The Israel Latin America Network (ILAN), which has expanded to Costa Rica, Chile, Guatemala and the United States, on June 9 held the first award ceremony for the Shimon Peres Lifetime Awards on behalf of ILAN – in partnership with the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation.

During the ceremony, awards were given to key groundbreaking figures with a global reputation who have promoted relations between Israel and Latin America in the areas of health, quality of environment, economy and technology.

Israel National News spoke to Isaac Assa, the founder of ILAN, about how the Israel Latin America Network is reshaping the relationship between Israel and Latin American nations.

“ILAN is a foundation that we started in 2018 with the purpose of strengthening the relationship between Israel and Latin America,” Assa said. “Israel is a country that has flourished through innovation and we want to make it so that's also the story of the Latin American people.”

“By doing so we believe that we can encourage more participants, more business, and better relations for the Israeli people in Latin America,” he added.

While most people are familiar with pro-Israel organizations in North America, why is it important to focus on Latin American communities?

“Latin America is comprised of 31 countries. We’re 700 million people. As well in the United States you have 60 million Latinos, this is the biggest growing community that in 20 years is going to be over a hundred million,” Assa said. “Twenty years from now in the United States one of every three Americans is going to be of Latino origin. So it's very important that we strengthen as Israelis and as Israel the relationship, not only with the Latin American countries but as well as with the Latinos that live in the United States.”

It’s not simply about networking and business connections but a whole lot more.

We do it by different ways. The first way is we do delegations to Israel, we bring to Israel government officials, business people and academics for them to see and to learn what is Israel and what is the innovation that is happening in this country,” he explained. “The second way we do it is by awarding those innovators both from Latin America and Israel and making a community of innovators that can work together to improve the people’s lives.”

He came to Israel with a large delegation.

“We came with a delegation of 23 Latin America people from Costa Rica, Chile, Guatemala and the United States as well as the innovators that received the ILAN awards in 2020 and 2021 and what we're doing here today at the beautiful Peres Center is we just finished a beautiful event where we awarded seven Israeli innovators that have done beautiful projects that had impacts in Latin America, from education to science, medicine, peace, and others – seven different projects. We are very happy to do so.”

Assa explained that his father’s family originally came from Syria and that he has a personal story that connects to what he’s doing today.

“My grandfather was the Chief Rabbi of Damascus, Syria and my father he left Syria in 1948 after a terrorist attack in the synagogue that massacred about 70 people,” he says. “He came to Israel, he joined the army for the War of Independence, and then he came to Mexico, invited by a friend about ten years after and he rode the country and he met my mother, and this is how I grew up in Mexico. But my father always used to tell me, ‘Isaac, a Jew that doesn't do something for Israel he wasted his life.’ So we founded ILAN on that vision, that we have always Jewish people who support Israel, and we are doing it this time by connecting Israel with Latin America.”