Israel,Palestine,and Latin America: The Contemporary Moment

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 considerable length elsewhere (Robinson, 2014; 2018a; 2019a; 2019b), global capitalism is facing a deep crisis that is both structural (one of overaccumulation) and one of legitimacy or hegemony. As the accumulation crisis has deepened, continued growth in the global economy has been based on unsustainable 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 throughout the region, the resurgent right and extreme-right are resuming historic political and military ties to Israel as the surrogate for U.S. intervention that Munck and Pozzi identify. It was, as they note, Israel that provided the crucial military and intelligence support for the dictatorships that beat back the left in South and Central America in the 1970s and 1980s.

Yet, this time around, Israel, for its part, is at least as concerned with targeting and undermining the Palestinian solidarity that has spread throughout Latin America since the 1990s as with stepping up its role as a surrogate for U.S. imperial and global capitalist pretensions in the region. Indeed, these are twin dimensions of a single agenda that is as much Washington’s as it is Tel Aviv’s. U.S.-Israeli support for overthrowing the Maduro government in Venezuela, as Moussa (2019) observes, “is part of a larger agenda to cement an anti-Palestine campaign in Latin America.” In his push to strengthen these renewed ties with Latin America, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu visited Latin America (Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil) on three occasions in a little over a year, from September 2017 to December 2018 (Salacanin, 2018), which is all the more remarkable considering that he is the first sitting Israeli premier ever to visit the region.

At the same time as Washington has pushed to regain the influence in Latin America that it lost during the pink tide years, the Trump administration has stepped up anti-Palestinian policies. Along with moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, it has suspended aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a program of relief aid for five million Palestinian refugees in the Occupied Territories and in countries that neighbor Israel. Washington has indicated that it will not censure further Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories and has committed to increasing military and economic aid to Israel. In Latin America, it has promoted the growing influence of Zionist evangelical Christians who push for a normalization of relations with Israel (Fouriezos, 2018; Salacanin, 2018).

We cannot separate the political agenda of rolling back support for Palestinian freedom from the economic agenda of a new round of transnational capitalist expansion in the region. The same right that has turned to embracing the U.S. agenda of renewed interventionism in Latin America, spearheaded by its all-out campaign against Venezuela, is also targeting Palestinian solidarity in Latin America in lockstep with Tel Aviv and Washington. It is this right that is overseeing a new round of global capital expansion in the region, with its commitment to reverse privatizations, deregulation, imposing renewed austerity, and further opening up the region to transnational corporate appropriation (Robinson, 2018b).

This unitary agenda came together in Honduras. The 2009 coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya, we now know, enjoyed the full support, if not the outright involvement, of the United States (Frank, 2018). Less well known is that Israel supplied the new coup regime with military aid and political support. Yet when Zelaya denounced the Israelis for supplying tear gas that was used against his supporters he was immediately charged by Israel with “anti-Semitism.” This is not a new trope. Conflation of criticism with Israel with anti-Semitism serves as a smokescreen for delegitimizing criticism of Israeli practices and for denigrating supporters of Palestinian freedom (Robinson and Griffin, 2017b). The maneuver against Zelaya generated the intended outcome. The overthrown president became defensive. No longer was his or the international media’s focus on the criminal support provided by Israel to the coup regime. Now, in the words of the Washington-insider publication Foreign Policy, it was all about “anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric by supporters of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya” (Keating, 2009). The far-right dictatorial regime that replaced Zelaya went on to receive wide-ranging political, economic, and military support from the Washington–Tel Aviv axis as it undertook systematic persecution of social movements and eviction of local communities and facilitated a vast new round of appropriation by transnational capital of the country’s land and resources (Frank, 2018).

This issue will ideally inspire further research into matters that, in Munck and Pozzi’s words, “have hitherto been the preserve of specialists and historians.” While many of the contributions in the issue are historical and specialized, they provide fertile context for research into the current moment in what appears to be a resurgence of Israeli influence in the region in concert with the return of the right and the U.S. and transnational corporate political and economic agenda. If experience is anything to go by, there is a likelihood of persecution and campaigns of defamation against scholars and journalists who critique and expose the renewed involvement of Israel among the right-wing governments that have come to power recently and Israeli support for their antipopular and repressive agendas (Robinson and Griffin, 2017a). This issue will surely have achieved its objective if it helps to open up debate on an issue that has often been taboo.