With the massive audio leak known as Hondurasgate coming into the public eye earlier this year, the previously unknown extent of the Honduran government’s connection to global Zionism is now much clearer. Though there is likely a lot more that will be revealed in the future, what we have learned about this already builds upon much that we have previously known about Honduras’ geopolitical importance, especially as related to Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) and Nasry Asfura.

This article seeks to elucidate the context behind the very existence of the Hondurasgate tapes in the first place. It will be an analysis of the myriad geopolitical factors that have led to this moment where Honduras is at the focal point of a massive, US-Israeli conspiracy to solidify their economic and political hegemony in the region. We will come to understand Honduras’ specific importance in this endeavor through both historical study and the current political matrices at play, in which cocaine smuggling, hasbara, counter-insurgency operations, surveillance and AI are all at play.

The US

Despite its small size and population, for at least a century Honduras has been incredibly important for US economic and geopolitical concerns. The nation lies near the geographic center of the Central American region and has access to both the Atlantic (via the Caribbean Sea) and the Pacific oceans. Its coastal alluvial plains fed by the mountainous interior provide rich soil for agriculture, and the mountains themselves, along with the many dry and wet forests, have been used for the large-scale extraction of lumber and the heavy metals. As the use of Honduras by the US as a military outpost flows from its initial status as an economic neo-colony, we must necessarily start there, with resources and the potential for exploitation.

Influenced by its rich, agricultural soils, Honduras has a long history as a US “banana republic”, a nation essentially under complete control of the interests of US fruit companies. Referred to as the “original banana republic” much of Honduras’ land was bought up by US companies such the United Fruit Company (now “Chiquita”), Standard Fruit and Cuyamel Fruit Company beginning in the late 19th century. Within decades, almost all Honduras financial, governmental and economic institutions were the control of these companies, and by proxy, the US state, therefore most of the country sank in deepening poverty exasperated by comprador oligarchs and infrastructure almost solely for the production and shipping of fruits. The successor companies of Chiquita and Dole continue to exercise massive amounts of influence over Honduras’ economy primarily via banana production and exporting to this day.

It did not take long for the US military to increase its presence in Honduras, an effort that began in the early 1900s. Seven different deployments of the American military landed in Honduras to protect the interest of banana corporations between 1903 and 1925, including a 1912 coup which included banana corporation mercenaries (a topic we will explore more in an upcoming section where it is more specifically relevant). From that point, Honduras became a permanent base for other US military interventions in the areas. One of the biggest steps in securing this status was the establishment of the Palmerola Air Base in Comayagua in 1940, which over the next few decades became the US’ largest base in Central America, taking the name “Soto Cano”. This military infrastructure and the presence of US personnel served to provide military training to Honduras’ military so as to effectively participate in and assist future military interventions.

This would soon pay off with the 1954 CIA coup against Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz and his implementations of land reforms at the expense of the United Fruit Company. In May of that year, one month before the coup, the US and Honduras signed a bilateral military assistance agreement that would be expanded upon in the following decades. This enabled the further coordination of arms shipments to US-trained Honduras anti-Árbenz fighters, who would make marked armed incursions into Guatemala that year with the assistance of air bases in both Honduras and Nicaragua that provided bombers. The success of this coup and a consistently pliant government in Honduras would only increase its geo-political importance to the US for coups and reactionary counter-insurgencies. Honduras gave the US an increased geographical reach for its interventions in terms of logistics. One of the most definitive attempts of imperialism linked to Honduras during this period was the 1961 failed Bay of Pigs invasion against Cuba in which the Honduran Swan Islands were used as both a CIA training ground and weapons trafficking point for anti-Castro insurgents. Increased, consistent military exercises between Honduras and the US began in earnest in 1965, the same year in which different US Task Forces would rotate in and out of Soto Cano Air base. The fourth of these groups, Joint Task Force Bravo(JTF-B), would be deployed in 1982 (at first as “Alpha”), corresponding with the full, modern establishment of the Soto Cano Air Base as the fully US-operated SOUTHCOM air force hub. Bravo still remains the primary military force at Soto Cano Air Base due to the specific conditions that first created them in the 80’s, with their extended presence past 1982 due the US’s imperial need for a

“Central American regional training center in Honduras, from which the United States would train military and paramilitary forces from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and Costa Rica, and the conduct of a multinational exercise, Big Pine II, which was focused on Sandinista activities in Nicaragua.”

Indeed, it was Sandinista victory in 1979 that most prompted this, as well both the socialist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) from El Salvador and the Cinchoneros, another revolutionary socialist guerilla group domestic to Honduras itself. Big Pine II was the first of several military/intelligence operations coordinated between 1983 to past the “official” end of the Contra War in 1990 where a rotating door of at least 10,000 US troops (prominently including JTF-B) and CIA actors collaborated with the Honduran military to train the Contra insurgents for operations against not only the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, but the FMLN and Cinchoneros. Though the US army and media washed these actions to the public as a measure to “contain” the Sandinistas to Nicaragua1 they effectively turned Honduras into a massive base for the Contras and their US-trainers.

Between 1984 and 1990 (corresponding to the overlap of the “end” of the Contra War, and the military decline of the Cinchoneros and FMLN) the US poured at least a total of $432.7 million into Honduras so that JTF-B could continue conducting exercises for the Honduran military, as well training and funneling funds to the Contras and Salvadorean death squads. Despite claims that JTF-B “decided that military force would not be the answer to the insurgency problem” and other related claims in the previous source, School of the America’s graduate and Honduran general Gustavo Álvarez, with money and training to the Honduran army provided by both the US army and the CIA, went on massive repression campaigns where death squads “disappeared” at least hundreds of people suspected of being fighters/sympathizers of either the Sandinistas or Cincheros until 1984. The repression of Álvarez was part of a rightward trajectory in which the Honduran army, encouraged by their government’s alignment with the US in counter-insurgency measures, sought to destroy all perceived leftist threats to them and the US. The torture tactics used by Álvarez and his ilk are well known for being taught at the School of the Americas to future US-alignment civic and military authorities in Latin America. Álvarez’ associate Florencio Caballero specifically acknowledged both the CIA’s lack of hindering human rights violations as well as their role in employing professional torturers from the US-backed Argentine military government to assist the Hondurans. “The Americans knew everything.” Not a protest from JTF-B nor the US government. “They did not do anything” Caballero also stated. The money, training and joint exercises continued for years.

The only pause in US support to all these aforementioned reactionary forces, but specifically relating to the Contras, came with the series of Boland Amendments which cut off official military funding to the Contras beginning in 1982. In order to continue clandestine activities against Nicaragua and the FMLN, The CIA assisted the Contras in drug trafficking operations to the US, which generated funds for their continued armed operations. This, along with arm sales to Iran which generated more funds to be laundered into military and logistical assistance, comprised the Iran-Contra scandal and it effectively bypassed the Boland amendments. It connect the Contras to a vast CIA-affiliated network, including but not limited to the Medellín Cartel, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and Honduras’ air-based logistics system; an entire international laundering operation funding the Contra’s war crimes that caused the US to first run cover with the Boland Amendments in the first place. Honduras, with its air infrastructure and massive presence of Contra bases, was vital to this effort. Weapons both meant for them and Honduran military were facilitated through JTF-B at Palmerola after first being smuggled in via a CIA base in the Swan Islands. Through all this, not only will Honduras’ political and military utility to the US be solidified, but the infrastructure and organizational capacity for drug smuggling be established.

(The following section pulls largely from the Honduras section of my previous piece “Surveillance and the Network Hemisphere. All specific sources for claims common between these pieces can be found in “Surveillance”. Any claims that are not differently cited come from either from the original analysis or sources cited in the aforementioned work.)

The consequences of the 2009 US-backed coup in Honduras revitalized and strengthened institutional cocaine trafficking. The eventual ascent of Juan Orlando Hernández to the presidency saw the whole use the Honduran state infrastructure to secure his personal profit from said trafficking. Hernández utilized the police especially to smuggle drugs and to protect personal narcos associated with him, by which he attained more funds for political campaigns. He also selectively extradited rival drug traffickers to the US to both monopolize the drug trade under him and curry favor with his imperial supporters. For years, the US intelligence and military presence in Honduras paid little mind to Hernández’ activities given his alignment to the US instead of the previous leftist president, Manuel Zelaya. Supported by both Obama and Trump (during his first term), Hernández was only convicted when he accepted a $1 million bribe from former Sinaloa Cartel leader “El Chapo” and when his brother, Tony, was caught smuggling cocaine in Miami. Even then, his conviction and extradition only came at the end of his second term in 2022.

Hernández used the panic of the drug trade in order to manufacture a state of exception that allowed Honduras’ government to build a massive surveillance apparatus, one also helped him to secretly solidify his slice of the narco pie. He boosted former president (and coup-participant) Porfirio Lobo’s 2012 Wiretapping Law with AI technology from Palantir and from Israel’s Cellebrite to further crackdown on dissidents and rival drug traffickers. As he consolidated power with the tacit consent of the US, the “Special Economic Zones”(Spanish acronym “ZDE” Zona de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico) that enabled that expansion of large “start-up cities” such as Próspera, essentially a “tax-free, crypto and AI-fueled playground for rich techno-fetishists”, a Thiel-linked venture that began the US’ ambitions to surveil all of Latin America through both compliant surveillance regimes and unaccountable extraction and development zones for foreign capital: a “network state/hemisphere”.

Despite its supposed opposition to drug trafficking, JTF-B and the greater US military ignored every instance of abuse and corruption. Hernández was (and with Trump’s second-term pardon, is) their guy. He and his current president/National Party comrade, Nasry Asfura (who came into the presidency after US meddling), have the complete support of the US government due to their continued subordination to US military and economic designs. Unlike the Manuel Zelaya/Xiomara Castro led opposition, and a good portion of Hondurans, Hernández and Asfura have no intentions of closing the largest US military base in Central America. Time will tell if the US deems Hernández’ desire to succeed Asfura as puppet-in-chief necessary to expand Yanqui economic and military control and maintain a fake news propaganda war against any existing left-wing government in the region, setting the stage for future coups and repression.

Israel

The relationship between Israel and Honduras goes back decades, having been intertwined principally with US imperialism in the nation. This section will look at events overlapping with US actions and those not already elaborated upon in chronological order, starting from the rule of banana companies to Hondurasgate. Special attention will also be paid to their role together with Hernández and Asfura, drawing again from a previous article of mine to some extent.

One of the most decisive actions in solidifying Honduras’ subservience to US economic interests occurred as one of the many early 20th interventions in the nation. In 1910, president Miguel Dávila attempted to renegotiate its sovereign debt and curb the influence of bribes paid by Cuyamel Fruit Company. This earned the ire of its founder, Samuel Zemurray, a Zionist Jew. That year, Zemurray organized a troupe of mercenaries to force exiled former president Manuel Bonilla back into his old position and rolled back any reforms hostile to Cuyamel; this included a further concession of over 24,000 acres.

Zemurray, with his Honduran and US government connections, would also use this influence to help coup Árbenz from Guatemala for expropriating thousands of acres from United Fruit, which was also owned by that point. Many of his profits went towards facilitating the founding of Israel through both violent and diplomatic means. He was known to have financially supported the Jewish terrorist organization Irgun, which would later be an establishing organization of the IDF, by sending them arms with which they killed and expelled Palestinians before and during the Nakba. According to biographer Rich Cohen, Zemurray’s power in Central America even held to lead to the passing of UN Resolution 181, which established Israel as cleaved away from the former Mandatory Palestine,

“All the countries that changed their votes were the countries where the Banana King (Zemurray) had control and influence”.

We can see this specifically in the “yes” votes from Guatemala and Costa Rica above (Honduras abstained), though this abstention could have easily been a “no” vote. The National Party as founded by Manuel Bonilla, the comprador president re-installed by Zemurray in 1910, was still in power during the 1947 vote. As we will see later, though US/Israeli collaboration is not limited to the National Party, they will continue to intensify their connections especially with the ascension of Hernández. This specific connection has its genealogy here.

Israel’s connection to Honduras and the US-sponsored anti-revolutionary campaigns there really ramped up in the 1980s. Israel made massive arm sales and associated in training efforts to both the Contras as well as El Salvadoran and Guatemalan death squads (a major contributor the Mayan Genocide which the Guatemalan state perpetrated with Israelis assistance), the former two largely using Honduras as their base. At many points, they even took greater material roles in the region than the US themselves. American sources in Honduras during the time remarked that

“Israel operates without the restrictions imposed on us in this part of the world. It doesn’t have to explore the abuse of human rights. It has arms to sell and the governments of this region need them.”

