On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

We live in a world where the mainstream education system teaches you to obey and listen to authority from the earliest age and does not offer you the chance to think for yourself and express yourself in ways that are outside the proclaimed norm.

We live in a society where the “nothing” (shopping, watching TV) has become a “something” and the “something” (relaxing, meditating, sharing) has become a void in need of being filled.

The “remote control” of our world only has two buttons, “Play” and “Fast Forward,” while the one we are all looking for is the “Pause.”

I “became” an activist through books.

I started with reading Chomsky and slowly became very interested in anything that had to do with Israel/Palestine. Reading Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, John Berger, Tanya Reinhart, Ilan Pappé, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Kurt Vonnegut, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein . . .

Books changed me and I think that they are, more than anything else, one of the best tools we can use to learn, reflect on, and truly understand the world we are living in. They are a bridge between languages, continents, and people. A book will accompany you and will stay with you, it will mark you like nothing else. You will go back to it, quote it, argue about it. You will borrow one and lend one.

The past, as far as Palestine and Palestinians are concerned, is 1948, the Nakba, and the ethnic cleansing of two-thirds of the population (yes, two-thirds; try to put this in perspective and do the math with the country you are living in right now) that was expelled from historical Palestine to make space for a new state, Israel. It is a not-so-distant past;

I was glad to see some of my close friends involved in civil disobedience actions all over the world. It gave me strength and faith. With good people like that around, the struggle, after all, might not be endless.

The Palestine question is emblematic of what is wrong with the world. The role played by Western states, the complicity of corporations and of various institutions make this case a very special one.

Palestine is slowly becoming global—a social issue that all movements fighting for social justice need to embrace. The next step is connecting the dots between various struggles around the world and creating a truly united front. We are many. We will prevail.

The first paradox is the gap between the dramatic change in world public opinion on the issue of Palestine on the one hand, and the continued support from the political and economic elites in the West for the Jewish state on the other (and hence the lack of any impact of that change on the reality on the ground).

The second gap, indeed paradox, is the one between this widely held negative image of Israel on the one hand, and the very positive image its own Jewish society has of the state.

The third paradox is that while specific Israeli policies are severely criticized and condemned, the very nature of the Israeli regime and the ideology that produces these policies are not targeted by the solidarity movement.

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

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 story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.

the story of Palestine has been told before: European settlers coming to a foreign land, settling there, and either committing genocide against or expelling the indigenous people.

before presenting the entries in the new dictionary, I would like to look more closely at the waning of the old one still dominating the conversation about Palestine among diplomats, academics, politicians, and activists in the West. I call this discourse “The Dictionary of the Peace Orthodoxy” (in fact, not my term; but alas I cannot recall where I first heard it and I apologize for justifiable claims of unoriginality).

Expressions and phrases like “a land for two people,” “the peace process,” “the Israel-Palestine conflict,” “the need to stop the violence on both sides,” “negotiations,” or “the two-state solution” come straight out of a contemporary version of Orwell’s 1984.

The emergence of the BDS movement, through the call for such action by Palestinian civil society inside and outside of Palestine, the growing interests and support for the one-state solution, and the emergence of a clearer, albeit small, anti-Zionist peace camp in Israel, has provided an alternative thinking.

Settler colonialism is a conceptual fine-tuning on the theories and histories of colonialism. Settler movements that sought a new life and identity in already inhabited countries were not unique to Palestine. In the Americas, in the southern tip of Africa, and in Australia and New Zealand white settlers destroyed the local population by various means, foremost among them genocide, to re-create themselves as the owners of the country and reinvent themselves as its native population. The application of this definition—settler colonialism—to the case of Zionism is now quite common in the academic world and has politically enabled activists to see more clearly the resemblance of the case of Israel and Palestine to South Africa and to equate the fate of the Palestinians with that of the Native Americans.

The new movement relates to the whole of historical Palestine as the land that needs support and change. In this view, the whole of Palestine is an area that was and is colonized and occupied in one way or another by Israel, and in that area Palestinians are subject to various legal and oppressive regimes emanating from the same ideological source: Zionism. It stresses particularly the link between the ideology and Israel’s current positions on demography and race as the major obstacle for peace and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine.

The activist and the scholarly depiction of Zionism as a settler-colonialist movement and the state of Israel as an apartheid state also determine the mechanism of change.

The new approach proposes the decolonization of Israel/Palestine and the substitution of the present Israeli regime with democracy for all. It thus targets not only the policies of the state but also its ideology.

The reassertion of the “Zionism as colonialism” equation is critical not only because it best explains the Israeli policies of Judaization inside Israel and settlement in the West Bank, but also because it is consistent with the way the early Zionists perceived their project and talked about it.

The Hebrew verb le-hitnahel or le-hityashev and the Hebrew nouns hitanchalut and hitayasvut were used ever since 1882 by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel to describe the takeover of land in Palestine. Their accurate translation into English is “to settle,” “to colonize,” “settlement,” and “colonization,” respectively.

