Palestinians displaced after the June 1967 war are practically absent from scholarship on the relations between the Middle East and South America. Perhaps reflecting the defeat of the forces led by Egypt, Jordan and Syria, most scholars focus on Israel's ties to Latin America in this period, epitomised by the landmark work of Edy Kaufman, Yoram Shapira and Joel Barromi.Footnote ¹ In the 1980s, intellectual and social critics published exposés of Israel's military support of repressive states in Central and South America.Footnote ² By the 1990s and 2000s, historians and social scientists had begun to consider Israeli diplomats’ assistance to politically active Jews escaping military regimes in the Southern Cone.Footnote ³ What is missing in these critical or favourable views of Israeli relations with Latin America is the historical fact that, after their 1967 victory over the Arab states, Israeli officialshistorical fact that, after their 1967 victory over the Arab states, Israeli officials envisioned South America as a possible location for Palestinian resettlement.Footnote ⁴

Even in the limited number of works that look at Arab states or Arab–Israeli politics in relation to South America after 1967, scholars note increasing or deteriorating support for Israel or underscore the economics behind Arab–Latin American rapprochements.Footnote ⁵ In concentrating on South American states' search for energy sources and improved terms of trade with Arab oil exporters, scholars downplayed the broader politics behind the region's intermittent support of Palestinians and the censure of Zionism, such as Brazil's backing for the 1975 United Nations (UN) ‘Zionism is Racism’ resolution and its approval of an office for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).Footnote ⁶ In addressing Middle East–South America relations after 1967, scholars pay scant attention to those vanquished by the June war, the Palestinians.Footnote ⁷

This article aims to fill the void by focusing on Palestinians as key actors who connected South America to the Middle East under circumstances not of their own choosing. On 4 May 1970 two young Palestinian men from Gaza entered the recently inaugurated Israeli diplomatic office in Paraguay's capital of Asunción. Local newspapers reported that they had intended to kill the ambassador, but instead they shot at an Israeli diplomatic secretary, Edna Peer, and a Jewish-Paraguayan clerk, Diana Zawluk, killing the former and wounding the latter.Footnote ⁸ Decades later, in Ma'ariv, a newspaper based in Tel Aviv, the secretary's widower, Moshe Peer, revealed that Israel had encouraged the emigration of the two assailants.Footnote ⁹ As Israel's consul and first secretary in Asunción at the time, Peer explained that the Palestinians ‘were promised they will be land-owners’ in exchange for their departure from Gaza with Paraguayan passports. ‘At the time’, Peer recalled, ‘you could buy a Paraguayan passport for US $50.’ He stated that Israelis brought Palestinian youth to rural Paraguay and promised further support. After a month without remuneration or assistance, two Palestinians returned to the embassy in Asunción, with tragic consequences. In contrast to US media, which at the time portrayed the shooting as the Arab–Israeli conflict spilling over into an irrelevant corner of the world, this work focuses on what this moment says about South America as an active location of post-1967 Middle East politics.Footnote ¹⁰

Centred around the May 1970 shooting at the Israeli embassy in Asunción, this article traces a dramatic chain of actions and reactions which was set into motion by Israel's victory in June 1967 and drew to a close after the June 1972 verdict of a Paraguayan court regarding the two Palestinians. In these five years, I suggest that both the victors and the vanquished in the June war were accommodated by South America's most enduring authoritarian regime, Paraguay's Stronato, the military government of General Alfredo Stroessner (1954–89).Footnote ¹¹ Stroessner's decision to put the two Palestinians on trial in Paraguay rather than extradite them to Israel was part of a larger story of South America's connection to the Arab–Israeli conflict. Based on government documents, news reportage and oral histories, my article explores this linkage through three sets of relationships: high-ranking Israeli officials who, from June 1967 to May 1970, encouraged the emigration of Palestinians from Gaza to South America; Israel's ambassador to Paraguay and Paraguayan Stronistas (Stroessner supporters) of Syrian-Lebanese descent who came into contact with the two assailants after the shooting; and, from May 1970 to June 1972, the two Palestinians prosecuted by the embassy's Jewish-Paraguayan clerk and defended by a Syrian-Lebanese Stronista. Through these overlapping interactions, South America was not only encompassed by but also domestically contained the effects of the June 1967 war, including both the victory of Israel and the exacerbation of Palestinian displacement.

The approach used here answers Arjun Appadurai's call for a shift from ‘trait’ to ‘process’ geographies, examining the formation of an ‘area’ through the movement of ideas, persons and things.Footnote ¹² Rather than being construed as a pre-given region that became entangled in the Arab–Israeli conflict, South America took shape through ideas about relocating Palestinians, their actual diaspora, and debates about the circumstances that precipitated it. In scholarship on the displacement or expulsion of Palestinians after 1948 as well as after 1967, Nur Masalha has most cogently historicised the ‘concept of “transfer”’ in Zionist thought.Footnote ¹³ His insights about Israeli plans to resettle Palestinians after the 1967 war, including references to their South American destination, have been confirmed by Tom Segev's work, drawing on new material from Israeli state archives.Footnote ¹⁴ Building on this research from Israel/Palestine through mostly Paraguayan sources, this article first asks how Israeli authorities and Gazan residents circumscribed South America after 1967. The article then turns to the aftermath of the 1970 shooting, and the reactions of the Israeli ambassador and Syrian-Lebanese Stronistas towards the Palestinians and the Paraguayan state, which was implicated in their resettlement and became the arbiter of their fate. The final section considers the two-year-long trial that came to accommodate Palestinians and post-1967 Israeli power, namely through the Syrian-Lebanese-led defence and the Jewish-Paraguayan plaintiff. Ideas about resettling Palestinians, as well as their displacement after Israel's victory in 1967, drew a map of South America not as isolated from, but rather as connected to, the Middle East.

While Palestinians have been minimised in scholarship regarding Latin American relations with Israeli and Arab powers, this article follows their lesser-known diasporic trajectories as a first step to framing the Middle East and a ‘globalized Latino America’ as mutual points of reference.Footnote ¹⁵ By taking this approach, the article moves beyond the Americas as the unit of study par excellence disseminated by scholars for the past two decades.Footnote ¹⁶ As Arlene Dávila reminds us, there is nothing inherently more ‘inclusive’, or emancipatory, about any of these diasporic efforts to rethink what is usually called Latin America and the Caribbean.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, the case at hand shows that Palestinians displaced by war in the Middle East ended up in authoritarian South America. That two of them were indicted by a Jewish-Paraguayan clerk in the Israeli embassy and defended by Syrian-Lebanese descendants with influential access to the Stronato points to the Southern Cone's containment of the Palestinian diaspora and post-1967 Israeli power that exacerbated it. Framed in this way, the study of ties cultivated with those who lost and won in the Middle East reveals South America's own pluralism, namely of Syrian-Lebanese and Jews.Footnote ¹⁸ The connections between regions seldom associated with one another bring to light relations of difference within a given region.

