On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

In support of the observations that it is really a racist issue is the fact that Israel has been trying to block by law or by force commemorating the Nakba or recognizing it.

Justifying your own repression and violence. I was in refugee camps not that long ago. The people live in horrible conditions. It’s very moving. I visited a family who lived in a small room. As usual, Middle Eastern–style, they offered coffee and so on, but when they start showing you the keys of their villages, their houses, pictures of their land, when they start telling you idealized stories about what life was like in the Galilee . . . you’re right, Ilan, it has to be dealt with realistically, but it’s hard to tell people like that, “You are never going to see your village again.”

What I meant is that we should tell them that until they see their villages, they should make their lives better. You are not undermining your chance of seeing your village by creating some comfort in your life now.

The conversation here is different and we do not condemn people for persisting in the last sixty-five years to dream about their return home. They have this right. But what do we do until that right is implemented? To my mind this is no less important than protecting the right.

There was an offer from Egypt for a full peace treaty. The Israeli government, led by Golda Meir, considered it and rejected it because they wanted to colonize the Sinai. Basically their choice at the time was between security and expansion. A peace treaty with Egypt, whatever one might think about that outcome, would have meant security, in fact, permanent security as Egypt was the only powerful Arab military force.

Ever since then Israel prefers expansion over security.

Step by step they are going to become isolated, a pariah state, delegitimized, very much like South Africa, they are going to be able to survive only as long as the US supports them.

We now know from declassified documents that the foreign minister called the American ambassador and told him that he knew everyone was voting against them, but that as long as the US was backing them, they did not care.

When US policy shifted, apartheid ended. Israel is moving in exactly the same direction. By now, their sole support, virtually, is the US. They are becoming delegitimized. They are worried about it, but it is going to continue.

What I am saying is that the white community in South Africa was, from a socio-economic point of view, quite homogenous. Whereas the white supremacist group in Israel is polarized economically and socially. If you add to this what Noam was talking about, the international delegitimization of Israel, you have two powerful processes. One from the inside and one from the outside that really questions the viability of the state.

The Israelis now have to brand two commodities. They have to market to the world the legitimacy of the state in a world that finds it very difficult to accept it. But then they have also a domestic branding to do. They have to explain to the poor and marginalized Jews why belonging to the master race has not improved their socio-economic standards of living.

Israeli strategists will tell you that they have dealt with this by having a common enemy, a security issue, by having a war on Islam.

In the past and until recently, the ability to keep enough people convinced that their ethnic association also benefits them economically depended largely on the huge amounts of American financial aid to Israel.

The question would be whether the Jewish state is still a strategic asset or financial liability.

It is the prospective fall of Zionism that brings us to a very dangerous period in the history of Palestine. We all have to be very alert and on guard about what is going to happen in the next few years rather than in the long term. You can be a bit more optimistic about the long term in terms of justice and changes in the reality.

I would not push the South African analogy too far because there are striking differences. One difference that cannot be acknowledged in the USA for obvious reasons is that it was the Cubans that destroyed the South African regime. It was they who drove South African aggressors out of Angola, Namibia, broke the mythology of the white superman.

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.

They did not care about the fact that people in the US felt good, they cared about what happened to them, on the ground. And the effects on them were harmful since it provoked a huge backlash and strengthened support for the war.

In other words, it is very difficult to adopt a clear ethical position that respects the interests of all the Palestinian groups concerned.

The Palestinians are subjected to different sufferings because of Israeli policies, but there is an ideological source behind it.

Only two countries—the USA and Britain. They supported apartheid strongly right to the end, particularly Reagan. That was sufficient for the regime, as long as they had US support they did not care, like Israel right now.

Part of the intellectual weakness of the BDS movement is that it is directed against Israel but not against the USA. US policies are absolutely critical. Israel understands,

The US solidarity movement has to focus on that. What are we going to do to change US policies? That is quite critical.

The USA supports Israel not out of benevolence, but because it’s useful for US policies. So yes, they do overlap a lot. Also cultural relations, Christian Zionism for example, is part of the demographic base of the Republican Party—extremely anti-Semitic, but pro-Israel.

well said

Popular pressure did make a difference. That’s the same on every other issue. Civil rights, women rights, whatever it may be. That’s what has to be done here too. Now, does BDS contribute to that? It could.

So for example, the Jordan Valley. I do not think this has been done in the US, it should be. Boycotting products of the Jordan Valley. First of all it harms the Jordan Valley settlement project, but much more significantly, it brings out here that the USA and Israel have a policy of depopulating the Jordan Valley, which is a real ethnic cleansing.

For example, if the significant domestic lobbies in the USA, the business lobbies, which just overwhelm everything else, if they came to the opinion that US policy in support of Israel is harmful to their interests, they would change it very quickly. That can be done.

When Mandela was let out of jail, his first comment was to praise Cubans for their inspiration and their help, because they played a huge part in ending apartheid. You cannot say that in the USA or in England, because we have a kind of religious fanaticism that says that we are not allowed to tell the truth about these matters.

The result is that there has been a shift from concern with Israeli crimes and US support for them to the issue of academic freedom. Very much like what happened in 2002. Shift from focus on Jenin and the crimes there, and the US background, to a discussion about anti-Semitism at Harvard.

Like what Israel is doing in the Jordan Valley altogether. How come they are able to get away with it? Only because of US support.

As for the liberal Zionist elements within these elites, I think campaigns like this embarrass them in a positive way. It forces them to adopt clearer positions on the oppression and occupation. They are being reminded in a very forceful way that their self-image of Israel as a democratic society is questioned by people they respect and societies and associations to which they want to belong.

When you say let’s carry out these actions against Israeli institutions, why not against US institutions, which have a much worse record?

Israeli institutions are not more blameworthy than American institutions, much less. Focusing on Bar-Ilan or any others directly involved in the occupation could have been much more effective.