As a result of Palestinian diplomatic efforts, several countries, mostly Latin American, recognize the Palestinian state based on 1967 borders
: Brazil
(1 December), Argentina
and Uruguay
(6 December), Bolivia
(22 December), Ecuador
(24 December), and Paraguay
(28 January 2011). Other countries—Chile
(7 January 2011), Guyana
(14 January), and Peru
(26 January)—extend recognition but add that borders must be agreed to with Israel. Several months later, El Salvador
(25 August 2011), Honduras
(26 August), Iceland
(29 November), and Thailand
(19 January 2012) recognize Palestine as an independent state. In addition, five European countries—Norway
(15 December 2010), Ireland
(25 January 2011),
Many outside observers are surprised to learn that Honduras hosts the second largest Palestinian community in the world outside the Middle East second only to Chile. In this Central American country of just 11 million inhabitants, around 300,000 people trace their ancestry to Palestine. Forming a successful economic enclave, Palestinians in Honduras have been prominent members of the country’s business and political elite for decades. As with the rest of the Latin American diaspora, they are mainly Christians originating from the Bethlehem area who began their migrations in the late nineteenth century as itinerant merchants. Over the subsequent century and a half, this community has built a cohesive sense of Palestinian identity in Honduras through various forms of cultural and social associations. This identity has not, however, translated into large-scale participation in the global Palestinian liberation movement that has developed since the 1960s. Perhaps more than anywhere in Latin America, Palestinians in Honduras have acquired a reputation for political conservatism. While the lived reality is often more complex, the community has remained largely detached from the politics of Palestinian liberation.
Following the Banana Trail
Palestinian migration to Honduras is intimately linked to the rise of the global banana trade. Beginning in the early 1880s, Palestinian traders already based on Caribbean islands like Cuba and Haiti became aware of emerging opportunities on the nearby Caribbean coast of mainland Honduras. Construction on a new railroad in the previously remote Caribbean region of Honduras had begun in the 1870s and the Honduran government had adopted an open-door immigration policy in the hope of attracting white European and North American investors. Sensing an opportunity, Palestinian traders began following the railway south from the Caribbean port of Puerto Cortés, peddling small goods they imported from the Caribbean islands, Europe, and North America, such as dried foods, tools, and clothes. Their ultimate target were the workers flocking to the new banana plantations being established all around the railway line. When they reached the end of the railroad at the small town of San Pedro Sula, they had to board makeshift barges and paddle their way along swampy waterways in sweltering humidity, searching for plantations dotted around the surrounding Sula Valley.
As in many cases across Latin America, Palestinian migrants served as the shock troops of global capitalism in northern Honduras. They were the first to bring consumer goods to previously unexposed areas of the country, paving the way for larger corporations to later follow. Among the first Palestinians to settle in the Sula Valley was Salameh Kattan, born in Bethlehem in 1875 as the youngest of eight siblings. His elder brothers Daoud and Jadallah had earlier established trading bases in Cuba and Haiti before they sent word for young Salameh to join them from Bethlehem in the 1890s. Salameh’s assigned task was to investigate the possibilities for trade in northern Honduras and soon he had opened a dry goods store in the plantation town of El Progreso in the Sula Valley. His success encouraged several others from the Kattan family to follow in his wake.
By this time the Sula Valley was in a state of rapid change. The banana plantations were being taken over and expanded by large North American corporations such as the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit. Such investment initially represented a threat to Palestinian merchants as the North American corporations opened their own company stores to supply laborers they recruited from Jamaica. The Palestinians, however, proved highly adaptable and resilient; they repositioned themselves as wholesale suppliers of the banana corporation stores, while simultaneously moving into new lines of import–export to supply growing urban populations. One example was the Bethlehemite Hanna Niqula Kawas who arrived in the port town of La Ceiba in 1898 and quickly established the company Juan N. Kawas y Hermanos, which would grow to become one of the biggest wholesalers in Honduras with a reputation for selling high-quality imported shoes from Europe.
While coastal towns like La Ceiba expanded rapidly in the 1910s, San Pedro Sula remained the epicentre of the banana boom and the heart of the Palestinian community. The town grew exponentially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – from around 600 inhabitants in 1870 to 17,000 by 1926. The Palestinians were among the first foreign merchants to make the town their home, proving instrumental in its rapid economic development. Their impact was felt particularly strongly in the textile trade where they quickly switched from retail to manufacturing, laying the foundations of today’s multimillion-dollar garment industry centered in San Pedro Sula (the maquiladores). From their starting point as auxiliaries of the Caribbean banana boom, Palestinians have spread out to all areas of Honduras, dominating the country’s banking, finance, media, and manufacturing sectors. San Pedro Sula, however, remains the focal point of the community. Out of the city’s 800,000 residents, around 25 percent are estimated to be of Palestinian origin.
