'If Israel falls, all of the West is next' – Milei calls on Latin America to align with Israel

President Javier Milei reaffirmed Argentina's international alignment with Israel and the United States on Monday, using a keynote speech at a conference to call for a regional alliance against terrorism and anti-Semitism.

Milei, speaking at the Latin American Conference of the Israel Allies Foundation in Buenos Aires, said there is "no possible neutrality" in the face of such threats and called on Latin America to offer greater backing to Israel.

Milei said anti-Semitism poses a threat to all of Western civilisation as he defended his government's foreign policy decisions and urged Latin American countries to join the "Isaac Accords," an Israeli initiative aimed at strengthening cooperation with nations in the region.

The President opened his remarks by recalling the bombings of the Israeli Embassy and the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 respectively, attacks that left 114 people dead. 

Defending Israel was a central theme of the address. He described the nation as "the last line of defence" against terrorist organisations and regimes such as Iran's.

"If Israel falls, all of the West is next," he warned, framing its defence as both a "moral" imperative and a matter of "self-preservation" for Western democracies.

He added that Western values originate in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that attacks on Israel amount to attacks on those principles too.

Milei dedicated part of his address to denouncing anti-Semitism, which he called "the canary in the coalmine of the West's moral decline," invoking the biblical story of Amalek in the book of Shemot as a metaphor for contemporary terrorism.

The La Libertad Avanza leader argued that anti-Semitism did not vanish after the Holocaust but simply took on new forms. 

He pointed to Hamas' October 7, 2023 attack on Israel as the most recent example of that threat, part of what he called a continuum stretching from the Iranian regime to Hezbollah and other groups.

Milei then linked the rise of anti-Semitism in Latin America to what he described as the influence of "21st-century socialism," arguing that left-wing governments across the region had for decades maintained ties with Israel's enemies, allowed Iranian influence to expand and downplayed attacks on Jewish communities.

He claimed there is an "implicit alliance" between the radical left and Islamist terrorism, rooted, he said, in a shared rejection of Western values.

Addressing lawmakers and political figures from across the region, Milei called for laws to strengthen the fight against terrorism and the financing of extremist organisations. "Words without action are just words," he said, adding that the region had already had "too many speeches and too much inaction."

In his closing remarks, Milei argued Latin America is undergoing a political shift and welcomed what he called the retreat of the left across the region.

"First they lost in Chile, last week they lost in Colombia, we already know they lost in Peru too, and I hope they lose in Brazil in October," he said. He also claimed Cuba's government had been forced to "acknowledge the failure of its ideology" and credited "the bold intervention of the United States" with ending Nicolás Maduro's rule in Venezuela.

He closed by framing the international landscape as a contest between two opposing models, telling the region's leaders the choices made "in the coming years will determine which side of history we end up on."

"There is no possible neutrality," he concluded.

– TIMES/NA/PERFIL