On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

The minutes of the meetings are now open to historians. They expose the impossibility and incompatibility of these two impulses: the appetite for possessing new land on the one hand and the reluctance to either drive out or fully incorporate the people living on them, on the other. But the documents also reveal a self-congratulatory satisfaction from the early discovery of a way out of the ostensible logical deadlock and theoretical impasse. The ministers were convinced, as all the ministers after them would be, that they had found the formula that would enable Israel to keep the territories it coveted, without annexing the people it negated and while safeguarding its international immunity and reputation.9 When those three goals are translated into actual policies they can only produce an inhuman and ruthless reality on the ground. There can be no benign or enlightened version for a policy meant to keep people in citizenless status for a long period of time.