‘I Don't Mind if They All Emigrate’: An Israeli Plan, Palestinian Gazans and América Footnote ¹⁹

In 1967 the so-called Six-Day War that resulted in Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank created a new dilemma for the victor. Nur Masalha explains that the newly occupied territories ‘overnight quadrupled the Arab population’ and exacerbated the ‘refugee problem’ of non-Jewish Arabs.Footnote ²⁰ In a high-level meeting convened by the Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, dissonant voices called for humanitarian aid for refugees but warned of an Arab demographic presence in or near a Jewish state. One possible solution, they thought, was to encourage Palestinian ‘emigration’. Eshkol began to look into ways to facilitate the voluntary relocation of Palestinians from the occupied territories, ‘which later became known as the Moshe Dayan plan’.Footnote ²¹ As the minister of defence who led the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in the June war, Dayan allegedly designed this strategy after the fighting ended and ‘consolidated a plan for promoting Arab emigration from the occupied territories to South America’.Footnote ²²

‘A secret unit charged with “encouraging” the departure of Palestinians’, Israel Shahak writes, was set up by officials from the prime minister's office, the Ministry of Defence and the army.Footnote ²³ The unit on al-Mukhtar Street in Gaza City and similar ‘emigration offices’ worked through agents who offered potential emigrants money, further assistance at their destination, and ‘one-way tickets to various South American countries (mainly Paraguay) through a Tel Aviv travel agency’.Footnote ²⁴ As Segev explains: ‘Upon departing the country, the emigrants had to leave behind the identification cards they had received from the military government. They also had to sign a form declaring, in Hebrew and Arabic, that they were leaving willingly and understood that they would not be able to return without a special permit.’Footnote ²⁵ ‘Few Israelis', Segev concludes, ‘knew of the transfer project. Everything was done secretly.’Footnote ²⁶

Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs helped in this initiative, which pinpointed South America as the destination for Palestinians. Segev writes that the ‘Foreign Ministry, apparently in coordination with the Mossad, did what it could to encourage refugees to emigrate to Brazil and elsewhere in South America’.Footnote ²⁷ Helping to obtain the necessary passports from the region was the prime minister's adviser on Arab affairs, Shmuel Toledano, who ‘reported happily that he had a thousand foreign passports that he was distributing to Gaza residents who wished to leave’.Footnote ²⁸ This detail troubled other officials, who feared that Gazans with passports issued by a South American state could easily be discovered and compromise the operation because they ‘didn't even speak the language’.Footnote ²⁹ The plan to encourage Palestinian emigration needed to be carried out in a way that would not implicate the Israeli government after its victory in 1967.

Despite such thoughtfulness, there exists documentation of 21 Gazans who arrived in Asunción in August and September 1969, 11 of whom gave declaraciones indagatorias (sworn statements) to the Paraguayan Dirección de Registro de Extranjeros (Directorate for the Registration of Foreigners, DRE) in late September of the same year.Footnote ³⁰ The DRE's sub-commissioner asked a series of questions, including whether the Gazans were sponsored to travel to Paraguay. Without exception, the 11 men related that, through word of mouth in Gaza, they had heard of ‘Patra’, a ‘travel agency’ or ‘organisation’ that ‘enrolled’ (inscribía) people interested in travelling to work in ‘Brazil’ or ‘América’. Some men also recalled speaking with a certain Gad Greiver, who still today runs an Israeli travel agency of the same name, Patra, founded by his Jewish-Polish father several decades previously.Footnote ³¹ As indicated earlier, travel agents facilitated Palestinian emigration from Gaza in the context of an Israeli government plan.

Written by the DRE's sub-commissioner with the help of an Arabic–Spanish translator, the 11 men's ‘sworn statements’ also provide a window into Palestinians' view of their own journey. All the men explained that Patra first required them to pay an initial fee for a work-abroad programme. After some time, the men were told by Greiver or an unnamed agent that Patra would purchase plane tickets and advance them money for expenses to be incurred within the first days of their arrival in South America. In exchange Patra required the men to pay back this loan with the money earned from the employment they were promised. After a period of two years they could renew the contract or return to Gaza. Four men stated that they were asked to sign a document in Hebrew, ‘a language not understood’ by them. They were reassured by Greiver or an unnamed agent that the document contained the terms of the agreement and loan repayment. Whether or not this was the contract that sealed their exile, as mentioned earlier, it would seem that Palestinians who left Gaza for Paraguay in late 1969 did so under the assumption that they were travelling to work abroad for a specified amount of time.

According to their responses to the sub-commissioner's questions regarding their arrival date, the 21 Gazans disembarked in Paraguay in smaller groups during August and September 1969. Most followed a similar itinerary, departing from the airport that they called Lydda but which by then had become Tel Aviv and its suburb of Lod.Footnote ³² They made their connections in Brussels, London or Paris, and later stopped over in Brazilian cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, before disembarking in Asunción. Only one of these young men, who travelled with his wife and children, acknowledged that he knew that his final destination was to be Paraguay. Eight thought they were heading to Brazil, while others stated that their assumed destination was ‘América’ (South or North). That most of these Palestinians were unaware of their final destination might be grasped in the light of the statement of one of the Gazans, Fared Shain, who remarked that he was given his airline ticket and travel documents by an unnamed individual just five minutes before his flight embarked from Tel Aviv.

