As Israel continues its genocide in Gaza and its bombing of five different countries, the same lines keep getting repeated: “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Otherwise, there will be more attacks like the one on October 7, 2023, which was the “worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” This phrase has been used by Netanyahu, Biden, Harris, etc., attempting to link the armed struggle against Israel with the Nazi genocide.
Is it true, though? On October 7, a total of 736 Israeli civilians were killed (though not all of them were Jewish). At least 14 of these were killed by the Israeli army, and likely more. In addition to roughly 700 Jewish civilians, Palestinian militants also killed 379 armed combatants.
How does this compare to other antisemitic massacres since the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945? The military coup in Argentina on March 24, 1976, killed an estimated 3,000 Jews.
The “National Reorganization Process,” as the generals cynically called it, aimed to crush Argentina’s powerful workers’ organizations and left-wing groups. This included mass killings and forced disappearances. Prisoners were thrown from airplanes into the ocean. Newborn babies were seized from their detained mothers and given up for adoption. At least 8,961 people were disappeared in the Dirty War — but human rights groups put the real number between 22,000 and 30,000. Argentinian courts have called this a genocide.
Argentina’s Jewish Community
As Saúl Sosnowski told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2016: “Jews in Argentina only made up 1 percent of the population, but they were about 10 percent of the disappeared.” As was the case in other countries and epochs, Jews were overrepresented in the revolutionary movements like the Montoneros and the Trotskyists — and thus drew the ire of the generals.
As Juan Pablo Jaroslavsky explained to the Guardian in 1999, “We have identified 1,296 Jewish victims by name out of the official list of 10,000 victims. But if the unofficial figure of 30,000 total victims is correct, then the number of Jewish victims could be over 3,000.”
This was no coincidence: After the Second World War, the government of Juan Perón provided refuge to thousands of Nazi war criminals, and the Argentinian military was full of antisemitism. Many officers believed in the Andinia plan, a conspiracy theory about Jewish subversives hoping to create a second Jewish homeland in Patagonia. (Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, had indeed considered Uganda or Argentina as possible locations for a Jewish state, but rejected them in favor of Palestine in the early 1900s.)
U.S., German, and Israeli Complicity
Today, the U.S. government and its Israeli vassal claim their warmongering in the Middle East is necessary to protect Jewish lives. So, how did they react to the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, as it was taking place in Argentina?
The military coup was part of Operation Condor, a U.S.-backed plan to eliminate the Left in the Southern Cone. Henry Kissinger gave a “green light” to the mass disappearances in Argentina. The junta got tens of millions of dollars in military aid from the U.S., and Germany was another vital backer.
The Israeli government did help some Argentinian Jews emigrate to the Holy Land. This is consistent with Zionist policy during the Holocaust: they would help Jews find refuge only so far as it contributed to their goal of colonizing Palestine. As David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, put it:
If I knew that it was possible to save all the [Jewish] children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.
This cynical policy was repeated in Argentina.
At the same time, Israel continued to supply Argentina’s military with weapons — weapons that were being used to murder Jews. Tel Aviv remained one of the Junta’s main allies, even as disagreements grew between Buenos Aires and Washington.
Javier Miliei, Argentina’s far-right president today, is a big supporter of Israel and also a defender of the generals who murdered thousands of Jews. This is yet another example of how antisemites love Israel and vice versa.
October 7 was not the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The military coup of 1976 was several times more deadly. The U.S., German, and Israeli governments, who today claim that a genocide is about “protecting Jewish lives,” were actively supporting the antisemitic massacre in Argentina. Imperialists and Zionists only care about Jewish lives when it serves their geopolitical interests.
Red Flag is a weekly column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel Flakin has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.
