On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

The fact that Israel actually benefits from violating international law and receives “red carpet” treatment from the West means that we all have a role to play in ending the injustice that the Palestinians are facing.

These days, it is very easy to expose not only the Israeli policy but also the racist ideology behind it. The activists’ efforts and this deplorable policy produced a dramatic shift in Western, including American, public opinion; but so far this shift has failed to reach the upper echelons of society and therefore on the ground Israel continues—unabated and uninterrupted—its policies of dispossession and does not seem to be paying a price for its policies.

There is no demonstration against Zionism, because even the European Parliament regards such a demonstration as anti-Semitic.

Imagine, in the days of supremacist South Africa, if you were not allowed to demonstrate against the apartheid regime itself, but only against the Soweto massacre or any other particular atrocity committed by the South African government.

The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex ...

Insisting on describing what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 and ever since as a crime and not just as a tragedy or even a catastrophe is essential if past evils are to be rectified.

The idea of reparations, and in particular the right of the refugees to return, is rarely questioned in any other conflict in the world, apart from Palestine.

When an Israeli soldier sees a Palestinian baby he does not see an infant—he sees the enemy.

Partition, in both 1947 and 1993, means a license to have a racist Jewish state in more than 56 percent of Palestine in 1947 and more than 80 percent, if not more, in 1993.

Israel is a democracy because the majority decides what it wants, even if the majority is determined by means of colonization, ethnic cleansing, and, recently, by ghettoizing the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, enclaving them in Areas A and B in the West Bank and in isolated villages in the Greater Jerusalem area, the Jordan Valley, and the Bedouin reservations in the Naqab.

Economic elites supported the “peace process” because it was perceived to lead to an economic bonanza.

The importance of insisting on a socialist worldview can be gleaned from the example of post-apartheid South Africa, which has proven so disappointing as it maintains an economic structure that still discriminates against the African community there.

The impulse to allow, indeed to push, Jews to settle in Palestine was motivated also by British, and Western, Islamophobia.

What I mentioned before—Israel determined that they will be a pariah state, but that it did not matter as long as the US backed them. That’s very much the South African position. That is why I have often written, since the 1970s, that the people who call themselves supporters of Israel are in fact supporters of its moral degeneration and probably ultimate destruction.

Israel understands, like South Africa at the time, that they can be a pariah state, the whole world can be against them, but that it does not make a difference as long as the USA backs them.

I still think the principal motive behind Israelis’ support for the two-state solution is not reconciliation with the Palestinians but a wish to control as much of the land with as few Palestinians in it as possible.

The dehumanization in Iraq and Syria is widespread and terrifying, as it is in Gaza. But there is one crucial difference between these cases and the Israeli brutality: the former are condemned as barbarous and inhuman worldwide, while those committed by Israel are still publicly licensed and approved by the president of the United States, the leaders of the European Union, and Israel’s other friends in the world.

It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists, or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way.

A world that would stop employing double standards in its dealings with Israel is a world that could be far more effective in its response to war crimes elsewhere in the world.