This journey was, in fact, a second displacement. In response to the Paraguayan official's questions about their place of birth and place of departure, half the men implied that they were 1948 refugees who had resettled in Gaza. Fared Shain, a 28-year-old, was born in ‘el Magdal’, a coastal Arab village that became the Israeli city of Ashkelon after 1948.Footnote ³³ Shain resettled in Gaza and worked as a ‘chauffeur-driver’ before emigrating. Abderkader el Isardi, a 23-year-old painter, related that his birthplace was ‘Iebna-Palestina’ (Yibna), but his place of departure was ‘un campamento de refugiados en Gaza’ (a refugee camp in Gaza). Travelling with his wife and five children, Salah Abu Kamal, a 31-year-old language teacher, was born in ‘Jaffa-Palestina’ – overtaken by Haganah and Irgun forces in 1948 – and departed from ‘Sabrah-Gaza’.Footnote ³⁴ Ahmed Salahel El Assar, a 22-year-old watch repairman born in ‘Yules-Palestina’ (perhaps Yalu, south of Ramlah, which became the homonymous Israeli town after 1948), left from the Gazan coastal city of ‘Deir El Balah’. Likewise, Subhi Yadala, a 22-year-old mechanic, was born in ‘Deir Sneid-Palestina’; when Deir Sneid became the Israeli settlement of Gan Hadarom after 1948, Yadala resided ‘in the city of Khan Yunes-Gaza’ until heading abroad.Footnote ³⁵ Other Gazans, such as two 21-year-olds, Ahmed Abdala and Abdala El Abdala, were born and raised in the Gazan city of Khan Yunes. Similarly, Said Saleh, a 16-year-old mechanic, and Abderahman Abd Rabbuh, a 24-year-old carpenter, were born in ‘Yabalia El Balad-Gaza’. These Palestinians who arrived in Paraguay in late 1969 were part of the so-called ‘refugee problem’ that had so troubled Prime Minister Eshkol and his cabinet.

It is unclear whether the 11 Gazans, as well as another ten arrivés mentioned during their testimonies, were detained by the Paraguayan police forces or appeared independently at the DRE. Their statements, however, imply that they were undocumented at the time of their interrogation. All the men related that, before their journey, Patra assured them that an agent would be at their place of destination with the necessary documents to enter the country. These men did not say whether they were given Paraguayan passports, but two of them, Fared Shain and Foud (sic, probably Foua) Farwook, complained that their own travel documents were taken by Arabic-speaking individuals who appeared to be Patra agents, after they passed through Paraguayan immigration controls. After the same agents used these credentials to check them into hotels in Asunción, the Gazans were left without any documented evidence of their provenance from Israel/Palestine or their passage into Paraguay. Perhaps this confiscation was related to Israeli officials who sought to shield themselves from the paper trail that would link them to Palestinians resettled abroad.Footnote ³⁶ At any rate, eight Gazans came to address a formal letter of request to the Paraguayan chief of police investigations. Typed in Spanish, this letter stated that the undersigned ‘Palestinian youth’ had ‘refused to accept any sponsorship by any Arab consulate in this capital city’ and desired ‘to stay in our new country’ (Paraguay). Their trail almost fades after this late 1969 encounter with the Paraguayan authorities, and would perhaps be unremarkable if it were not for two other Palestinians who arrived under similar circumstances six months later.

According to Paraguayan newspapers after the shooting, the two men arrested, Fadel Abd AlRahman and Karim Abu Jalil, arrived from Gaza with ‘legal documents’ to enter Paraguay in April 1970.Footnote ³⁷ As indicated earlier, they entered the embassy and asked to speak with the Israeli ambassador, Benno Weiser Varon. His secretary, Edna Peer, picked up the telephone to notify the ambassador. Fearing that she was calling the police, the men started to shoot, killing Peer and wounding a Jewish-Paraguayan clerk, Diana Zawluk. AlRahman and Abu Jalil fled, and the alleged target, Varon, remained unharmed in his office. Abu Jalil was seized near the embassy shortly afterwards, and AlRahman was taken into custody a few hours later. Although these reports assumed that the two assailants intended to kill the ambassador, AlRahman, in a personal conversation with me, qualified that he and Abu Jalil carried concealed weapons in order to demand the money and assistance promised to them, not to kill anyone.Footnote ³⁸

The widower of the slain Israeli secretary, Moshe Peer, kept silent for more than 30 years about the circumstances of the shooting. In a news story that appeared in Ma'ariv in 2004, he explained that AlRahman and Abu Jalil were two of the ‘thousands of Palestinians arriving in Paraguay as part of the [Israeli] operation’.Footnote ³⁹ However, in the same article, Shlomo Gazit, a former head of the IDF intelligence services (and coordinator of the Defence Ministry in the occupied territories in 1967), countered that ‘the number of the transferred did not exceed twenty’. Still, Meir Novik, then in charge of the Special Operations unit of the Israeli Police Department, which helped to execute the plan, cited ‘several dozens’. If AlRahman and Abu Jalil are added to the Gazans mentioned in the ‘declaratory statements’ transcribed by the Paraguayan DRE, there is evidence that 23 Palestinians from Gaza had arrived in Paraguay in August and September 1969 as well as in April 1970. Why did Moshe Peer allege that much larger numbers of Palestinians were relocated to South America?

This discrepancy might be explained by the unanticipated effect of the shooting on the then nascent plan of the Israeli government. Citing an interview given to Ha'aretz, Masalha relates that the head of IDF Central Command in the 1960s, General Uzi Narkiss, acknowledged that this ‘experiment’ to send Palestinians to South America had ‘failed’ when ‘one of our daughters [Edna Peer] was killed in revenge in our embassy in Paraguay’.Footnote ⁴⁰ For Narkiss, the plan to encourage Palestinian emigration was cut short by the shooting in Asunción. In this light, Moshe Peer may have referred to an intention to move thousands of Palestinians, while Gazit and Novik perhaps specified a smaller number of Palestinians who were actually resettled in South America. Regardless, the period from June 1967 to May 1970 marked the rise and demise of an Israeli plan to relocate Palestinians to Paraguay as well as the start of the uneven incorporation of a seemingly distant region into the Arab–Israeli conflict. As the victor after the June war, Israel envisioned South America as the place for the vanquished, while Palestinians themselves held, at best, vague notions of their actual destination and the unlikelihood of their return.

Israeli, Syrian-Lebanese and Palestinian Contours of Authoritarian South America

In his memoir, the Israeli ambassador Benno Weiser Varon recalled that not long before the shooting, ‘a trickle of Palestinian Arabs had arrived in Paraguay. They all came from Gaza and travelled on Israeli laissez-passers … Some had … been handled by Moshe Peer, who dealt with consular affairs’ and ‘enjoyed speaking Arabic with them’. Varon assumed that they ‘were entitled to … the consular services of the embassy’, since Israel had occupied Gaza since the Six-Day War.Footnote ⁴¹ Written some two decades after his service, Varon's memoir acknowledged that Gazans disembarked in Paraguay and met with Moshe Peer in Asunción.

