February 20, 2013

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA) — Argentinians living in Israel have organized a rally to protest the agreement signed between Argentina and Iran on a joint investigation of the 1994 AMIA Jewish center bombing.

The rally outside Argentina’s embassy in the central Israeli city of Herzliya Pituach is scheduled for Friday. It was organized via the Facebook group Kehila Latina en Israel.

“We the Argentinian community in Israel, with no political parties and in our framework as Argentines, Israelis and Jews, but particularly as human beings committed to truth and justice, reject all kinds of dialogue that does not help in the resolution of the AMIA bombing case,” Gaston Mendez, a rally organizer who moved to Israel in 2003, told JTA.

Among the scheduled speakers is the Argentinian-Israeli journalist Roxana Levinson, whose uncle Jaime Plaksin was killed in the AMIA bombing. Levinson’s aunt Graciela Levinson had been killed in 1992 in the terrorist attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires.

“This will be an opportunity to express my doubts, my concern and the great distrust that such an agreement with a country like Iran generates in me,” Levinson told JTA. “I think there are too many dark points in this agreement and too many unanswered questions.

“Here in Israel, unfortunately, there are several families with more than one victim in different attacks. In Argentina, only mine. But the pain does not stop us from seeing things clearly.”

At the demonstration, the organizers are scheduled to read a letter to the Argentinian ambassador. It reads, in part, that Argentina “cannot sign any international agreement with a dictatorial regime who represses the political opposition brutally, who oppresses its people, violating human rights especially women’s rights, and freedom of expression, freedom of belief and religion, and denies the Holocaust, as does the current Iranian government.”

Organizers will ask rally participants to sign a petition against the memorandum of understanding, which then will be delivered to the Argentinian ambassador to Israel, Carlos Faustino Garcia.

In Argentina, some 300 people attended a Feb. 14 demonstration against the pact. The protesters included relatives of the survivors of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish center and survivors of the Holocaust.
 

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