From Occupied Palestine

Apocalypse near
MERAV YUDILOVITCH
Ynetnews, 4 August 2006 [Yediot Aharonoth]

Last week, a group of renowned intellectuals published an open letter blaming Israel for escalating the conflict in the Middle East. The letter, which mainly referred to the alignment of forces between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, caused a lot of anger among Ynet and Ynetnews readers, particularly due to its claim that the Israeli policy's political aim is to eliminate the Palestinian nation.

Reshaping history
NOAM CHOMSKY
Al-Ahram, 18-24 November 2004

The death of Yasser Arafat, writes NOAM CHOMSKY, provides some lessons on the importance of owning history and the principles that guide its proper shaping

The fundamental principle is that "we are good" - "we" being the state we serve - and what "we" do is dedicated to the highest principles, though there may be errors in practice. In a typical illustration, according to the retrospective version at the left-liberal extreme, the properly reshaped Vietnam War began with "blundering efforts to do good" but by 1969 had become a "disaster" (Anthony Lewis) -- by 1969, after the business world had turned against the war as too costly and 70 per cent of the public regarded it as "fundamentally wrong and immoral", not "a mistake"; by 1969, seven years after Kennedy's attack on South Vietnam began, two years after the most respected Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall warned that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity... is threatened with extinction...[as]... the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size"; by 1969, the time of some of the most vicious state terrorist operations of one of the major crimes of the late 20th century, of which Swift Boats in the deep South, already devastated by saturation bombing, chemical warfare and mass murder operations, were the least of the atrocities underway. But the reshaped history prevails. Serious expert panels ponder the reasons for "America's Vietnam Obsession" during the 2004 elections, when the Vietnam War was never even mentioned - the actual one, that is, not the image reconstructed for history.

South Africa, Israel-Palestine, and the contours of the contemporary world order
NOAM CHOMSKY and CHRISTOPHER J LEE
Safundi: Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies, Issue 13/14 April 2004

On behalf of Safundi, Christopher J. Lee interviewed Professor Noam Chomsky on March 9, 2004, in his office at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They spoke on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the end of apartheid, the building of the so-called "separation wall" in Israel-Palestine and its comparison to apartheid measures, and his general resurgence as a critical voice against U.S. foreign policy since September 11, 2001.

A wall as a weapon
NOAM CHOMSKY
New York Times, 23 February 2004

It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else. Careful scrutiny is always in order. Israel's so-called security fence, which is the subject of hearings starting today at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, is a case in point.

Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Palestinians
NOAM CHOMSKY
Variant, 11 October 2002

It's useful to mention a moral principle that's so trivial it's embarrassing—the reason for doing so is it's near universally disregarded. It's easy (and not even gratifying) to criticise and condemn the crimes of others. It's a little harder to look in the mirror and ask what we're doing because it's usually not very pretty, and if we're minimally decent we're going to try to do something about it. When we do, depending on where you are in the world the problems can vary. In some countries it can mean prison, brutal torture, or getting your brains blown out. In countries like ours its condemnation, the loss of job opportunities, or something mild by international standards. It's much harder than to just talk about how awful the other guy is.

Questions on Israel
NOAM CHOMSKY
ZNET, 30 June 2002

Bush, Arafat And Reform

President Bush has called, in an open display of blackmail, for the Palestinians to replace Yasser Arafat as their leader and to institute "reform" of the Palestinian Authority. Given that when Arafat was signing on the dotted line the "international community" cared little for the corrupt nature of Arafat's rule it can be surmised that Washington wants to replace Arafat with a Marshal Petain and to bring into existence a vichy Palestine. However, to speculate, could it be possible that Israel and Washington are trying to provoke a civil war in Palestine liked they tried to do when they supported Islamic fundamentalism as a force against secular Arab nationalism? Could this be a pretext for permanent occupation?

CommonSense Interview
NOAM CHOMSKY
CommonSense, 3 May 2002

CS: You have made an analogy between the conflict in Palestine and apartheid South Africa - do you think universities should respond to Israel in the same way they did to South Africa? Specifically, do you think universities should divest from companies doing business in Israel?

Chomsky: The circumstances aren't identical. With South Africa, the crucial thing was not so much university divestment, which was a slow and enduring process, as pressure to ensure that our own government did not participate in criminal activities. There were arms and oil embargoes against South Africa, for example. University divestment was a marginal factor in the scheme of things. In the case of Palestine, the critical demand in the petitions ought to at least be a call for a suspension of arms sales transfers as long as certain minimal conditions are not met. That call has been in the petitions that I signed. CS: But if students want to be local activists, do you think that calling for university divestment is an effective method? Or should students be concentrating their efforts on national issues? Chomsky: I think it's a reasonable activity but we shouldn't have any illusions - it's a highly indirect mode of affecting the behavior of states.

U.S-Israel-Palestine
NOAM CHOMSKY
Red Pepper, April 2002

A year ago, Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling observed that "What we feared has come true." Jews and Palestinians are "regressing to superstitious tribalism... War appears an unavoidable fate," an "evil colonial" war. After Israel's invasion of the refugee camps this year his colleague Ze'ev Sternhell wrote that "In colonial Israel...human life is cheap." The leadership is "no longer ashamed to speak of war when what they are really engaged in is colonial policing, which recalls the takeover by the white police of the poor neighborhoods of the blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era." Both stress the obvious: there is no symmetry between the "ethno-national groups" regressing to tribalism. The conflict is centered in territories that have been under harsh military occupation for 35 years. The conqueror is a major military power, acting with massive military, economic and diplomatic support from the global superpower. Its subjects are alone and defenseless, many barely surviving in miserable camps, currently suffering even more brutal terror of a kind familiar in "evil colonial wars" and now carrying out terrible atrocities of their own in revenge.

Distorted Morality: America's War on Terror?
NOAM CHOMSKY
Kennedy School, Harvard University
February 2002

Well, the title, you noticed, had a question mark after it and the reason for the question mark is that whatever has been happening for the past several months and is going on now, and however you evaluate it -- like it, hate it, or whatever -- it's pretty clear that it cannot be a war on terror. In fact, that's close to a logical necessity, at least if we accept certain pretty elementary assumptions and principles, so let me try to make those clear at the outset.

Al-Aqsa Intifada
NOAM CHOMSKY
ZNET, 25 October 2000

After three weeks of virtual war in the Israeli occupied territories, Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced a new plan to determine the final status of the region. During these weeks, over 100 Palestinians were killed, including 30 children, often by "excessive use of lethal force in circumstances in which neither the lives of the security forces nor others were in imminent danger, resulting in unlawful killings," Amnesty International concluded in a detailed report that was scarcely mentioned in the US. The ratio of Palestinian to Israeli dead was then about 15-1, reflecting the resources of force available.