At the time of the shooting, however, Varon made no reference to such exchanges between Palestinians and Israeli diplomats. In the Chicago Tribune, O Estado de S. Paulo and the Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color, Varon repeated that ‘the attack [atentado] committed yesterday in this Capital against the Embassy of Israel … was one more in the chain of acts of this nature perpetrated in the whole world against Israel and against its representatives'.Footnote ⁴² In his memoirs, Varon again characterised this ‘attack’ as against Israel when he paid tribute not to the Jewish-Paraguayan clerk who had been shot five times, but solely to the slain Israeli diplomatic secretary: ‘Edna had been a soldier in Israel's army. Now she had fallen far from its borders, in the service of her country.’Footnote ⁴³ In failing to mention Israel's own role in the movement of Palestinians to Paraguay, Varon framed the shooting as an ‘attack’ against Israel.

Varon had opened Israel's embassy in Asunción in 1968, not ostensibly to oversee the emigration of Palestinians, but rather because of Paraguay's two-year appointment to a rotating seat on the UN Security Council.Footnote ⁴⁴ During this time the UN's most powerful body would vote on the fate of the Palestinian refugees, the status of Jerusalem and other pressing questions following the June 1967 war. It was up to the Israeli ambassador to convince the Stroessner regime not to vote against Israel. In his memoirs, Varon related his ability to do so by appealing to Stroessner's anti-communism and militaristic nationalism.Footnote ⁴⁵ Whether or not solely due to Varon's efforts, Paraguay did in fact vote in accordance with Israeli interests on the UN Security Council.Footnote ⁴⁶

Stroessner had a history of cultivating ties with Syrian-Lebanese too. Nearly a decade before coming to power, he attended the 1944 inauguration of the ‘Syrian Club’ in Asunción.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1950, this same club reciprocated by helping to organise the ‘First Congress of Colorado Youth’ for the Asociación Nacional Republicana (National Republican Association, ANR), the regime's official political party, nicknamed the Partido Colorado or Colorado Party.Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1954, at the dawn of Gamal Abdel Nasser's political rise in Egypt, the Syrian Club hosted an official visit from an ‘Egyptian Ambassador’ and subsequently purchased ‘200 book copies of La filosofía de la revolución by Coronel Gamal Abd-el-Nazer [sic]’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1963 President Stroessner sent his foreign minister to ‘personally deliver’ to Nasser the highest national honour in Paraguay, the ‘Mariscal Francisco Solano López' medallion. Upon the Arab nationalist leader's death in 1970, Stroessner declared three days of official mourning in Paraguay.Footnote ⁵⁰ Though he was alleged to ‘rather like’ the Israeli ambassador and, as mentioned earlier, had supported Israel at the UN, Stroessner also held Syrian-Lebanese in Paraguay and their Arab nationalist icons in high regard.Footnote ⁵¹ Having quelled divisions among Colorado Party members by 1967, Stroessner was already exercising his ‘patrimonial’ style to establish ‘personal, reciprocal ties of faithfulness and obligation’ among otherwise opposed forces when his own country became linked to the Arab–Israeli conflict.Footnote ⁵²

Two days after the shooting, ABC Color reported that ‘authorities from Israel [had] requested the extradition of those implicated in the attack’.Footnote ⁵³ Indeed, in a conversation with me, AlRahman recalled, ‘Moshe Dayan wanted my head.’Footnote ⁵⁴ According to this Palestinian, Stroessner himself reasoned that since the crime was committed on Paraguayan territory, its perpetrators would be judged in Paraguayan courts. Whether or not the dictator espoused such an attitude, it is clear that his government lacked an extradition treaty with Israel.Footnote ⁵⁵ In failing to convince Stroessner to hand over the two Palestinians willingly (and not mentioning it in his memoirs), Varon then relayed two additional requests from the Israeli government: that there be adequate protection for diplomatic staff, and that the government of Paraguay quickly make ‘all the weight of justice fall upon the two assassins’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In refusing to release two foreign nationals, authoritarian Paraguay would need to take steps to accommodate the victor, but not necessarily the vanquished, of the June 1967 war.

Remarkably at this time, however, Samir Rassi Lahud, a young Paraguayan lawyer from a middle-class Syrian-Lebanese family, ‘assumed the defence of the two Palestinians’ and filed papers on their behalf in the lower criminal court of the city of Asunción, gaining access not only to ‘the complete documentation of the two Palestinians’, but also to the defendants themselves, who were held in the same Tacumbú penitentiary as political prisoners.Footnote ⁵⁷ Rassi Lahud had attained his law degree from the Universidad Nacional de Asunción and had participated in the Comisión Central de la Juventud Colorado, the youth committee of the ANR.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the late 1970s and 1980s, he served as a national deputy on behalf of the ANR. After the 1989 coup against Stroessner that continued the rule of the Colorado Party, Rassi Lahud was elected as a senator, and he became president of the ANR from 1998 to 2001.Footnote ⁵⁹ As Israel pressured Paraguay to punish them, the two Palestinians were accommodated by a Syrian-Lebanese descendant who decades later presided over the same party of Stroessner's regime.

Born in Asunción in 1944, Rassi Lahud was the son of a Syrian immigrant and a Paraguayan mother of Lebanese ancestry. His father was from the village of Masyaf, and his mother from the province of Guairá, a few hours east of Asunción. Rassi Lahud was one of several thousand descendants of Syrian and Lebanese migrants who experienced dizzying upward class mobility in Paraguay after the Second World War.Footnote ⁶⁰ In one of my conversations with him, he remembered that the shooting had been an escándalo (outrage) that ripped through Asunción, causing immense grief for the family of the wounded Jewish-Paraguayan woman and the Jewish community.Footnote ⁶¹ Upon hearing that the shooters were Palestinians, Paraguayans of Syrian-Lebanese origin were also shocked. Rassi Lahud first met the two Palestinians under these circumstances, according to news reportage a day after the shooting.Footnote ⁶²

Among other Syrian-Lebanese contacting the two Palestinians was Humberto Domínguez Dibb, often known by his initials, HDD. Infamous among Paraguayans coming of age during Stroessner's rule, HDD was born to Syrian-Lebanese parents in Asunción in 1943 (and died in 1991). His father was one of the founders of the Syrian Club in 1944, and HDD later helped to establish the Paraguayan branch of FEARAB, the Federation of Arab Entities in the Americas.Footnote ⁶³ In the mid-1960s HDD wed Stroessner's daughter, Graciela. Having the ear of his father-in-law, HDD exercised indiscretionary power in the regime, even after divorcing Graciela. According to AlRahman, HDD cut short a violent interrogation that he was undergoing at the hands of Pastor Coronel, Chief of the ‘Department of Investigations’, or the secret police, in the Paraguayan capital city. Coronel's department engaged in the ‘torture, exile and execution’ of Paraguayans, and Coronel himself took charge of the investigation into the shooting.Footnote ⁶⁴ Bursting into the room where the Palestinian was being ‘tortured’, in AlRahman's words, HDD grabbed Pastor Coronel and ‘shouted “¿Qué estás haciendo con mi paisano?” [What are you doing to my countryman?]’.

