The disaster diplomacy behind Israel's return to Venezuela

On 11 August, Delcy Rodríguez’s de facto government announced the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel.

Venezuela, like Bolivia, had severed diplomatic relations with Israel in January 2009 in response to Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s military aggression that killed over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza.

In a similar vein to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Peru, Chile, and the Dominican Republic over the past month, Venezuela began the process of re-establishing diplomatic relations with Israel at the consular level.

The move followed intense public relations efforts by Netanyahu and Delcy Rodríguez in the wake of the twin earthquakes that struck northern Venezuela in June, during which ZAKA and Israeli army operatives were deployed in Caracas and La Guaira.

The disaster, with a provisional death toll of over 6,300 and tens of thousands injured, was used by Delcy Rodríguez to argue that humanitarian cooperation would “open new paths and doors” for the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, whilst Netanyahu spoke of rebuilding “ruins and relations (…) proving how good it is to have relations with Israel”.

The reorientation of Venezuelan foreign policy from its alliances with Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba to its alignment with the US is part of a broader shift to the right across the region.

In most cases, this change has been imposed through the ballot box, with significant US interference and overt pressure.

In the case of Venezuela, it is primarily a consequence of US armed intervention on 3 January, which accelerated a political decline that had been underway for over a decade, culminating in total capitulation to the US, including major legal reforms at the service of US oil and mining corporations and the authorisation of military exercises and bombings on Venezuelan territory.

It is not surprising that the Israeli government declared that 2026 would be the year of Latin America. Besides Venezuela, Bolivia and Colombia also re-established relations with Israel. Honduras and Chile, meanwhile, have reappointed ambassadors who had been absent for years in protest against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Javier Milei, who calls himself the ‘world’s most Zionist president’, hosted legislators from 12 other Latin American countries in Buenos Aires in April to promote what he dubbed the ‘Isaac Accords’, parodying the ‘Abraham Accords’ between Israel and various Arab states.

It was slated as a forum to promote support for Israel and the adoption of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism, which includes criticism of Israel as an instance of antisemitism.

Venezuela's post-Maduro political direction

In 2017-2018, whilst Delcy Rodríguez was Foreign Minister, there had already been an attempt to re-establish relations with Israel, as part of which Isaac Cohen, a leading rabbi of the Israeli Association of Venezuela, was awarded the Order of the Liberators.

Cohen would resume this role this year by mediating between Delcy Rodríguez and Netanyahu for the deployment of Israeli army officers and ZAKA agents in July to assess the damage to infrastructure caused by the twin earthquakes, and subsequently to re-establish diplomatic relations.

In addition to the conspicuous Israeli military presence following the earthquakes, in July, Caracas received delegations of Christian Zionists from the US National Faith Advisory Board and Republicans Brian Mast, Randy Fine, and Kat Cammack, Florida representatives in the US Congress linked to the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, who were received by Delcy Rodríguez.

In an interview in late July, when asked about what she considered Maduro’s greatest mistake, Delcy Rodríguez stated: “We should have been more open geopolitically (…) we are moving towards a new relationship with the US, and I believe that Venezuela’s international relations should be more open and diversified”.

Beyond its anti-imperialist rhetoric, the very structure of the Venezuelan regime has, from its inception, included elements of Christian Zionism.

It has cultivated its relationship with the Protestant right for years, through funding programmes such as ‘My Well-Equipped Church’, a monthly stipend for evangelical pastors, and the creation of an official Evangelical Pastors’ Day.

Nicolás Maduro Guerra, son of the former head of state and a member of the National Assembly, as well as Vice-President for Religious Affairs of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, was the first senior official to call for resuming relations with Israel on 16 January, barely two weeks after US forces killed 81 people and kidnapped his father in Caracas.

Christian Zionists, Trump, and a right-wing shift

According to reports in the Israeli press, in the weeks leading up to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, the Israeli Minister for Energy and Infrastructure and security cabinet member Eli Cohen discussed with his Venezuelan counterpart potential cooperation in energy, trade, and technology, with the diversification of its energy suppliers being one of the priorities for Israel.

Omar Vázquez Heredia, sociology professor at the Central University of Venezuela, considers the re-establishment of relations with Israel as “part of a foreign policy aligned with the Trump administration,” which he says has its precedent in the Venezuelan state’s withdrawal from the ICC amidst the State Department’s campaign to dismantle it.

“Rebuilding relations whilst Israel continues to commit genocide stirs widespread condemnation and demonstrates that the sole objective of the Chavista leaders is to prolong their control of the state, even if it implies subordination to Trump and Rubio,” Vázquez Heredia told The New Arab.

Ilan Pappé, professor at the University of Exeter and co-director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies, told The New Arab that Israel seeks to strengthen “an international coalition to sustain its current policies against the Palestinians, the Lebanese, the Syrians and the Iranians”.

According to Pappé, this coalition “has dwindled over the years, with the departure of social-democratic governments that used to support Israel but refused to remain in such a coalition given the nature of Israeli policies in recent years”.

The Israeli historian warns that “Israel can still rely on right-wing politics wherever they are found: Christian Zionists, some Jewish communities, the military, the security sector, and high-tech industries. But it needs to rely on a future in which there is no chance of the Left returning to power where there is currently a right-wing party in power”.

According to Alexander Aviña, a professor of history at Arizona State University, Israel views the current right-wing transition in Latin America as an opportunity to strengthen its position and influence political developments in the region, particularly given its growing international isolation over the genocide in Gaza.

Christian Zionism, following the spread of Pentecostalism since the early 2000s, has also laid the ideological groundwork for deeper relations with Israel.

“The right wing in Latin America has been using the Israeli flag as part of the symbolism of their political movement; for example, Bolsonaro in Brazil,” Aviña told The New Arab.

“One way to interpret the right-left divide in Latin America, at least at grassroots level, is to look at who is pro-Israel and who is pro-Palestine. It’s a bit murkier at state level, as always. For example, Mexico’s centre-left government has been unable to stop buying Israeli weapons.”

Trump’s presence in the White House presents, in some respects, an even more favourable situation for Israel in Latin America than in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was the main market for its weapons exports.

“The justification for Israel’s heightened role in Central America was that the Carter administration stopped sending weapons and money to these death squad regimes run by the military dictatorships in Latin America, which opened up the space for Israel to start arming the Salvadorans, the Guatemalans, and Nicaragua until the Sandinista revolution,” Aviña told The New Arab.

“Even Reagan, due to the US Congress and the Boland Amendment, was unable to openly align himself with what Israel was doing in Central America. Now, with Trump in power, there is no need to pretend that they are not aligned with Israel’s economic and political goals in Latin America.”

However, Latin America’s rightward shift and subsequent political opening for relations with Israel is not necessarily permanent.

“If you look at the polls, Israel’s reputation is, quite rightly, at rock bottom. In countries where there is an electoral option for the Left to return to power, those favourable conditions for Israel might recede,” Aviña says.

Simón Rodríguez is a Venezuelan journalist, researcher, and editor at Venezuelanvoices.org.

Edited by Charlie Hoyle