Along with the United States, Israel provided weapons and training to Guatemala’s military and their campaign against Indigenous Maya civilians from 1974-1996.

But there was another source of weapons and advisors: Israel, “the only country that gave us support in our battle against the guerrillas,” Benedicto Lucas said, as foreign correspondent Yoav Karni reported in 1986 in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

Yet Israel should not be considered a mere proxy for the United States during Lucas’s genocidal sweeps through the Ixil. Israel was a war machine on its own, searching for arms markets and anxious for allies. Tel Aviv supported the brutal Guatemalan army in Lucas’s day and beyond.