On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

Israel has the power to eliminate states; the peace movement does not. But it does have the moral power to question the ideology and ethical validity of the state and the destructive impact it had through the expulsion of half the country’s population.

Well said

The third milestone was the head-on challenge of one of the most basic assumptions of the peace orthodoxy: that partition of a country is an act of peace and reconciliation. Partition in the history of Palestine is an act of destruction committed within a framework of a UN “peace plan” that drew no international reaction or condemnation whatsoever.

But to offer partition now as a solution on the same premise that informed the 1947 resolution—which was that Zionism was a benevolent movement wishing Israelis to coexist as equals with the Palestinian native majority—is an absurdity and a travesty.

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.

This charade is still marketed successfully in the West: 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.

The Israeli government understands that without this “peace process” Israel would become a pariah state and would be exposed to international boycott and even sanctions. As long as the process is alive, Israel can continue to expand its settlement project in the West Bank and the dispossession of the Palestinians there (including in the Greater Jerusalem area) and establish facts on the ground that would render any future settlement unfeasible and impossible. Because of the dishonest brokering of the United States and Europe’s impotence in international affairs, Israel continues to enjoy immunity in this process.

The emergence of a new and left-leaning political force in Israel does not seem likely at this time. Anyone who is still hopeful of such an eventuality underrates the mental process Jewish society in Israel underwent following the creation of the state in 1948. It was put under an indoctrinating steamroller that pressed together old Jewish phobias about hostile Gentiles in Europe with typical colonialist anxieties about the natives into a frightening local version of racism. Deep racist layers like this are not removed easily and definitely do not disappear by themselves as the case of post-apartheid South Africa has so clearly shown us.

In the new Greater Israel, impotent local Palestinian councils and uninterested police forces watch helplessly as organized crime takes over the more deprived Palestinian neighborhoods and villages between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean, fed by the poverty and unemployment that has reached unprecedented levels.

but whoever subscribes to the importance of the Jewish-Palestinian joint struggle has to recognize a worldview that confronts the ethnic cleansing throughout all of Palestine and not just in part of it. A genuine and clear conversation about the new options instead of a dead formula is imperative at this moment in history.

But for the sake of some sort of progress beyond the conceptual paralysis imposed on us in the name of the two-state solution, anyone who can and wants to—on every possible stage—should offer a political, ideological, constitutional, and socio-economic structure for whoever lives in the country of Palestine—and not just in the state of Israel.

Peace cannot be on the agenda of a state that exercises such policies against its own citizens.

The Nakba took place where Israel is today, not in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. Any conversation about reconciliation with both communities should take this fact as a starting point.

Heading toward 2020, we will all most probably face a racist, ultra-capitalist, and more expanded Israel still busy ethnically cleansing Palestine.

These peace brokers claim that the relevant past for any peace process is the moment the process begins. Anything that happened before is irrelevant for that process. So if you already have huge Jewish settlement blocks all over the West Bank, you cannot think about dismantling them.

Zionism has many interpretations. Its more neutral definition would be ideology I suppose. Zionism is a set of ideas that inspires people to do certain things and act in accordance to them.

Zionism today is an ideology of power that is quite peculiar in history as it is directed against one particular group of people. Usually ideologies have wider implications for people. Zionism is very focused.

From 1948 on, Zionism meant the ideology of the state. A state religion. Like Americanism, or the magnificence of France. In fact even in this period the notion has changed.

For example, in the mid-1940s, I was a Zionist youth leader, but strongly opposed to a Jewish state. I was in favor of Jewish-Arab working-class cooperation to build a socialist Palestine, but the idea of a Jewish state was anathema. I was a Zionist youth leader, because it was not a state religion.

So the concept of Zionism changed. Everyone had to accept the “right to exist” of Israel. States do not have a right to exist. Mexico does not accept the right of the USA to exist sitting on half of Mexico. States recognize each other but not their right to exist. There is no such thing. But Israel raised that barrier to require that Palestinians accept that their oppression and expulsion is justified.

The Palestinians now have to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. That’s the core element of most of the speeches that Netanyahu gives. Why that? Because that’s understood to be impossible. Nobody should recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Just as we do not recognize the USA as a Christian state.

Zionism as state policy is a shifting concept depending on what the state needs.

From the moment the more vague ideas of Zionism as the revival of Judaism as nationalism became the concrete project of settling in Palestine, Zionism became a settler-colonialist project and still is one today.

When the colonizers are already a third generation and even succeeded in founding their own state, the native population has to strategize differently and find ways of coexisting with this generation of colonizers.

Technically the Zionist movement did not formally accept the notion of a state until 1942, but it was always in the background of political Zionism. You just could not say it.

When you talk about what Zionism was, it depends on how wide you want to spread it. The movement that developed, yes, is a settler-colonial society. Like the USA, Australia, the Anglosphere. Israel is one of them.

Look, we did it, it must be right. So they are doing it, so it must be right. The settler-colonial societies have a different kind of mentality. We did exterminate or expel the indigenous population so there has to be something justified about it—superior civilization or other ideas.

