Following four days of hearings last week, a verdict is expected Wednesday in the criminal case brought by the Delegation of Israeli-Argentine Associations (DAIA) based upon slanderous charges of “antisemitism” against Alejandro Bodart, the leader of the Argentine Socialist Workers Movement (MST), which belongs to the Left and Workers Front-Unity (FIT-U) coalition.

The prosecution was based on two posts on Twitter (now X) from May 2022. The first was “Zionists=Nazis,” commenting on the assassination by Israeli forces of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh of Al Jazeera. The second called Israel a “racist and genocidal state” on the anniversary of the Nakba, that is, the expulsion of 700,000 Arab Palestinians from their lands and killing of thousands in 1948, through which the state of Israel was founded. 

While the lawsuit preceded it, the Israeli onslaught against Gaza since October 2023 has only confirmed that the Zionist ruling class and its imperialist patrons in America and Europe have long seen genocide as the “final solution” to the Palestinian question. Within months, Israel has wiped out an estimated 10 percent of the defenseless population of the tiny, occupied territory and displaced most of it through bombings, starvation and destruction of critical infrastructure.

The prosecution of Bodart takes place after the International Criminal Court requested the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the crime of “extermination.” 

The World Socialist Web Site, whose differences with the MST and the Morenoite International Socialist League are well documented, calls on workers in Argentina and internationally to oppose the political frame-up against Bodart, which has nothing to do with anti-Jewish hatred. 

It is part of an offensive by ruling elites internationally, including in the US and Europe, to exploit baseless claims of antisemitism to criminalize all opposition to war. In Argentina, fascistic President Javier Milei is exploiting these claims to repress the resistance of the working class to his economic shock therapy and the accelerated alignment of Argentina behind the warring camp of US-NATO imperialism, which uses Tel Aviv as an armed outpost. 

The Bodart prosecution is only the tip of the iceberg. The DAIA and federal prosecutor Carlos Stornelli launched a similar case last November against Vanina Biasi, a legislator of the Partido Obrero, another group of the FIT-U, after she tweeted that the Israeli government had lied about the death of the hostage Emily Hand, who was later freed alive by Hamas. 

Then, on Friday, Milei’s Security Minister Patricia Bullrich announced the detention and planned deportation of seven individuals, claiming they belonged to “radical Islamic terrorist group identified after it threatened a Jewish journalist.” The police claims it found caches of weapons in their homes and “anti-Christian and anti-Jewish statements,” as well as alleged terrorist plots, on their Telegram and WhatsApp accounts. 

The charges against Bodart are based on the definition of “antisemitism” by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which it equates it with all criticism of Israel, including statements describing Israel as racist and comparing Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. 

During the hearings, the prosecutors had the prominent judge Franco Fiumara as a witness to present the “factual” premises of the case, including that Israel is a democratic state, that 98 percent of Jewish people are Zionists and that the Argentine state adopted the IHRA definition of “antisemitism,” which applies to Bodart’s tweets. 

As explained by WSWS editorial chairman David North in a seminal lecture last December, the dissolution of Judaism as a religious identity into the Israeli state and ideology of Zionism is an entirely fraudulent concoction “based not on history, but on biblical mythology,” specifically the claim of an ancestral home “promised” by God. 

The case against Bodart, moreover, confirms the warning made by UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, E. Tendayi Achiume. She called for an end to using the IHRA definition “owing to its susceptibility to being politically instrumentalized and the harm done to human rights resulting from such instrumentalization.”

Bodart’s lawyers, Ismael Jalil and María del Carmen Verdú, pointed to the description of Israel as an “apartheid” state by the UN Commission of Human Rights and the thousands of Jewish anti-Zionists who have demonstrated against the ongoing genocide across the United States, Argentina and internationally. Finally, Bodart’s lawyers argued that only the Foreign Ministry under Peronist President Alberto Fernandez adopted the IHRA definition, which does not make it judicially binding. 

Jalil stressed that “is impossible to condemn Alejandro Bodart without compromising the most elementary democratic right, which is the right of expression.” 

It is worth noting that judge Fiumara was the only Latin American participant in an international conference convoked last year by Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky to prepare a special war crimes tribunal against Russia, highlighting the connections of the Bodart case to US and European imperialism. Israel’s war in Gaza is one front of an expanding global conflict, including the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the drive to war against China. 

The DAIA also acted with the support of the Prosecutor’s Office of the City of Buenos Aires, which is governed by Jorge Macri, brother of ex-President Mauricio Macri, both close allies of President Javier Milei. 

In her testimony for the defense, Myriam Bregman, a human rights lawyer and former presidential candidate for the FIT-U, alluded to the hypocrisy of the prosecution, which is aligned with forces that support the legacy of the fascistic and openly antisemitic military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. “When I walked into the genocide trials and they shouted at me ‘fucking Jewess’ that was an anti-Semitic act,” she said, referring to her participation in cases against dictatorship officials. 

Jews were killed disproportionately by the dictatorship, about 12 percent of the 30,000 killed, and the junta was composed of open neo-Nazis. This did not stop Israel from becoming a top supplier of weapons and military-intelligence training to the Argentine junta. 

Milei has not only embraced the crimes of the dictatorship but has integrated open neo-Nazis into his government. This includes Solicitor General Rodolfo Barra, who was detained for participating in the fascist Tacuara Nationalist Movement in the early 1960s. Tacuara, which had direct ties to former Nazi officials hiding in Argentina, carried out hundreds of attacks, including bombings and setting fire to synagogues, Jewish schools and institutions, shooting, kidnapping and torturing Jewish students and youth, and desecrating Jewish cemeteries. 

The most famous attack by Tacuara was the assassination of a leftist youth Raúl Alterman, who was shot outside of the home of his parents, who then received a letter by the organization that said: “his son was killed because he was a communist Jewish dog.” 

Successive governments, including that of Milei, have consistently justified their political alignment with Tel Aviv, by referring with hypocritical remorse to the explosions in 1992 at the Israeli embassy and in 1994 at the AMIA Jewish Community center in Buenos Aires, which killed a total of 107 people and whose perpetrators were never identified.

Laura Alché, whose husband died in the 1994 bombing, exploded this narrative as a witness for the defense. First, she denounced the effort to “equate popular repudiation of the state of Israel’s invasion and massacre of the Gaza Strip with anti-Semitism.” Then, she argued: “Those of us who are victims of the AMIA attack know what an anti-Semitic attack is and we know how the Argentine state has covered up for 30 years those responsible for the crime and in this cover-up it was accompanied by and had as an accomplice the local Jewish leadership and the State of Israel.”