Contra groups themselves boasted about receiving thousands of weapons from Israel, who would come to provide them over ¼ of their total arms capacity - and before even arming (overwhelmingly with Galils and Uzis) and training the Contras, Israel also provided over 83% of the arms El Salvador’s military, police and death squads (including napalm used against rural people) between 1973 and 1980 - Israeli advisors would also go on to train them in torture methods throughout the 80s (ibid.). Israel provided Honduras itself with dozens of hypersonic bombers “the first in Central America”, transport planes, jets, armored cars, small arms and many more types of military equipment leading up to the 80s. These would be used both against the Nicaraguan and Salvadorean communist forces as well as those domestics to Honduras, both via direct training and the usage of Honduran infrastructure. Previously mentioned death squad leader Gustavo Álvarez specifically visited Israel in 1982, the inaugural year of full, modern Soto Cano/Palmerola Air base, “in search of alternatives to US warplanes in case Congress refused to sell them”. Israel’s air force and defense ministry happily obliged him. They sent Israeli jets that would have been stationed at Soto Cano as well as tanks, small arms and personnel, not only military trainers for Honduran death squads but Israeli pilots and troops to fight with them. As elaborated pages and paragraphs before, we have seen how this has contributed to the massively fatal consequences for people and militants across the region during this time.

Financial gain was not the only motive for Israel during this time; it was a chance to continue solidifying ties with the US by assisting in their own local, more local geo-political goals as the US has assisted Israel in theirs. Though this is speculation, these may have also been moves to recover more favor with the Reagan administration after his 1982 threats to cut-off financial assistance to Israel after their massive, civilian-targeting bombing campaigns and incursions into Lebanon. Luckily for us, Israel, allies of the former Somoza government, itself cited “anti-semticism” by the Sandinistas as a justification for their activities throughout the region. This claim, bolstered by the Anti-Defamation League and the Reagan administration, was rebuffed by the Nicaraguan Jewish community itself.

Israel would go on to have normal relations with Honduras since, with this relationship accelerating to the point it is at today through the different actions of the National Party throughout the 21st century. The government of Porfirio Lobo emphasized, after succeeding Roberto Micheletti (the brief, post-coup interim president). that Honduras “aspires to maintain good diplomatic, cooperation and market relations with Israel.” As touched on earlier, the following Hernández government would go on to further strengthen this relationship. In addition to using Israel surveillance tech, like Pegasus, Cellebrite and Circle, to spy on dissenting forces, Hernández would not only massively ramp up Israeli arms sales since their peak in the 80s, but he also invited about 1,000 IDF troops to station in Soto Cano air base with the US military. This first ever time Israel has had a permanent military presence abroad was ostensibly to help with “border protection” but was truly part of the process of moving the Honduran-Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. The former source also explains the relevance to a $1 million arms purchase from Israel validated around the same time. Any involvement of the DF in Hernández’ drugs schemes and targeted persecutions is at the time unknown.

Hernádez’ successor Asfura has described himself a Zionist and has every intention of continuing Honduras’ ties with Israel, which also stretch to patronage of Palantir and the expansion of ZDE (such as the infamous Próspera) that are linked to several Zionist capitalists such as Peter Thiel, Marc Andreeson, Sam Altman and others. As someone who largely owes his election success to interference from the US Zionist government (ibid.), Asfura continues to support the US’s hegemony and the expansion of their imperialist drive to turn the entire region to the right. His name is mentioned countless times in the Hondurasgate recording as a party to restore Hernández to power and sell off Honduras to tech billionaires, General Electric and the US and Israeli militaries/intelligence systems. One specific recording mentions “moving another Palmerola” to Roatán, the site of Próspera, and trading specifically with the US and Argentina in order to cut out China.

The reactionary governments of Honduras have for decades been able to carve out their own functional niche in the US imperialism; it now figures stronger than ever in different economic and military matrices that stretch not just across Latin America, but to West Asia, if not further. We see through the different leaked recordings just how vital it has become. The US cannot give it up. It is a site of investment not only of US and Israeli military/spy tech/infrastructure, but off massive, continent-spanning surveillance and disinformation systems. All of this has germinated from its conversion of the country by several generations of opportunists and fascists into a Banana Republic and a 112,000 square kilometer military base. This is why Honduras has emerged in this such way - it was a minnow elevated into a bastard, half-formed shark, but one that can never swim on its own, relegating to biting and lashing out even as it’s made to starve on the crumbs and chum of what it helps to destroy. It is clear now that any challenge to US/Israeli power must reckon with their removal from Honduras.

Zionism, as the colonial ideology fueling the settler-colonial state of Israel, principally relies on one logic that motivates all the others: expansion. Expansion from armed kibbutzim into entire cities across Mandatory Palestine, expansion much deeper than it was after 1967, or even after Oslo, into Gaza and the West Bank, expansion into the Golan Heights and the Litani River and further beyond according to the vision of “Greater Israel” to include, at the very least, the entire Levant, as well as the majority of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

What Israel had always and most principally used to facilitate its expansion has been settlers and the settlements they inhabit and grow. Military force is only that which clears areas and removes peoples in order for settlers and settlements to plant the weeds of their state’s presence as to putrefy into demographic, economic and legal dominance. Israeli politicians and Zionist ideologues themselves have proudly acknowledged this imperative ad nauseam since the inception of the Zionist movement down to the modern day; journalists freely use the term Lebensraum when describing their support for the settlements, politicians positively invoke Hitler and, perhaps most crudely yet most directly, settlers themselves (from the US no less) nakedly express that “colonialism gets a bad rap”.

This colonial expansion via the expulsion/murder of Palestinians, in addition to those in neighbouring countries, is essential to Israel’s existence. Every diplomatic and military move Israel makes on the world stage is in service to this goal. The vast majority of Jewish cultural institutions and synagogues the world over have deep ties with Israel, engaging not only in the active recruitment of settlers through “birthright” trips and military drives, but also through the auctioning off of land in the West Bank to Jews in North America.

Every Aliyah is a colonization effort and over the decades, Israel has leveraged every strategy to get Jews of any nationality to become part of their supremacist project. The fundamental relation between making Aliyah and expansion of settlements is mutually beneficial, with the settlements “help(ing) Israel’s policies to prosper while simultaneously enforcing Judaization of the annexed territories”, essentially proof of the Aliyah’s function by its furthering of colonization via transplanting settlers. Aside from the recruitment of North American and European Jews, one of the most consistent sources of state-assisted migration and settlement has been the steady stream of Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) with broad assistance from The Jewish Agency for Israel, a non-profit that works closely with the IDF and Israeli government encourage continuous Aliyahs to all areas of Occupied Palestine. According to their own statistics, The Agency has, since the 1950s, facilitated the migration of over 95,000 Ethiopians with the most recent operation occurring in 2022. The Israeli state has also absorbed thousands of Arab Jews for the maintenance and expansion of their colonial society. Most of these actions took place not long after 1948 and includes striking a deal with France to expel over 100,000 Moroccan Jews to fuel Israel’s growth and propagandizing to, as well as smuggling away another 100,000 Iraqi Jews, an effort helped along by a Mossad-orchestrated bombing of a synagogue that was blamed on the Iraqi government.

And indeed, such undertakings have and continue to work. Regardless of the true desires and levels of coercions involved in many of these people coming to Israel, the vast majority of them remained. They and their descendants became integrated as part of Israel’s demographic war against Palestinians, no matter what intra-settler discrimination may take place. Jews of all lineages can be found not just in the core Jewish-majority occupied lands (Tel Aviv, Haifa etc), but also in the settlements, mostly in the West Bank. A record 27,252 settlements were approved in 2025 alone with thousands of more underway as of this article’s writing.

One of the less acknowledged ways that Israel had been seeking to increase its settler presence is via direct missionary propaganda, an endeavor largely undertaken by a little-known organization called Kulanu. Kulanu is an incredibly chauvinistic Jewish institution that for more than 30 years has been, to quote for their website, "supporting(ing) isolated, emerging and returning Jewish communities around the globe”. Their practical emphasis falls squarely on the latter two words in their slogan, though the “emerging” is more akin to astroturfing/manipulation and the “returning” is unambiguously colonization via Aliyah.

Though they hardly mention their direct support of Israel, Kulanu is a Zionist organization through and through. If one were to discount the instances of their encouragement of Aliyah (which will be a later focus of this article), one can easily find self-described evidence of collaboration with Chabad in places such as Guatemala and Brazil. Additionally, many of their board members openly list their affiliations with Israel, such as treasurer Lili Kaufmann, a committee member of the Jewish Agency of Israel who facilitated the Aliyah of many Russian and Ethiopian Jews. President Bonita Nathan Sussman has also stated on the same page that “Her current mission is to help integrate emerging Jewish communities into world Jewry” though elsewhere she had made her Zionism much more blatant. In an interview with the Times of Israel, she elaborated on her support for Donald Trump, specifically citing her support for Israel and feeling “betrayed” by Barack Obama not contesting the UN’s condemnation of West Bank settlements in 2016. Given the long-standing and unambiguous Zionism in the US’s duopoly, this is quite a statement.

Kulanu operates on every continent on Earth and primarily embeds itself within different marginalized communities within each country they operate in. The plurality of their activities is focused in Latin America and Africa, where they “find” most of their supposedly lost and active Jewish communities in nations as disparate as Bolivia to Burundi. The general modus operandi of Kulanu follows a set format of action

1. Identify individuals with some religious interest in Judaism or the State of Israel

2. Make contact and fund said individuals with religious/political Jewish literature and acculturate them into mainstream Zionist/Jewish culture through the establishment of synagogues, the spread of rituals, Hebrew lessons, etc.

3. Begin officially converting those in the greater local community often through the help of emphasizing some link to ancient or recent assimilated Jewry

4. Encourage greater financial/political ties with Israel, including birthright trips, and often complete migration to Israel

Steps 2-4 are not always sequential, but can happen simultaneously, given the entrenchment of Zionism in both secular and religious Jewish communities world-wide. These observations are based both on specific case documents and Kulanu’s own and more specific information sheet. Of special attention is the emphasizing of links to past Jewry, which is referred to in the Information Sheet as “Lost tribes...Crypto-Jewish origins”. This specific interest and justification for Kulanu’s Zionist activities is pre-eminent in their organization’s genealogy. Years before the establishment of Kulanu, Israeli rabbi Eliyahu Avichail used the colonial-era obsession with hidden Jews to convert disparate communities as far as flung as Peru to Japan, people which many Europeans during the early modern era speculated to be descendants of the so-called biblical “lost tribes” in order to bring them “to the land of Israel”. Though Kulanu is not as outwardly explicit about their goals towards new Jewish groups making Aliyah (unlike their sister organization Shavei Israel, which this article uses to unsubstantially differentiate the effect of both groups) they continue to at the very least implicitly encourage Aliyah by their very ideology and institutional proximity to Israel, using, among other means, the “lost tribes” idea to look for and foster a modern, mainstream Zionist identity whether there was ever any Jewish heritage in said groups or not. This would not be a justifying factor for settlement in Occupied Palestine anyway.

Any type of supposed long-removed and distant descent from Jews, or even folklore with little to material substantiation, is enough for Kulanu to begin proselytizing to a specific group. Large conversions amongst the Lemba people of Zimbabwe and South Africa have been facilitated by both insisting that they carry on “Jewish” customs of circumcision and not eating pork, and that a large amount of the population carries the Jewish “Cohanim” gene haplotype which supposedly occurs in Jewish populations worldwide. Kulanu touts this as one of their greatest successes, and these claims are often repeated in different mainstream articles with little scrutiny. However, circumcision and avoiding pork are also essential practices in Islam, Coptic Christianity and Yazidism among other faiths. Additionally, more precise genetic studies have shown that the “Cohanim” gene was not at all prominent in the Lemba people. Their genetics were tested, and their unique chromosomal instead data linked to non-diasporic Jewish, non-Levantine Middle Eastern populations, likely brought by Arab traders in Sofala and Zanzibar who later moved inland corresponding with the outer peripheral growth of the Great Zimbabwe civilization.

Both of the aforementioned methods have also been put into practice in Peru, where Kulanu’s efforts are some of their most detailed and documented. Kulanu has spent much time in the Peruvian (and to a lesser extent, Brazilian) Amazonian regions instigating Jewish revivals aligned with mainstream Jewish Zionism. The city of Iquitos and those of Belem and Manaus, the former Peruvian and the latter two Brazilian, have long histories of settlement mostly by Moroccan and Sephardic Jews who arrived during the mid 19th-century “Rubber Boom” across the entire Amazon.

Like many foreign and domestic migrants to these areas, Jews became merchants, middlemen and sometimes out-right plantation owners. The Moroccan Pinto family, amongst others, would become prominent in ferrying rubber between Iquitos and Manaus. Abraham Pinto has related his experiences selling rubber and exploiting people with other Jewish people between Iquitos, Manaus and Tefé at length in his memoirs,

There were three hundred or so inhabitants (in Tefé), primarily mestizo Indians, but also a few civilized people, among them Señor Salomon Levy and his family…A few days after settling in, my uncles bought a canoe which they outfitted with a canopy made of palm leaves. They hired Indian rowers, loaded the canoe with merchandise worth roughly 50 pounds, and sent my brother, Moyses, down some nearby estuaries to trade with the locals that lived in huts along the banks. With no prior experience, he carried out these expeditions with only God's guidance and returned to Teffé fifteen days later with a pretty good haul, and to my uncles' great satisfaction. In the ensuing months he gained confidence bit by bit and substantially increased his profits. A few weeks later it was my turn: another canoe, more small trips, etc. After six months of this, my uncles decided to send us out on larger canoes so we could go further and take more merchandise. My brother, Moyses, went to the Javari river, about ten-days' travel aboard a small steamship with a canoe in tow carrying the merchandise. Once there, he got in his canoe and spent the six months of the rubber season going up and down the river, trading where he could. When he ran out of merchandise he would return to Teffé to resupply in exchange for a portion of the rubber he had collected. When the harvest was over, he would row back from the Javari - a twenty-to-thirty-day trip -- and trade with the natives along the Amazon.

