A friendship with a tyrant
NEXT WEEK THE Glasgow Film Festival will close with a screening of Nae Pasaran! (They Shall Not Pass!)
The film tells the story of how engineers at the RollsRoyce East Kilbride factory in 1974 refused to repair aircraft engines that belonged to the Chilean armed forces. Led by General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean air force, flying British Hawker Hunter jets, had bombed La Moneda presidential palace and overthrown the elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende.
A brutal dictatorship was established in which more than 3,000 people were killed or “disappeared” and some 40,000 suffered torture and imprisonment.
The murder of Allende and the coup were condemned by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and shocked the governing Israeli Labour party — especially since the Chilean leader had accepted an invitation to visit Israel from President Zalman Shazar.
Allende had been close to the Histadrut and to Israel’s Marxist Zionist party, Mapam, whose political secretary, Naftali Feder, had been present at the presidential inauguration in 1970.
Allende had expressed concern for oppressed Jews in the Soviet Union and in Arab lands. Some 200 Israelis were working in Chile to study irrigation. Allende argued that the Middle East conflict could only be solved “within the concept of the Jewish state’s right to existence and survival”.
This experiment in building a different society had inspired many young left-wing Zionists to delay their aliyah in order to help the Allende government. The Zionist Left Front had broken communal ranks by inviting
Allende to address them during the election campaign.
They too became targets during Pinochet’s reign of terror — not as Jews, but as leftists. Several of them sought refuge at the Israel embassy in the capital, Santiago, where they stayed for many months before being escorted by diplomats to the airport en route to Israel. Unlike Argentina in the 1970s, where the military junta killed a disproportionate number of Jews, Pinochet’s regime did not embrace antisemitism as state policy. Instead his underlings visited synagogues on Yom Kippur to express their goodwill and regularly met communal leaders.
Jews were important figures in the regime. General José Berdichevsky Scher, a fluent Yiddish speaker, who was instrumental in the La Moneda bombing, was appointed ambassador to Israel. Miguel Schweitzer Walters was ambassador to the UK and Sergio Melnick was consulted on economic questions. In contrast, those Jews who had served in the Allende administration such as Enrique Testa, the head of the Sephardi community, were hunted down. Jaime Faivovich, the former mayor of Santiago, sought refuge in the Mexican embassy. Volodia Teitelbaum, the head of the Communist Party, escaped to Italy.
Many middle-class Jews who had left Allende’s Chile for mainly economic reasons now returned to appreciate a new-found stability. Many were relative newcomers from Europe where they had experienced both fascism and communism and carried with them a deep fear of persecution and instability. Yet the draconian nature of the Pinochet regime worried those Jews who also had a sense of history but refused to turn a blind eye to what was happening. There was a split in a small community of 25,000 souls.
The newly appointed rabbi, Angel Kreiman, attempted to obtain safe conduct permits for Jewish leftists and was close to the Committee for Peace, established by clergymen shortly after the coup. Rabbi Kreiman signed a petition along with Cardinal Silva and the Lutheran Bishop Frenz which asked the regime to grant an amnesty to political prisoners. The rabbi’s activities were criticised by conservative elements within the community who wished to hear no criticism of Pinochet. He consequently moved to the Sephardi Sinagoga Maguen David in Santiago.
Rabbi Kreiman meandered carefully between Pinochet and his liberal conscience. In one conversation, Pinochet told him that his government was going to ban the film of Fiddler on the Roof because it showed revolutionaries waving a red flag and advocating the overthrow of the Tsar.
Pinochet admired Israel’s armed forces but simultaneously was careful to cultivate the Arab states. Chile therefore opposed the Zionism is Racism resolution at the UN but hosted the Pan-American Arab Congress in Santiago in 1978. The PLO attended Pinochet’s reception.
The general’s coup coincided with the Yom Kippur war — many states under Arab economic pressure broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. Labour governments under Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin were diplomatically isolated and economically vulnerable.
This forced Israel to pursue a policy of cultivating regimes in the 1970s which were considered pariah states by the international community.
A redacted CIA intelligence report of February 5 1988 stated that Israel sold
Jews who had served in Allende’s government were hunted down’