On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

All these plausible explanations tend to see the policies as the direct product of the particular and extraordinary circumstances of June 1967. But these decisions were mainly the inevitable outcome of Zionist ideology and history (however one chooses to define this ideology or insist on its shades and innuendoes). The particular circumstances made it easier to remind the politicians of their ideological heritage and reconnected them once more, as they did in 1948, to the Zionist drive to Judaize as much of historical Palestine as possible. The first decision was not to ethnically cleanse the population despite the joy of expanding the Jewish state onto what many Israelis felt were the natural and historical borders of ancient Israel. The ministers played with the idea but eventually ruled it out. They doubted whether the army had the will and mentality to carry it out, as it was unclear whether the army had sufficient means for accomplishing it.7 The second decision was to exclude the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from any future deal based on territories for peace (a principle that, at least in theory, the government accepted for the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights). The prevailing sense in those meetings was that the international immunity for land expansion was guaranteed—not as an endorsement of expansionism per se but more as an unwillingness to confront it. But with one crucial caveat: there could not be a de jure annexation of the territories, only a de facto ...