We can easily glimpse Pinto’s opinion of the aboriginal people by contrasting them with those he considers “civilized”, and we can imagine some less pleasant details that he may not have wanted to mention, whether committed by him or business partners. Jews, like the other migrants in the area, were colonizers on a far frontier whose trade depended on and supported the expansion of the rubber harvesting which decimated local indigenous populations. It certainly also telling that Kulanu has decided to describe such people, ancestors of those they want to re-convert, as “adventurers”.

In Peru, this increased demand for rubber exploitation and the growth of their urban trading hubs led to what is now called the Putumayo Genocide (after the river), in which across several decades going into the 20th century the mass enslavement, infection, trafficking and extrajudicial executions of thousands of people, most specifically the Huitoto, Ocaina and Bora, reduced their collective populations from over 50,000 before 1890 to only 6,000 in 1920. The Peruvian Amazonian company and its multi-national, multi-ethnic agents and employees committed the brunt of these atrocities, but each country that actively colonized the Amazon for rubber shared structural responsibility. Brazilian rubber barons were the first to begin the process of ‘debt-slavery’ to keep Amazonian people trapped on rubber plantations which began at the very least in the 1850s, itself corresponding to when over 900 Jewish families, apart from other settlers, began to come to the frontier extraction post of Belem alone. This debt slavery later became the first instances of the region’s literal chattel slavery of indigenous people, and many of those enslaved in Peru were trafficked to Belem and Manaus by these same populations of “very predatory foreign people” in order to further their urbanization by the arduous harvesting of rubber for its trade. The atrocities of the various settlers and governments fighting for the Amazon’s rubber still survive in indigenous oral traditions, such as that of the tigre negro of Peru’s Kulama people, which continues to circulate the crimes of old rubber barons.

The majority of those descendants of "Amazonian Jews” are now mixed-race people who for over a century have been assimilated into either mestizo (or pardo/caboclo in Brazil) or urbanized indigenous communities, preserving little to no Jewish culture. Very few families in either the Peruvian or Brazilian sectors of the Amazon actively practiced Judaism or identified as Jewish for decades. This, however, has not stopped both local and Kulanu-incentivized revivals from incentivizing Aliyah since the fall of their colonial “Eretz Amazonia” golden days. These local revivals have been happening in Iquitos since at least the 90s, where both Rabbis from Lima as well as different foreign nations have essentially astroturfed a modern Jewish identity onto different urban indigenous and mixed-race groups and fast-tracked their relocation to Israel. With their new religion and single Jewish great-grandparents as justifications, at least 400 people from Iquitos have made Aliyah and settled in Israel since 2009, according to notable local mestizo Zionist Ronald Reátegui Levy.

Though exact numbers for Brazil’s Amazonian Jews making Aliyah seem to not be recorded, they are ardently Zionist, with one of their main Rabbis commenting, “Since October 7, we've rediscovered just how sick the world is with antisemitism" and that Hamas are “animals”. Despite this, Brazilian Jews in general make Aliyah at a high rate; as of 2020, about 17,000 have gone to Israel, with great spikes in Alliyah between 2000 and 2009. Many of these activities are sponsored by Kulanu, who in 2026 alone have converted 50 Brazilians, riding the wave of different Amazonian revivals and Aliyah efforts to extend their organizational practices across the rest of Brazil.

None of the efforts thus far discussed can compare, however, to Kulanu’s success in converting and preparing Peruvians in the Andes for either Aliyah or domestic advocacy for Israel. This significant regional success is an obvious point of pride for the organization; it is among their most documented projects and has been a decades-long process. With this ample and robust documentation, we can see exactly how Kulanu puts their MO to use in attracting poor indigenous people, in this case Quechuas, as well as poor mestizos, into becoming part of a privileged settler class in the Levant.

Before Kulanu even was able to start their operations in Peru, a limited yet notable milieu of Judaization was already being fomented between the coast and the Western slopes of the Andes. This was kicked off by a mestizo from the city of Trujillo named Segundo Villanueva, who personally converted to Judaism in 1966. Over the next couple of decades, Villanueva was able to convert about 500 people between Trujillo and Cajamarca, people who largely came impoverished mestizo (mixed Quechua descendants) and indigenous (Quechua) backgrounds1 and were erroneously called “Inca Jews” by outsiders while they themselves used the name “Bnei Moshe” (the tribe of Moses). The collective motivation for conversion was a mix of, on one hand, a desire to escape poverty in Peru for Jewish-supremacist privilege in Palestine, and on the other, an alienation from not just the indigenous Quechua culture to which most of them at least partially belonged, but a greater alienation from both mainstream Peruvian society and Peru’s continuum of native civilizations. Detailed sources on this breakdown are scarce, the closest we get from one of the eponymous “Inca Jews” is a solemn question of “Where are they and their gods now?”, referring to the ruins of Chan Chan, a pre-Inca civilization. Despite this, the article still relates this to them as if this distinct, much older culture is essential to their Inca heritage.2

This community's relationship with Zionism developed relatively quickly and was prefigured in some of their actions in establishing Jewish settlements. During the 1967 6-Day War, Villanueva and many followers created a Jewish colony, cruelly called Hebron, in the Northern Amazonian area of Peru. This was part of a large movement of then President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, “The Conquest Peru by Peruvians”, an effort to extend destructive state control into the Amazon through the building of roads and theft of lands from the area’s original inhabitants. This was a way to undermine ongoing urban, and especially rural. class struggle in Peru, the latter of which predominately was based in Andean Quechua and Aymara peoples organizing against the haciendas that had most of them in feudal bondage and demanding radical land reforms. Belaúnde instead proposed very small reforms largely inconsequential to the landed elite and incentivized poor Peruvians to join new colonial projects in the Amazon as settlers, taking pressure of his rich, landed supporters by also figuring

The Andean migrant (as) the central agent of the plan, encouraged to settle in the jungle with the promise of a miraculous land…to alleviate the mass migration from the highlands to the capital by opening escape valves toward the eastern part of the country… Fernando Belaúnde identifie(d) the settler as the Andean migrant entrusted with the task of populating and exploiting the resources of the Amazonian lands.

Propagandized and incentivized to the urban poor of all background as escapes from the squalor of ghettos and Andean Indigenous serfs as escapes from their hacendados, Belaúnde himself compared this to US Manifest Destiny, “only by turning our vision to the interior, and conquering our wilderness as the United States once did, will South America finally achieve true development”. And just like thousands of the marginalized and rich alike, Villanueva’s community of converts also went to the Amazon and tried to benefit from mass land theft disguised as “development”, much like the Sephardic Jews during the Rubber Boom that preceded them, and much like their Israeli contemporaries and descendants. This long-standing Jewish-Peruvian colonial genealogy continued to motivate them even after leaving the Amazon.

After their isolationist and colonial venture failed, Villanueva and his followers actively sought Israeli and US Jewish clerics to facilitate their conversion and thus make it easier for them to make Aliyah. According to an essay published by Kulanu themselves, the “Inca Jews” succeeded in making contact with a rabbi in 1985 and finished their conversion in 1989. Soon after, 380 of them settled in the West Bank colony of Elon Moreh near Nablus and “rapidly integrated faster into Israeli society, far more easily than the Russian or Ethiopian Jews…Some Inca Jews joined the army”. Since 2000, 90 more families “of Indian origin” also made Aliyah to the Alon Shvut and Karmei Tzur settlements, also in the West Bank, with notable convert Nachshon Ben-Haim, formerly Pedro Mendosa, stating that how “there is no Indian culture left”3 motivated this group’s colonization of the West Bank. He later cites a “scientific view of Judaism” to give credence to his notion that “The Arab has the instinct of murder and killing like all gentiles, and only Jews do not have that instinct - that is a genetic fact."

Despite Kulanu’s claims that the Jews of Huánuco are not “seeking aliya (sic) or emigration” and the general lack of numbers of those that did, Kulanu had nonetheless set up this community for greater ties with Israel, Step 4. As of this year, the Zionist “birthright trip” organization Taglit is planning to give at least 20 young Huánuco Jews a promotional trip to Israel in order to incentivize their loyalty to it and likely future advocacy for Aliyah to Israel. In their own words, Taglit has said “Our mission is to keep the flame alive, so that those who want to return, return with confidence and with the joy of feeling at home”. Truly, whatever modification in Kulanu’s stated purpose or honest self-reporting (and this goes for all Jewish revivals in general), is not important; their functional purpose is consistently Zionist, frequently explicitly or implicitly encouraging Aliyah. This is visible by their own documentation throughout their missions across the world, with other notable examples in Latin America being in El Salvador (the cities of Armenia and San Salvador), Mexico and Guatemala. Even if Kulanu and others do not succeed in convincing these communities to make Aliyah, they build domestic, Jewish advocacy organizations for Israel. If 99% of US Jewish organizations are Zionist, then this number is likely comparable in Latin America. Statistics as a whole for the entire region are hard to come by, but some polls (though they are old) from Mexico, as well as continued Aliyah statistics, help paint this picture. According to a 2018 poll 82% of Latin American Jewish community leaders supported a Two-State solution (maintaining the existence of Israel) with 2/3s agreeing with the US moving their embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, whose eastern sector still faces Zionist colonization.

Overall, the function of Kulanu and these other various groups are united in Jewish Supremacy and the Colonization of the Levant as a whole. With Judaism/Jewish ethnic identity as the unifying factor, plenty of Israelis and the people who become them will tolerate discrimination from their whiter brethren in order to benefit from the Zionist project. For this reason, it is detrimental to focus on any kind of intra-Jewish/intra-Israeli bigotry when each subgroup within is united in the displacement and genocide of both Palestinians and others for the “Greater Israel” project they try to realize. Rashid Khalidi points out the “precedence” of being Jewish above all else by citing a law that was de facto understood in Israel for years already,

“In July 2018, the Knesset codified that choice in constitutional law, adopting the “Basic Law on the Jewish Nation-State,” which institutionalized statutory inequality among Israeli citizens by arrogating the right of national self-determination exclusively to the Jewish people, downgrading the status of Arabic, and declaring Jewish settlement a “national value” with precedence over other needs.”

Just like how the US incentivized the ghettoized urban Irish fleeing British genocide to steal native land as part of Manifest Destiny, and as Liberia used the desperation of both free and formerly enslaved black USians to establish settler-plantation state with indigenous Africans on the bottom, and as in Peru with Belaúnde’s Amazonian schemes, Israel, through missionary and revival organizations, exploits the poverty and racial marginalization of thousands throughout the Third World in order to entice them into becoming settlers in Palestine. In each case it is the undermining of class struggle either/both in the colony or elsewhere in order to create active colonial collaborators. The need for these settlers trumps all else in order to continue the expanding demographic majority requisite for Israel to continue as a state. At some point in Zionist society, skin color and national origin begins to matter much less than one’s Jewishness. And since the possession or attaining of Jewishness is what unlocks colonial privilege in Israel, then Israel is truly a Jewish state, one where Jews and the state they reside in and expand are identical. All settler colonial projects rely on some degree of converting those who may be at society’s margins, or are oppressed in some other way, into the colonial, expansive, demographic majority they need. Israel has largely moved away from assimilating the largely poor and often non-hite Yemeni, Iraqi, Maghrebi, Ex-Soviet and Ethiopian Jews. They and Jewish organizations in general have realized the historical truth that anyone of any background can be an active colonizer somewhere if the right material conditions are met, and they will find people willing, racist or desperate enough anywhere. Once the threshold into mainstream religious and secular Judaism is crossed, becoming a Zionist settler in the Levant is much easier regardless of if one is brown, or black or slightly tanner than average.

The Peruvian city of Cusco, the one-time capital of the Inca Empire, has been put through the ringer of touristic gentrification by foreign capital investment for the past 20-30 years. In this process that has led to the displacement of families due to rising costs and the selling and conversion of residences into touristic business, capital contributed by Zionist Israelis continues to play a role that has the potential to be uniquely and disproportionately destructive. Though outsized by investments by Americans and Europeans, the transplant of Israeli capital as well as Israelis themselves, including former members of the IDF, has both been a strong driver of gentrification in historic areas of Cusco as well as a conduit for violence against vocally pro-Palestinian locals. This is but the most recent manifestation of Cusco’s enduring problems with gentrification.

