Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (27 page)

Understanding the Middle East Conflict

M
AN
: If I can just change the topic a little, Professor—I’d like you to talk a bit about the situation in the Middle East these days. People say the Palestinians are utilizing the media more than they ever have before to draw attention to Israeli repression [i.e. during the Palestinian uprising of the late 1980s]. I’m wondering whether you think that will have any effect on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the future?

[Editors’ Note: The following discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict forms the foundation of Chomsky’s analysis of the so-called “peace process” that began in the early 1990s, which is discussed in chapters 5 and 8.]

Well, this business about the Palestinians “using the media” is mostly racist garbage, in my view. The fact of the matter is that the Intifada is a big, mass, popular revolution in reaction to the absolutely brutal treatment the Palestinians have been living under—and it’s going on in places where there are no television cameras, and places where there are.

See, there’s a whole racist line which is very common in the United States. One of my favorite versions of it appeared in the journal
Commentary
, in an article written by some professor in Canada. It said: the Palestinians are “people who breed, and bleed, and advertise their misery.”
  ³⁷
Straight Nazi propaganda. I mean, imagine if somebody said that about Jews: “Jews are people who breed, and bleed, and advertise their misery.” But that’s the kind of thing you hear—it’s a particularly vulgar version of it, but the line is: look, the Palestinians are just doing it for the cameras because they’re trying to discredit the Jews.

They do exactly the same thing when there are no cameras.

The real point is, Israel is having a lot of trouble putting down this popular revolution. I mean, the repression of the Palestinians in the West Bank is not qualitatively different right now from what it’s been for the last twenty years—it’s just that it’s escalated in scale since the Palestinians started fighting back in the Intifada. So the brutality you see occasionally now on television has in fact been going on for the last twenty years, and it’s just the nature of a military occupation: military occupations are harsh and brutal, there is no other kind [Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria during the Six Day War in 1967, and has controlled them ever since]. There’s been home-destruction, collective punishments, expulsion, plenty of humiliation, censorship—I mean, you’d have to go back to the worst days of the American South to know what it’s been like for the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. They are not supposed to raise their heads—that’s what they say in Israel, “They’re raising their heads, we’ve got to do something about it.” And that’s the way the Palestinians have been living.
  ³⁸

Well, the United States has been quite happy supporting that—so long as it worked. But in the last few years, it hasn’t worked. See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence. If violence is effective, everything’s okay; but if violence loses its effectiveness, then they start worrying and have to try something else. So right now you can see U.S. planners reassessing their policies towards the Occupied Territories, just as you can see the Israeli leadership reassessing them—because violence isn’t working as well anymore. In fact, the occupation’s beginning to be rather harmful for Israel. So it’s entirely possible that there could be some tactical changes coming with respect to how Israel goes about controlling the Territories—but none of this has anything to do with “using the media.”

W
OMAN
: What do you think a solution might he for resolving the conflict in the region, then?

Well, outside of the United States, everybody would know the answer to that question, I mean, for years there’s been a very broad consensus in the world over the basic framework of a solution in the Middle East, with the exception of two countries: the United States and Israel.
  ³⁹
It’s going to have to be some variety of two-state settlement.

Look, there are two groups claiming the right of national self-determination in the same territory; they both have a claim, they’re competing claims. There are various ways in which such competing claims could be reconciled—you could do it through a federation, one thing or another—but given the present state of conflict, it’s just going to have to be done through some form of two-state settlement.
  ⁴⁰
Now, you could talk about the modalities—should it be a confederation, how do you deal with economic integration, and so on—but the principle’s quite clear: there has to be some settlement that recognizes the right of self-determination of Jews in something like the state of Israel, and the right of self-determination of Palestinians in something like a Palestinian state. And everybody knows where that Palestinian state would be—in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, along roughly the borders that existed before the Six Day War in 1967. And everybody knows who the representative of the Palestinians is: it’s the Palestine Liberation Organization [P.L.O.].

All of this has been obvious for years—why hasn’t it happened? Well, of course Israel’s opposed to it. But the main reason it hasn’t happened is because the United States has blocked it: the United States has been blocking the peace process in the Middle East for the last twenty years—
we’re
the leaders of the rejectionist camp, not the Arabs or anybody else. See, the United States supports a policy which Henry Kissinger called “stalemate”; that was his word for it back in 1970.
  ⁴¹
At that time, there was kind of a split in the American government as to whether we should
join
the broad international consensus on a political settlement, or
block
a political settlement. And in that internal struggle, the hard-liners prevailed; Kissinger was the main spokesman. The policy that won out was what he called “stalemate”: keep things the way they are, maintain the system of Israeli oppression. And there was a good reason for that, it wasn’t just out of the blue: having an embattled, militaristic Israel is an important part of how we rule the world.

