Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (66 page)

But the point is, most of these voting blocks that joined to put Netanyahu in power have a kind of religious chauvinist element to them—you know, they want to restore and establish Jewish identity, their emphasis is on what are called in the United States “the cultural issues,” that’s what Likud won on. And often that does have sort of a populist appeal: so Likud got the support of poor and working people, and they got it in the same kind of way as Pat Buchanan gets their support here—and with about as much authenticity in terms of concern for their interests. And part of the irony of the elections is that the people these nationalist constituencies elected are almost pure Americans and secular—I mean, Netanyahu could run for office in the United States and nobody would notice it, he’s essentially an American, just listen to him on television. Or take his leading foreign policy advisor, Dore Gold: he grew up in the United States, has an American accent, he’s completely Americanized and secular—and he’s the chief policy advisor. So what in fact happened is that the most Americanized element that has ever existed in Israeli politics won the election on a nationalist/religious program. And since you’ve got to give some crumbs to your constituency, the question now is, how are they going to do it? Well,
that’s
the issue after the Israeli elections.

And right now the more secular European-types in the Israeli population are extremely worried about it—and they’re extremely worried about it for the exact same reason we would be extremely worried about it if the Christian Right turned out to be the major constituency of the guy who wins the Presidential election in the United States. So suppose Bob Dole had won the Presidency here in 1996 with the overwhelming support of the Christian Right, and chauvinist fanatics, and the “militias,” and so on and so forth. I mean, basic policies wouldn’t change much as a result, but something would have to be done—there would have to be some kind of palliative offer to the constituency that voted him in. And that can mean things, it can have serious effects. So those are the sorts of changes I think one can expect to see in Israel, and it’s not very clear how these internal factors will play out.

P.L.O. Ambitions

M
AN
: Can you add a word about the Palestinian leadership’s response to the whole “peace process”? You generally characterize the P.L.O. as a bunch of conservative mayor-types—has that analysis changed at all?

Well, you know, I’ve always thought that the P.L.O. is the most corrupt and incompetent Third World movement I’ve ever seen.
  ⁸⁷
I mean, they’ve
presented
themselves all these years as, you know, revolutionaries waving around guns, Marx, etc.—but they’re basically conservative nationalists, and they always
were
conservative nationalists: the rest was all pretense.

In fact, part of the reason for the failure of the whole Palestinian cause is that the P.L.O. is the only Third World leadership I’ve ever seen that didn’t try to stimulate or support—or even help—any kind of international solidarity group. Even the North Koreans, crazy as they are, have made efforts to try to get popular support in the United States. But the Palestinian leadership never did. And it’s not because they weren’t
told
that it would be a good idea—I mean, there were people like, say, Ed Said [Palestinian-American professor], who were trying to get them to do that for years, and I was even involved in it myself. But they just couldn’t hear it. Their conception of the way politics works is that it’s arranged by rich guys sitting in back rooms who work out deals together, and the population’s irrelevant. They haven’t the slightest conception of the way a democratic system functions. So while it’s true we don’t have like a stellar democracy in the United States, what the population thinks and does makes a difference here—a big difference—and there are mechanisms to influence things. But the P.L.O. leadership has just never understood that.

The extent of this is really astonishing, actually. Just to give you one example of it, back in the early 1980s, when South End Press [a radical American publishing collective] was first coming along, it was publishing some books which could have been very useful for Palestinians. So one of the books it published was a very good war diary about the 1982 Lebanon war, written by a well-known Israeli military officer who was one of the founders of the Israeli army actually, a guy named Dov Yermiya, who’s a very respected guy and a decent human being—and he was absolutely horrified by what was going on during Israel’s attack on Lebanon. So he wrote a war diary which was published in Hebrew and was very different from anything you ever heard here in the mainstream, giving an accurate picture of what was going on, which was massive atrocities.
  ⁸⁸
Well, obviously no publisher in the United States was going to touch it, but South End did publish it in English translation—and of course, it never got reviewed, no library would pick it up, nobody knows it exists, and so on; I had a book on the Middle East which was the same story, and there were a couple others like that.

Well, there was an approach to the P.L.O. about all of this—and incidentally, the P.L.O. had tons of money. I mean, part of their problem was that they were way too rich for their own good: they had a ton of money because the rich Arab states were trying to buy them off so they wouldn’t cause them any trouble. So you know, Arafat was able to broker billion-dollar loans to Hungary, and all this kind of crazy business. But anyway, the P.L.O. had tons of money, and there was a proposal to try to get them just to purchase books—like, say, Yermiya’s book—and send them to libraries so the book would be in American public libraries: it was nothing more than that.

Okay, it got up to the P.L.O. leadership, and they refused. Or rather, they would agree to do it only if the book was published with a P.L.O. imprint on it, saying, you know, “Published with the support of the P.L.O.” Well, you can guess what it would mean if you published a book in the United States with that imprint on it—so that was the end of that idea. But just to do something like buying books which never would be reviewed and putting them in libraries which aren’t going to buy them on their own, as a way to maybe help Palestinians in refugee camps who are being smashed to pieces in Beirut [the Lebanese city that was the focus of Israel’s attack]—that they wouldn’t do. And in fact, that’s just symbolic: they would do
nothing
that would help to build up support for the really suffering people who they were supposed to represent—just because they were playing a different game. Their game was, “We’re going to make a deal with Kissinger or Nixon, or some rich guy in a back room, and then our problems will be over.” Well, of course that will never work.