The growth of Peru in general and Cusco specifically as a tourist destination came principally through the neoliberalization of Peru throughout the 1990s. Though Cusco had been a growing tourist destination throughout the 20th century, especially when it was designated as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1983, the growth of this sector was severely hampered by Peru’s inflationary crisis and Shining Path insurgency. The Peruvian state under the authoritarian presidency of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) began to implement heavy neoliberal reforms between massive corruption scandals, military persecutions of dissidents, and the mass sterilization of at least 300,000 rural, indigenous women.

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Following a 1992 self-coup, Fujimori enshrined these reforms in the 1993 Peruvian constitution. Besides general austerity measures and the sale of many state-owned businesses, the constitution solidified earlier actions from 1991 that “opened all sectors of the Peruvian economy to FOI and lifted restrictions on remittances of profits” and legislative decrees no. 662 and 757, which both guarantee the complete economic freedom of foreigners to grow private investments, own property, and re-export profits from Peru. This cluster of laws eased restrictions on and promoted foreign direct investment (FDI) by different nations in addition to investments from specific companies and individuals. Particularly regarding the tourism sector, Peru received over $36 million in FDI between 1993 and 1997, 96% of which came from the USA and UK. In 2024 alone, the amount ballooned to 6.89 billion in total FDI. The statistics for the gross amount of capital invested by individual foreign capitalists is not elaborated on in any accessible statistics.

The fundamental orientation towards neoliberalism and the opening of the economy to global capital in effect made Peru “one of the most open and liberal economies-not only in Latin America but in the world” according to the IMF itself. Despite the fact that these efforts to put Peru’s economy up for sale led to sustained and continuance GDP growth, it did little to alleviate the nation’s inequality.

Cusco felt the effects of the new 1993 constitution and the other aforementioned reforms almost immediately. The 1993 establishment of PromPeru (Peruvian Promotional Commission), led to an immediate 50% increase to tourists visiting Cusco that same year. Concerning data collected since 1995, new heightened flows of tourists increased each year consistently between 20-25%, so far peaking to 2.9 million tourists visiting Cusco alone in 2023. This general trend corresponds to a marked decrease of buildings used for residency in the greater “Centro Historico” of Cusco, principally in the areas closest to the “Plaza de Armas” such as the San Blas and San Pedro neighborhoods. When taking together the decrease of strictly residential as well as joint commercial-residential structures while calculating the specific difference per neighborhood, San Blas saw a decrease of 28.1% between 1995 and 2005, while San Pedro experienced a decrease of 10.4%. The former also saw an increase of purely touristic and touristic residential-commercial area of 50% in the same period, while the later saw an 87% increase. These represent predictable results of the relaxation of the ownership rules for foreigners, which is also indicated that, as of now, foreign entities can own 100% of a Peruvian accommodation service, manifesting mostly as hotels and hostels.

A further series of turn-of-the-century reforms on the Cusquenian level pushed many locals and their establishments out in order to cater to tourists. The many actions taken by Carlos Valencia Miranda, Cusco’s mayor from 1999 to 2006, such as pushing out street vendors and the adoption of regulations promoting commerce instead of livable residencies, have not only inherently benefitted the already existing foreign capital invested in Cusco’s tourist industry but have also paved the way for the further “gentrification of trading activity” where more specialized and monied industries and services are given space to grow and conduct business. As this process was applied to Cusco’s main square, so came the establishment of the first Israeli businesses which further fueled the incipient gentrification.

Despite the fact that there are no clear numbers of the amount of money (if any) the Zionist entity itself has invested in Peru’s tourism sector, the city of Cusco has become a breeding ground for investment and the establishment of businesses by Israelis. By the Plaza de Armas and stretching from the adjoining neighborhoods of San Pedro and San Blas, one can find several restaurants advertising culturally appropriated foods such as falafel, bagels and tabbouleh with Hebrew signage. Almost as common is pro-Israel graffiti on my public walls, with pro-Palestinian graffiti and stickers either adjoined next to it as a response or covering it to some degree.

The influx of Israeli businesses specifically in the Cusco region correlates with the opening of Peru’s economy and the general tourist boom. It is well known that for decades many ex-IDF soldiers have taken to traveling around the world when they are not actively part of the genocidal army, often due to retirement or a decreased need for manpower. The areas where ex-IDF hikers and expats have traditionally frequented has been known, in the form of a cultural misnomer, as the “hummus trail”, where these war criminals turned tourists ritualistically make long international trips. These areas used to be more directly focused around Southeast Asia and India, which were key areas for both “spiritual tourism” and their low costs of living compared to Israel; India specifically received about 80,000 Israeli tourists a year for the last 30 years.

The “hummus trail” has since expanded with the tastes of the Israeli (frequently ex-IDF) tourists to include many parts of Latin America, which altogether receives about 40,000 Israeli tourists embarking on backpacking trips each year. Peru and the greater Cusco department specifically receives a large share of these ex-military backpackers (as shown by the statistics cited earlier) due to its high status as a touristic hotspot and for similar spiritualistically-driven motives akin to the appeal to India/Southeast Asia, though in Peru it mostly revolves around the ingestion of Ayahuasca. As a predictable result, local businesses have sprung both from already-established Israeli tourists and locals ignoring Israel’s action to accommodate and profit from steady Israeli tourism, mostly in the form of restaurants, hotels, and hostels. Not only in Cusco city itself, but in rural indigenous towns like Pisac, can one find Hebrew signage adorning buildings and Hebrew speech dominating in areas where Israelis are accommodated, even more than Spanish, Quechua, and the more conventional touristic lingua franca of English.

A common and specific anchor point for consistent Israeli presence along the so-called “hummus trail” is the Chabad house. These worship/lodging/community center hybrids have been springing up ever since the pattern of ex-IDF backpacking started in Indian and Southeast Asia and have accordingly appeared as focal points in Cusco and the smaller town of Pisac. Chabad as an organization self-describes as being pro-Israel, a statement made evident by their justification of the Gaza genocide, their catering to Israelis and ex-IDF members wherever they congregate internationally, and their IDF recruitment drives. Cusco’s Chabad house was founded in 2016, during which over 14,200 Israelis visited Peru, a single-year peak yet unsurpassed by currently available statistics. It was founded by the rabbinical couple Ofir and Yael Kripor, the former specifically having education ties to Israel and, according to this Facebook post, was an ex-IDF paratrooper himself. Both enthusiastically cater to the multitude of ex-IDF backpackers that patronize their establishment such as the approximately 1,300-1,500 Seder participants they receive each year.

Such concentrations of Israelis cause the diffusion of Zionist ideals through the opportunistic investment of their Zionist capital. Presently, capital invested by Israelis in the Cusco region serves the dual purpose of entrenching Israeli financial interests at the expense of locals through the process of gentrification and of creating ideological space for Zionism; a tight feedback loop of the base and superstructure’s mutual reinforcement. Through this accruing of wealth and social influence can these communities grow and spread, leading even to local Cusquenians trying to get a piece of their pie by appealing to Israelis with Hebrew advertising and the display of their flag, legitimizing Zionism’s destruction both locally and in the Levant.

The emergence of these Zionist communities would not be possible, economically speaking, without Peru’s adoption of neo-liberalism and its openness to investment, which includes patronizing both Elbit systems and Israel Weapons Industries. With this crucial inroad long established, Zionists in Cusco are able to continue the expansion of both their businesses and the tourist traffic that grows their communities. Though this does not resemble the initial Zionist colonization of Palestine in the early 20th century, it is still guided by the colonial and replacing logic of Zionism.

Zionism’s characterization as a Jewish supremacist and colonialist ideology has been well known and oft stated plainly by its original founders and ideologues, notably by Revisionist Zionism founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the original founder of Political Zionism, Theodore Herzl. Historically, the colonial expansion of Israel and its inhabitants included an initial and evolving economic replacement of Palestinians before large scale-ethnic cleansings like those seen during the 1948 Nakba were possible. This came in its earliest form as land purchases and seizures made mostly during the Mandatory Palestine period of the early 20th century, which resulted in the evictions of previous Palestinian inhabitants and the expulsion of said inhabitants to segregated and less fertile lands. By the time of the UN’s Partition Plan of 1947, a full year before the establishment of the state of Israel, the area designated as the “Jewish State” held over 56% of the land in all of Mandatory Palestine while the “Arab State” held only about 43%, with Jews in both designated areas already holding a combined total of 15% of the most arable land, a number that only accelerated into an outright majority in the following years. Acquisition of land through violent and coercive means continues to this day largely through illegal settlements in the West Bank, but also through the Israeli gentrification of cities where Palestinian Arabs living within the state of Israel make up significant parts of the population.

Gentrification in the city of Jaffa, often described as a ‘mixed-city’ with similarly-numbered Israeli and Arab populations, shows clearly how the Zionist tendencies towards gentrification come from a colonial ethos. Since the 2000s, Israeli companies have bought up large portions of urban space in Jaffa expressly for the settlement of Jewish families and thus the displacement of older Palestinian homes and businesses. A 2024 study explicitly links this practice with that of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which in turn originates from Zionism’s overall ideology that precipitated and justified the colonization of Palestine through the original Zionist movement. Regarding Jaffa, the new Israeli gentrifiers often self-identify as ‘settlers’ and ‘conquerors’ and describe their actions as “a continuation of the general mission of Judaizing the city” . Predictably, this colonial/gentrifying displacement has led to outright violence against the already-existing Palestinian populace in the city in addition to their continued social and economic marginalization. What happens in Jaffa is but a microcosm of the West Bank settlements, and what happens in Cusco is a work emulating both.

Though the gentrification of Cusco by Israelis is not known to be funded by large Israeli firms or the Israeli state itself, like the Jaffa and West Bank settlements, it still expresses a fundamental logic based on gaining an economic and social advantage at the expense of locals. The case of both Cusco city and the Cusco department, particularly the town of Pisac “reflects exclusionary economic and cultural processes prevailing in Jewish Israeli society” as formulated in the previous citation, we can see this push in the very term “Eretz Peru” as clearly endorsed ex-IDF restaurateurs Gilad and Ohad Duchovny as well as Ben Brodny. The former two still run “The Bagel Cafe” in Peru’s historic center, with Gilad apparently considered a target by an alleged 2024 plot concocted by one Iranian and two Peruvians detained without confirmation, as being aligned with the Iranian “Quds Force”1. Brodny has stated without irony that he is “more Peruvian than a lot of the Peruvians here”. This one quotation from the horse’s mouth could truly substitute at least a third of this article.

The Levantine and Cusquenian cases demonstrate a Zionist character in both their expression of chauvinistic justifications for their actions and in the actions themselves, the slow and deliberate wresting of economic control from locals. However, they crucially differ in their implementation. For one, there is currently not a feasible way for Cusco’s Zionist gentrifiers to replace the indigenous inhabitants of Cusco wholesale; they lack the direct backing of the State of Israel that has facilitated previous and more geographically-proximate settlement. Directly related is the second reason: even though Cusco-based Israeli businesses cater to co-national tourists for the purpose of building larger communities of them based around capital investment, the existing population is miniscule and there is not an increasing nor already substantial enough influx of yearly Israeli tourists to grow said communities. Though statistics for Cusco specifically are not available, estimates ultimately sourced from the UN state only about 961 Israelis have immigrated to Peru as a whole since 2015.

Despite the low probability for an exponentially growing community of Israelis in Peru, the violence and intimidation enacted against pro-Palestine protests in the Cusco region was only possible due this community’s long-standing presence in the local economy, aided and abetted by decades of economic and city-planning policy, both local and national, that overwhelming benefits rich foreign investors. The Chabad Houses, though they cannot guarantee an ever-increasing number of permanent Israelis transplants in Cusco, nonetheless serve as the main draws and epicenters for their self-interested communities of settlers. This institution’s function as a signal beacon to Israelis has resulted in hostile actions against locals, an extension of the same violent and colonialist Zionist ideology that motivates wanton buying and conversion of local property into spaces catering to other Zionists. The more gentrified Zionists establishments, the more Zionists will come, and the more future Zionists will claim. And when the locals push back, they deploy the less subtle forms of coercion that they have purposefully cultivated and incentivized for decades all over the world.

The principal way in which this has manifested in violence was in different incidents recorded and written about in the Cusco Department between 2024-2025. On April 11th of that year, 4 Israeli tourists coming out of a larger group verbally provoked, spat upon and pushed local pro-Palestinian activists in Cusco’s Plaza de Armas. A recording of the incident shows that local police did not detain the specific Israeli who pushed an activist, but instead allowed them to continue to posture in a physically aggressive manner and blather on about the activists “supporting terror”. To this day there is no record of an assault charge related to this incident.

The following year, two additional incidents of violence and intimidation occurred in Pisac. A video from April 12 shows a woman being verbally threatened by a group of Israeli tourists, reportedly because she criticized them for tearing down a pro-Palestine poster. In June of that same year, Pisac locals witnessed a Chabad rabbi assault a woman criticizing the building and organization’s existence in the town. This resulted in a large protest against the Zionists presence in Pisac where locals played traditional siku flute music, chanted and waved Palestinian flags to both express their solidarity the victims of the Gaza genocide and to express their growing discontent at the violent and disrespectful Israeli presence. However, local police and the city council hampered the action by forcing them to stop playing music and waving flags, likely directly at the behest of the rich, influential Zionists who own much of the town’s capital. Two further incidents occurred earlier in 2026, one outside a restaurant and one in different public squares, where vocally anti-Zionist Cusquenians and their allies were intimidated by groups of Israeli tourists, though in the latter confrontation the Israel were forced from the public space in which they aggressively interfered.

