Noam Chomsky

Ilan Pappé

"Chomsky is a global phenomenon . . . he may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet."—The New York Times Book Review "Ilan Pappé is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian."—John Pilger Praise forGaza in Crisis by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé: "This sober and unflinching analysis should be read and reckoned with by anyone concerned with practicable change in the long-suffering region."—Publishers Weekly "Both authors perform fiercely accurate deconstructions of official rhetoric."—The Guardian Operation Protective Edge, Israel's most recent assault on Gaza, left thousands of Palestinians dead and cleared the way for another Israeli land grab. The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine.On Palestine is the sequel to their acclaimed bookGaza in Crisis (Haymarket Books). Noam Chomsky is institute professor in the department of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. A member of the American Academy of Science, he has published widely in both linguistics and current affairs. Ilan Pappé is the Director of the European Center for Palestine Studies and a fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. He is the author of fifteen books among themThe Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London and New York 2007)Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on the US-Israeli War Against the Palestinians (Haymarket Books 2012), and his most recent book isThe Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge (London and New York 2014).

On Palestine

Sachi

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. 

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.

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. 

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

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.

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.

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

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.

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.

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.

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.

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