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On August 24, the Dominican government adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, infamous for equating opposition to Israeli apartheid and Zionist colonialism with antisemitism. President Luis Abinader made the announcement in Santo Domingo, while speaking at an event organized by the U.S. Zionist organization Combat Antisemitism Movement. Subsequently, a statement from the Dominican Foreign Ministry justified the decision by invoking a supposed official policy against hate and discrimination dating back to 1938 when, according to the text, “the Dominican State was the only one to offer asylum in Sosúa to a significant number of Jewish refugees fleeing the war crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime”.

In 1938, the racist and genocidal Trujillo dictatorship was in power. Just as the Israeli regime pushes for the redefinition of antisemitism to shield itself, in Orwellian fashion, Abinader is rewriting the past to accommodate the neo-Trujilloist present.

It is not surprising that the Dominican government, led by Abinader, would uphold the Trujilloist legacy. This is a government that has denied the significance of slavery during the Spanish colonial period that preceded the formation of the Dominican state, that does not officially commemorate the genocide against Haitians in 1937, known as the Parsley Massacre, and that denies the existence of widespread racism in the Dominican Republic while keeping more than 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless. President Abinader boasts of following the ideas of dictator Joaquín Balaguer, one of the Trujillo era’s main ideologues. Abinader follows in Trujillo’s footsteps regarding what Dominican racists dub “the Haitian problem,” as shown by his policy of mass deportations and the construction of a border wall — an aggiornamento of the Trujillo-era political program known as the “Dominicanization of the border.”

Today’s neo-Trujilloist regime, with its apartheid policies of racial mass deportations, denationalization and statelessness, is coherent in its support of the genocidal Israeli regime and in claiming the legacy of the dictatorship. This is the true significance of the Dominican endorsement of the IHRA definition through a........

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