Lawyers for Palestine in Chile say they have filed a formal petition with the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic, asking it to investigate Chile’s Ambassador to Israel, Gabriel Zaliasnik, over an interview broadcast on Aug. 26 on “Defending Israel,” a US programme on the Jewish Broadcasting Service (JBS). The group announced the filing in a press statement.
According to the statement, Zaliasnik, introduced in the interview as Chile’s ambassador, accused Chile’s Palestinian community of manipulating its numbers, saying “they play with the number because that’s politics.” The group notes that in the same interview he conceded that on the figure “we can speculate only.” It says he was asked only about the community’s size, yet went on to refer to the “radicalising” of “some small sectors” of it, without naming any person, organisation or event.
The group also says the interview took place in front of a map showing the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza as parts of Israel. It says the ambassador raised no objection, although Chile has recognised the State of Palestine since 2011, and it argues that he stayed silent where he was obliged to represent Chile.
The statement says the Civil Service Statute prohibits all public officials from engaging in arbitrary discrimination as defined in Law No. 20,609, which protects, among other grounds, ethnicity, nationality and political opinion.