HDD's defence of a Palestinian should be grasped in relation to a previous incident with the Israeli ambassador. Inadvertently, Varon had alluded to HDD as a ‘jackass’ in La Tribuna newspaper.Footnote ⁶⁵ Ironically, La Tribuna at this time sought to avoid any criticism of the government and even lacked editorials, paying greater attention to international rather than domestic events.Footnote ⁶⁶ Invited to publish short stories ‘once a month in its literary supplement’, Varon had written a piece that featured a character called ‘Graciela’, the same name as Stroessner's daughter, who was then married to HDD. The Graciela in Varon's story had a frog ‘who liked caviar’, but instead of becoming a prince, the frog turned into a jackass. The unintentional reference to the real Graciela's would-be prince sparked rumours, and Varon dreaded becoming persona non grata in Paraguay for insulting the general's daughter and son-in-law. In subsequent gatherings, however, Varon was surprised that HDD ‘went out of his way to be cordial’. Having interacted with or heard about the Israeli diplomat in a negative light, HDD, Rassi Lahud and other elites of Syrian-Lebanese origins accommodated the two Palestinians, an act that they knew would be at odds with the official representative of post-1967 Israeli power in Paraguay.

Such assistance to Palestinians, however, was not forthcoming from the wider community, which was overwhelmingly made up of Syrians and Lebanese. AlRahman recalled that only a handful of Paraguayans of Syrian or Syrian-Lebanese origins – including Rassi Lahud and HDD – reached out to him. Lebanese were altogether absent in his own recollections, despite the founding of the Unión Libanesa in 1942 and its appearance alongside the Syrian Club in ABC Color during the early 1970s.Footnote ⁶⁷ Well-known for stores specialising in textiles and household accessories near the Calle 25 de Mayo in the Paraguayan capital, Lebanese residents of Asunción, as well as most Syrians or Syrian-Lebanese, steered clear of a police matter that would have brought unwanted attention to their businesses. Unlike a Jewish community association that released an official statement (mentioned in the next section), these and other Lebanese or Syrian-Lebanese associations took no public position regarding the shooting. In this light, the actions of Rassi Lahud, HDD and others did less to promote what was called the ‘Palestinian case’ among more circumspect Syrian-Lebanese in Paraguay than it did to showcase their own exclusive access to the upper echelons of Stroessner's regime.

This handful of Syrian-Lebanese capitalised on their power within the Stronato, which was not only pressured by Israel to punish the Palestinians but also implicated in its plan to resettle them. Privy to the two Palestinians' perspective that Israelis oversaw their emigration, HDD, Rassi Lahud and an immigrant from the Syrian village of Mohardi by the name of Eduardo Nader looked into how the Palestinians entered Paraguay. According to AlRahman and the son of Nader, an unnamed clerk in Paraguay's Interior Ministry was found to be guilty of selling Paraguayan passports to the Israeli embassy, which were then used to relocate Palestinians from Gaza to South America.Footnote ⁶⁸ As stated earlier, Segev found that the Israeli prime minister's ‘advisor on Arab affairs’ claimed to possess passports ‘from the interior minister of a South American country’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Paraguay's interior minister at the time was Sabino Augusto Montanaro. Holding this post for 21 years of Stroessner's 35-year rule, Montanaro took charge of intelligence gathering as well as the ‘dreaded secret police’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Regardless of his personal knowledge of Paraguayan passports sold to Israeli officials after 1967, Syrian-Lebanese elites scrutinised Palestinians’ entry into Paraguay and took measures within his ministry, which, unlike its counterparts across authoritarian South America, controlled Paraguay's entire intelligence system.Footnote ⁷¹ With very little support from the wider Syrian-Lebanese community, these elite reactions disrupted the post-1967 Israeli plan and implicated the Interior Ministry, one of the most feared entities of the Stronato, which was normally ‘shielded from controversy’.Footnote ⁷² Encompassed by and implicated in post-1967 Israeli power, an authoritative Paraguayan government structure was targeted by a select few Syrian-Lebanese who used their influence to accommodate those vanquished after 1967.

Extending beyond Paraguay, the May 1970 shooting in Asunción led Brazilian and Uruguayan states to declare ‘increased security measures’ as military police reinforced the ‘protection’ of all diplomats and missions in Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo.Footnote ⁷³ In the 1960s armed resistance groups such as the Brazilian MR8 and the Uruguayan Tupamaros had targeted diplomats. After the unrelated ‘attack’ in Paraguay's capital, Brazilian and Uruguayan forces deployed the same repressive tactics they used against apparently similar acts of the armed political opposition. Later the Brazilian military regime took action at the country's border with Paraguay, in efforts to investigate unproven media claims that Arabs there played a role in the Israeli embassy shooting.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Delegacia de Ordem Política e Social (Department of Political and Social Order, DOPS) of Brazil's Federal Police asked local officers at the border to profile and expel innocent Lebanese and Palestinians.Footnote ⁷⁵ Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (Delegation of Jewish Argentine Associations, DAIA) feared that the ‘brutal assassination’ of the Israeli secretary in Asunción would bring the Arab–Israeli conflict to bear upon Arab–Jewish relations in Argentina amidst the contemporaneous visit of Jerusalem's former Palestinian mayor, notwithstanding the latter's cautionary note that ‘we don't know under what circumstances the assailants arrived in Paraguay’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The effects of the embassy shooting in Asunción reverberated across South America momentarily, but they continued to play out in Paraguay over the next two years.

A Jewish-Paraguayan Plaintiff, a Syrian-Lebanese Lawyer, and Palestinian Defendants

Two weeks after the shooting, Diana Zawluk appeared in Asunción's lower criminal court, presided over by Judge Blas Roque Alcaraz.Footnote ⁷⁷ Having been the embassy's clerk, this Paraguayan woman of Jewish Ashkenazi origins was shot five times and survived. The twenty-something stood before the judge and declared herself as the plaintiff of a ‘criminal lawsuit … against the supposed authors of the attack’, identified as Fadel Abd AlRahman and Karim Abu Jalil. Her lawyers charged them on three accounts, ‘armed robbery, homicide, and assault’, asking for a sentence of 25 years in prison.Footnote ⁷⁸ In her petition Zawluk stated, ‘I understand that I have assumed the role of personal litigant and I recognise my status as such’, and she asked the court to ‘favourably grant a definitive sentence condemning the accused’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Having called for the Palestinians to be brought to justice, the Israeli embassy was accommodated by the Paraguayan judicial system as a former clerk became the domestic litigant against them.

