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.”

It is a rallying call to move forward, change gears, and totally rethink the vocabulary we use when it comes to the Palestine question—to use semantics as an educating tool for change.

The Palestine question is emblematic of what is wrong with the world. The role played by Western states, the complicity of corporations and of various institutions make this case a very special one.

While in the past, the activists could have attributed this gap to a measure of sophistication behind the Israeli actions that hid well the uncanny, and quite often criminal, Israeli policies, this could not have been the case in our century. The successive Israeli governments since the beginning of this century rendered any sophisticated analysis of Israel quite redundant.

Israel does suffer from social and cultural rifts and cracks, but they have been muted for the time being by the invention of a phony threat of an Iranian nuclear war and other such scenarios that also ensure the uninhibited flow of money to the army and security services.

The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.

But Israel succeeded nonetheless, with the help of its allies everywhere, in building a multilayered explanation that is so complex that only Israel can understand it. Any interference from the outside world is immediately castigated as naïve at best or anti-Semitic at worst.

Again I'm noticing how this dynamic is also changing

This language has helped Western diplomats and politicians remain ineffective—either out of will or necessity—in the face of continuing Israeli oppression. Expressions and phrases like “a land for two people,” “the peace process,” “the Israel-Palestine conflict,” “the need to stop the violence on both sides,” “negotiations,” or “the two-state solution” come straight out of a contemporary version of Orwell’s 1984.

The application of this definition—settler colonialism—to the case of Zionism is now quite common in the academic world and has politically enabled activists to see more clearly the resemblance of the case of Israel and Palestine to South Africa and to equate the fate of the Palestinians with that of the Native Americans.

The Green Line that created different classes of Palestinians (those inside Israel and those in the occupied territories) is slowly disappearing because the same policies of ethnic cleansing are enacted on both sides of the line.

In fact, the more sophisticated oppression of the Palestinian citizens inside Israel looks at times worse than the oppression of residents living under direct or indirect military rule in the West Bank.

this hits home (quite literally)

An important task in this respect is introducing to Western schools’ curricula and textbooks this understanding of colonialism and strengthening the research on it in universities. If this were to succeed, the media would follow suit. The task is not easy, but if this message were conveyed effectively, we could then hope that every decent person in the West, as in the time of colonialism, would not stand on the side of the oppressive ideology and instead would identify with its victims and deem their struggle as anticolonialist.

The most recent research has noted how uniform Israeli legal, economic, and cultural policies have become on both sides of the Green Line. The de facto and more invisible apartheid has been replaced by racist legislation in the Knesset and open policies of discrimination. It may be a different version of apartheid, but the Israel of 2014 is a state that segregates, separates, and discriminates openly on the basis of ethnicity (which in American parlance would be race), religion, and nationality.

Insisting on describing what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 and ever since as a crime and not just as a tragedy or even a catastrophe is essential if past evils are to be rectified. The ethnic cleansing paradigm points clearly to a victim and offender and more importantly to a mechanism of reconciliation.

The international silence in the face of this crime against humanity (which is how ethnic cleansing is defined in the dictionary of international law) transformed the ethnic cleansing into the ideological infrastructure on which the Jewish state was built. Ethnic cleansing became the DNA of Israeli Jewish society—and remains a daily preoccupation for those in power and those who were engaged in one way or another with the various Palestinian communities controlled by Israel. It became the means for implementing a not yet fulfilled dream—if Israel wanted not only to survive but also to thrive, whatever the shape of the state, the fewer Arabs in it, the better.

If they were to partake in the Zionist dream, they had to be de-Arabized

Whether you expel or massacre people, including children, they have to be objectified as military targets, not as human beings.

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. This realization turns on its head the logic of the peace process that has been attempted so far.

Chomsky was the first to observe that the process was never meant to reach a destination but only to perpetuate a situation of no solution. Israel used it as a means to grab more land, build more colonies, and annex more space. The status quo was the solution.

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. The blatant misbalance of power should have discredited this solution a long time ago as a realistic approach to peace.

This charade is still marketed successfully in the West: Israel is a democracy because the majority decides what it wants, even if the majority is determined by means of colonization, ethnic cleansing, and, recently, by ghettoizing the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,

Economic elites supported the “peace process” because it was perceived to lead to an economic bonanza.

However, speaking about the future, this is changing in the Anglosphere. Since the 1960s, mainly the effect of sixties-era activism, there has been a considerable revival, a significant one, of concern for what actually happened in the past. A lot of it was suppressed until then, literally.

Where the Israelis find it difficult is actually in escaping the description of the reality as colonialist when trying to do this in Hebrew. Any translation into another language of the Israeli terminology of settlement is bound to expose the colonialist nature of the project. Even those progressive Jews who support Israel feel uncomfortable when this act of translation is taking place.

We are dealing with a nineteenth-century fossil that is very alive and kicking in the twenty-first century. That’s why I think the power of connecting the past to the future comes through the paradigm of settler colonialism. Because settler colonialism is not only about the act of settling and colonizing but what happens afterwards. NC: Driving out the indigenous population.