An important task in this respect is introducing to Western schools’ curricula and textbooks this understanding of colonialism and strengthening the research on it in universities. If this were to succeed, the media would follow suit. The task is not easy, but if this message were conveyed effectively, we could then hope that every decent person in the West, as in the time of colonialism, would not stand on the side of the oppressive ideology and instead would identify with its victims and deem their struggle as anticolonialist.

Anyone who does not subscribe to the Israeli version of a two-state solution is suspected of being an anti-Semite.

The Israeli version is a Jewish state next to two bantustans, divided into twelve enclaves in the West Bank, and contained in a huge ghetto in the Gaza Strip, with no connection between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and run by a small municipality in Ramallah operating as the seat of government. Official Israel insists that in the interest of national security a Palestinian state, if at all allowed, would be modeled along these lines.

ISM (the international solidarity movement). It has provided an alternative source of information to the distorted reports of the mainstream media in the West, in particular grabbing public attention in the United States when Rachel Corrie, a young activist in the ISM, was brutally killed by the Israeli army.

The analysis of Israel as an apartheid state that resembles South Africa during its worst moment has produced another prognosis that is diametrically opposed to the raison d’être of the “peace process.”

This is how the BDS campaign was born—out of a call from Palestinian civil society to pressure Israel through these means until it respects the human and civil rights of Palestinians wherever they are.

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.

Zionist ideology and the movement’s polices in the past and Israeli policies in the present: both aim to establish a Jewish state by taking over as much of historical Palestine as possible and leaving in it as few Palestinians as possible. The desire to turn the mixed ethnic Palestine into a pure ethnic space was and is at the heart of the conflict that has raged since 1882.

This impulse, never condemned or rebuked by a world that watched by and did nothing, led to the massive expulsion of 750,000 people (half of the region’s population), the destruction of more than five hundred villages, and the demolition of a dozen towns in 1948.

Ethnic cleansing became the DNA of Israeli Jewish society—and remains a daily preoccupation for those in power and those who were engaged in one way or another with the various Palestinian communities controlled by Israel. It became the means for implementing a not yet fulfilled dream—if Israel wanted not only to survive but also to thrive, whatever the shape of the state, the fewer Arabs in it, the better.

millions of Jews who were brought from Islamic and Arab counties. If they were to partake in the Zionist dream, they had to be de-Arabized (losing any connection to their mother tongue and proactively showing how un-Arab they were by daily expressing their self-hate, as Ella Habib Shohat has put it, for everything that is Arab). The Arab Jews who could have been the bridge to reconciliation turned out to be one of the highest obstacles to it.

So the refusal to allow the repatriation of refugees, the military rule on the Palestinians who were left inside Israel (1948–1966), the occupation and treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank, the erection of the apartheid wall, the silent transfer of Palestinians from Jerusalem, the siege on Gaza, and the oppression of the Bedouins in the al-Naqab are all either stages or components in an ongoing ethnic cleansing operation.

This dehumanization is the bitter fruit of the moral corruption that the militarization of the Jewish society bore in Israel. The Palestinians are a military target, a security risk, and a demographic bomb. This is one of the main reasons why ethnic cleansing is an ideology that is regarded by the international community, in the aftermath of the Second World War, as a hideous crime and moreover one that can lead to genocide—since with both crimes you have to dehumanize your victim in order to implement your vision of ethnic purity. Whether you expel or massacre people, including children, they have to be objectified as military targets, not as human beings.

the worst corruption of young Israelis is the indoctrination they receive that totally dehumanizes the Palestinians. When an Israeli soldier sees a Palestinian baby he does not see an infant—he sees the enemy.

In Israel, since 1948, ethnic cleansing is not just a policy—it is a way of life, and its constant practice criminalizes the state, not just its policies.

The depiction of Zionism as colonialism, the analysis of Israel as an apartheid state, and the recognition of how deeply imbedded the notion of ethnic cleansing is in Jewish society in Israel is the source of thee key entries in our new dictionary shaping our view of the future: decolonization, regime change, and a one-state solution.

people in the West could see the discrepancy between the various attempts to solve the conflict (such as Geneva 1977, Madrid 1991, Oslo 1993, and Camp David 2000) and what was really taking place on the ground. In this respect Chomsky was the first to observe that the process was never meant to reach a destination but only to perpetuate a situation of no solution. Israel used it as a means to grab more land, build more colonies, and annex more space. The status quo was the solution.

The principle of regime change was abused by the United States and Britain in their attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan but won a new international legitimacy in the popular revolutions in Tunis and Egypt.

Regimes can change dramatically and drastically, but they can also change gradually and in a bloodless manner.

The new movement of activists does not possess the power to eliminate states nor are they interested in doing so. 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.

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.

Partition signifies international complicity in the crime of destruction, not a peace offer.

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.

a purely Jewish state in a binational country. 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 international community interested in helping Palestine needs to stand behind the attempt to turn Israel into a pariah state as long as Israel continues to pursue its policies of apartheid, dispossession, and occupation.