This piece focuses on votes at the UN General Assembly. Later pieces in this series will cover African voting at UNESCO and the UN Human Rights Council. Read the first in the series for an overview of Israel-Africa ties.
On the afternoon of March 17, 1992, Israel’s embassy in Argentina was reduced to rubble by a blast that killed 29 people – four Israelis and 25 Argentinians – and injured nearly 250. A group tied to Hezbollah, a proxy for Iran, claimed responsibility.
Former President Sebastián Piñera won Chile’s presidential election on Sunday, December 17. His triumph demonstrates a turn towards the center-right in a region that has been dominated by leftist movements for over a decade. In 2012, Piñera became the first Chilean president to visit Israel, a fact that sets great expectations for the future of bilateral cooperation.
At a time when the world is polarized, and our region faces challenges of all kinds, multilateral efforts to achieve common objectives, such as the Summit of the Americas now underway in Lima, Peru, should be welcomed – and called on to deliver results.
Benjamin Netanyahu's historic visit to Africa this week is the first by an Israeli prime minister in close to 50 years. While the occasion is to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Entebbe raid in which he lost a brother and Israel's military prowess dazzled the world, Israel has considerably more to celebrate in Africa today. Little of this is publicly known, as it is a fraught story of people-to-people affinities ill-served by frequent government-to-government misalliance.