16 September 2025
Rawa Alsagheer at a demonstration in Sao Paolo, Brazil, on 17 May, 2025.
Siman Khoury left his hometown of Aboud, Palestine, in May 1980.
Just 25 and recently married at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity to Nassira Miguel Jubis, a Salvadoran national of Palestinian descent, the two left for El Salvador to meet a community of Palestinians, including Nassira’s family, who began arriving in the country over a century earlier.
But the newlyweds would never return to Palestine as they had planned.
“We thought two months would be enough time to pack our bags again to return to our home,” said Khoury, “but our destiny was written differently.”
Following multiple rejected attempts to renew his laissez-passer (the travel document given to Palestinians instead of a passport), the young couple had to give up their dreams of home and he embraced his new life in El Salvador.
The early years were long and hard, and took in a lot of different jobs, “from factory manager to clothing salesman, from teacher to learning a new language in order to trade, from eating hummus and falafel to tamales and pupusas,” he told The Electronic Intifada.
Now he is president of the Palestinian Salvadoran Association and director of the Palestinian Museum of El Salvador, Latin America’s first Palestinian museum. There he oversees a striking collection of cultural artifacts, from Fatimid-era gold coins to traditional fabrics to the works of prominent figures such as Edward Said, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish and George Habash.
During Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, where over 64,000 people have been killed since October 2023, the drive to galvanize his community has never been greater.
“Our voices and our bodies are united in resistance and dignity, demanding an end to genocide,” Khoury said.
At the time of writing, Khoury is preparing for a hunger strike in solidarity with the people of Gaza where, as of 10 September 2025, at least 404 people have been deliberately starved to death.
From Ottomans to the Nakba
Latin America is home to the largest Palestinian community outside of the Middle East and North Africa, yet their stories are rarely told.
Predominantly the descendants of a pre-Nakba generation who fled economic hardship and forced conscription under Ottoman rule, they descend mainly from Bethlehem and Beit Jala, Jerusalem, Taybeh and Ramallah. To this day, the majority live in Chile, home to some 500,000 people of Palestinian descent, with other substantial communities in Honduras and El Salvador.
Palestinians in Latin America are “mostly middle to upper-class Christians who are well-represented among political and business elites,” according to Cecilia Baeza, cofounder of RIMAAL, a network of researchers on the links between Latin America and the Middle East.
“They have therefore held little interest for Palestinian historiography as they did not meet the criteria of “Palestinian-ness” as defined by a nationalist discourse centered on dispossession, denial and statelessness,” she wrote in a 2014 essay for the Journal of Palestine Studies.
Omar Salame’s Dabke troupe in full flow at the Palestinian embassy in Santiago, Chile.
Yet this disregarded diaspora is the multifaceted product of migration across successive periods of imperial and colonial rule. It ranges from the great-grandchildren of Ottoman-era migrants who have never set foot in Palestine, to children of the 1947-49 Nakba, the 1967 Naksa and subsequent intifadas, with visceral memories of Zionist rule.
Upon arrival in the late 1800s, the first Palestinians with their Ottoman passports were categorized as “Turcos”, a derogatory term which became synonymous with merchant, or peddler, because “many started out as itinerant salesmen, often selling small religious items from the Holy Land,” according to Manzar Foroohar, a historian with California Polytechnic State University.
Anticipating their return home, they avoided work in agriculture, Foroohar writes, as such work required a sense of permanence. However, following news of the Nakba in the late 1940s, many settled down, expanding their businesses and exploring new ventures, joined by relatives escaping persecution and seeking opportunity.
Ongoing task
In Honduras, home to the region’s second biggest Palestinian community, Elias Karufe tells a similar story to Khoury’s. Arriving in 1978 from Beit Jala near Bethlehem, he also started out as an itinerant salesman before building his own textile business.
Fortunately, he told The Electronic Intifada, “God was very generous from then on.”
Now, as the Honorary Consul for Palestine in Honduras, which recognized the State of Palestine in 2011, bridging the gap between his host country and his homeland is an ongoing task, he said.
The administration of Juan Orlando Hernandez – who was president from 2014-2022, and who was convicted of drug trafficking in 2024 – maintained cozy relations with the Zionist state.
In 2021, Hernandez relocated the embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to signify the country’s recognition of Jerusalem as the “undivided capital” of Israel.
An entirely different policy has been adopted by the current administration under Xiomara Castro, despite the continued influence of the country’s pro-Israel Evangelical lobby.
The country has openly condemned Israel’s war on Gaza as a genocide and recalled its ambassador in November 2023.
Honduras is also one of eight countries in The Hague Group, a global bloc formed to take economic, diplomatic and legal action against Israel for its crimes.
Yet for the community itself, watching the horrors unfolding in Gaza, Karufe described a sense of helplessness.
Despite protesting and organizing, he said, there is a constant sense of “not being able to do anything to stop the injustice and genocide that engulfs the entire population.”
Cultural resistance
For many in the diaspora, being Palestinian is bound to a process of cultural resistance.
“Our existence is threatened by a colonial settler entity that is trying to erase us,” said Omar Salame, cultural director at Club Palestino, a Palestinian social club in the heart of Santiago, Chile.
While Palestinians in Gaza are resisting by surviving, for Salame preserving Palestine’s cultural traditions is essential to the protection of Palestine from afar.
“They [Israelis] love our costumes, our food, our music. But they want it all for themselves.”