Meanwhile, an appeal for calm and solidarity was made by the Jewish-Paraguayan community itself, which according to Varon's own estimates numbered no more than 800 persons.Footnote ⁸⁰ On the day before the shooting, its main association, the Consejo Representativo Israelita del Paraguay (Jewish Representative Council in Paraguay, CRIP), held a ceremony in Asunción in honour of Holocaust victims.Footnote ⁸¹ A day after the shooting CRIP repudiated the ‘criminal attack’ in the ‘Embassy of Israel’ that resulted in ‘one Jewish Israeli citizen killed and one Jewish Paraguayan gravely injured’, and condemned the attempt ‘to transfer conflicts between states of distant climes to this country where different collectivities, implicated or not, … live in an environment of complete harmony and understanding’.Footnote ⁸² This over-idealisation of Paraguay's pluralism after such violence was due not only to Syrian-Lebanese sway in the Stronato but also to the considerable influence of German immigrants, epitomised by President General Stroessner, whose own father was from Germany.Footnote ⁸³ When the first Latin American branch of the Nazi Party opened in 1931, Nazi ideology was already popular among Paraguayan political and military elites, and Nazi war criminals fled to Paraguay following the Second World War.Footnote ⁸⁴ In a country ruled by a German descendant with fresh ties to the Nazi Party, a Jewish-Paraguayan became the national plaintiff in the trial of two Palestinians while the wider community association publicly framed the attack in the Israeli embassy as contradicting ‘our peaceful coexistence’ in the ‘Paraguayan nation’.

Zawluk's role as the sole litigant against two Palestinians amidst a circumspect Jewish-Paraguayan community must also be grasped in relation to international and national norms. Since the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations prohibited diplomats from participating in the ‘internal affairs of that [receiving] State’, it was Zawluk, and not the Israeli ambassador, who became the plaintiff in the criminal lawsuit.Footnote ⁸⁵ Accordingly, the prosecution based its case on Article 8 of Paraguay's Penal Code, which stated that ‘crimes perpetrated within the territory of the Republic will be punished according to the present Code, whether the perpetrators be citizens or foreigners’.Footnote ⁸⁶ In his memoirs Varon made no mention of Zawluk's central role in filing the lawsuit. But just how Paraguay's judicial system would arbitrate this matter was another question altogether. Drafted in 1967, Paraguay's Constitution subordinated the judiciary to the executive branch, enabling the head of state to subvert ‘the functioning of the state's institutions’ at will.Footnote ⁸⁷ Given such power wielded from above, the fact that Stroessner allowed the trial to drag on for more than two years is telling. Amidst the contending pressures of Syrian-Lebanese Colorado Party members and the Israeli embassy represented by its former clerk, Stroessner perhaps exercised his ‘reserved and mild-mannered’ style to let the trial play out.Footnote ⁸⁸

ABC Color covered what it called the ‘Palestinian case’. Although the shooting and its immediate aftermath made the pages of another main newspaper of the day, Patria, the official publication of the Colorado Party, it was only ABC Color that continuously reported on the trial's proceedings. Founded in 1967, ABC Color became the most widely read newspaper of the day not only because it featured photographs in colour, but also due to its attention to local and domestic events.Footnote ⁸⁹ Although careful not to criticise the government at this time, ABC Color did ‘dedicate a specific section to political activities’, usually followed by ‘information’ on judicial hearings and police investigations.Footnote ⁹⁰ It was here that news articles on the Palestinian case appeared. Dispassionately, an unnamed journalist conveyed the politically fraught actions and stances taken in the judicial proceedings. Such reporting reveals how those who won and lost in the June 1967 war were domestically contained by Paraguay.

A day after the lawsuit was filed, AlRahman was scheduled to give his sworn statement in Arabic through two Arabic–Spanish translators, an Israeli and an Arab. No sooner had the hearing been convened than it was suspended. The ‘defendant's lawyers’ filed an appeal, objecting that ‘one of the [two] interpreters designated’, later identified as Jacobo Recanate, was of ‘Israeli nationality’, and hence biased.Footnote ⁹¹ Nonetheless, the hearing for the other defendant, Abu Jalil, was scheduled and held a couple of months later, in July 1970.Footnote ⁹² The latter refused to testify, ‘due to the presence during the proceedings – in the role of interpreter – of a person of the Jewish race (making an allusion to Sr. Jaco Recanata [sic])’.Footnote ⁹³ The judge resolved to ‘convert the status of the defendant held in custody to that of incarcerated and to freeze his assets’. When rescheduled to give his sworn statement through the same translator a week later, AlRahman again refused and received the same treatment.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Palestinian defendants and their Syrian-Lebanese lawyer, who objected to a translator's ‘Israeli nationality’, epitomise the pressures placed on a Paraguayan courtroom to accommodate both Arab and Israeli interests.

In response, however, the Paraguayan bench overruled the defence's objection that a translator ‘of Israeli nationality’ would bias the defendants.Footnote ⁹⁵ An appellate court ‘resolved to ratify’ Judge Alcaraz's decision to maintain an Arabic–Spanish translator of ‘Israeli nationality’ alongside the other translator, Abdul Karim Kabeu, who was of Arab origins. The judge reasoned that ‘the presence of the two experts would contribute to the trial's seriousness and genuineness’. The ABC Color reporter added that ‘the naming of two expert translators was rightly done in order to achieve better impartiality in the course of the lawsuit’. By endorsing translators ‘of Israeli nationality’ and of ‘Arab’ origins, the judge and news reporters attempted to accommodate both Arab and Israeli ‘sides’ in Paraguay's hardly independent judiciary.Footnote ⁹⁶

After the defendants still refused to testify, Judge Alcaraz carried out, in August 1970, an ‘ocular inspection of the headquarters of Israel's embassy’.Footnote ⁹⁷ He asked that sketches be made of Israel's diplomatic offices that he could reference during the testimony of the Jewish-Paraguayan clerk soon afterwards.Footnote ⁹⁸ Curiously, ABC Color provided few details of Zawluk's ‘almost two-hour-long’ statement in relation to the Palestinian ‘attack’, other than stating that her testimony was given in the presence of her mother, her lawyers and the Palestinians’ legal defence.Footnote ⁹⁹ By March 1971 the judge had ordered other witnesses to testify and announced that after ‘these investigative tasks, the case would be elevated to plenary status’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ With or without their participation, the judgement day of the Palestinians seemed to be drawing closer a year after the shooting.

