The Diaspora
Bethlehem's emigrants built Latin America's largest Palestinian communities
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Newsdesk gathers reporting from wire services and primary sources and rewrites every story in-house before publication. How our journalism is made →
The largest concentration of Palestinians outside the Arab world is not in Europe or North America. It is in Chile, where some five hundred thousand people trace their descent to Palestine, and in two small Central American republics where the proportions are more striking still.
Honduras, a country of about ten and a half million, is described in the reference literature as home to the second largest Palestinian-descended population outside the Middle East, with estimates running to three hundred thousand. El Salvador holds the third largest in Latin America. Almost all of them came from one small district: Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahour.
The migration began in the last years of the nineteenth century, under Ottoman rule, and it began as commerce. Men left the Bethlehem hills as itinerant traders in devotional goods and textiles, crossed the Atlantic, and worked their way inland through ports and market towns where the competition was thin. Their descendants moved from peddling to shops, from shops to factories and banks, and from there into public life.
What that produced this year#
The scale of that arrival is legible in Honduras today. President Nasry Asfura, sworn in on 27 January after winning December's election with 40.3 per cent of the vote, descends from Christian Palestinian emigrants from Bethlehem — his father's parents reached Honduras in the late 1890s, his mother's in 1918.
He was a Tegucigalpa councilman, then a deputy, then the capital's mayor for eight years before taking the presidency at sixty-seven.
His main opponent in that race, Salvador Nasralla, is also commonly identified as of Palestinian descent. Reporting on the election noted the arithmetic without much comment: a country where the two leading candidates for the presidency both carried Bethlehem surnames.
One origin, several politics#
It would be a mistake to read a single Palestinian position out of any of this, and the scholarship does not. Palestinians in Latin America are, as the Institute for Palestine Studies has long described them, largely Christian and largely middle to upper class, well represented among political and business elites — and their politics range across the spectrum of the countries they helped build.
In Chile, support for Palestinian statehood runs across party lines and far beyond the community itself; the state recognised Palestine in 2011, and Club Deportivo Palestino, founded by immigrants in 1920, still plays in the first division in the colours of the flag. El Salvador, by contrast, has kept notably close relations with Israel.
What holds across all three is memory rather than a programme. A century after the first ships, the family names of a handful of villages south of Jerusalem are read out in Central American cabinets and Chilean boardrooms — and Bethlehem, walled and shrinking, is still where they come from.
.jpg?width=640)