Club Palestino has sat at the intersection of culture and politics since it was founded in 1938. By hosting lectures, dancing dabke and learning tatreez, traditional embroidery, they connect new generations to their Palestinian heritage despite the distance in time and space.
“We are the living testimony of our own existence,” Salame said.
Salame is a third generation Palestinian-Chilean whose family left Palestine over a century ago. From Bethlehem on his father’s side and Beit Jala on his mother’s, perilous journeys across land and sea led them to the other side of the world by 1905.
Omar Salame as a child with the 2004 Deportivo Palestino squad.
His father, Jaime Salame, was president of Deportivo Palestino, a Chilean football club established by Palestinian immigrants in 1920 and known for public displays of solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
The team normally plays in the colors of the Palestinian flag, but at a game with Union Española in May 2024, the team walked out dressed in black, holding the imaginary hands of children murdered by Israel in Gaza.
Back in 2014, the club was fined by Chile’s Football Federation for shaping the number “1” on the back of their shirts into a map of Palestine before the 1948 annexation.
A recently released limited-edition jersey features this same design over a black and white keffiyeh print. The club promises that a percentage of all proceeds will go to the Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem, home to more than 7,000 people.
“All my life I have been a fan of Palestino,” said Salame, proudly showing me a photograph of himself as a child with the 2004 squad that he found in the stadium’s gift shop.
Historical rupture
“I first saw Palestine through my fathers eyes,” says Soraya Misleh, a Palestinian-Brazilian journalist in São Paulo.
Born in 1935, in the village of Qaqun, her father, Abder Raouf Misleh, his siblings and their parents, were expelled during the Nakba. Abder Raouf was just 13. Fleeing for survival, “by ship, on a 12-day journey, with the clothes on his back and only $100 in his pocket,” according to Misleh, her father eventually arrived in Brazil in 1956. Like others before him, once there, he worked as a peddler.
Through her father, who died in 2023, Soraya was always connected to her heritage. Now, she is a journalist and coordinator at the Front in Defense of the Palestinian People in São Paulo, a rights advocacy group.
She is also a member of the Shireen Abu Akleh Collective, formed in June 2025 and named after the Al Jazeera journalist Israel murdered in 2022. It’s a group committed to “denouncing the genocide” and “criticizing commercial and traditional media that continues to propagate war,” she told The Electronic Intifada.
In São Paolo, she added, the Palestinian restaurant and cultural center Al Janiah has become “a meeting place for all just struggles” and “a symbol of Palestinian resistance” from afar.
Also in Brazil, Rawa Alsagheer is a Palestinian-Syrian filmmaker and coordinator with Samidoun, a network of organizations in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners.
“Being outside Palestine has never meant being outside the struggle,” she told The Electronic Intifada.
Alsagheer was born in Syria. Zionist militias had forcibly displaced her family from Haifa in 1948. In 2014, she escaped the Syrian civil war, migrating through Turkey and Europe to Brazil, the first country in the Americas to offer special humanitarian visas to those fleeing Syria in 2013, according to the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR.
The travel document used by Sorayah Misleh’s father.
The Brazilian diaspora has become deeply divided, observed Alsagheer, a division she attributes to the community’s geographical dispersion and the political consequences of the 1993 Oslo accords.
“Oslo not only fragmented Palestine physically and institutionalized the occupation. It also ideologically disarmed much of the diaspora,” she told The Electronic Intifada.
“In Brazil, this translated into an entire generation of Palestinians who were taught to hide their anger, to refrain from talking about return, to accept the idea of a ‘possible state’ in fenced and occupied lands. The struggle became a cultural symbol rather than political resistance.”
But something shifted after October 2023.
“Today, we see the emergence of a generation that no longer accepts the logic of ‘negotiation,’ that refuses to ask permission to exist,” Alsagheer told The Electronic Intifada. This is “a moment of historical rupture.”
For Gaza
“My soul hurts,” said Catherin Chomali Kokaly. “The worst thing is feeling powerless … with my hands tied. There is destruction, a genocide, and it won’t stop.”
Born in Chile, Kokaly is a businesswoman, an activist, and the “proud daughter of Palestinian parents.” She is also a member of the Palestinian Union of Latin America (UPAL) and has lived in Guatemala since 1992.
On 10 June, Kokaly, alongside her sister Teresa, a reconstructive surgeon and founder of Médicos por Palestina (Doctors for Palestine), as well as Siman Khoury, joined thousands of international comrades on the so-called Global March to Gaza that was to have started from Cairo.
“Activists from all countries, of different colors, languages and cultures shouted for the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea,” said Khoury.
Yet, “upon arrival at the airport [in Cairo], many people were deported. Then came hotel searches, and later, at checkpoints, many had their passports confiscated and were attacked by infiltrators during a peaceful demonstration,” Kokaly told The Electronic Intifada.
Armed only with medical supplies and hope, “we faced obstacles and repression,” she said, but at least “we broke the silence.”
“It doesn’t matter how many generations have passed,” Omar Salame said, “we are all part of the Palestinian people. So when we liberate Palestine, when we reconstruct our society, it will be very diverse because of this diaspora.”
In the fight against genocide and colonialism, “neither exile, nor repression, nor Zionist attacks will stop us,” Alsagheer said. “And in the midst of all this, Gaza is our guide.”
Ana Maria Monjardino is an independent journalist based in London.