Actually, the corruption of the P.L.O. has just infuriated Palestinians in the Territories, I should say. I was in the Territories back in 1988 or so, and when you went into, say, the old city of Nablus, or villages, and talked to organizers or activists, their hatred and contempt of the P.L.O. was just extraordinary. They were very bitter about it—about the robbery and the corruption and everything else—but they just said: look, it’s the best we’ve got, that’s our international image, you want to talk diplomacy you’ve got to talk to them.

However, by about 1992 or ’93 even that kind of grudging acceptance had begun to collapse. There was a lot of opposition to the Arafat leadership in the Territories—and in the refugee camps in Lebanon, there were open calls for his resignation, calls for democratizing the P.L.O., and so on. The Israeli press knew all about it—they cover the Territories pretty well—and certainly Israeli intelligence knew about it, because they’ve got the place honeycombed. So there were articles by doves in the Israeli press around the summer of 1993 or so, saying: now’s a good time to deal with the P.L.O., because they’re going to give away everything—since their support is so weak inside the Occupied Territories, the last chance the P.L.O. leadership has to hang on to power is to be our agents, Israeli agents. Israeli
doves
wrote articles about that, and of course the Israeli government knew it.
  ⁸⁹

Well, okay, that whole phenomenon led to the Oslo Agreements—and now where the P.L.O. leadership fits in is just as part of the standard Third World model: they are the ruling Third World elite. So take a classic case, look at the history of India for a couple hundred years under the British Empire: the country was run by
Indians
, not by British—the bureaucrats who actually ran things were Indians, the soldiers who beat people up and smashed their heads were Indians. There was an Indian leadership which became very rich and privileged by being the agents of the British imperial system—and it’s the same thing everywhere else. So for example, if you look at Southern Africa in the more recent period, the most brutal atrocities were carried out by black soldiers, who were basically mercenaries for the white racist South African regime. And every Third World country is like that. Whatever you want to call it, the whole American sort of “neocolonial system”—El Salvador, Brazil, the Philippines, and so on—is not run by
Americans
. The U.S. may be in the background, and when things get out of hand you may send in the American army or something—but basically it’s all being run by local agents of the imperial power, whose internal power depends on their support from the outside, but who very much enrich themselves by their client ruler status. Alright, that’s the standard colonial relationship, and the P.L.O. is intending to play that role.

So they have a huge security force—nobody really knows how big it is, because it’s secret, but they may have thirty or forty thousand men enlisted. They surely have one of the highest densities of police per capita in the world, if not the highest. They work very closely with the Israeli secret services and the Israeli army. They’re very brutal.
  ⁹⁰
And they’re making a ton of money. So you go to places like Gaza which are just collapsing, there are people starving in the streets—and there’s also a ton of construction, new fancy restaurants, hotels, a lot of Palestinian investors going in and making plenty of money: it’s the standard Third World pattern, that’s the way the whole Third World is organized. And you see it everywhere these days—Eastern Europe is becoming that way too right now. I mean, about a year ago the per capita purchasing rate of Mercedes-Benzes in Moscow was higher than it was in New York, because there is tremendous wealth. Meanwhile, half a million more people are dying every year in Russia than in the 1980s; mortality for men has gone down seven or eight years on average in the last few years; and on and on.
  ⁹¹

Okay, that’s the Third World. And that’s the way the P.L.O. leadership sees its future—and with some justice too, you know, because otherwise they probably would have been kicked out. So now that’s their role, to oversee all of this, and they’ll put up with any humiliation, it doesn’t matter what. I mean, you look at the terms of the peace treaty, it was just gratuitous humiliation. But the P.L.O. is perfectly happy to take it. And they’ll get rich, they’ll have the guns, and they’ll be the equivalent of the elite in India, or Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, or any other place that you see in the Third World.

The Nation-State System

W
OMAN
: Noam, the problems you describe in the world sound almost chronic to me—systematic underdevelopment and exploitation in the Third World, proliferation of nuclear weapons, the growing environmental crisis. What means of social organization do you think would be necessary for us to overcome these things?

Well, in my view what would ultimately be necessary would be a breakdown of the nation-state system—because I think that’s not a viable system. It’s not necessarily the natural form of human organization; in fact, it’s a European invention pretty much. The modern nation-state system basically developed in Europe since the medieval period, and it was extremely difficult for it to develop: Europe has a very bloody history, an extremely savage and bloody history, with constant massive wars and so on, and that was all part of an effort to establish the nation-state system. It has virtually no relation to the way people live, or to their associations, or anything else particularly, so it had to be established by force. And it was established by centuries of bloody warfare. That warfare ended in 1945—and the only reason it ended is because the next war was going to destroy
everything
. So it ended in 1945—we hope; if it didn’t, it
will
destroy everything.

The nation-state system was exported to the rest of the world through European colonization. Europeans were barbarians basically, savages: very advanced technologically, and advanced in methods of warfare, but not culturally or anything else particularly. And when they spread over the rest of the world, it was like a plague—they just destroyed everything in front of them, it was kind of like Genghis Khan or something. They fought differently, they fought much more brutally, they had better technology—and they essentially wiped everything else out.
  ⁹²

The American continent’s a good example. How come everybody around here has a white face, and not a red face? Well, it’s because the people with the white faces were savages, and they killed the people with red faces. When the British and other colonists came to this continent, they simply destroyed everything—and pretty much the same thing happened everywhere else in the world. You go back to about the sixteenth century and the populations of Africa and Europe were approximately comparable; a couple centuries later, the population of Europe was far higher, maybe four times as high. Why did that change? Well, you know, those were the effects of European colonization.
  ⁹³