Hideous. Sadistic. Vicious. Murderous. That is how Noam Chomsky
describes Israel’s 29-day offensive in Gaza that killed nearly 1,900
people and left almost 10,000 people injured. Chomsky has written
extensively about the Israel/Palestine conflict for decades. After
Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, Chomsky co-authored the book
"Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians"
with Israeli scholar Ilan Pappé. His other books on the Israel/Palestine
conflict include "Peace in the Middle East?: Reflections on Justice and
Nationhood" and "The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and
the Palestinians." Chomsky is a world-renowned political dissident,
linguist and author, Institute Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where he has taught for more than 50 years.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: To
talk more about the crisis in Gaza, we go now to Boston, where we are
joined by Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist,
author, Institute Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where he’s taught for more than 50 years. He has written
extensively about the Israel-Palestine conflict for decades.
AMYGOODMAN: Forty years ago this month, Noam Chomsky published Peace in the Middle East?: Reflections on Justice and Nationhood. His 1983 book, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, is known as one of the definitive works on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Professor Chomsky joins us from Boston.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Noam. Please first just
comment, since we haven’t spoken to you throughout the Israeli assault
on Gaza. Your comments on what has just taken place?
NOAMCHOMSKY:
It’s a hideous atrocity, sadistic, vicious, murderous, totally without
any credible pretext. It’s another one of the periodic Israeli exercises
in what they delicately call "mowing the lawn." That means shooting
fish in the pond, to make sure that the animals stay quiet in the cage
that you’ve constructed for them, after which you go to a period of
what’s called "ceasefire," which means that Hamas observes the
ceasefire, as Israel concedes, while Israel continues to violate it.
Then it’s broken by an Israeli escalation, Hamas reaction. Then you have
period of "mowing the lawn." This one is, in many ways, more sadistic
and vicious even than the earlier ones.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what of
the pretext that Israel used to launch these attacks? Could you talk
about that and to what degree you feel it had any validity?
NOAMCHOMSKY:
As high Israeli officials concede, Hamas had observed the previous
ceasefire for 19 months. The previous episode of "mowing the lawn" was
in November 2012. There was a ceasefire. The ceasefire terms were that
Hamas would not fire rockets—what they call rockets—and Israel would
move to end the blockade and stop attacking what they call militants in
Gaza. Hamas lived up to it. Israel concedes that.
In April of this year, an event took place which horrified the
Israeli government: A unity agreement was formed between Gaza and the
West Bank, between Hamas and Fatah. Israel has been desperately trying
to prevent that for a long time. There’s a background we could talk
about, but it’s important. Anyhow, the unity agreement came. Israel was
furious. They got even more upset when the U.S. more or less endorsed
it, which is a big blow to them. They launched a rampage in the West
Bank.
What was used as a pretext was the brutal murder of three settler
teenagers. There was a pretense that they were alive, though they knew
they were dead. That allowed a huge—and, of course, they blamed it right
away on Hamas. They have yet to produce a particle of evidence, and in
fact their own highest leading authorities pointed out right away that
the killers were probably from a kind of a rogue clan in Hebron, the
Qawasmeh clan, which turns out apparently to be true. They’ve been a
thorn in the sides of Hamas for years. They don’t follow their orders.
But anyway, that gave the opportunity for a
rampage in the West Bank, arresting hundreds of people, re-arresting
many who had been released, mostly targeted on Hamas. Killings
increased. Finally, there was a Hamas response: the so-called rocket
attacks. And that gave the opportunity for "mowing the lawn" again.
AMYGOODMAN: You said that Israel does this periodically, Noam Chomsky. Why do they do this periodically?
NOAMCHOMSKY:
Because they want to maintain a certain situation. There’s a
background. For over 20 years, Israel has been dedicated, with U.S.
support, to separating Gaza from the West Bank. That’s in direct
violation of the terms of the Oslo Accord 20 years ago, which declared
that the West Bank and Gaza are a single territorial entity whose
integrity must be preserved. But for rogue states, solemn agreements are
just an invitation to do whatever you want. So Israel, with U.S.
backing, has been committed to keeping them separate.
