“Zionists control the world” and “Jesus was Palestinian” are just two of the claims made by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a three-hour episode of his show, Con Maduro+ on Monday.
Maduro, who has been an outspoken critic of Israel, said throughout the interview that the fight for Palestinian liberation was the most important battle in history.
“Palestine is the birthplace of humanity,” he began. “Palestine has always been Palestine. Look it up in the annals of all histories.
“The most important battle in human history is for this birthplace, and it is a battle for the liberation of Palestine, the liberation of Jerusalem,” the president said. “Jerusalem is the epicenter of the prophets, of God’s messengers – Abraham, David, Solomon, the Palestinian child Jesus, the Palestinian man Jesus Christ.”
This is not the first time Maduro has claimed Jesus – a Jewish man born in Judea, now Israel – was a Palestinian, having made similar comments in October 2023.
Maduro’s take on regional history
Maduro added that Palestine was the “epicenter of cultural and religious coexistence” among Jews, Christians, and Muslims until the colonialist project of the US and the Zionists destroyed the peace.
“76 years ago, the tragedy of the Palestinian people began, an Arab people, a Semitic people, because when people talk about antisemitism, then they are really speaking of the oldest Semitic people, which are the Arab people: the Palestinians,” he claimed.
“So bombing and killing Palestinians is being antisemitic,” Maduro continued. “Supporting the murder of Palestinians is being antisemitic.”
While the term “Semite” is used to refer to semitic-language-speaking peoples in the region, the use of the term is now obsolete. However, the term antisemitism was coined in reference to hatred of Jews in the mid-19th century. The word is credited to an Austrian Jewish scholar, Moritz Steinschneider.
Maduro lambasted those who tried to “paint [the conflict] as a religious one” saying instead that it was “a conflict between the colonialist project of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe to control an enclave of a militarized state and to expand all their capacities of influence, domination, and hegemony over the rest of the region.”
The Israel-Hamas War
The Venezuelan president also sharply criticized journalists, news outlets and media sites for referring to October 7, the date of the episode’s broadcast, as the “one-year anniversary of the Israel-Hamas war” or for speaking of “Hamas’s attack on Israel.”
Such journalists, he claimed, are “complicit in the genocide,” as they were portraying Israel’s war as being with Hamas, and not the Palestinian people, as Maduro claimed it to be.
“Were the 27,000 children who were killed by precision bombs part of Hamas?” he asked. “Were the more than 10,000 women who died cooking in their homes Hamas members? The 80% of Gazan buildings and homes destroyed – 80% – were they Hamas barracks?”
The war, he added, is “the most horrifying extermination war since the time of Hitler” not just against the Palestinians in Gaza, but now against the Lebanese people.
This “war of extermination,” as Maduro called it, now threatens to spread to “the beloved Arab people of Syria and the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Zionism and global control
Maduro spent a significant part of the episode discussing Zionism, which he claimed controls the world via money, technology, and political lobbying.
Listing his opposition members and political enemies, he added that behind each one is Zionism. This included María Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, and previous presidential candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski, who is of Jewish descent.
“The world should know that behind the Venezuelan right wing… is Zionism,” he said. “The Zionist project is a colonialist project that has demonstrated its capacity for violence and killing over the last 76 years.”
Maduro also condemned the International Court of Justice for not condemning Israel, saying it “showed who it answers to: it answers to the powers of the West, it answers to Zionism. The International Court of Justice could have stopped the massacre, the genocide.”
Maduro said the only hope for peace in the region is if the “Jewish people who live there in the occupied territory that they call ‘Israel,’ but which is actually the Palestine of Jesus of Nazareth, achieve a union with the Christian people and the Muslim people.”
Jews in Venezuela
To emphasize his point, Maduro drew upon his alleged Jewish ancestry: “I tell you as a grandson and great-grandson of Jewish men and women, this insane war must be stopped.”
The president has made claims to this heritage before. In a 2013 interview, he stated that his grandparents were Jewish, from a “Sephardic Maghrebi background,” but that they converted to Catholicism in Venezuela. Maduro was raised Catholic.
He also alleged to “have the full support of the Jewish people in Venezuela and in the world to stop this insane war of genocidal extermination and to stop the genocide.”
Sources in the Venezuelan Jewish community told The Jerusalem Post that this was not an accurate reflection of the views of the community: that they were raised with a strong love for both Israel and Venezuela.
Israel’s assassination of terror leaders
Maduro also spoke on Israel’s targeted assassinations in recent weeks, saying that the Jewish state used the “unimaginable, unacceptable excuse of attacking a political leader like Hassan Nasrallah in order to level 10 apartment buildings and kill local residents.”
Maduro also claimed that, when Nasrallah was killed, the Hezbollah head was hours away from approving a peace agreement and that the US had informed Netanyahu that they were proceeding to a ceasefire, but that instead of signing, Israel assassinated the leader “who was the person with the political power to achieve peace on behalf of Hezbollah and Lebanon.”
He doled similar condemnation on Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh – something Israel has never publicly admitted to – saying that Haniyeh had been in Tehran for “dialogue purposes with the new Iranian President [Mahmoud Pezeshkian] to sign a peace agreement.”
“And Israel dared to launch a missile at him in Tehran to assassinate him when he was the political leader who had the authority to sign the ceasefire-peace agreement,” he said.
Maduro’s terror ties
Maduro’s connection to Hezbollah has been relatively well-documented. According to the Center for a Secure Free Society think tank, Hezbollah’s External Security Organization (ESO) is active in Venezuela through a network embedded into the Maduro economy.
The organization United Against A Nuclear Iran reported that Hezbollah sympathizers had occupied high-ranking offices in the Venezuelan government, enabling them to galvanize the terror group’s illicit activities such as the drug trade.
The report said that Nasrallah and Maduro were political allies with a long relationship dating back to Maduro’s travels to the region when he held the role of foreign minister in the Chávez administration.
Furthermore, in 2019, the former head of Venezuela’s intelligence services, Hugo Carvajal, revealed powerful ties between Maduro and Hezbollah, as well as widespread corruption and drug activity.
“Maduro is a puppet,” Johan Sandrea, a Venezuelan living in Israel, told the Post.
“He would rather support terrorists to maintain his governmental mafia than support democracy. One cannot call for ‘peace for the Jewish people’ while simultaneously calling Israel an occupied state and ignoring thousands of years of history.”
Sandrea said that before giving opinions on Palestinians, Maduro should “focus on improving the quality of life for Venezuelans.”
“He’s the last one who should be talking about ‘crimes’ when many of his own citizens are currently in jail unfairly because they spoke against him.”