with the participation of a few others from global south countries—in order to “examine the documents presented” by the two sides. The proceedings of the commission were, naturally, to be held in Tehran. The Argentine court seeking the extradition of the Iranian fugitives would be able to question them, but only in the Iranian capital. At the end of the investigation, the commission would draw up a report that the parties would bind themselves to “take into account.”
The agreement represented an astonishing cession of sovereignty by the government of Argentina. It effectively invited the nation that had refused to extradite men suspected of murdering dozens of Argentine citizens to stand in judgment over the Argentine legal system.
The pact was quickly ratified by the Argentine Congress and signed into law by the President. But such was the gravity of the concessions made to Iran that the official representative bodies of the Jewish community in Argentina—the DAIA and AMIA—were shaken out of their legendary mix of torpor and eagerness to please the government of the day. They filed an appeal to have it declared unconstitutional on the grounds that it represented an intrusion on the part of the executive into the work of the judicial branch and prevented the case from being dealt with by its natural judge. Just over a year later, the pact was indeed declared unconstitutional by a federal court and has never been put into effect.
Though the Argentine Jewish community’s official representative bodies opposed the Iran pact a chorus of Jewish intellectuals and public personalities supported it as did a number of the families of the AMIA massacre victims.
This is more than just another example of the traditional role of the Jewish witness in antisemitism, such as when in the medieval period a Jewish apostate would be produced to argue with a rabbi. And nor is it comparable to previous cases of Jewish assimilation, such as that of assimilated Jews in Germany, who felt themselves to be fully German and loyal to the state but yet were never really accepted as being part of the nation by German antisemites.
It might be argued that the very success of the assimilation of Jews into Argentine life has provided some of them with a solid emotional base from which to support the execution of objectively antisemitic policies such as the Iran deal, and to cheer endless speeches about the dastardly manoeuvres of international bankers. Generations of universal state education, strict monolingualism in the public sphere, and, until the early 1990s, compulsory military service for men had their desired effect; they made Argentines out of immigrants from all over the world, and of Jewish ones too. The role of Peronism is also important. As work by Israeli historian Ranaan Rein has demonstrated, the rise of Peronism was crucial to the inclusion of Jews in political and public life in Argentina.
2.
Now let’s go through the text of the petition published yesterday, one paragraph at a time.
We, the undersigned, proud of our Jewish, Argentine and humanist identity, express our concern about the hateful expressions of Javier Milei, the most voted candidate in the recent presidential primary elections, as well as for the political use he makes of Judaism, its texts and symbols.
They are certainly right about Milei’s hateful expressions and the generally fascist tone of his campaigning, but he only has words of praise for Jews and Judaism. And it’s notable that right from the start the signatories, some of whom have made careers of disparaging Zionism and the religious aspects of Judaism now see themselves as arbiters of how Jewish texts and symbols should be correctly used.
During this presidential campaign, this candidate has made statements of discriminatory and misogynist content, contrary to sexual diversity, political plurality and democratic coexistence in general. It is also necessary to condemn his attack on Pope Francis, offending him and, through him, millions of faithful.
The first sentence is absolutely right and no democratically minded person could disagree with it. The reference to the Pope is a harmless wave to the gallery of Catholic Argentina.
Likewise, it cannot be ignored that his running mate, Victoria Villarruel, is the main proponent of denialism in our country and of the defence of a dictatorship that had a proven antisemitic character and was especially cruel to the disappeared of Jewish origin. Similarly, in recent weeks he has made a notorious attack on Estela de Carlotto, an outstanding figure in the human rights movement.
By “denialism” they mean attempts to justify the mass human rights violations committed by the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina, a dictatorship which indeed had some notably antisemitic aspects. De Carlotto is an outstanding figure in the human rights movement, and she’s also a fully committed kirchnerista and loyal to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
Milei claims to study the Torah assiduously, he included the talit and the shofar in his campaign closing ceremony prior to the primary elections, he frequently quotes Jewish sources and makes references to characters such as Moses, among other things.
We want to express the following clearly: the Jewish ethics that we learned and that we aspire to put into practice in our lives is intimately linked to the notion of equality and social justice, which Milei calls an aberration. Therefore, our Judaism is at the antipodes of Javier Milei and his political project. The prophet Amos, the same one that Milei decontextualizes in his campaign material, was the one who denounced the inequality between the rich and the poor of his people. Another prophet, Isaiah, harshly criticised those who fasted following the religious rule without seeing the need to free the oppressed from their yoke and to help the needy. The text is found in the Tanakh, the same book that insists on the need to always remember with humility that we are descended from slaves in Egypt, and that orders us to protect the most vulnerable groups of society through laws and redistributive practices based on the intrinsic dignity of the human being.
Pretty amazing stuff that people who in their entire careers have never expressed the slightest interest in Jewish religious life are now suddenly concerned about the improper use of Jewish symbols and texts by Milei. At least one of them, Tamara Tenenbaum, has built part of her career on systematically mocking them. And is intersectional social justice really the basis of Judaism?
Furthermore, Milei's references to the "aesthetic superiority" of the right and his fight against "cultural Marxism" (a concept of undoubtedly antisemitic origins) should function as a wake-up call for all of us, Jews or not, who are committed to peaceful coexistence and dialogue.
This is correct, and signals Milei’s doubtful intellectual consistency and even more doubtful emotional stability.
Likewise, he states that Israel will be one of his main allies and would move the embassy to Jerusalem if he comes to power. We have already seen how political projects of similar characteristics in other parts of the world, identified with Israel, harboured within them clearly antisemitic expressions, and supporters of other forms of racism and discrimination, which have grown under their shelter.
I think here they are referring to Hungary and Victor Orban’s regime which while being friendly with Israel, has tried to whitewash the role of Hungarians in the Holocaust. OK, fair enough. But it does seem odd to hold Milei’s enthusiastic support for the state where half the world’s Jews live as a sign of closeted antisemitism
As part of a people that has suffered the most horrendous persecutions throughout its history, we firmly say that Milei does not represent us. We will not allow his appropriation of Jewish symbols and concepts to cloud this reality.
This is the most morally repugnant part of the text. All of its leading signatories whose names I recognize were enthusiastic (some more, some less) supporters of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner government when it signed the Iran deal. One, Ricardo Forster, was its Secretary of Strategic Coordination for National Thinking (not a joke). None of them, at the time or since, raised concerns about it, as far as I am aware.
Javier Milei is a disturbed individual with repugnant views, and if he is elected President of Argentina next month it will be a catastrophe for all who live there and who love the country. However, those who consented to a shameful surrender of the authority of Argentina’s courts to the Iran regime - its hands soaked in Jewish Argentine blood – have no right to now wield their Jewish identities and their newfound interest in the religious aspects of Judaism to condemn him. And they have even less right to speak of the “dignity of the human being” when the dignity of the dozens of Jews murdered by the Iranian regime in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s evidently means nothing to them.