Though there has been no explicit confirmation that the Zionist aggressors were ex-IDF, it ultimately does not matter. Despite the likelihood of their service in the genocidal army, as Chabad especially caters to them, both ex-IDF members and Israeli civilians are both united in their avaricious colonial goals, essentially identical in Palestine and Cusco but differentiated in the scale and efficacy. As they continue to act in accordance with their Zionist ideology it is guaranteed that they will also continue to incentivize Israelis to come to Cusco and enrich themselves, maintaining and growing this reality by whatever means. A continued increase of the Israeli presence in the Cusco department, even if it’s a slight increase per year, will lead to the further cementing of their collective economic power and thus their sway with both local and national authorities, whether that’s getting slaps on the wrist for assault, or being freely allowed to sell weapons.

The conditions that allow for gentrification throughout the Cusco department still endure and therefore so does the threat of Zionists, whether they be settled capitalists or violent, chauvinistic, and often ex-IDF tourists. Economic and outright physical violence has always been part of the Zionist playbook and as long as the national and local governments of Peru allow them participation and privilege then there is infinite potential for these Zionists to become even more dangerous. Expansion means marginalization for the mostly indigenous people of Cusco who have endured 300 years of colonialism by the Spanish and 200 years more of continuous American and European neo-colonialism aided by a largely comprador national government. If there be any chance for a brighter future for Cusquenians, it must include the elimination of the disproportionately large and violent Israelis economic base that now exists as part of a greater national struggle of reclaiming resources from foreign entities back into Peruvian hands. Until then, the phrase oft chanted by local pro-Palestinian activists “Lo que hacen en Gaza, mañana en tu casa”, will continue to show itself increasingly, devastatingly, true.

Tech oligarchs on behalf of the US and Israeli governments are on the cusp of unleashing ever more advanced (and conjoined) AI and surveillance technology onto the defiant governments and peoples of Latin America. This process has long been accelerating through the gradual installation of right-wing Zionist heads of state throughout the region b7 direct intervention, election meddling, or frustration ultimately stemming from the reign of neo-liberalism across the region. As it has been since the days of the likes of Nicaragua’s Somoza and Chile’s Pinochet, these self-proclaimed “nationalists” are nothing but vehicles for increased American control of their nation’s respective domestic economies. What is now forming at its most basic level is a new level of symbiosis between these new puppets and transnational tech oligarchs: so long as they continue the rule of neoliberalism, AI-driven mass surveillance will protect the entire chain of authority, from the lowest technocrats to the heights US empire itself.

The overt inclusion of powerful technocratic interests in Donald Trump’s second term has re-aligned the specificities of US imperialism to the increased usage of new data-driven technologies to maintain and expand US economic hegemony through the complete control of information. Firms as diverse as Anduril to OpenAI enjoy lucrative contracts with the broad spectrum of US intelligence agencies for the purpose of enhancing US hegemony with many of them having already cut their teeth not only aiding in the American death machine, but that of Israel too.

It would be difficult to not mention Peter Thiel’s and Alex Karp’s Palantir regarding expert surveillance towards imperial subordination. As if it was not enough that Palantir has been in use in both the US military and several other governmental entities from the CIA to the NSA to ICE since 2007, notably in creating data-based patterns of militant tactics used by Afghan resistance fighters while also amassing thousands of their DNA samples, they have been steadily increasing their partnership with Israel in aiding their own occupation and genocide in Gaza.

Israel has understood the potential of putting AI in service of their colonial goals since at least the May 2021 Gaza war, using Google and Amazon’s joint “Project Nimbus” to identify “Hamas militants”, who are almost always unrelated civilians, for murderous direct military strikes. Palantir has since gone on to provide the IDF with surveillance and data-gathering technology for the dual purpose of securing profits through genocide and sharpening Palantir’s own ability to further develop their integrated data-amassing surveillance and AI technology for any future customers. Despite denying direct involvement, systems like “Lavender”, which assigns scores to Gazan citizens that allegedly determine their chance of becoming a militant and thus adds their name to generate “kill lists”, relies directly on AI data-gathering for predictive surveillance akin to what Palantir has long developed and continues to develop. Any kind of (potential) resistance of “predicated” and punished with the death of entire families.

As AI has advanced in its abilities to weaponize data, so has the trend of big tech companies realizing that they shouldn’t limit themselves to deployment by the American war/control machine alone. Not only do Microsoft and OpenAI (of which Microsoft is the largest investor) enjoy patronage with the US’s Department of Defense, the former’s Azure cloud storage system gives the IDF the ability to compile from the massively surveilled population of Gaza, with the latter’s system of automatically translating (and often outright fabricating) Arabic text that the IDF uses to justify targeted strikes on whoever they deem a “terrorist”. AI and data giant Oracle and its arch-Zionist co-founder, Larry Ellison, have purchased TikTok and are already censoring pro-Palestinian dissent on the app. Given its specialty in amassing data and deploying it towards the ends of the IDF, both for genocidal attacks and internet propaganda, it is nowhere outside of their ability to compile information on anti-Zionist critics in West Asia for deliberate targeting as well. Unsurprisingly, Ellison is a major supporter of Donald Trump and Oracle has worked with the DOD since 2022, with Ellison stated that he believes that each nation wants their Hobbesian “sovereign cloud" to more effectively rule with the power of amassed and manipulable data. What is more sovereign than the data of each nation managed by a single company?

Though Elon Musk is no longer Trump’s right-hand, his data-collecting surveillance and satellite firm, Starlink, still enjoys federal support and his aspiration to a greater “American Technate” continue to influence the current administration. This notion, of which Musk’s grandfather was an original theorizer in the 1930s, seeks to establish a vast supra-state ruled at all levels by experts and scientists tasked with using modern specialized technology to more efficiently maintain and expand the imperial flow of cheap raw materials to US companies from Latin America, and eventually from the entire global south; in essence, it is an intensification of the current core-periphery world economic order. The many “Freedom Cities” (also sometimes called “Start-Up Cities”) envisioned by the likes of Thiel, Sam Altmann and Marc Andreesen as constituents of a greater “Network States”, conglomerations of “private, corporate-controlled cities…places where democracy, regulations, and taxes won’t apply” are the tissue of this Technate to come. They are optimized systems of gathering and transmitting data to grease the wheels of US international economic power. They have already been tested for years in the US’s massive surveillance apparatus, and with it applied to the logic of extractive neo-liberalism, all pretensions of the sovereignty of US-aligned nations global south will be erased. AI figures into it as a tool for its supposed efficiency, that which extends from brute extraction of natural resources itself to the transmogrification of all remaining humans into manipulable statistics and variables. This continental technocracy and its constitutive enclaves of hyper-optimized resource robbery goes beyond a 21st century equivalent of a colonial feitora to become the foundation of a mass, and inhuman privatization of everything below the Rio Grande; an entire hemisphere forced into an ever-sophisticating network of weaponized data and hyper-efficient exploitation.

The appeal of this idea as the greatest extension of American economic imperialism is obvious - it is a method of crushing resistance before it can even threaten profit margins. A fully-automized super-state meant to subdue the dreams of Latin America’s independent and autonomous development. The market and the law fully merged under the full control of all personal and productive data. The links of millions of chains welded by 1s and 0s.

It’s no surprise the original plans for the Technate conceptualized the subordination of Venezuela, and even less so that the US’s kidnapping of Maduro was made possible through Palantir’s AI partner firm, Anthropic. Connected further to the establishment of chartered and unregulated freedom cities is Thiel-funded Mark Lutter, who has been targeting Venezuela as a site for a “transfer of power” conducive to his aims since 2018, and American pupper-hopeful Maria Corina Machado, who in 2025 spoke glowing to Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale about the potential “$1.7 trillion business opportunity” awaiting a Maduro-free Venezuela.

Included also in the specific interests intersecting as Venezuela is brought from sovereignty into the monstrous lab of the US’s new data-driven model of compliance, ripe for unethical experimentation, are those of Israel. Aside from their already elaborated-on support for American tech oligarchs and their designs, Israel seeks to make the entire region into one massive ally through the “Isaac Accords”. Much like how the previous “Abraham Accords” normalized Israeli relations with much of the Islamic world, thus aligning them closer to the US as well, the Isaac Accords seek the same for Latin America. They were launched with the co-sponsorship of Argentine Zionist, US-loving president Javier Milei in order to begin the building of Israeli ties throughout the region in order to initiate “possible joint projects in technology security and economic development”; a troubling proposition given not only Israel’s ties with AI-based data mining and surveillance firms, but their historical material support for many of violent and genocidal US-aligned regimes during Operation Condor. Such precedents will be elaborated on when discussing specific relevant nations.

The symbiosis is explicit not only in this statement, but in Maduro’s kidnapping itself. Venezuela has been staunchly anti-US, and thus anti-Zionist, since the Hugo Chavez years, which led to a long-standing economic partnership with Iran. This orientation combined with a severing of all ties with Israel in 2009 painted a target on the nation’s back. Along with aiding US regional hegemony, the kidnapping of Maduro and Venezuela’s conversion into an extractive neo-colony will weaken Iran’s trade network, specifically the oil trade between the two nations. With Iran’s market to sell its own refined oil and gas narrowing, the control over the world’s total reserves falls more into the hands of the US, Israel and its ally, Saudi Arabia. This weakens Iran’s leverage over access to through the Strait of Hormuz as they will have less total world reserves; the lion’s share now lies in the US-Israeli alliance network who now have “greater potential to weaponize this vital resource”.1If this was not damning enough, Machado has just been an enthusiast collaborator with the US’s technocratic colonizers, but a vocal Zionist supportive of the Isaac accords, specifically stating that her camp needs “Israel’s support to in dismantling Maduro’s crime regime” and a friend of Reza Shah Pahlavi , the son of the last US-aligned Shah of Iran who seeks to usurp the current Iranian government in order to resume allyship with the US and Israel. Where the US benefits, so does Israel, and vice versa. Where the Network Hemisphere advances, so does Greater Israel. So will ever more Network Hemispheres.

Diplomatic concordance with the Isaac Accords has been and is currently happening concurrently with greater US interference through the both the promotion of right-wing heads of state and the adaptation of US-Israeli aligned tech firms. Each nation in Latin America currently possessing a right-wing government or undergoing a transition to such exhibits some specific intersection in this advancing matrix of control. The number of these intersections has exploded on a nation by nation basis within the last year especially. Where one finds privatization or the patronage of big tech, one also finds the embrace of Zionism. By looking at each recent national case, we can see commonalities and differences in how each matrix of interests has formed and especially how they fit into this insidious, totalizing current of US imperialism. Surveillance is a globe-spanning issue intimately tied to new technology and the expanding economic interests of the Global North, in whose societies such apparati are already almost fully implemented and thus ready for further deployment.

This grand analysis is as much an attempt to understand current developments as it is speculation of dynamics to come regarding this section of the imperial periphery, which has for centuries been brutalized by every new method of control and extraction hitherto created by its richer northern aggressors. It is a not an ultimate theorization of a “Network Hemisphere” but a recognition of its observable and probable expansion given what has already transpired in tech and geopolitics. Whatever limits this piece suffers from, it still links together a real pattern.

Argentina

Starting with the most actively zealous example, Javier Milei’s Argentina has had ties with Israel long before his sponsorship of the Isaac accords in 2025. The president, who proclaimed in front of Zionist organization Chabad-Lubavitch to having a “fanaticism” with Judaism has visited Israel multiple times, supports moving Argentina’s embassy to occupied Jerusalem and has consistently supported every hostile move the US has made against any Palestinian-aligned Latin American head of state, especially Maduro. As one can also surmise, he firmly supports the joint Israeli-US assault on Iran as well.

Since assuming the presidency, Milei has turned Argentina into a fiscally-crippled, hyper-deregulated hellscape where workers are increasingly at the mercy of both local and foreign capitalists. In the process of solidifying their relationship, Milei increased business ties with Israel since assuming office in 2023, notably by letting the firm XtraLit exploit Argentina’s raw lithium resources and by selling most of the nation’s public water infrastructure to Mekorot, a firm infamously responsible for stealing water from the West Bank, that now owns 90% of the previously state-owned Aguas y Saneamientos S.A (AySA).

This coziness with both the US and Israel has predictably brought Argentina closer to the AI and surveillance firms operating in both aforementioned entities. Milei, through deals brokered by Zionist Interior Minister Patricia Bullrich, has long purchased arms and sponsored Israeli military training of the Argentine military and police. Now deeper than ever this cooperation, the Argentine state enjoys contracts with Starlink and Palantir, the latter of which is now the most embedded in Argentina’s Intelligence agency Secretaría de Inteligencia del Estado (SIDE). SIDE has a long and bloody story of abuse going to Argentina’s “Dirty War” in the 1970s, a function of Operation Condor, which not only helped the military government track, kill and disappear thousands of political dissidents in Argentina, even running an entire detention camp for that purpose.

