São Paulo – On November 5th and 6th, the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) promotes the seminar The Palestinian Diaspora from the Middle East to Latin America in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. The meeting will gather experts on the topic from Brazil, Argentina, Austria, Lebanon, England and France.
The seminars’ debates will be based on the book “Between the Old and New World: The Palestinian Diaspora from the Middle East to Latin America”, organized by the Brazilian Leonardo Schiocchet, who is a researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) in Austria.
In an interview via email to ANBA, Schiocchet said that the Palestinian immigration to Latin American countries begun at the end of the 19th century. “Around half million of Palestines and their descendants currently live in Latin America, making the group, by far, the largest Palestinian diaspora outside the Arab world”, said the researcher.
According to him, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil, Peru and Colombia were the Latin American countries where the largest communities of Palestinians established themselves. The United States, North America, also received a large number of these immigrants.
According to the researcher, the older generations of Palestinians are very well integrated in the Latin American countries. However, he emphasizes that the recent arrival of refugees from the Middle East to Latina America can induce a change in the integration between the Arabs already here and Brazilians.
“First, because these refugees, exactly because of their refugee status, have a very different socio-economic profile and legal situation from the one on the Brazilian imagination, and on other Latin American countries also, about the Arab immigrant”, said Schiocchet.
The second reason given by the researcher is that the political alignment of some of these refugees, referring to the people involved in wars in places such as Lebanon, Libya and Iraq, have been causing a discomfort between the different generations of Arabs, especially in Brazil.
Schiocchet believes it’s very important that Brazil and other Latin American countries to support the Palestinian cause in the international bodies. “Especially because, contrary to common sense beliefs, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is not a problem created only by them and that it should be solved between them”, he adds.
“The creation of Israel was voted on the UN’s General Assembly, as a way to end the British mandate [that stood over Palestine]. However, this was a decision taken in the name of Palestinians, but not accepted by them and by other Arab countries, based on the need to produce a solution for the Jewish refugees in Europe. During the establishment of Israel, then, the Palestinians were expelled from their houses, villas, dispossessed of their assets, bank accounts, real estates and other material assets, and banned from re-entering their native land”, reminds the researcher.
He also believes that there’s a lack of interest for the topic among the Brazilian population. “Simply, the Israel and Palestinian conflict tends to be rectified by Latin American, and by the rest of the world in general, as being something produced at and limited to the Middle East, instead of being seen as a consequence of more wider social and historical processes, centered, especially, in the colonialism and European interests at the end of the Second World War”, he assesses.
According to Schiocchet, the Palestinians’ right to return to their land is desired by both immigrants that live in the Middle East and the ones living in Latin America, although in different ways.
“The return is not thought of by Palestinians only in terms of its practical possibility or individual interests. It’s a political, ideological platform and, more than anything today, a Palestinian cosmological component”, he says. “Maybe it’s possible to say that the return as a practical issue is more present in the Middle East than in Latin America, since the life of Palestinian refugees in the Middle East tends to be harder in comparison the ones of Palestinians already established for generations in Latin America”, he says.
Among the differences in the adaptation of Palestinians in several of Latin American countries, Schiocchet says that there are places in which Palestinians communities stand out more than in others. And the prejudice question sets in due to factors not concerning the Palestinian issue itself.
“In Chile and Honduras, for instance, Palestinians are a very visible community, while in Brazil, Syrians and Lebanese are much more visible. But that doesn’t mean, in any way, that Palestinians are more isolated in Brazil. When it comes to prejudice, this is a complicated issue, because, sometimes, Palestinians face prejudice based in the religious or ethnic components of their identities, that is, for being Muslims or Arabs, and not necessarily because of the national component”, he says.
The seminar is being organized in a partnership between the Center for Middle East Studies (Neom), which is linked to the Post-Graduate Program in Anthropology at UFF, and the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA).
Admission is free and registrations can be made at http://diasporapalestina.weebly.com/inscriccedilotildees.html.
*Translated by Sérgio Kakitani
