On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

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.

Counter-educational projects in the long run, active resistance, and huge pressure from the outside can transform a society like that in Israel. However, counter-education is a very long process,

a slide toward an age of more racist legislation, expanded projects of Judaization, and an alarming increase in attacks on Palestinians under the slogan Tag Mehir (Price Tag) that consists of the daily destruction of Palestinian property and holy places.

A genuine and clear conversation about the new options instead of a dead formula is imperative at this moment in history. The reframing of the Arab-Jewish relationship over the whole land of historical Palestine is a crucial project that has to commence. Whatever one proposes in terms of the future political entity, it has to be based on full equality for whoever lives in or was expelled from the country.

the need to offer the old-new Palestinian refugees a return to their original homeland has to be endorsed as both a humanitarian gesture and as a political act that can contribute to the end of the conflict in Israel and Palestine.

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

To forget about the past means forgetting about the future because the past involves aspirations, hopes, many of them entirely justified, that will be dealt with in the future if you pay attention to them.

the past becomes an obstacle in the eyes of the so-called mediators, but the past is everything in the eyes of the occupied and the oppressed people.

most of what is interpreted today as Zionism violates, and contradicts, basic human rights and civil rights for anyone who is not a Jew in Israel.

Zionism meant something different in the pre-state and post-state period. From 1948 on, Zionism meant the ideology of the state. A state religion.

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.

they were Ahad Ha’Amists. They wanted a cultural center as a place where the diaspora could find a way to live together with the Palestinians. That ended in 1948.

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.

For me there is one constant dimension of Zionism that does not easily shift with time, one can call it mainstream Zionism, sometimes referred to as Labor Zionism. It’s the colonialist, or settler-colonialist, dimension of Zionism. 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.

NC: The Jewish settlement in Israel was certainly a settler-colonial movement. 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. It’s not a small point. If you take a look at the international support for Israeli policies, it’s of course primarily the USA, but secondarily it’s the Anglosphere.

activists. 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.

We are dealing with a nineteenth-century fossil that is very alive and kicking in the twenty-first century. That’s why I think the power of connecting the past to the future comes through the paradigm of settler colonialism. Because settler colonialism is not only about the act of settling and colonizing but what happens afterwards. NC: Driving out the indigenous population. IP: Exactly.

If a group is a victim of a crime and is looking for a safe haven, it cannot obtain this by expelling someone else, another group, from this space that you want as your safe haven.

The problem is not the right of the Jews to have a state of their own or not. That’s an internal Jewish problem. Orthodox Jews might have a problem with this. Palestinians have no qualms about the Jews forming a state in Uganda, as some people proposed in 1902 to 1903. Not one Palestinian in the world would be interested in this scenario. That’s the main issue. How do you implement your right to self-determination?

NC: The idea of a Jewish state is an anomaly. It’s not something that’s happened...

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?

Every state, if you look at its history, is created by extreme violence. There is no other way to impose a uniform structure on people of varying interests, backgrounds, languages, and so on. So it’s done by violence. 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.

There is no Israeli nationality. You cannot be an Israeli national. This came up in the courts back in the sixties and came back up again recently. A group of Israelis wanted to have their papers identify them as Israelis, not as Jews. It went all the way to the high court, which rejected it. It reflects this anomalous concept of a Je...

IP: Paradoxically it is used by Israel in an attempt to stifle any criticism of the state and its ideology. If you chastise Israel, you assault the Jewish state and by association you attack Judaism. That’...

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.”

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.

it’s worth remembering that the Holocaust was not a big issue in the 1940s. On the contrary; it became a big issue after 1967. If you take a look at the Holocaust museums,...

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

NC: 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.

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 are terrible historical injustices, some of them you can try to do something about, but just to unwind history is very difficult.

Chomsky

states have no inherent legitimacy. They have all been imposed by violence, they are causing violence all over the world. It’s an inhuman social structure. It should erode every time.

Chomsky

IP: The reason they do not accept the return has nothing to do with practicalities. It has to do with Jewish supremacy and Jewish exclusivity.

What is a Jewish state? Can it really exist as such? What would be a solution that is not based on a continued violation of basic human and civil rights and one that has to include the right of people to come back to their homeland, their right to visit their homeland? I think that’s where we sometimes do not differentiate between what is right, what we believe is justified, and what should be the issues we discuss inside Israel, inside the Palestinian community, and among the community of negotiators and mediators. We should be beyond that argument of supporting or not the right of return. We should talk about what it means. This is what Israeli society has to do. Have a serious internal discussion about its own racist nature.

Pappé

NC: This has nothing to do with refugees, this is pure racism. 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.”

the people who call themselves supporters of Israel are in fact supporters of its moral degeneration and probably ultimate destruction. IP: Absolutely.

Those are the kind of choices that you always have to make when you are considering acting in the interest of someone. You have to ask what is going to help them, not what is going to make me feel good. Call it pragmatic if you like, but I would call it ethical. You are concerned with the effects of your actions on the people you are standing in solidarity with.

IP: I think there are three elements here which are very important to consider: the fragmentation of the Palestinian existence; the accountability of the Zionist ideology for the reality we face today in Israel and Palestine; and finding the right balance between ethical positions and concrete actions.

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.

Israel understands, like South Africa at the time, that they can be a pariah state, the whole world can be against them, but that it does not make a difference as long as the USA backs them.

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

cultural relations, Christian Zionism for example, is part of the demographic base of the Republican Party—extremely anti-Semitic, but pro-Israel. All these things have to be addressed.

NC: I think that US foreign policy as in every other case will have to change because of pressure from the bottom.

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.

South Africa

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. Kicking the Palestinians out, whose population is now down to sixty thousand, compared to a couple of hundred thousands in 1967. There is a systematic policy of displacing them, replacing them by Jewish settlements, which leads the way to a form of annexation which would completely imprison any Palestinian entity that might arise somehow—in 30 percent of the West Bank. The US is backing these actions and policies. Something simple like boycotting products is an entry point to bringing out all of these issues. Among the general public that’s intelligible.

Apartheid was substantially ended by Cuba. The scholarly record on this by now is just overwhelming. The Cubans sent military forces, mostly Black soldiers, who drove the South Africans out of Angola, forced them to leave Namibia, broke the mythology of this white superman, which had a big effect on white and Black South Africa. And the South Africans know it. 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.

We still don’t have a clear study that tells ordinary people in the United States why the Israeli academia should be targeted. There is a need to present a clear proof to people about their complacency: the level of their collaboration with the occupation and the oppression.

the Israeli wish to keep the status quo and the Palestinian crave to change it. The former have a lot to lose in terms of privileges and power, the latter everything to gain. Thus the need to pressure the former is the key for peace or reconciliation.

NC: I suspect that there is a not-too-hidden sense among the Israelis of the fragility of their future. One indication is that there are a number of people who are trying to get a double passport.

the Arab Jews . . . they’ve got nowhere to go!

NC: I read somewhere that the most rapidly growing Jewish community in the World is in Berlin . . . IP: Yes, it is absolutely true. It is a bit ironic!