Basically the United States doesn’t give a damn about Israel: if it goes down the drain, U.S. planners don’t care one way or another, there’s no moral obligation or anything else. But what they
do
care about is control of the enormous oil resources of the Middle East. I mean, a big part of the way you run the planet is by controlling Middle East oil, and in the late 1950s, the United States began to recognize that Israel would be a very useful ally in this respect. So for example, there’s a National Security Council Memorandum in 1958 which points out that the main enemy of the United States in the Middle East (as everywhere) is nationalism, what they call “radical Arab nationalism”—which means independence, countries pursuing a course other than submission to the needs of American power. Well, that’s always the enemy: the people there don’t always see why the enormous wealth and resources of the region have to be in the control of American and British investors while they starve, they’ve never really gotten that into their heads—and sometimes they try to do something about it. Alright, that’s unacceptable to the United States, and one of the things they pointed out is that a useful weapon against that sort of “radical Arab nationalism” would be a highly militarized Israel, which would then be a reliable base for U.S. power in the region.
  ⁴²

Now, that insight was not really acted upon extensively until the Six Day War in 1967, when, with U.S. support, Israel essentially destroyed Nasser [the Egyptian President]—who was regarded as the main Arab nationalist force in the Middle East—and virtually all the other Arab armies in the region too. That won Israel a lot of points, it established them as what’s called a “strategic asset”—that is, a military force that can be used as an outlet for U.S. power. In fact, at the time, Israel and Iran under the Shah (which were allies, tacit allies) came to be regarded by American planners as two parts of a tripartite U.S. system for controlling the Middle East. This consisted first of all of Saudi Arabia, which is where most of the oil is, and then its two gendarmes, pre-revolutionary Iran and Israel—the “Guardians of the Gulf,” as they were called, who were supposed to protect Saudi Arabia from indigenous nationalist forces in the area. Of course, when the Shah fell in the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Israel’s role became even more important to the United States, it was the last “Guardian.”
  ⁴³

Meanwhile, Israel began to pick up secondary functions: it started to serve as a mercenary state for the United States around the world. So in the 1960s, Israel started to be used as a conduit for intervening in the affairs of black African countries, under a big C.I.A. subsidy. And in the 1970s and Eighties, the United States increasingly turned to Israel as kind of a weapon against other parts of the Third World—Israel would provide armaments and training and computers and all sorts of other things to Third World dictatorships at times when it was hard for the U.S. government to give that support directly. For instance, Israel acted as the main U.S. contact with the South African military for years, right through the embargo [the U.N. Security Council imposed a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa in 1977 after the U.S. and Britain had vetoed even stronger resolutions].
  ⁴⁴
Well, that’s a very useful alliance, and that’s another reason why Israel gets such extraordinary amounts of U.S. aid.
  ⁴⁵

The Threat of Peace

But notice that this whole system only works as long as Israel remains embattled. So suppose there was a real peace settlement in the Middle East, and Israel was just integrated into the region as its most technologically advanced country, kind of like Switzerland or Luxembourg or something. Well, at that point its value to the United States is essentially over—we already have Luxembourg, we don’t need another one. Israel’s value to the United States depends on the fact that it is threatened with destruction: that makes them completely dependent on the United States for survival, and therefore extremely reliable—because if the rug ever is pulled out from under them in a situation of real conflict, they
will
get destroyed.

And that reasoning has held right up to the present. I mean, it’s easy to show that the United States has blocked every move towards a political settlement that has come along in the Middle East—often we’ve just vetoed them at the U.N. Security Council.
  ⁴⁶
In fact, up until very recently, it’s been impossible in the United States even to
talk
about a political settlement. The official line in the United States has been, “The Arabs want to kill all the Jews and throw them into the sea”—with only two exceptions. One is King Hussein of Jordan, who’s a “moderate,” because he’s on our side. And the other was President Sadat of Egypt, who in 1977 realized the error of his ways, so he flew to Jerusalem and became a man of peace—and that’s why the Arabs killed him, because the Arabs’ll kill anybody who’s for peace [Sadat was assassinated in 1981]. That has been the official line in the United States, and you simply cannot deviate from it in the press or scholarship.

It’s total lies from beginning to end. Take Sadat: Sadat made a peace offer to Israel in February 1971, a better offer from Israel’s point of view than the one he later initiated in 1977 [which led to the Camp David peace talks]. It was a full peace treaty exactly in accord with U.N. Resolution 242 [which had called for a return to pre-June 1967 borders in the region with security guarantees, but made no mention of Palestinian rights]—the United States and Israel turned it down, therefore it’s out of history.
  ⁴⁷
In January 1976, Syria, Jordan and Egypt proposed a two-state peace settlement at the U.N. Security Council on the basis of U.N. 242, and the P.L.O. supported the proposal—it called for territorial guarantees, the whole business: the United States vetoed it, so it’s out of history, it didn’t happen.
  ⁴⁸
And it just goes on from there: the United States was unwilling to support any of these peace offers, so they’re out of history, they’re down Orwell’s memory hole.
  ⁴⁹

In fact, it’s even at the point where journals in the United States will not permit
letters
referring to these proposals; the degree of control on this is startling, actually. For example, a few years ago George Will wrote a column in
Newsweek
called “Mideast Truth and Falsehood,” about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: he said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977.
  ⁵⁰
So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to
Newsweek
—you know, four lines—in which I said, “Will has one statement of fact, it’s false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down.” Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the
Newsweek
“Letters” column. She said: “We’re kind of interested in your letter, where did you get those facts?” So I told her, “Well, they’re published in
Newsweek
, on February 8, 1971”—which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story.
  ⁵¹
So she looked it up and called me back, and said, “Yeah, you’re right, we found it there; okay, we’ll run your letter.” An hour later she called again and said, “Gee, I’m sorry, but we can’t run the letter.” I said, “What’s the problem?” She said, “Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he’s having a tantrum; they decided they can’t run it.” Well, okay.