On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

NC: I think we have to ask ourselves what Israel is planning and will be able to implement as long as the US supports it and ask ourselves how do...

It seems that what they are clearly planning is Greater Israel, which will of course include the Golan Heights, and will separate Gaza from the West Bank, which is a crucial violation of Oslo and everything else, but they don’t care about laws. As far as the West Bank is concerned, they have certainly planned to tak...

The Jordan Valley, which Israel claims it occupies only because of security, is now in fact inaccessible to most Palestinians since Israel has used the “security” issue to build more and more settlements. Looking at the plans that are being implemented, there are definite intentions to take over the Jordan Valley. It will mean that this Greater Israel, if it looks something like this, will have a very few Palestinians in it.

Pappé

A racist society will force them out even if they don’t want to leave. It will be presented to the West as a very gracious act of letting the Palestinian state have a piece of Israel, the piece that we don’t want because there are too many Arabs there and maybe, you know, giving them a little bit of land in the Negev. That looks like the picture on the ground, and if so, that is the picture we have to face.

Pappé

do we need to go through two states because of the consensus to eventually get to one state? NC: Yes, that is because the way I see it, Israel and the United States do not want one state and will never accept it. They have a preferable alternative from their point of view to take over what I’ve just described, this Greater Israel which is not going to have many Palestinians in it—in fact, a smaller percentage than in Israel today. The big Palestinian concentrations are going to be outside, population concentrations will be outside. The plan for them is I think they can mostly rot, or maybe flee. There will be a standard neocolonial structure in which there is a center for the elite.

Now, if some kind of two-state settlement, no matter how rotten it is, is established, my guess is that the borders are going to erode, because if you know the country at all, there is no way to draw a line, it would not make sense whatsoever. In fact, when there have been relaxations of tension in the past, there has been some erosion of the sharp boundaries, and commercial, cultural, and other kinds of interchange began to take place.

Chomsky

The vast majority regards this is a part of a Jewish state in a two-state solution. And in such a scenario nothing is left for the other state and what they mean is a support for a one-state version in which Zionism continues to prevail as a racist ideology or if convinced they would eventually accept a different democratic basis for such a state.

Pappé

a support of a one-state solution is activism that promotes the whole space as one land and the people as one people. What we should not succumb to is the Zionist version of the two states that limits the idea of a Jewish Palestine with few Palestinians in it to “just” 80 percent of Palestine.

Pappé

I think the task here and in Europe is to delegitimize the occupation, which is possible, delegitimize Israel insofar as it is involved in the occupation, press forward as much as possible to get the US to drop its unilateral opposition to diplomatic settlement along the lines that were laid out thirty-five years ago and see what the options are to create some alternatives to this Greater Israel picture which we see developing.

Chomsky

You are part of what is called by some people “the new historians” who give a new analysis and narrative of the history of Zionism and the history of the creation of Israel. You’ve taken some radical positions against the state of Israel. Why and when did you decide to stand on the Palestinians’ side? And what were the consequences for you, being Israeli? IP: Changing one’s point of view on such a crucial issue is a long journey, it doesn’t happen in one day and it doesn’t happen because of one event. I’ve tried in one of my books called Out of the Frame to describe this journey out of Zionism to a critical position against Zionism. If I had to choose a formative event that really changed my point of view in a dramatic way, it would be the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982.

Then the first Intifada happened. These events were eye-openers in many ways for people like myself who already had some doubts about Zionism, about the historical version we learned at school.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan, who has written a book about the way Arabs are portrayed in Israeli schoolbooks to show the world the amount of brainwashing and propaganda in Israel that starts from a very early age. Can you tell us more about this society as you’ve experienced this yourself as well? IP: Indeed. It is a very indoctrinated society, probably more than most Western societies and more than the non-Western societies. It is not because of coercion that people are indoctrinated; it is a powerful indoctrination from the moment you are born to the moment you die. The people in power don’t expect you to get out of it because you seem to be swimming in this fluid. What

One should think about the way you are brought up to believe that there are some truisms of life that if you challenge them, you need to clean yourself up to the bottom to be sure that you are able to move on because otherwise you have all these doubts all the time.

Pappé

there is a difference between my generation and the present generation of Nurit’s sons and my own sons: they know more than we did because of the Internet and what goes on. I think it is more difficult for the Israelis now to rely just on indoctrination although they are doing a good job. There are a very few among the young people of Israel who challenge Zionism. I hope that the world has become more opened with what happened in the Arab world as well. You thought that these were closed societies who would not know what is going on, so I hope this is going to change, but for us, we were like in a bubble, we did not know that there was a different existence; it was very difficult to get out of it.

Pappé

It is very difficult for Israelis to separate between the violence and the experience and the reasons for that violence. One of the most difficult things is to explain to the Israelis what is the cause and what is the effect. What brings that violence about and not to regard this violence as just coming out of the blue and therefore they have no other choice than being where they are.

Pappé

I think one of the major challenges is to find space for Israelis and Western people to be able to understand how it all began. Even the first Zionist settlers when they came and realized that what they thought was an empty land, or at least their own land, was full of Arab people, they regarded these people as aliens, as violent aliens who took over their land. It is this infrastructure they have built about the other side that feeds all the Israelis’ perception and visions. It is a dehumanization of the Palestinians that begins in the late nineteenth century. How to explain to people that they are actually a product of this alienation? It is one of the biggest tasks for anyone who engages in alternative education or is trying to convey a different message to the Israeli Jews’ society.

Pappé

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;

Pappé