Israel, Palestine, and Latin America: The Contemporary Moment

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19837922
• Published date: 01 May 2019
• Author: William I. Robinson
• Date: 01 May 2019
• Subject Matter: Afterword

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19837922

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 226, Vol. 46 No. 3, May 2019, 164–167

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19837922

© 2019 Latin American Perspectives

164

Afterword

Israel, Palestine, and Latin America

The Contemporary Moment

by

William I. Robinson

The governments of Guatemala and Paraguay announced in 2018 that they

would follow in Washington’s footsteps and move their embassies in Israel

from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Shortly afterward, Honduras announced that it was

considering a similar move, as did Brazilian president-elect Jair Bolsonaro on

the eve of his early-2019 inauguration. In the larger picture, these embassy

relocations underscore why Israel’s role in Latin America is so revealing more

generally of the historic conjuncture we face in the Americas and worldwide as

we move toward the third decade of the new century.

How can we summarize this conjuncture? As I have written at consider-

able length elsewhere (Robinson, 2014; 2018a; 2019a; 2019b), global capital-

ism is facing a deep crisis that is both structural (one of overaccumulation)

and one of legitimacy or hegemony. As the accumulation crisis has deep-

ened, continued growth in the global economy has been based on unsustain-

able debt-driven consumption, wild speculation in the global casino that has

inflated one financial bubble after another, and state-driven militarization as

the world enters a global war economy and international tensions escalate.

The system is now pushing toward expansion through wars, conflicts, and

militarization, a new round of violent dispossession, and further plunder of

the state. All three of these expansionary tendencies are evident in Latin

America as the transnational capitalist class seeks a violent seizure of lands

and resources in collusion with a resurgent right and extreme-right in the

region (Robinson, 2018b).

What does this conjuncture have to do with Israel in Latin America? It was

the rise of the left that turned much of the region toward solidarity with the

Palestinian freedom struggle, as Ronaldo Munck and Pablo Pozzi observe in

their introduction to this issue, but some two decades after the turn to the left

the right has resumed power with a vengeance in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay,

Chile, and Honduras, while the Venezuelan revolution is in deep crisis and

leftist projects in Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador have

been emptied of much of their socialist content. As the pink tide ebbs through-

out the region, the resurgent right and extreme-right are resuming historic

William I. Robinson is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and

coeditor (with Maryam S. Griffin) of We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s

Critics (2017).

837922LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19837922Latin American PerspectivesRobinson /

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