I remember how I struggled to explain to my students in England that what they see in Israel and Palestine today is a daily implementation of nineteenth-century colonialist ideology and discourse.

This Israeli predicament is also our predicament as activists. We are dealing with a nineteenth-century fossil that is very alive and kicking in the twenty-first century.

I think that no one I know has ever objected or questioned the right of people to redefine themselves on a national, ethnic, or cultural ground. There is no ground for objecting from the perspective of international law or international morality.

The problem lies elsewhere. What is the price paid by this transformation and who pays the price? If this new definition comes at the expense of another people, this becomes a problem.

The problem is not the right of the Jews to have a state of their own or not. That’s an internal Jewish problem.

Once a state is established, any citizen is a citizen of the state. No matter who you are, if you are a French citizen, you’re French. If you live in Israel, and you are an Israeli citizen, you are not a Jew. So the Jewish state concept is a complete anomaly. It has no analogs in the modern world. Therefore it’s obvious why we should not accept it. Why should we accept this unique anomaly?

But once it’s there, at least in the modern state system, anybody who is part of a state is theoretically an equal member of the state. Of course it might not work in practice, but that’s the concept. In Israel it is totally different. There is a distinction between citizenship and nationality. There is no Israeli nationality. You cannot be an Israeli national.

If you chastise Israel, you assault the Jewish state and by association you attack Judaism. That’s a very interesting line of argumentation and defense.

They defined the parameters of the game: you are allowed to demonstrate against Israeli policies, but if you demonstrate against Israel, you demonstrate against the Jewish state and therefore you demonstrate against Judaism. That is why it is very important to bring this to the fore of the discussion.

When Netanyahu says, “You have to recognize us as a Jewish state,” he is saying: “You have to recognize us as something that does not exist in the modern world.” There is no such thing.

Christian Zionism is a very significant force. It goes back way before Jewish Zionism. It was an elite phenomenon. Lord Balfour, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman read the Bible every morning. It says there, “God promised the land to the Jews.” That’s in the powerful states. There was already plenty of support. In fact, Britain as the mandatory authority facilitated the development of the Jewish national institutions. So my guess is that it would have happened without the Holocaust.

How many of them came to the United States? Virtually none. If you had asked them where they wanted to go, I think you can make a sane guess that they would have wanted to come to the United States.

The American government did not want them, the American Jewish community did not want them. Zionist emissaries took over the camps. They had a principle that able-bodied men and women between seventeen and thirty-five had to be shipped off to Palestine.

Truman is very much honored because he was trying to force the British to send Jews to Palestine. Nobody asks why Truman did not say, “Okay, let’s take a hundred thousand Jews here.” This is the place where it would have been easiest to absorb them. It can absorb anybody. It’s a country that is not densely settled, the richest country in history. . . . They did not because the Holocaust was considered a way to damn the enemy,

It is absolutely true that without the Holocaust there were vested religious and strategic Western interests to have a Jewish presence instead of a Palestinian one, or they would have called it at the time an Islamic one.

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

I think it tells you something very interesting about Western culture. When they went to the concentration camps and were appalled, they did not say, “Let’s save the survivors”; they said, “Let someone else pay for saving the survivors.”

This tells you something about the West, the deeply rooted imperial mentality that affects the West like a plague. Yes, there are these people living in misery. We are the ones able to help them, but we are not going to even raise that possibility. Somebody else, who does not have the capacity, they have to suffer for it.

In 1924 there was an immigration law in the USA that was aimed at Jews and Italians. Let’s keep them out of the country. They did not say it that way, they said Eastern and Southeastern and Southern Europeans.

This is a humanist Zionist who said that Jews should recognize that they should be sympathetic to the Nazis because they have the same kind of ideology we do. Blood and land and so on. We agree with that, if we can only explain to them that we are really on the same side, they will stop persecuting us. This was in 1935.

I gave a talk in Arizona recently and I simply referred to it as occupied Mexico, which it is. It should be referred to that way. It’s occupied Mexico. We conquered it in a violent brutal war of aggression. We should do something about it. That’s why they have names like San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and so on. Recognize it, recognize what we did. On the other hand we know we are not going to give it back to Mexico.

There is a Palestinian demand for an Israeli recognition of the right itself through a combination of acknowledgment and apology. This, maybe in the form of an apology, can open the ground for discussions over practicalities.

The third dimension concerns the Palestinians alone. It concerns the question of how to live an ordinary life under the shadow of the “right of return” slogan. How does one navigate between perceiving the right as sacred with the knowledge it is not around the corner? This translates into concrete questions: Do you really condemn Palestinians in the refugee camps in Lebanon for improving a little bit their homes, without immediately accusing them of naturalization (tawtin)? Or that they have betrayed the right of return because they have slightly improved their standard of living? It’s up to the Palestinians to strategize,

We should be beyond that argument of supporting or not the right of return. We should talk about what it means.