In October 2023, Craig Mokhiber resigned as director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights over the UN’s failure to act to stop the genocide in Gaza. Since then, he has been writing and speaking out about Israel’s crimes in Gaza as well as the other wars launched by the US-Israel Axis. This week, we’re focusing on Israel’s secret role in destabilizing Latin America, the Maduro government in Venezuela in particular, and in training ICE.
Useful Idiots: Can you talk about the Israeli regime’s nefarious role in Latin America?
Craig Mokhiber: It’s a long story, the history of the Israeli regime supporting far-right governments and death squads in Latin America and attacking or supporting attacks on progressive governments and movements in the region. And that’s why in her first address after the U.S. attacked Venezuela, the vice president, who’s now the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, said that the attack on the country had “Zionist undertones.”
People of the region are well aware that the hand of the Israeli regime in destabilizing progressive governments has been going on forever. We’re talking about Israeli weapons, Israeli equipment, Israeli surveillance technology, Israeli intelligence cooperation, spying on opposition, and so on. But what’s really sometimes missed in these conversations is that the Israeli regime has been exporting not just weapons and technology and tactics, but it also exports a kind of violent and racist ideology. Ideas that are very right-wing, very Zionist, very militarist, very anti-human rights, obviously deeply anti-Muslim and anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian and anti-left, and this general idea that tries to frame law enforcement as equivalent to military.
That has been a big part of it. And that’s why, after the attack by the US on Venezuela, Israeli regime leaders were absolutely giddy celebrating the attacks on Venezuela and the abduction of the Venezuelan president.
Useful Idiots: What about Israel’s role in U.S. crackdowns against its own citizens?
Craig Mokhiber: This is what I refer to as the Zionist boomerang. This support for Zionism, fascism, apartheid, all of the crimes of the Israeli regime in Palestine, now it’s come back to our own cities. We’re talking about policing tactics that are entirely inconsistent with international human rights standards. You’ve got decades of the US underwriting apartheid, surveillance, repression, and genocide in Palestine. Those practices are now being brought home.
We’ve seen it in the brutal persecution of student protesters. You see it in the distortion of US legislation by Israel. The official adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism as an Israeli tool to try to silence dissent about Israeli abuses. You see it in the wholesale suspension of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in the U.S. on behalf of the Israeli regime.
This is blowback from support for Zionism in Western Asia and you now see it in the corruption of U.S. law enforcement with this continuous structured flow of Israeli weapons and equipment and surveillance technology. A lot of these things come out of Israel’s so-called counterterrorism tactics. And whenever you hear that word counterterrorism, I think we’ve all learned, human rights runs for cover. It’s surveillance, it’s brutal crowd control techniques, racial profiling, intrusive intelligence gathering that’s now touching all of us.
That is a product of this Zionist boomerang. And that alone should terrify everybody who lives in the United States.
