On Palestine

There are analogies often made to South Africa, but they’re quite misleading. South Africa relied on its Black population. That was 85 percent of the population. It was its workforce. And they had to sustain them, just like slaveowners have to maintain their capital. They tried to sustain the population. They even tried to gain international support for the bantustans. Israel has no such attitude toward the Palestinians. They don’t want to have anything to do with them. If they leave, that’s fine. If they die, that’s fine. In standard neocolonial pattern, Israel is establishing— permitting the establishment of a center for Palestinian elites in Ramallah, where you have nice restaurants and theaters and so on. Every Third World country under the colonial system had something like that. Now, that’s the picture that’s emerging. It’s taking shape before our eyes. It has so far worked very well. If it continues, Israel will not face a demographic problem. When these regions are integrated slowly into Israel, actually, the proportion of Jews in Greater Israel will increase. There are very few Palestinians there. Those who are there are being dispossessed, kicked out. That’s what’s taking shape before our eyes. I think that’s the realistic alternative to a two-state settlement. And there’s every reason to expect it to continue as long as the United States supports it.

Hence “the peace process” and talk about “two states for two peoples” are not in any contradiction with the occupation, not even the “temporary occupation” of 1967. They are a political and conceptual framework designed to enable and perpetuate the status quo for as long as possible. Israel would find it hard to market this façade to the world if it were not assisted by many others, some serving their self-interests and others out of misled good intentions. The leadership of the Palestinian national movement also plays a key role in providing credibility for the fake peace process. It is followed by a large part of the leadership of the Palestinian Arab population within the Green Line. Many peace activists around the world have fallen into this trap.

Israeli officials laud the humanity of what it calls “the most moral army in the world,” which informs 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.”

In January 2006, Palestinians committed a major crime: they voted the wrong way in a carefully monitored free election, handing control of Parliament to Hamas. The media constantly intone that Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In reality, Hamas leaders have repeatedly made it clear that Hamas would accept a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus that has been blocked by the United States and Israel for forty years. In contrast, Israel is dedicated to the destruction of Palestine, apart from some occasional meaningless words, and is implementing that commitment.

The dehumanization in Iraq and Syria is widespread and terrifying, as it is in Gaza. But there is one crucial difference between these cases and the Israeli brutality: the former are condemned as barbarous and inhuman worldwide, while those committed by Israel are still publicly licensed and approved by the president of the United States, the leaders of the European Union, and Israel’s other friends in the world.

There’s also no such thing as “responsibility to protect,” that’s a fraud perpetrated in Western intellectual culture. There is a notion, in fact two notions: there’s one passed by the UN General Assembly, which does talk about a “responsibility to protect,” but it offers no authorization for any kind of intervention except under conditions of the United Nations charter. There is another version, which is adopted only by the West, the US, and its allies, which is unilateral and says R2P permits “military intervention by regional organizations in the region of their authority without Security Council authorization.” Well, translating that into English, this means that it provides authorization for the US and NATO to use violence wherever they choose without Security Council authorization. That’s what’s called “responsibility to protect” in Western discourse.

From the US point of view, negotiations are, in effect, a way for Israel to continue its policies of systematically taking over whatever it wants in the West Bank, maintaining the brutal siege on Gaza, separating Gaza from the West Bank and, of course, occupying the Syrian Golan Heights, all with full US support. And the framework of negotiations, as in the past twenty years of the Oslo experience, has simply provided a cover for this.

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.

The first point is to relate to the biggest success of the Zionist project, which was to fragment the Palestinian existence; in this respect they suffered more than the Vietnamese or the South Africans (although not in terms of human cost, at least in the case of the former). The Palestinians have gone through history ever since 1948 as a fragmented group and thus different Palestinian groups are exposed to a ton of different Israeli policies. As an activist, when you have a fragmented group with no clear leadership, no clear address to which you can refer to get clear guidance of what are the national priorities of the people you support—it is not always easy to come with the right or adequate response. In other words, it is very difficult to adopt a clear ethical position that respects the interests of all the Palestinian groups concerned. For instance it is obvious that when you live under occupation in the West Bank or when you are a refugee in Lebanon you may have different priorities as far as the Israeli policies against you are concerned, and therefore you would ask the solidarity movement to do two different, contradictory, things.