Palestinians have no qualms about the Jews forming a state in Uganda, as some people proposed in 1902 to 1903. Not one Palestinian in the world would be interested in this scenario. That’s the main issue. How do you implement your right to self-determination?

If you live in Israel, and you are an Israeli citizen, you are not a Jew. So the Jewish state concept is a complete anomaly. It has no analogs in the modern world.

Every state, if you look at its history, is created by extreme violence. There is no other way to impose a uniform structure on people of varying interests, backgrounds, languages, and so on. So it’s done by violence.

Israeli policies will lead Israel to self-destruction.

Ever since then Israel prefers expansion over security. To say they prefer expansion to security means that they are going to follow the path of apartheid South Africa because that follows automatically. Step by step they are going to become isolated, a pariah state, delegitimized, very much like South Africa, they are going to be able to survive only as long as the US supports them.

The Israelis now have to brand two commodities. They have to market to the world the legitimacy of the state in a world that finds it very difficult to accept it. But then they have also a domestic branding to do. They have to explain to the poor and marginalized Jews why belonging to the master race has not improved their socio-economic standards of living. Why do they still live in impoverished development towns? Why is their culture not represented in the European-dominated and hegemonic culture?

We need to make sure we do not stay at the level of slogans. You know what you are talking about and are very concrete about the kind of atrocities that you are facing. In most cases, you can leave it to an academic debate later on to explain the general context. But as an activist there has to be a direct address to the community of suffering, even if you do not have national leadership and even if the reality is fragmented.

This combination of highly committed young Arabs to both the idea of Palestine and democracy frightened the Israelis who would be much more comfortable if the pro-Palestinian sentiment were packaged in an anti-democratic way.

We still don’t have a clear study that tells ordinary people in the United States why the Israeli academia should be targeted. There is a need to present a clear proof to people about their complacency: the level of their collaboration with the occupation and the oppression.

support it and I think there is a problem with the state of Israel as it is, not just with what it is doing in the West Bank but also what it is doing in Haifa, in the Naqab, and in Acre. This is not yet clear to many people in the West. I think that people there are not aware that they are facing a bigger injustice than just the Israeli policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

when people talk about apartheid, it is a little bit misleading. I mean, inside Israel, there is repression, but it is not apartheid. In the Occupied Territories, it’s much worse than apartheid;

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.

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.

I think it is an important period to go back to to understand how British imperialism, Christian Zionism, and of course Jewish nationalism played together as a formidable force that left very few chances for the Palestinians when it all came together in the late nineteenth century.

The second reason is that we will never succeed in changing political views about the Palestinian issue if we don’t explain to people how knowledge was manipulated. It is very important because you need to understand how certain phrases are being used like peace process, how certain ideas are being broadcasted like the only democracy in the Middle East, like Palestinian primitivism, and so on. You need to understand how these languages are means of manipulating the knowledge that is there so as to form a certain point of view and prevent another point of view for coming into the space.

There is all the time this laundry list of words and ideas that try to convince you that whatever the Israelis are doing, if you are unhappy with this, it doesn’t matter because there is no one on the other side that has anything legitimate to offer—it all depends on the Israelis’ kindness.

The second reason is that the two-state solution has a logical ring to it. It’s a very Western idea. A colonialist invention that was applied in India and Africa, this idea of partition, while the non-Western world is a far more holistic world. [The idea of partition] became a kind of religion to the extent that you do not question it anymore. You work out how best to get there. To my mind it makes very intelligent people take this as a religion of logic. If you question the rationality of it, you are criticized.

They survive on donations essentially. Israel has made sure that it’s not a productive economy. They’re a kind of what would be called in Yiddish a schnorrer society: you just borrow and live on what you can get.

Ever since June 1967, Israel has searched for a way to keep the territories it occupied that year without incorporating their indigenous Palestinian population into its rights-bearing citizenry. All the while it participated in a “peace process” charade to cover up or buy time for its unilateral colonization policies on the ground.

Ever since 1994, and even more so when Ariel Sharon came to power as prime minister in the early 2000s, the strategy there has been to ghettoize Gaza and somehow hope that the people there—1.8 million as of today—would be dropped into eternal oblivion.

Whether it is burning alive a Palestinian youth from Jerusalem, fatally shooting two others just for the fun of it in Beitunia, or slaying whole families in Gaza, these are all acts that can only be perpetrated if the victim is dehumanized. The only chance for a successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based on a human and civil rights agenda that does not differentiate between one violation and the other and yet identifies clearly the victim and the victimizers.

A world that would stop employing double standards in its dealings with Israel is a world that could be far more effective in its response to war crimes elsewhere in the world.

“The most common sentence I heard when people began to talk about cease-fire: Everybody says it’s better for all of us to die and not go back to the situation we used to have before this war. We don’t want that again. We have no dignity, no pride; we are just soft targets, and we are very cheap. Either this situation really improves or it is better to just die. I am talking about intellectuals, academics, ordinary people: Everybody is saying that.”