Ukraine and Palestine: What does that have to do with us?

South America often claims it has nothing to do with distant wars. Yet there are maps that move us, and others we merely observe. The truth is that memory shapes the continent’s political empathy far more than geography does. That is why two contemporary wars, equally brutal and equally distant, provoke such different reactions across the region.

Ukraine has been burning for two Years, the response is muted. Gaza bleeds, the continent ignites. This is not hypocrisy, but something more complex, and perhaps more revealing, than we would like to admit.

South American empathy is not born from the news cycle, but from history. Gaza is not merely a besieged territory, it is a historical mirror, uncomfortable, recognizable: prolonged occupation, imposed borders, asymmetries of power, civilians crushed between forces and discourses that never consulted them. For a continent marked by external interventions, sponsored coups, maps redrawn from afar, and promises of “order” that always arrived hand in hand with violence, Palestine sounds familiar.

Ukraine, by contrast, sounds like something else: a conflict between recognized states, fought on the classic chessboard of European geopolitics, with formal alliances, regular armies, and a diplomatic language that was never ours. It is not that Ukrainian suffering is lesser; it is that it does not touch the same wound, does not activate the same memory. And in politics, memory almost always speaks louder than pragmatic reason.

This difference in perception also exposes a silent hierarchy of moral credibility. The Ukrainian narrative reaches South America mediated by the same voices that, for decades, justified interventions in the region in the name of democracy, stability, or the fight against abstract enemies. It is a familiar language, and precisely for that reason, one received with suspicion. The Palestinian cause, on the other hand, has crossed generations without ever becoming a victory: no Hollywood, no Marshall Plan, no uplifting ending. It persists as continuous defeat, and long defeats tend to generate identification in regions that have learned to live without redemption. For many South Americans, Ukraine appears as part of a struggle among power centers that have always decided the world without consulting us; Palestine, by contrast, seems to speak from the margins, a place we know intimately.

There is also an element of historical mirroring that is rarely spoken aloud. For decades, South America was a stage for conflicts framed by the logic of the Cold War, where the lines between aggressor and victim were blurred by strategic convenience. Dictatorships were justified as “necessary,” coups as “preventive,” massacres as “excesses.” This vocabulary left deep scars in the way the continent listens to war rhetoric today. When Ukraine is presented as the advanced frontier of Western democracy, many South American ears recall how often that same argument was used to legitimize violence in their own backyards. Gaza, meanwhile, comes without a civilizing promise, only a naked, repetitive tragedy, devoid of effective political marketing. It is precisely this lack of polish that makes the conflict more intelligible, closer, harder to relativize.

Add to this the weight of asymmetry, a factor South American sensibility recognizes almost instinctively. The region knows well the language of unequal power: modern armies against civilian populations, cutting-edge technology against improvised resistance, official narratives against anonymous bodies. In the continent’s average reading, the war in Ukraine appears as a confrontation between states, with tanks, alliances, chancelleries, and carefully worded communiqués. Palestine, by contrast, emerges as the recurring image of organized abandonment, a population compressed between borders it does not control and decisions it does not make. It is not that South America ignores Ukrainian Sovereignty, it is that it recognizes, almost effortlessly, the Palestinian drama as an extreme version of something it has already lived: the experience of being an object, not a subject, of international politics.

South America has learned to distrust narratives that present themselves as the defense of international order, law, or civilization. These words reached the continent almost always preceded by fleets, coups, or “stabilization missions.” Thus, when Ukraine is framed as the liberal democratic frontier against authoritarian barbarism, many in the Global South hear less of the real tragedy of the Ukrainian people and more of the familiar echo of a discourse that once justified selective interventions and conditional solidarities. Gaza, by contrast, arrives without civilizational promises, it arrives only with ruins. And ruins, stripped of redemptive rhetoric, sound more honest to a continent that knows well the distance between discourse and practice.

None of this means that South America is “right” in one empathy and “wrong” in another. Nor does it absolve the continent of simplifications, selective silences, or convenient blindness. The point lies elsewhere: our reactions say less about Ukraine or Palestine than they do about ourselves, about which wounds still ache, which discourses we have learned to fear, which tragedies we recognize without needing translation.

To ask “and what does that have to do with us?” is, in truth, a poorly framed question. We have everything to do with these wars not because we participate in them, but because we project onto them our own history, our failures, our suspicions, our poorly healed defeats. South American empathy does not follow maps or alliances; it follows memory. And memory is neither neutral nor obedient to the logic of chancelleries.

Perhaps the deepest discomfort lies there: in reacting so differently to two human tragedies of comparable scale, we reveal that international politics is never only about universal principles, but about whom we recognize as similar, who feels familiar to us, and who speaks in a language we have learned to distrust. South America does not choose Palestine over Ukraine; it chooses, consciously or not, the narrative that least resembles those that have historically wounded it.

In the end, these reactions do not tell us who is right in the world, they tell us who we have been in it. And until the continent confronts this mirror honestly, it will continue to believe it is merely observing distant wars, when in fact it is only reacting to its own memories projected onto them.