With this new partnership, Milei is essentially creating a more technologically-advanced version of Argentina’s old Dirty War-era secret police (and with enough time, death squads) in order to falsely imprison critics and opponents that may disrupt his lucrative partnerships with Israel and the US. The already-existing system of mass surveillance in Buenos Aires and beyond is integrated into SIDE which itself continues to advance its usage of AI facial recognition and data-driven predictive models to undermine Argentine dissidents under the familiar guises of “terrorism” and “national security”. With the added involvement of the Argentine army, it is increasingly possible for anyone to be subject to a sudden arrest based on predicted profiles constructed from stolen data. Even without the full implementation of this infrastructure, we already see the persecution of dissidents. Just in February, an Argentine teacher is beginning being prosecuted by the government for criticizing not the policies of Milei, but of Donald Trump, Milei’s guarantor. Her actions are being maliciously framed as “political indoctrination”.

In an environment as deregulated and up for sale to the world as Argentina’s, it is not hard to imagine Milei sponsoring the creation of a freedom city from which he and his ilk would profit, protected by the full might of modern and efficient American-Israeli surveillance technology. Given the long-rampant techno-philia in Argentina’s government, bolstered by Milei’s obsession with AI, as well as cryptocurrency scams, this may already be a foregone conclusion.

Bolivia

Following an energy crisis and infighting in the leading MAS( Movimiento al Socialismo) Party, Bolivia has again slid into a right-wing, neoliberal government. Headed by Rodrigo Paz Pereira, Bolivia has been steered back into the US’s sphere of influence, with renewed openness to US presence in military, security and economic sectors. Already, Bolivia has resumed joint-exercises with the US’s Drug Enforcement Agency and has slashed protections and domestic investment for their oil, gas, and lithium industries. Paz’s government is now pushing a “50-50” initiative for the former two, with ownership split between the Bolivian state and foreign firms that provide extractive technology, while removing protectionist policies on the former; something that may include putting the famous Salar de Uyuni salt flats in danger in order to extract their lithium. Under MAS, the extraction of lithium was only allowed for the state itself. These new actions by Paz will effectively take more of any potential profits from the extraction and/or further manufacturing of these resources into goods from the hands of Bolivia’s populace for the benefit of overseas businesses.

Paz is already courting a familiar host of AI-powered data collection and surveillance companies alongside foreign extraction firms. In December of 2025, just a few months after assuming the presidency, Paz decreed that Starlink would be able to use their satellites over Bolivia, an action done under the insultingly ironic guise of providing faster internet and “data protection and national security concerns”. The same source states that this will be accompanied by the construction of data centers owned by Amazon and Oracle. Just as Bolivia establishes links with Zionist companies, they have also already restored ties to Israel itself, a reversal of the staunch pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist international position of the MAS government. An official statement from the government website of Bolivia elaborates on this restoration cites a US-approved decision for Bolivia and Israel to cooperate in “opening the doors to new flows of knowledge, technology and technical cooperation”

Faced with an indigenous-majority populace who formed the base of the MAS government that continues to confront the return of neoliberal policies, Paz knows that he needs to form alliance with any and all entities that share his interests. Behind the rhetoric of “modernizing” Bolivia is the same logic of sovereignty-eroding under the guise of security and progress. As Bolivia moves closer to US-Israeli technological subordination, we can see that a guarantee of rule is worth much more to this new regime than the lives of Bolivians and Palestinians alike. A return to the 20th-century enrichment of the mostly creole elite guarded by eyes in the sky and tendrils woven by ones and zeros.

Chile

The election of Jose Kast in Chile represents a hard shift right from the previous milquetoast center-left government of Gabriel Boric. Kast, a vocal admirer of Augusto Pinochet and the unrepentant child of two Nazis is set to follow in his footsteps as a loyal servant of continued US-backed neoliberalism in this nation. In addition to his reactionary stances regarding immigrant and transgender rights, Kast and his Chicago Boys-esque team of economists is planning on several hostile economic measures in the vein of Pinochet, including raising the retirement age and cutting corporate taxes.

Also keeping with his adherence to Pinochet’s legacy, and his admiration for Nazis, Kast is also an ardent Zionist. Citing the similar flimsy concerns of “national security” Kast has vowed to strengthen ties with Israel, a reversal of Boric’s gradual distancing from the genocidal Zionist entity; an indication that Israel will likely assist in state repression just as it did with Pinochet in the 70s and 80s, providing the regime with weapons and assisting with the operation of a “Gestapo-type police force”. As a show of hostility towards Chile’s 400,00 strong Palestinian community, Kast, with the hyper-Zionist influence of Argentina’s Patricia Bullrich, has called Chile “the most anti-semtic country in Latin America” and has played up the non-existent threat of Hezbollah to the country as a pretext to likely persecute anti-Zionist and left-wings critics and groups in his presidency to come. Already the Chilean state is inventing a reality of imminent and disastrous insecurity to justify its rule, with anyone who could possibly be aligned against Israel conflated with an enemy of the Chilean state. Looking back to the 70s, it is not hard to see how this definition of “enemies” will extend as Chile’s populace is inevitably plunged further into poverty and radicalized against the US-Israeli forces that support Kast.

Kast is not known to have many specific links to any surveillance firms, besides some indirect contact that could be ascertained with a renewed economic proximity to the US and Israel. The one exception, however, is Elon Musk’s Starlink. Musk has shown his support for Kast by tweeting "¡Felicidades!”(Congratulations!) when the former was elected. Chile has since acquired a connection to Starlink, which will undoubtedly function as an accessory to Kast’s increased plans for criminalizing anti-Zionist opposition groups and his “Relentless Plan” of mass deportations and imprisonments. By virtue of this patronage, Kast can already see the future weaponized data will play in his petty regime.

Chile is shaping up to be a renewed neo-colonial Zionist outpost as it was under Pinochet. Hysteria about terrorism and antisemitism are just a couple of the fingers in Kast’s repressive fist. Through Musk’s connection to other venture capitalists and tech billionaires in the US and Israel, we may see the creation of more fertile ground for new start-up cities that could increasingly dominate Chilean society in a nightmarishly robust and unregulated surveillance apparatus, of which Starlink is but one self-interested beneficiary. As such, the increased potential for a strong, regional anti-Zionist and anti-Capitalist resistance is under renewed threat of being suffocated.

Ecuador

Ecuador’s shift further right under billionaire Daniel Noboa is already making manifest its renewed economic vassalage to the US. In a blatant undercutting of a vote in 2025 in which Ecuadorians rejected the establishment of any US military bases in the country, Noboa has since started military exercises with the US on Ecuadorian soil under the pretense of fighting rampant drug trafficking gangs. This has already resulted in strict curfews for Ecuadorians in coastal provinces and could open the door to more civil liberties volitions that have characterized Noboa’s tenure.

Noboa has also shifted Ecuador firmly towards Israel, claiming that collaboration in the fields of military, security and technology is necessary not only for supposed action against drug traffickers but “as an option for investment, trade, production and growth”. Ecuador’s Zionist president has even gone so far to establish a diplomatic office in Jerusalem and withdraw from the UN’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Right of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP). These actions serve to position Ecuador ever to the Israeli-US axis that is drawing more and more of Latin America into the Isaac Accords, which in turn are likely to strengthen his business ties with all entities involved. As a neoliberal billionaire and heir to the Noboa Corporation (as well as the owner of two offshore companies), Ecuador’s largest banana shipping company, Noboa can see that it is in best class interests to find his place in the US’ resurgent imperial sphere.

Also solidly in Noboa’s political interests in his consolidation of intelligence and surveillance services. In a presidency plagued by protest and internal opposition, not to mention again the internal economic stability from drug traffickers, Noboa’s continued position as president is precarious. In addition to explicit military presence from the US and ambitions of greater Israeli involvement, the Noboa government has made sure to empower his intelligence apparatus.

As part of June 2025’s “Organic Law on Intelligence”, the new National System of Intelligence (SNI) in the Ecuadorian government can now intercept phone calls, analyze real-time civilian data and ask for private employee telecommunication information from companies all without court orders or consent. The law has been justified as a way to combat the security crisis. Ecuador has also started to explicitly work with Palantir for the purpose of monitoring its customs service via the National Telecommunications Corporations (CNT), whose broader handling of personal and organizational telecommunications data is also in the new hands of the SNI’s mass surveillance apparatus. There has not yet been confirmation that Palantir has been formally integrated into the SNI, but Noboa has made clear his intentions to integrate AI in general into the Ecuadorian state for both “governance” and “increasing productivity”. Noboa has even credence to the idea that AI could help re-write Ecuador’s constitution.

The new reactionary government is taking every opportunity to benefit themselves through Ecuador’s multi-faceted crisis. Old constitutionally-enshrined protections for the environment are eroding as quickly as civil liberties for everyone from Amazonian indigenous people, whose lands are constantly under the threat of extraction, to Ecuador’s largest opposition party. Slowly but surely, Ecuador sovereignty is being eroded from this nascent network of tech-fetishizing, hyper-capitalistic Zionists both within and without it. As Noboa and his technocrat allies continue to use crisis and the betrayal of his people to consolidate his puppet privileges, we will see an ever-complexifying nexus of power and technology turning Ecuador even more into an extraction site for the US’s hemispheric empire. Every excuse to extend surveillance and dependence is another step towards the most efficient and totalizing subjugation.

Honduras

The Central American nation of Honduras has had the longest history with the Network Hemisphere as a material antagonism, in fact, the infant stage of this international extractivist effort started there, years before the infamous Próspera.

The groundwork for Honduras’ forceful submission to US-Israel technocrats was set in the 2009 US backed coup, where moderate leftist Manuel Zelaya was overthrown by neoliberal Porfírio Lobo Sosa. Sosa began to undo many of Zelaya’s reforms which resulted in massive amounts of public protests and outcry that the new government brutally crushed. Lobo’s regime began to take any criticism of its legitimacy as a threat, and thus for the rest of his tenure several human rights abuses were carried out, including the deaths of at least 7 journalists, 10 civilians and hundreds of beatings resulting from the repression of protests and the punishment of dissenting judges.

Lobo was able to sufficiently intimidate the Honduran judiciary and consolidate power in order to make it easier to declare internal enemies and silence critics who were against his, and by extension the US’s, economic and security policies, one of which was the amending of the constitution to allow for the development of “special economic zones”. Such a change was only possible after Lobo replaced judges on the Honduran supreme court who initially found the amendment unconstitutional. With new arbitrary power given to the state, police and military ordered towards protecting the president and their entrenched domestic and international interests, the path towards a security state was already tread.

Even before his election, the now-pardoned ex-president and drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández oversaw the further denigration of Honduras into a tech-governed neo-colony by both the drug trade and a full implementation of mass surveillance. Under Lobo’s tenure, Hernández used his authority as the president of the Honduran congress to pass a series of laws and strengthened his ties with both US and Israeli tech oligarchs. The original 2012 “Wiretapping Law” gave the police permission to listen on telecommunications with total impunity, and after ascending to the presidency in 2014, Hernández fully implemented a wide-ranging security apparatus which included the use of a both Palantir’s AI technology and the Israeli company Cellebrite’s digital data tracking and collation methods; these, among the products and services of other surveillance firms served “to monitor anyone threatening to expose its (Hernández’s government’s) its wrongdoing… and to ensure (Hernandez’s government’s hold on a thriving drug trade”. The passivity of the US against these actions developed by its geo-political and business partners spoke volumes of how they themselves benefitted from the mass repression. Tegucigalpa is home to the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), and companies like Chiquita Banana and Cuyamel have long profited massively from Honduran land and labor. Honduras, therefore, has an immense strategic and economic importance for the US, and the autonomy of its inhabitants is not even an afterthought.

The only autonomy the Hernández government had any concerns about, however, was the autonomy of foreign, unregulated, big-tech capital. In 2017 he oversaw the full implementation of the “special economic zone” law and out of that came the foundation of the infamous Próspera charter city on the island of Roatan. Financed by Thiel, Andreeson and Pronomos capital (founded by the literal grandson of Milton Friedman), Próspera is the prototypical Start-up/Freedom city, a tax-free, crypto and AI-fueled playground for rich techno-fetishists with no accountability to anyone. Undoubtedly it is working around the clock further connecting the Honduran surveillance state to those of the US and Israel. Pronomos capital, under Thiel, has since gone on to fund Praxis, the fascistic “world’s first network state” seeking to build dozens of Próspera-esque Start-Up cities from Greenland to Nigeria.

Próspera exists only to further the interests of big-tech data-brokers whose profit heavily depends on official backing from the US, Israel and its Latin American puppet regimes. The “city” is but an outpost of control that “exploit(s) land and labor against a state’s best efforts to exercise its sovereignty” while continuing to threaten the well-being of the local people of Roatan, who are mostly Anglophone Afro-Hondurans as well as mixed black and indigenous Garifuna people. Many people have already been displaced, with hundreds more under threat. These groups have likened Próspera’s expansion to colonial landgrabs that disrupt their tradition economies, undermine their autonomy and damage the local environment, with one local woman already finding links between Próspera’s unregulated existence and the permeation of drug trafficking to Roatan.

