Who Rules the World? (American Empire Project)

by Noam Chomsky

Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.

The founders, of course, did not intend the term “person” to apply to all persons: Native Americans were not persons. Their rights were virtually nil. Women were scarcely persons; wives were understood to be “covered” under the civil identity of their husbands in much the same way as children were subject to their parents. Blackstone’s principles held that “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.”22 Women are thus the property of their fathers or husbands. This principle remains in force up to very recent years; until a Supreme Court decision of 1975, women did not even have a legal right to serve on juries. They were not peers.

Of course, it was the United States and Israel that had rejected diplomacy and the PLO that had been offering compromise for years, but Lewis’s reversal of the facts was quite normal and unchallenged in the mainstream. There were other crucial developments in the immediate pre-Madrid/pre-Oslo years. In December 1987, the Intifada erupted in Gaza and quickly spread throughout the Occupied Territories.9 This broad-based and remarkably restrained uprising was as much of a surprise to the PLO in Tunis as it was to the occupying Israeli forces with their extensive system of military and paramilitary forces, surveillance, and collaborators. The Intifada was not limited to opposing the occupation. It was also a social revolution within Palestinian society, breaking patterns of subordination of women, authority by notables, and other forms of hierarchy and domination. Though the timing of the Intifada was a surprise, the uprising itself was not, at least to those who paid any attention to Israel’s U.S.-backed operations within the territories. Something was bound to happen; there is only so much that people can endure. For the preceding twenty years, Palestinians under military occupation

had been subjected to harsh repression, brutality, and cruel humiliation while watching what remained of their country disappear before their eyes as Israel conducted its programs of settlement, implemented huge infrastructure developments designed to integrate valuable parts of the territories within Israel, robbed them of resources, and put into place other measures to bar independent development—always with crucial U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support, as well as ideological backing in shaping how the issues were framed.

Oslo II thus rescinded the decision of virtually the entire world, and all relevant legal authorities, that Israel has no claim to the territories occupied in 1967 and that the settlements are illegitimate.

The Oslo process was “expected to bring peace to the Middle East,” Waage writes, but “for the Palestinians, it resulted in the parceling of the West Bank, the doubling of Israeli settlers, the construction of a crippling separation wall, a draconian closure regime, and an unprecedented separation between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.”32 Waage concludes plausibly that the “Oslo process could serve as the perfect case study for flaws” in the model of “third party mediation by a small state in highly asymmetrical conflicts”—and that, as she puts it starkly, “the Oslo process was conducted on Israel’s premises, with Norway acting as Israel’s helpful errand boy.”

Israeli officials laud the humanity of their army, which even goes so far as to inform residents that their homes will be bombed. The practice is “sadism, sanctimoniously disguising itself as mercy,” in the words of Israeli journalist Amira Hass: “A recorded message demanding hundreds of thousands of people leave their already targeted homes, for another place, equally dangerous, 10 kilometers away.”45 In fact, no place in the prison is safe from Israeli sadism.