On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

Again, it goes back to a rationalist Western way to look at reality. It says that I can only advocate for what I can get, not what I want. At this moment in time it seems that you have such a wide coalition for a two-state solution, so you go for it. You do not evaluate its morality, its ethical dimension, even if it’s likely to change the reality later on. This whole idea that this is a very reasonable approach is of course reasonable to a point. But it’s totally insane because it has nothing to do with the conflict. It has to do with the way Israel wants the world to accept this idea, constructed in 1967, that it needs most of the territory that it occupied then, but that it is willing to allow some autonomy to the Palestinians in that territory. That’s the debate in Israel. It’s never about the principles. The thing that Israel has always needed is international support. They need their policies rubber-stamped by the international community. They also need a Palestinian representative. In 1993 the PLO surprised them when it agreed to have a small autonomous area on a small part of the West Bank and leave all the rest to Israel. That’s the two-state solution that everybody wants to convince us is the only way forward. The problem is that not one Palestinian can live with this, hence the continuation of the conflict.