Since the 2022 election of leftist Xiomara Castro, both the Honduran government and Roatan locals such as Vanesa Cárdenas and Luisa Connor have been working to end Próspera. This culminated in the original Lobo-Hernández era law allowing for Próspera’s founding to be repealed, though the Start-up city’s backers then sued the Honduran government for $12.3 billion, “nearly twice as much as Honduras’ entire public expenditures in 2022”. These efforts against a deeper forced integration into the Network Hemisphere, at least on the part of the Honduran government, have since been halted with the very fraught (the most generous description possible) election of Nasry Asfura in 2025. Despite being of Palestinian descent, Asfura is a Zionist who cozies up to the US and Israel alike, preferring to cultivate neo-colonial business ties with both at the expense of not only the average Honduran, the thousands of ethnic Palestinians within its borders. Much of Asfura’s backing also came from Peter Thiel, who along with Trump and the recently-pardoned Hernández, understand the use of another Zionist who won’t disturb either the Próspera project, SOUTHCOM, or the expansive Honduran surveillance state.

Paraguay

Like his predecessors, President Santiago Peña of Paraguay is also a Zionist seeking to keep his nation and people firmly in the US-Israeli neoliberal sphere. Peña is fully enmeshed in the Isaac Accords and, on reviving an old ambition of 2018’s president Horacio Cartes, he moved Paraguay’s Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem . The Paraguayan president’s diplomatic kowtowing has even gone so far as combat South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the Internacional Court of Justice, stating that the charges “are outside the scope of the application of the Genocide Convention”.

Paraguay’s general links to big tech have so far been limited. No public sources have indicated contracts with Palantir, Start-Up Cities, or the flying of Starlink satellites. However, Peña notably hosted former British Prime Minister Tony Blair last year on the topic of “technology, innovation and good governance”. Blair’s eponymous institute (TBI) has been making efforts with Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison to “engage in tech sales to governments” for the purpose of data collection, an action already undertaken by the joint TBI-Oracle partnership with the UK’s National Health Service for the purpose of “unify(ing) public data”.

In a nation so plagued by governmental Zionism and inequality as Paraguay, especially in majority/plurality indigenous rural areas where 85% of all arable land in the country is owned by 2.5% of the population, Blair and Ellison’s offers of incorporation are highly enticing. Given his strangle on media as diverse as TikTok to Paramount, Ellison will have another opportunity to access the data of millions of people in order to silence any anti-Zionist, and thus anti-US, dissent. The TBI’s nascent neo-colonial role in administrating “special economic zones" in Gaza as part of Trump’s “Board of Peace” also shows a motive for partnering with Paraguay’s Zionist government, not only to use mass data collection squash any dissent to resistance or dissent anywhere in the world, as with Ellison, but to possibly incorporate Paraguay into a future site for technocratic extraction. Regardless, this closer relationship with Israel and the US has opened the door for to Paraguay to development is own AI and data-driven surveillance “sovereign cloud” apparatus, and thus to become another link in an adversarial, world-expanding, network.

Peru

Peru’s continued political crisis has seen 8 different presidents in a decade. This process was accelerated by the ascension of Dina Boluarte after throwing former president, Pedro Castillo, under the bus with US support. Her right-wing, neoliberal government was hostile to the general working class and outright murderous towards Castillo’s Quechua and Aymara base in southern Peru, who the police and military have massacred by the dozens in the cities of Ayacucho, Puno and many others with large protests. From these events alone we can see Peru’s relationship with Israel. Everyone victim of the 2022 Ayacucho Massacre was shot by 5.56mm NATO rounds of the Galil assault rifle, an Israeli model long contracted by the Peruvian military even before Boluarte. A new deal with Israel Weapon Industries was struck the next year in 2023.

Before being impeached in 2025, Boluarte also made a deal between Peru’s Fábrica de Armas y Municiones del Ejército (FAME) and Israel’s Elbit systems, known for creating drones used for both surveillance and offensive purposes regularly put to use spying on and killing Palestinians, as well artillery. This $60 million contract is the first of its kind in Latin America and even the Times of Israel and Globes have gleefully noted that this demonstrates “a strategic expansion of Elbit Systems in Latin America.” This same articles also notes the potential danger for both indigenous and pro-Palestinian activists with this new surveillance technology in the hands of the Peruvian government.

Boluarte is now gone, but her successors, Jose Jerí and then Jose María Balcázar, have not reversed any of her previous policy choice regarding Israel. They have instead continued to maintain this previous military agreement while establishing new ones with the US, leading it be a declared “an Important Non-NATO Ally” regarding “cooperation in defense, security, and technology”. Most of these actions were undertaken by Jerí, who in 2025 agreed to let active-duty US troops stations themselves and move throughout Peru in an increased capacity and in 2026 agreed to a $1.5 billion deal to expand the Callao Naval Base with major input from the US military. It has been opined that this move is to allow the US to compete with the partially Chinese-owned Chancay commercial port.

Aside from the deal with Elbit, there is no information regarding any partnership between Peru and Palantir, or any other US-Israeli private security firm. With that in mind, Peru’s continued recognition of Israel and their patronage of its arms-dealing could grant it greater access to partnerships with said firms, which is not even to speak of probably continued intelligence cooperation with SOUTHCOM. As Peru enters into a new election replete with fascists, such as Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori who like her father is an ardent neoliberal, US ally and, by proxy, a Zionist, dissenters advocating for a sovereign Peru or for anti-Zionism are likely to continue facing ever more sophisticated state repression. Even without the latest in AI data-gathering via, the Peruvian state has new tools to maintain itself and its neo-colonial administration of its people. Additionally, though there are no plans for a Start-up city there, Peru seems like it will continue to be an increasingly efficient extraction state for the US and regional bully on the behalf of Israel, whether fully integrated into the Isaac-Accords and the full capacities of technocratically optimized exploitation or not. Maybe not all of its economic data is at the whims of US-Israeli tech oligarchs, but the data of those who oppose will likely become further weaponized against them. What happens after the election must be carefully observed. We know that political integration in the Network Hemisphere and economic/digital integration into it are not all far-removed.

As Israel’s genocide, through ceasefire violations and the blocking of aid in Gaza, continues to surpass more than 680,000 dead, journalist Hani Haizemeh has angrily expressed how the UN has repeatedly, decisively, failed. “Why?” he asks,

“Because the institution has become a hostage to geopolitics. The Security Council — designed to ensure global peace and security — has become a theater of power politics. Any resolution that dares to criticize or attempts to restrain Israel’s actions is immediately vetoed by the US, rendering international law effectively toothless.”

His words continue to ring true, given that the US has long since vetoed six ceasefire proposals and is moving forward with the so-called “Board of Peace” to gentrify Gaza into oblivion, further marginalizing its survivors into the underclass of a start-up city. Donald Trump even declared that the Board “is going to almost be looking over the United Nations and making sure it runs properly”, a statement that most concisely and honestly speaks to the UN’s entire purpose.

This blatant cover-up for Israel and its crimes is nothing new. Ever since the foundation of the UN in 1945, the United States has leveraged its status as a founding member, permanent seat on the security council, and economic and military hegemon to enforce its interests on the international stage. This subordinate inception has led to an unending manipulation of the liberal international order to benefit Israel as the US’s most effective attack dog in the Western Asia.

The principal ways in which the US has exercised influence within the acquiescent UN have been through a mix of economic warfare and the use of its veto power as a permanent member of the security council, something which was never a part of the UN charter and was only implemented due to demands from both the US and USSR. The former method dominated most of the 20th century, stemming from the fact that in 1945 the US was one of the dominant powers to emerge from WW2 and thus began to initially fund 39.39% of the UN budget, with its current contribution today being the smaller, yet still significant 22%. Despite the current veto power strategy, American economic leverage still functions in the UN due to how the non-permanent member nations of the security council were (and are) consistently either nations with governments servicing American economic imperialism or those who would otherwise be susceptible to hostile American economic action: Latin American nations within which the US government and companies have significant influence, as well as other economic and/or military satellites like Japan, India or Italy.

The US’s near-consistent backing of Israel long predates the present diplomatic sabotage against Gaza. Israel’s very establishment would not have been possible without America’s founding economic coercion facilitated through the UN. As the US overtook Britain’s role in managing the Palestinian situation between 1945 and 1947, Zionist lobbies began to work various political and social channels in the US. At the time, there was no set consensus on Israel’s utility to the US, but this soon changed with the efforts of political and ideological figures lobbying for the Zionist movement, such as David Niles and Stephen Wise, who combined with the desire for the Democrats to secure to Jewish vote in the 1948 election, swayed President Truman to their cause.

Zionists were eager to paint the creation of Israel as the creation of a state that “was hostile to Soviet expansion and a custodian of U.S. interests in the Middle East”, which would guarantee the US and the West’s usage of affordable, Middle Eastern resources, principally oil. Given the development and promulgation of both socialism and Pan-Arabism at the time, ideologies concerning the independence of the Arab world, among nations such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, Israel’s potential geopolitical use began to entice the US. As such, Truman threw his weight behind UN Resolution 181, which split Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish settler states.

The US went on to secure this resolution’s passing with the economic pressure it exerted on different member states in order to force them to cast favorable votes. This was done by both state and non-state means. Truman mandated that nations “wholly dependent on the United States” vote for partition. As a result, the anti-partitionist Liberia was coerced into a favorable vote when Zionist CEO Harvey Firestone threatened to shutter the expansion of the Firestone rubber plants that made up a substantial part of the nation’s economy. As elucidated on page 33 of “Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the War on Terror” (53 in the digital source) by Phyllis Bennis, the Philippines, a recently independent anti-partitionist nation heavily dependent on US aid, changed their vote after the US threatened the revocation of the aforementioned aid. A similar process affected the votes of Thailand, whose original anti-partition delegate was replaced, as well as Haiti and Nicaragua, the latter threatened with full economic sanctions. The vast majority of other nations who voted for the partition were Western states who shared the US’s geopolitical concerns in the West Asia, or Latin American countries already either enthralled by US economic interest or ruled by American-supported governments.

For much of the 1950s however, the US did little to influence its aims via the UN regarding Israel. This was mainly due to strained relations developing between the two nations during the Eisenhower administration that largely resulted from the Lavon Affair and the Suez Crisis. Even after 1948, the US government tried to maintain friendly relations with different Arab states as an attempt to balance those with Israel, given that many in the US government believed that a one-sided closeness Israel would make the Arab states “feel compelled… to turn to Russia”. Most of what took place instead during this period was inaction that did not end up causing an American break from Israel, nor relief for the Palestinians displaced by the Nakba, inaction that demonstrated “US failure to press more vigorously for enforcement of UN decisions on Arab refugees, on delimitation of the borders of Israel, and on the internationalization of Jerusalem”.

Although the US had voted for resolutions condemning Israeli attacks and ceasefire violations (such as resolution 101, pertaining to the 1953 Qibya massacre), it did not end its material or diplomatic support to Israel. Even though the Eisenhower administration was active in establishing a ceasefire through the UN in 1956, neither the US government nor the UN did anything substantial to curb Israel’s aggression. Israel refused to enter into further promises or compromises regarding the Palestinians or the other Arab states. They were instead preoccupied with their colonial expansion, with plans to re-invade Gaza and Sinai that would soon culminate in the 1967 6-Day War.

The Kennedy and Johnson years leading up to the 6-Day War saw increased material aid and more explicit political support for Israel. Closeness during the fanatically Evangelical Johnson administration led to explicit permission for Israel to go ahead with their attacks on Egypt, Syria and the Palestinian Territories. Even though the US would go on to ratify two UN Security Council ceasefire demands, with 234 calling for a more general end to hostilities, they did nothing to end material and back-door diplomatic support for Israel. On the contrary, Israel was allowed to delay the US’s acceptance of resolution 234 by lobbying Washington and taking advantage of efforts by the Arab states to push back Israeli military advances, stressing that Israel “needed to finish the job”.

A large share of effort was conducted by both Israeli and Jewish-American lobbyists as well as the advancement of, specifically, the June 8th draft of resolution 234 by American Zionist delegate Arthur Goldberg, which stipulated additional negotiations. However, since neither the US nor its allies on the Security Council, France and Great Britain, put any other pressure on Israel to cease hostilities during these negotiations, this stipulation allowed Israel to effectively continue its aggression until the end of the war on June 10th. As such, Israel was able to maintain its military presence for several months after completing its invasions of Sinai, the Golan Heights and the Palestinian Territories,

This diplomatically advantageous obfuscation would not be limited to the duration of the war itself but would carry on into the drafting of resolution 242, which demanded Israeli withdrawal from its newly occupied territories. Goldberg again would be the common denominator in the UN for US-Israel interest. The draft of 242 that would end up being adopted was also his, and it contained a linguistic slight-of-hand; on the topic of withdrawal from occupied Arab territories, the document omitted the specificity of “all”, “the” and “June 5th, 1967”, which in essence allowed Israel to maintain its occupation of all gains from the 6-Day War without being branded in the document or diplomatically as “an unlawful occupier”. All other revisions explicitly mandating Israeli withdrawal from the territories taken in the 6-Day War failed. On November 22, the full Security Council, not limited to the permanent and non-permanent US allies and economic satellites, but also the Soviets and China, adopted the American version of the resolution. Today, Israel still continues its occupation of the Golan Heights, Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, enabled by this resolution’s precedent.

