Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

So what in fact happened is that the most Americanized element that has ever existed in Israeli politics won the election on a nationalist/religious program. And since you’ve got to give some crumbs to your constituency, the question now is, how are they going to do it? Well, that’s the issue after the Israeli elections. And right now the more secular European-types in the Israeli population are extremely worried about it—and they’re extremely worried about it for the exact same reason we would be extremely worried about it if the Christian Right turned out to be the major constituency of the guy who wins the Presidential election in the United States. So suppose Bob Dole had won the Presidency here in 1996 with the overwhelming support of the Christian Right, and chauvinist fanatics, and the “militias,” and so on and so forth. I mean, basic policies wouldn’t change much as a result, but something would have to be done—there would have to be some kind of palliative offer to the constituency that voted him in. And that can mean things, it can have serious effects. So those are the sorts of changes I think one can expect to see in Israel, and it’s not very clear how these internal factors will play out.