Around this time the Syrian-Lebanese lawyer asked the judge to request information from the capital city's police regarding ‘the Palestinians’ date of entry into the country, how they arrived, and how or whether they were given Paraguayan I.D.s’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The defence also asked that a summons be sent to the Immigration Department of the Instituto de Bienestar Rural (Institute of Rural Welfare), requesting information in order to determine

This appears to be an attempt to locate a paper trail implicating Paraguayan officials who aided in the resettlement of Palestinians. Lastly, the defence requested that their clients’ hearings be rescheduled. Such appeals were repeated a month later.Footnote ¹⁰³

In September 1971, nearly a year and a half after the shooting, AlRahman testified before his defence, the prosecution, the translators, Judge Alcaraz and the court's secretary, as well as news reporters.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Born in the neighbourhood of ‘Aceituna’ (sic, Zeitoun in Arabic) in Gaza City in 1951, AlRahman recalled his arrival in Paraguay on 24 April 1970. According to ABC Color, the Palestinian then began ‘recounting the events that induced the fighting between Arabs and Israelis’. Tried for the Israeli embassy shooting in Asunción, this Palestinian and his Syrian-Lebanese legal defence gave the court a lesson in the Arab–Israeli conflict that began with British colonialism in Palestine: ‘The defendant added that the Jews [los judíos] fought for a long time to achieve a better condition for their people. Prepared to carry out warfare from the military teachings of the English, he continued, they sharpened hatred against the Arabs.’ AlRahman stated that he ‘understood that the cause of the Jews’ attitude is due to the abuse they suffered in Germany and other countries at this time and, without thinking, they put this into practice against the Arabs of Palestine … to displace Arabs from the region they inhabited’. Called to testify about the ‘attack’ on the Israeli embassy in Asunción, AlRahman spoke of European Jewish colonialism on Arab lands that precipitated what occurred in South America. After two hours, the judge adjourned until the next morning. In this and later hearings, a Paraguayan courtroom accommodated the vanquished from the June 1967 war.

On the following day AlRahman spoke of unspecified ‘atrocities’ committed by los judíos against los árabes in 1947 and 1948.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ According to ABC Color, the Palestinian ‘also referred to the fighting that followed the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egypt until he came to the Six-Day War in 1967’. When Israel occupied Gaza at that time, AlRahman stated that ‘he belonged to one of the resistance groups that subsequently organised themselves and that, as such, he was apprehended and cruelly tortured’. At this moment in the courtroom, the Palestinian defendant showed the judge the ‘scars’ on his arms and face that remained from wounds allegedly inflicted upon him. This spectacle of bodily ‘proof’ led into the trial's most remarkable moment, when ‘the indicted affirmed that he was pressured by the Jews, as many other youths had been, to abandon Palestine’. The judge reacted by immediately suspending the hearing. According to the article that appeared more than 30 years later in Ma'ariv, no one in the courtroom at the time believed the claim that a Palestinian was ‘pressured to abandon’ Israeli-occupied Gaza for Paraguay.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Two days later, however, AlRahman continued to testify and be heard in a Paraguayan court.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ According to ABC Color, ‘The indicted stated that to abandon Palestine, the Jews promised him sufficient money and lodging and even help in learning the language of the countries to which they would send him.’ After affirming that he had departed Gaza without telling his family out of fear for their safety, AlRahman specified that ‘the company, Patra, responsible for taking out [sacar] Arabs from that region … stripped [se le despojó] AlRahman of all his documentation’. AlRahman concluded by stating that he and other Palestinians were met by six persons who did not identify themselves at Asunción's airport, including one dressed as a ‘captain’ and two civilians. AlRahman's narrative dovetails with that of the 11 Gazans who had arrived earlier. In dealing with the same Patra agency, AlRahman, like the other Palestinians, lacked documentation and was promised support in Paraguay.

On the following day AlRahman's testimony was postponed by the judge. The ABC Color reporter noted that, even after three hearings, the Palestinian defendant ‘still has not referred to the events that motivated’ the embassy shooting.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Only six weeks later, during his final statement, did AlRahman enter into these details.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The persons who met AlRahman at Asunción's airport were said to have brought him and an unspecified number of Palestinians to Paraguay's border with Brazil. Left to their own resources, AlRahman met Abu Jalil and the duo then decided to return to Asunción ‘to speak with the [Israeli] ambassador in the name of the entire group of Palestinians’. AlRahman alleged that when they arrived at the embassy, he waited in the hallway while Abu Jalil entered the secretary's office and ‘a short while after, he heard gunshots’. Claiming to have fled the scene by catching a bus to his boarding house, he surrendered to Paraguayan authorities who were waiting for him. Nearly two months later, Abu Jalil countered that he also had been outside the embassy when an alleged third acquaintance fired upon the Israeli secretary and the Jewish-Paraguayan clerk.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Despite obvious attempts to deflect blame, Abu Jalil agreed with AlRahman's claim about the despojo of his documents after his entry into Paraguay that preceded the tragic shooting at Israel's embassy.

Although absent from this reportage of trial proceedings, Varon continued to head the Israeli diplomatic mission and maintained an array of public activities. He frequently appeared in ABC Color's high-society column, ‘ABC en sociedad’ (‘ABC in Society’), for several dinners at his residency, attended by diplomats and Paraguayan state officials.Footnote ¹¹¹ In these and other events, Varon hosted or met with Paraguay's foreign minister, Raul Sapena Pastor, and other officials in this ministry who could have properly relayed messages to Stroessner.Footnote ¹¹² Varon also helped to organise the visits of Israeli academics, musicians and agricultural technicians for the benefit of the Paraguayan public as well as events that commemorated Israeli independence day and the release of his own book, Si yo fuera paraguayo (If I were Paraguayan).Footnote ¹¹³ Regardless of the diplomat's possible involvement in the trail or trial of those vanquished after 1967, these efforts to build Israel's relations with Paraguay after its victory in the Six-Day War are necessarily entangled with Palestinian displacement. Whether diplomatic, educational or market-oriented, Israeli–Paraguayan relations developed at the same time that a Paraguayan court was asked to consider Israel's own role in encouraging the emigration of Palestinians from Gaza.