The aftermath of the 6-Day War would permanently solidify Israel’s status as a major, imperialist US asset in the West Asia. This coincides with a shift largely from diplomatic and economic subterfuge in the UN to push forward favorable resolutions, to outright abuse of the veto to deter resolutions unfavorable to the interests shared between the US and Israel. In 1972, the US used the veto to prevent the passage of a resolution ordering Israel to cease airstrikes on PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon that killed both Palestinians and Lebanese alike. The following year, the US would also veto S/10974 which again demanded Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the Six-Day War. Though the US would back the Security’s Council’s ceasefire for the Yom Kippur War, they only did so after expending millions of dollars in military equipment as part of Operation Nickel Glass, which helped Israel defeat the Arab coalition and retain its occupation of Sinai. The US would go on to, through Henry Kissinger’s “Shuttle Diplomacy”, undermine further UN negotiations by offering separate and unequal agreements to both Israel and the governments of the Arab coalition. To Egypt and Syria, Kissinger would entail that an Israeli withdrawal from occupied areas west of the Suez Canal would soon lead to a full withdrawal from Sinai and the Golan Heights respectively, but by excluding the PLO and other Palestinian groups, it implicitly signaled to Israel the US’s continued support for their occupation of the Palestinian territories. The act of ignoring PLO specifically was justified by President Jimmy Carter’s assertion that they did not deserve to be at the table because they did not accept “Israel’s right to exist” nor Resolutions 242, which as discussed, was already manipulated by Goldberg in the favor of the US and Israel.

Egypt would only receive the whole of Sinai back during the 1978 Camp David accords where President Anwar Sadat, a man more amenable to US and Israel influence than Nassar, would agree to recognize Israel and to not impair its international trade through blockages of the Suez Canal or the Straits of Tiran. This agreement was again brokered without representation of any Palestinian body and thus signaled approval of the construction of Israeli settlements in still-occupied Palestinian territories. The UN general assembly would go on to toothlessly condemn the US’s bypassing of their negotiation processes beginning with Resolution 33/28 A, a resolution the United States voted against that would also never be put into action due to both the US’s continued support of Israel and the UN’s powerlessness to invalidate Camp David.

Continuing from this point, more financially and geo-politically wed to Israel than ever and emboldened by the lack of consequences they faced from the UN, the US would go on to liberally misuse the veto. Notably in 1976 alone, the US vetoed drafts, S/11940, S/12022 and S/12199 , which all called for the right of return for Palestinians, Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories and inalienable rights for Palestinians. In the prior year, the US also vetoed S/11898, which condemned Israeli airstrikes into Lebanon after the start of their civil war. This would also signal tacit US approval of Israel’s continued meddling into Lebanese affairs.

The nascent Lebanese Civil War and its outcome was incredibly consequential for both Israel and the US. Israel had long supported the right-wing “Lebanese Front” Maronite political bloc due to their pro-Western alignment and opposition to the PLO’s presence in southern Lebanon, from which the anti-Zionist militants had launched many attacks on Israel. Future Lebanese president and head of the Lebanese forces, Bachir Gemayel, had long fought against the PLO as part of the Kataeb party, a large constituent of the Lebanese Front that was founded by his father, Pierre, as an explicitly anti-Communist organization modeled on the Nazis, Italian Fascists and Spanish Phalangists, “kataeb” being “phalangists” in Arabic. Their alignment against the PLO enabled them to receive arms and funds from Israel, who found them a great ally in destroying Palestinian refugee camps that gave the PLO manpower as well as in combating the leftist, anti-American and anti-Zionist factions such as the Lebanese Communist Party and Lebanese National Resistance front. As the war progressed, Israel brokered a deal with Gemayel that they would install him as president as payment for eliminating pro-Palestinian factions and thus Palestinian refugees from the Israel-Lebanon border.

Jimmy Carter did nothing to halt the armed and financial support to Israel, which then went into support for the Lebanese Front. Given his presiding over and assisting of the many, US-backed anti-left dictatorships throughout much of Latin America, as well as the financial and military assistance given to other right-wing regimes such as that of Mobutu Sese Seko in The Democratic Republic of The Congo (then Zaire), Carter had no problem enabling the establishment of another Pro-American, Pro-Israeli, entity in Lebanon. The Reagan administration that succeeded Carter was only different in its more active stance in favor of Israeli aggression, giving explicit approval of their 1982 invasion and thus the promise of Gemayel’s pro-US ascendancy. Having signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Strategic Cooperation with Israel the year prior, the US was even more committed to militarily aiding Israel in their shared aims. This operated in conjunction with the veto of four different Security Council proposals denouncing and calling for Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, demanding a halt to settlement building and the further imposition of Israeli law in the territories occupied during the 6-Day War. All four vetoes occurred in 1982 alone.

It would be more of the same thoughout the rest of the 1980s regarding both Lebanon and the occupied Arab territories, acting in violation of Security Council resolutions 425, 426 and 509, all demanding Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, as well as 446, the original declaration of the illegality of the Israeli settlements in Palestine, on which the US abstained. Again, regarding the General Assembly, the US and Israel would also abstain from the 1982 resolution condemning the Sabra and Shatila massacre perpetrated by their Falangist allies.

By the time the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) expanded following Israel’s 1982 invasion, its parent organization had barely any power or credibility left regarding the forcing of any Israeli aggression to end. Though their mission was to enforce the Security Council’s mandate of Israeli withdrawal, their presence itself undermined resistance efforts by the PLO in the area. Even more contrary to their purported goal, the Interim Force allowed IDF and Phalange forces to pass the “Blue Line” they set up between Israel’s occupied zone and Southern Lebanon, which enabled said forces to bloodily siege Beirut, leading to the ousting of the PLO and Gemayel’s brief presidency. This can hardly be surprising given the US’s increasing predominance on the Security Council and how, to this day, the US and its allies, such as Indonesia, Italy and Canada, make up the majority of deployed troops, historic commanders and other staff in the UNIFIL mission. This also tracks with their continued hostility towards Hezbollah and their inability to stop Israel’s renewed 2024 invasion.

The US’s flagrant abuse of their veto power in favor of Israel was part of a general trend through the 80s that was meant to guarantee the broad fulfilment of both the US’s imperialistic actions and those of its major allies. A non-exhaustive list includes vetoes against complaints regarding US support of anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua, condemnation of their invasive regime change in Grenada and co-vetoing with the UK against Apartheid South Africa’s occupation of Namibia. The rest of the 80s and 90s would see the continuation of this strategy, with the US vetoing multiple condemnations of settlement-building in occupied Palestine, Israeli actions in Lebanon and the killing of Palestinian civilians during the First Intifada, with 1988’s S/19466 being the first of many. Going back to the General Assembly, the US, Israel and their allies repealed UN GA Res 3379, which classified “Zionism as a form of racism”. The US, Israel, the nations of NATO, Australia, New Zealand, as well as numerous American-aligned dictatorships in Central America and Africa, originally voted against 3379 in 1975. They were later joined by the vast majority of nations in repealing it in 1991, most of whom had originally voted for the 1975 anti-zionist resolution as part of the now-defunct Non-Aligned and Soviet Blocs. These nations were implicitly coerced by the refusal of US and Israel to not participate in the Madrid Peace Conference.

The US again sidestepped UN authority during this failed conference and, emboldened as the sole world power after the collapse of the USSR, continued to do so during the Oslo Accords. The process was little more than a constant validation of Israel’s abuse towards both the Palestinian people and the surrounding Arab nations, neither promising withdrawal from the territories of the 6-Day War nor the halting of settlements in the West Bank. The meager recognition of the PLO as the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank in exchange for their mutual recognition of Israel greatly contributed to the current status quo where the PA functions as an Israeli collaborator, abetting their continuing occupation and settlement-building to this day. All that was accomplished was the further strengthening of Israeli authority over Palestinians, normalization with other US-aligned collaborator regimes in West Asia such as Jordan, and the loss of most of the Palestinian’s supposed UN guarantees and political rights in favor of a much more globalized political and economic strengthening between the US and Israel. The UN could do nothing against its master. A true “Palestinian Versailles”, as Edward Said put it.

Unopposed by any other power or regional block by the end of the Cold War, the US came to occupy a true hegemonic position in the UN, especially when it came to either maintaining or enhancing the West Asian status quo they had cemented with Israel. In 1996, the US wielded its veto against the re-election of then Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a lukewarm figure who was conciliatory to Israel during Camp David and never challenged the US’s prime and biased role during the Oslo Accords. What earned the ire of his old allies was his preparation of a report proving that Israel knowingly bombed the town of Qana in Southern Lebanon, killing over 100 Lebanese and injuring 4 UN peacekeeping troops. The veto, also encouraged by the Israel lobby, blocked his electability.

The US would again use their veto seven times to smother condemnations of and actions against Israeli atrocities during the Second Intifada between 2000 and 2005. There were truly very few times when the US would not bear its veto regarding West Asian matters in the intervening years, those times being when a Security Council resolution under consideration would indirectly benefit Israeli, and thus US interests. Two notable examples in 2006 alone were Resolution 1701, which enforced disarmament of Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon and the strengthening of the Western-aligned UNIFIL force, and Resolution 1723, in which the UN gave armed assistance to the US’s occupation of Iraq, a shared enemy with Israel. That same year, the US vetoed two more resolutions, S/2006/508 and S/2006/878 condemning Israel’s occupation and crimes in Gaza.

With 11 more vetoes cast since 2006 in Israel’s favor, including the six vetoes against a ceasefire in Gaza, the UN is shown to be even less powerful in halting Israeli atrocities than before. The US faces no tangible pressure as its continues to enforce its and Israel’s geopolitical aims through blatant abuse of veto power, wanton threats to withdraw UN funding, (if not to withdraw from the UN completely), as well as direct, internationally unapproved military action taken against those who fight on the side of the Palestinians, such as Ansar Allah in Yemen. The fact the Israel also faces no significant international pressures, combined with their being accustomed to constant US support, has incentivized them to utilize the Mossad in sabotaging the International Criminal Court and Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan’s case against Benjamin Netanyahu, an effort supported by the UK’s threat to withdraw from the Rome Statute and US’s sanctions against Khan himself.

The constant failure of the UN to support the principles of self-determination and anti-colonialism literally set up in its laws is inherent in its very genealogy. As the organization that was built to affirm and propagate the aims of the victorious powers after WW2, it has only succeeded abundantly. Now that the US has been the main global hegemon since before the full collapse of the Soviet Union, the UN’s actions towards anything that involves the US’s economic and geopolitical interests are incredibly limited at best and line-towing at worst, even as the vast majority of other member states oppose them. This is best evidenced by the great ramping-up of the US’s veto throughout the 80s, a time in which the Soviet Union was collapsing due to economic problems, losses in the Afghan war and moves towards neoliberal capitalism under Gorbachev. Since that time, there has been no other bloc within or without the UN that has been able to counter the US and its funding of Israel’s genocide, diplomatically, economically or militarily.

Even now, with their imperialistic influence continuing to thoroughly penetrate the world, the US still threatens dissent in UN not only by sanctioning judges and undermining International Court of Justice rulings mandating that Israel allow aid into Gaza, but by removing billions in funding for the UN in favor of American interests. This ability has been basically guaranteed since the UN’s foundation in 1945 and serves as an economic punishment on the world for even doing the very least to oppose American-Israeli interests. Not even the US’s so-called geopolitical opponents, Russia and China, are willing to cast their vetoes as to disrupt the US-Israeli joint imperialism in Palestine, merely abstaining from resolution 2803 and by proxy confirming the imposition of the occupational “peace plan” in Gaza. This again comes without any representation for Palestinians.

The human mask has long truly slipped from the international order and its institutions before the Gaza genocide. By examining the UN’s complete inability to combat and prevent the worst of the world’s atrocities, usually enabled or committed directly by the US and their allies, it is even more clear that the whole organization is just a corpse only able to move when animated by Western-Israeli machinations. If anything resembling international cooperation is to be established, it cannot yield to the pressure and interests of imperialistic and genocidal states which seek to only continue their entrenched capitalistic interests at the expense of millions of human lives. Internationalism, as originally purported by the UN, must center the needs and well-being of the majority of the world and maintain a proletarian nature. It must be ready to hold fast to liberatory principles that opposes those entities concerned with maintaining the flow of blood-money. In all of these ways, the UN has shown itself woefully insufficient, a source of pageantry and performance rather than praxis. As a puppet organization of Western Imperialism, it must be overcome alongside it in order to prevent another 680,000.

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