On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

There will be a standard neocolonial structure in which there is a center for the elite. So you go to Ramallah, nice houses, theaters, bars where Westerners can come and see how lovely Palestine is, which you find in every Third World country, the poorest country you want in Central Africa and you can find these sectors there that are for the elite which look like Paris or London. In fact, if you go back to the 1990s, Israeli industrialists openly and literally urged the government to shift from what they called a colonial program to a neocolonial program, which means establish this Third World–style entity with most of them rotting but with some kind of a center for rich Palestinians, the privileged ones, the elite, and so on. If that is correct, then there are really two options. One is, either this, which will have very few Palestinians, they will be somewhere else and the other one is two states. Two states is a rotten solution, but at least it has the merit of having overwhelming international support that has been blocked by the United States for thirty-five years now but has overwhelming international support. I don’t feel myself that the settlements are irreversible.