In March and June 1972, the prosecution and defence made their closing statements. As recounted by ABC Color, Zawluk's lawyers alleged that the defendants were ‘two Palestinian (Arab) terrorists [sic] who coinciding with other terrorist attacks perpetrated in various parts of the world against Israelis, came to Paraguay for the consummation of their cowardly deeds’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In response, the Syrian-Lebanese-led defence stated that, before judging the case, the court ‘should analyse the situation of the Palestinians who were sent from a distant country to our own’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It was ‘highly conscientious’, urged the defence, ‘to draw a picture of them in order to comprehend their truth’. In opposite ways, the prosecution and defence constructed South America in the geography of the Arab–Israeli conflict. While Zawluk's lawyers claimed that the two Palestinians came to Paraguay as part of an Arab conspiracy against Israel, their Syrian-Lebanese lawyer referenced European Jewish colonialism and the Israeli plan to encourage Palestinian emigration that preceded the Israeli embassy shooting in Asunción. Remarkably, both diametrically opposed views were not only mitigated by a Syrian-Lebanese-led defence and a Jewish-Paraguayan plaintiff but also contained by the Paraguayan judicial system.

Unfinished Histories and Connected Areas

Not long after these closing remarks in mid-1972, the two Palestinians were sentenced to 13 years of jail in Paraguay, and with the appeals filed by the defence, they were required to serve only eight of them.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The plaintiff, Diana Zawluk, hardly felt vindicated. According to the 2004 Ma'ariv article, Zawluk moved around until finally settling in Israel.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Jewish-Paraguayan reflected that, after the trial, ‘I was afraid to stay in Paraguay … I did not think the Palestinians were looking for me, but it was scary still.’ More haunted by this event is Moshe Peer, the widower of the slain secretary, who had to raise their two children. ‘My family’, stated Peer in the same article, ‘was the victim of this transfer.’ He characterised the episode as a ‘security screw-up’. Though lacking empathy with Palestinians, a Jewish-Paraguayan citizen and an Israeli foreign officer who each had very little to gain from an Israeli government plan to encourage their emigration suffered some of its worst losses.

In contrast, the Israeli ambassador felt accommodated by Stroessner's regime, and less than two months after the trial's end, he and his family bid farewell to Paraguay.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Taking note of the verdict in his memoirs, Varon stated, ‘Contrary to other Palestinian terrorists the world over, they [AlRahman and Abu Jalil] served their sentences.’Footnote ¹¹⁹ Whether or not Varon was ‘in the know’ about the Israeli plan to promote Palestinian emigration that preceded the shooting, the research of Nur Masalha, Israel Shahak and Tom Segev, based on primary sources from the Middle East, indicates that there was an Israeli plan to relocate Palestinians to Paraguay. But high-ranking Israeli officials seeking to allay the ‘refugee problem’ after June 1967 could hardly have imagined that two Gazans who were encouraged to emigrate would fire shots within the Israeli embassy in mid-1970 and that Stroessner would choose not to extradite them, but rather to prosecute them in a trial that lasted for the next two years.

In this dramatic chain of actions and reactions, the Stronato accommodated not only the victor but also the vanquished from the so-called Six-Day War. After refusing to hand over the assailants, the Paraguayan regime supported Israel's request for the Palestinians to be brought to justice as the embassy's former Jewish-Paraguayan clerk became the domestic litigant in a court case that convicted AlRahman and Abu Jalil. Concurrently, these two Palestinians were assisted by influential Stronistas of Syrian-Lebanese origin who privately and juridically led their defence, which highlighted Israel's role in bringing them to Paraguay, in order to obtain more lenient sentencing, ironically from the same authoritarian government implicated in the Palestinians’ resettlement. The final verdict felt like a just settlement for the Syrian-Lebanese lawyer, who beseeched me in an interview: ‘Don't forget that a homicide had been committed here.’Footnote ¹²⁰ In acknowledging that the two Palestinians had both suffered and authored violent actions, this Syrian-Lebanese descendant, who went on to become president of the ANR political party that ruled during Stroessner's 35-year regime, underscored how he sought to accommodate those vanquished in 1967.

In containing those who won and lost in the June war, authoritarian South America served not as a passive, pre-given region separate from the Middle East, but rather as an active space constructed through the Arab–Israeli conflict. At the very least, the connections between these two seemingly distant regions are significant because they draw attention to less remarked-upon relations of difference within South America, namely those of Syrian-Lebanese and Jews. Encouraged to emigrate from Gaza by the post-1967 Israeli government, two Palestinians were indicted by the Israeli embassy's former clerk of Jewish-Paraguayan background and defended by Syrian-Lebanese descendants with influential access to the Stronato. As noted here, the wider Arab- and Jewish-Paraguayan communities in Asunción respectively retained low profiles in the aftermath of the shooting and the subsequent two-year trial. Even within the next ten years, Syrian-Lebanese and Jewish authors who separately published books about their respective communities in Paraguay, referenced earlier, failed to mention the shooting and the trial altogether.Footnote ¹²¹ In so doing, they not only defused the effects of the June 1967 war, but also distanced their own relations of difference in Paraguay from the Arab–Israeli conflict.

Incomplete histories remain, however, of the other 23 or more Gazans after the two most visible among them were sentenced to jail in Paraguay. In January 1979 one of the earlier arrivés mentioned above, Fared Shain, requested to be interviewed by ABC Color.Footnote ¹²² Without mentioning his September 1969 journey to Asunción and his testimony to the Paraguayan DRE, Shain asked ABC Color to publish his open request to the Israeli embassy in Asunción for a visa to return to Gaza, in order to see his dying mother and his six children. A week later, AlRahman and Abu Jalil appeared in Hoy, a Paraguayan newspaper founded by HDD a couple of years before.Footnote ¹²³ The article, ‘Do You Remember the Palestinians?’, interviewed the two Gazans close to the end of their sentence. They recounted their ordeal that began ‘after the Six-Day War’ when Palestine was occupied and Israel paid for their passage to Paraguay, only to abandon them. Reconsidering their actions in the embassy shooting as borne of ‘desperation’ and ‘without politics’, both expressed the desire to remain in South America because, as one stated, ‘We Palestinians are men without a country.’ Whether seeking to return to Palestine, intending to stay in Paraguay or heading elsewhere, these Gazans lend urgency to Appadurai's call to study ‘how others, in what we still take to be certain areas as we define them, see the rest of the world in regional terms’.Footnote ¹²⁴ These Palestinians saw and experienced what are often assumed to be fixed and separate areas of the world in ways that moved and connected them, forcing us to locate Paraguay within the Arab–Israeli conflict itself. In a telling irony, the displacement of Palestinians connects South America and the post-1967 Middle East.