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? Israeli strategists will tell you that they have dealt with this by having a common enemy, a security issue, by having a war on Islam. The explanations and excuses have changed with time, but the polarized socio-economic reality remained the same. That’s where the Israelis will find it difficult. There is a limit to how much you can justify a socio-economic marginalization and polarization. This became a more acute problem because since 2008, the middle class in Israel is being pushed down to being the lower middle class, which means that a larger number of people is prevented from getting its share of the national cake despite their belonging to the “right” ethnic group.

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, enclaving them in Areas A and B in the West Bank and in isolated villages in the Greater Jerusalem area, the Jordan Valley, and the Bedouin reservations in the Nagab.

Partition signifies international complicity in the crime of destruction, not a peace offer. Consequently, anyone opposing partition became the enemy of peace. The more sinister and pro-Israeli elements of the peace orthodoxy used to blame the Palestinians for being irresponsible, warmongering, and intransigent—beginning with the Palestinian rejection of the partition plan in 1947. In hindsight, we know partition was also an ill-conceived idea from a realpolitik point of view. This may not have been known at the time. But to offer partition now as a solution on the same premise that informed the 1947 resolution—which was that Zionism was a benevolent movement wishing Israelis to coexist as equals with the Palestinian native majority—is an absurdity and a travesty.

The United Nations has a similar universal position and made a concrete decision on the right of the Palestinian refugees to return unconditionally to their homes when it adopted Resolution 194 in December 1948 (it was adopted by the same UN General Assembly that decided on the partition plan and the creation of the Jewish state). So putting the right of return at the very heart of any future solution is not a revolutionary idea that asks the Western world to betray its principles or adopt a unique exceptional attitude. On the contrary, it requires the Western world to be loyal to its principles and not exclude the Palestinians from the application of those principles. Yet the old peace orthodoxy abandoned these basic human principles and did not even think of fighting for them.

The Hebrew verb le-hitnahel or le-hityashev and the Hebrew nouns hitanchalut and hitayasvut were used ever since 1882 by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel to describe the takeover of land in Palestine. Their accurate translation into English is “to settle,” “to colonize,” “settlement,” and “colonization,” respectively. Early Zionists used the terms proudly since colonialism was very positively received by the public at the time (and continued to until the end of the First World War). When colonialism’s fortunes changed in the aftermath of the Second World War and colonialism connoted negative European policies and practices, the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel looked for ways of dissociating the Hebrew terminology from the colonialist one and started to use more universal and positive language to describe their policies. Despite this energetic attempt to claim that Zionism was not part and parcel of the universal colonialist movement, there was no escape from understanding these Hebrew terms linked to the act of colonization. “To settle” is deemed as an act of colonization in the scholarly and political dictionary of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. So there is no way out of it: even if the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel did not regard the expropriation of Palestine’s land, quite often accompanied by dispossession of the natives, as an act of colonizing, everyone else did.

FB: South Africa got rid of institutionalized or legal apartheid in the nineties, but when you look at South African society today and I think Professor Chomsky, you mentioned that yesterday, it is putting a few Black faces in power and keeping the same system in place. So looking at, let's say, a common state or one state, if it was ever to happen, how do you make sure you do not reproduce the South African experience?

NC: You see, that presupposes that Israel would ever want to take in the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza and I don't think they will. That is the crucial difference from South Africa. South Africa had to incorporate the Black population, they had no choice. First of all, it was the vast majority of the population and secondly, it was their workforce. They could not say, okay we will let you go rot somewhere and then they would disappear, but Israel can, that is the Greater Israel option.

I think we should also point out that like in any colonialist situation where you have an anticolonialist struggle, there is a lot of violence in the air. When you are brought up in a certain way and the policies and actions of your own government push the other side to take some violent actions as well, then you think that objectively your point of view is correct because you see that there are suicide bombers, violence, missiles sent from Gaza.

We also have to understand that this need to get out has been debated and examined within the context of permanent violence. It is very difficult for Israelis to separate between the violence and the experience and the reasons for that violence. 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.

Every state, if you look at its history, is created by extreme violence

What is the price paid by this transformation and who pays the price? If this new definition comes at the expense of another people, this becomes a problem.

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.

The huge growth and the impact of the boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) movement cannot be underestimated in putting Palestine back on the map. The BDS movement helped rejuvenate and rebuild the solidarity movement worldwide. It offered a step-by-step guide (with flexibility depending on the different national interests) on how to turn from a defensive stance to an offensive one. The BDS movement asserted: Let's stop trying to justify our actions, let's act.