On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

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.”

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.

Academic Palestinian historiography and the “new history” in Israel has succeeded in debunking some of Israel’s more absurd claims about what happened in 1948 and to a lesser extent had been able to refute the depiction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a purely terrorist organization.

Since 2010, the Israeli legislation in the Knesset—demanding loyalty to a Jewish state from the Palestinian citizens, codifying (thus-far) informal discrimination in welfare benefits, land rights, and job hiring policies against the Palestinian minority—clearly has exposed Israel as an overtly racist and apartheid state.

the change will not come from within Israel.

Anyone who has been in Israel long enough, as I have, knows that 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.

ethnic cleansing does not end because it peters out. It ends either when the job is completed or is stopped by a more powerful force.

The entry of decolonization in the dictionary would hopefully put an end to the “coexistence” industry, which fueled a false dialogue financed mainly by the Americans and the leaders of the European Union.

What was particularly annoying and unhelpful was the paradigm of parity on which the peace process was based: it divided the blame between the two parties and treated them as equally responsible for the conflict while offering, allegedly, an equitable solution.

Not all past evils can be rectified, but ongoing evils surely should stop.

As I’ve said before, 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.

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

support of the observations that it is really a racist issue is the fact that Israel has been trying to block by law or by force commemorating the Nakba or recognizing it.

By 1988 and a few years beyond, the US was still supporting South Africa, strongly.

When US policy shifted, apartheid ended. Israel is moving in exactly the same direction. By now, their sole support, virtually, is the US. They are becoming delegitimized.

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

Take the antiwar movement about Vietnam for example. There were young people who were properly outraged by the war and thought that the ethical attitude to have was to carry out acts of destruction against US property, corporations, destroy armaments, and so on. That’s ethical, but it was harmful. The Vietnamese were strongly opposed to it. They did not care about the fact that people in the US felt good, they cared about what happened to them, on the ground. And the effects on them were harmful since it provoked a huge backlash and strengthened support for the war.

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.

Look at the South African solidarity movement. They actually lived up to this condition pretty effectively. By and large, looking at their actions, they selected actions which both harmed South African apartheid and enhanced support for the anti-apartheid struggle in their home countries. That’s what we should be doing.

That’s part of the problem. The USA supports Israel not out of benevolence, but because it’s useful for US policies.

Activism among young people has sparked broader popular movements. It’s true for the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement. That can have a large effect and it’s a matter of considerable concern for the Zionist organizations.

solidarity movement ought to be focused on that. Negotiations which are organized by the USA, which is a participant in the conflict. That makes about as much sense as if Iran was called upon to mediate the Shia/Sunni conflict in Iraq.

South Africa had to incorporate the Black population, they had no choice. First of all, it was the vast majority of the population and secondly, it was their workforce. They could not say, okay we will let you go rot somewhere and then they would disappear, but Israel can, that is the Greater Israel option.

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.

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.

You have to go back to 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.

One of the myths is that Israel was created because the Bible gave it to the Jewish people.

Zionism had one element that is usually forgotten by historians. This was a wish to secularize Jewish life.

History is crucial.

there is a difference between a peace train that takes us all to a better destination, which is the peace process that we don’t have, and the peace train that runs over everyone on the way to the so-called peace, which I think is our present peace process

Five minutes on the ground shows you that one state is already there. It’s a non-democratic regime, an apartheid regime. So you just need to think about how to change this regime. You do not need to think about a two-state solution. You need to think about how to change the relations between the communities, how to affect the power structure in place.

The Zionist strategy of branding its brutal policies as an ad hoc response to this or that Palestinian action is as old as the Zionist presence in Palestine itself.

is better to die with dignity than to be slowly strangled by the torturer.

The media constantly intone that Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In reality, Hamas leaders have repeatedly made it clear that Hamas would accept a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus that has been blocked by the United States and Israel for forty years. In contrast, Israel is dedicated to the destruction of Palestine, apart from some occasional meaningless words, and is implementing that commitment.

We need to start by correctly identifying the problem: expose Zionism as a colonialist movement and characterize Israel as an apartheid racist state.