On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

the late nineteenth century when Zionism appeared as a movement. It had two noble objectives: one was to find a safe place for Jews who felt insecure in a growing atmosphere of anti-Semitism, and the other was that some Jews wanted to redefine themselves in a national group, not just as a religion. The problem started when they chose Palestine as a territory in which to implement these two impulses. It was clear because the land was inhabited that you would have to do it by force and you had to contemplate the depopulation of the inhabitants of the indigenous people. It took time for the Palestinian community to realize that this was the plan. Even the Balfour declaration did not awaken the people when it was adopted in November 1917; it did not bring the Palestinians to revolt against the British policy or the Zionist strategy. By 1936, you could already see the beginning of the real result of this strategy: Palestinians were evicted from land purchased by the Zionist movement; Palestinians lost their jobs because of Zionist strategy to take over the labor market. It was very clear that the European Jewish problem was going to be solved in Palestine. All these factors pushed Palestinians for the first time to say, “We are going to do something about it,” and they tried to revolt. You needed the might of the British Empire to crush that revolt. It took them three years;

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