Socio-political Alignments
The community’s emergence as a successful merchant enclave in a relatively remote and impoverished area of Honduras goes some way to explaining its reputation for political conservatism and sense of detachment from the Palestinian struggle. While Palestinians never moved directly into the banana trade, their status as owners of large businesses meant they frequently aligned against labor movements in the northern regions of Honduras. When the great strike of 1954 broke out, the initial impetus came from workers on the United Fruit Company plantations in the north of the country. Some Palestinian merchants in San Pedro Sula in fact supported the strikers that year as a way of undermining the monopolies of the banana corporations. But it was a position that could not be sustained in the long run among a community defined by its ownership of large swathes of the country’s industrial production. By the early 1960s, Palestinian textile factory owners were brutally suppressing labor movements; in the case of the Facussé factory, they called in the national army to put down a strike in 1965, and in the Hándal factory in San Pedro Sula, two striking workers were killed by armed guards that same year. Evidence suggests such tactics were widely supported by the Palestinian elites of Honduras, and scholar Celia Baeza even suggests that anti-communism became the principal political credence of the Palestinian elites in Honduras elites by the 1970s.
Despite the community’s increasing association with conservative, anti-communist politics, signs of diversification began to appear by the 1960s. Figures like the film makers Jorge Asfura, Sami Kafati (1936–1996), and Fosi Bendek (1941–2006) were indicative of a shift toward careers in the arts, media, and education among some members of the younger generation. Products of leftist student circles in the capital Tegucigalpa, these three Palestinians were foundational figures in the creation of a distinctly Honduran cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. Kafati in particular is known for his realist portrayals of everyday poverty and celebration of the country’s working classes in films such as No hay tierra sin dueño (There Is No Land Without an Owner), today considered the first feature film of Honduras.
Kafati’s work stands out as an exception to the rule among Palestinians in Honduras. Back in San Pedro Sula, Palestinian business elites generally steered clear of associations with leftist or anti-imperialist causes. But their characterization as conservative right-wingers can obscure more complex realities. Historian Darío Euraque has paid close attention to the central role Palestinians played in the development of a distinctly liberal political culture in northern Honduras. According to this interpretation, local capitalists and organized labor developed traditions of negotiation and reformism that helped avoid the polarization and civil wars that marked many other Central American countries in the latter half of the twentieth century. Within this picture, Palestinian business owners assumed key roles as intermediaries, unencumbered by any association with the country’s older elites who generally hailed from European origins.
Palestinian Origins, Pro-Israel Foreign Policies
However Palestinians have contributed to domestic Honduran politics, their engagement with the Palestinian liberation struggle has been strikingly low-key. Like many diasporic communities, Palestinians in Honduras celebrate their Palestinianness through food and the preservation of cultural traditions—dabke, traditional dress, and the like. This has produced a strong and enduring sense of community, reinforced by a number of key associations. These include the Club Hondureño Árabe - a prestigious social club in San Pedro Sula that hosts sports activities and social events - and the football club Palestino FC which was relaunched after originally being formed by Palestinian immigrants in 1970 and briefly competing in Honduras’ top league during 1996-97.
When it comes to support for the anti-imperialist politics of Palestinian resistance, however, the Honduran diaspora has frequently recoiled from vocal participation. This dynamic becomes all the more apparent when considered against the widespread presence of Palestinians among the country’s political leadership. In 1998, Carlos Flores Facussé became the first person of Palestinian descent to become head of state of a Latin American country when he was elected president of Honduras. Since then, numerous Palestinians have run for the top offices of state but none have questioned the country’s generally pro-Israel foreign policies. In the general election of 2025, the two lead candidates were both of Palestinian origin: Nasry Asfoura of the conservative National Party and Salvador Nasralla of the center-right Liberal Party. Asfoura’s victory brought to power a president who is proudly Palestinian in ancestry while simultaneously staunchly pro-Zionist.
In January 2026, just days after taking office, Asfoura carried out a state visit to Israel in which he met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top members of the Israeli government, initiating a new program of military and economic cooperation. While Asfoura can be seen as an extreme example of Palestinians in Honduras abandoning the Palestinian struggle (in his case partly due to his evangelical Christian Zionist beliefs), his approach is in fact a culmination of decades of close security and economic ties between Israel and Honduras – a process in which Palestinian government ministers have regularly acquiesced. Since 2021, Honduras has been one of only a handful of countries to have followed the United States in moving their embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
It has not always been this way. Historians Nadim Bawalsa, Lauren Banko, and Adnan Musallam have documented the ways in which the Palestinians in Honduras mobilized against British and Zionist colonization of Palestine in the early twentieth century. This activism reached a crescendo in the 1920s when the British imposition of exclusionary citizenship laws in Palestine prevented thousands of diasporic Palestinians from returning to their homeland. The emergence of a more revolutionary Palestinian movement in the 1960s, however, produced a strong ideological divide between the Palestinians in Honduras and their compatriots waging guerrilla warfare against the state of Israel. For a community positioned within Honduras as an economic elite with ownership over much of the country’s financial and industrial sector, the prospect of supporting an openly anti-capitalist Palestinian struggle became increasingly uncomfortable.
Over time, this divide has only widened. As in so many parts of the world, Palestine has acquired a symbolic value that has more to do with local political divides than it does with the realities of the Middle East. Despite their own heritage, Palestinians in Honduras largely align with a view of the world that emphasises free market economics, social conservatism, and pro–US foreign policies. Unlike countries like Chile, the Palestinian community in Honduras has not diversified into social groupings that might allow more radical political identifications to take shape. Exceptions can be found and there are some signs of younger Palestinians vocalizing opposition to Honduras’s pro-Israeli policies. For the moment, however, they remain exceptions within a community largely viewed by the Honduran working class as a nepotistic economic elite.