And there’s a good reason for that. Just look
at the map. If Gaza is the only outlet to the outside world for any
eventual Palestinian entity, whatever it might be, the West Bank—if
separated from Gaza, the West Bank is essentially imprisoned—Israel on
one side, the Jordanian dictatorship on the other. Furthermore, Israel
is systematically driving Palestinians out of the Jordan Valley, sinking
wells, building settlements. They first call them military zones, then
put in settlements—the usual story. That would mean that whatever
cantons are left for Palestinians in the West Bank, after Israel takes
what it wants and integrates it into Israel, they would be completely
imprisoned. Gaza would be an outlet to the outside world, so therefore
keeping them separate from one another is a high goal of policy, U.S.
and Israeli policy.
And the unity agreement threatened that.
Threatened something else Israel has been claiming for years. One of its
arguments for kind of evading negotiations is: How can they negotiate
with the Palestinians when they’re divided? Well, OK, so if they’re not
divided, you lose that argument. But the more significant one is simply
the geostrategic one, which is what I described. So the unity government
was a real threat, along with the tepid, but real, endorsement of it by
the United States, and they immediately reacted.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
And, Noam, what do you make of the—as you say, Israel seeks to maintain
the status quo, while at the same time continuing to create a new
reality on the ground of expanded settlements. What do you make of the
continued refusal of one administration after another here in the United
States, which officially is opposed to the settlement expansion, to
refuse to call Israel to the table on this attempt to create its own
reality on the ground?
NOAMCHOMSKY:
Well, your phrase "officially opposed" is quite correct. But we can
look at—you know, you have to distinguish the rhetoric of a government
from its actions, and the rhetoric of political leaders from their
actions. That should be obvious. So we can see how committed the U.S. is
to this policy, easily. For example, in February 2011, the U.N.
Security Council considered a resolution which called for—which called
on Israel to terminate its expansion of settlements. Notice that the
expansion of settlements is not really the issue. It’s the settlements.
The settlements, the infrastructure development, all of this is in gross
violation of international law. That’s been determined by the Security
Council, the International Court of Justice. Practically every country
in the world, outside of Israel, recognizes this. But this was a
resolution calling for an end to expansion of settlements—official U.S.
policy. What happened? Obama vetoed the resolution. That tells you
something.
Furthermore, the official statement to Israel
about the settlement expansion is accompanied by what in diplomatic
language is called a wink—a quiet indication that we don’t really mean
it. So, for example, Obama’s latest condemnation of the recent, as he
puts it, violence on all sides was accompanied by sending more military
aid to Israel. Well, they can understand that. And that’s been true all
along. In fact, when Obama came into office, he made the usual
statements against settlement expansion. And his administration
was—spokespersons were asked in press conferences whether Obama would do
anything about it, the way the first George Bush did something—mild
sanctions—to block settlement expansions. And the answer was, "No, this
is just symbolic." Well, that tells the Israeli government exactly
what’s happening. And, in fact, if you look step by step, the military
aid continues, the economic aid continues, the diplomatic protection
continues, the ideological protection continues. By that, I mean framing
the issues in ways that conform to Israeli demand. All of that
continues, along with a kind of clucking of the tongue, saying, "Well,
we really don’t like it, and it’s not helpful to peace." Any government
can understand that.
AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who spoke to foreign journalists yesterday.
PRIMEMINISTERBENJAMINNETANYAHU:
Israel accepted and Hamas rejected the Egyptian ceasefire proposal of
July 15th. And I want you to know that at that time the conflict had
claimed some 185 lives. Only on Monday night did Hamas finally agree to
that very same proposal, which went into effect yesterday morning. That
means that 90 percent, a full 90 percent, of the fatalities in this
conflict could have been avoided had Hamas not rejected then the
ceasefire that it accepts now. Hamas must be held accountable for the
tragic loss of life.
AMYGOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, can you respond to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu?
NOAMCHOMSKY:
[inaudible] narrow response and a broad response. The narrow response
is that, of course, as Netanyahu knows, that ceasefire proposal was
arranged between the Egyptian military dictatorship and Israel, both of
them very hostile to Hamas. It was not even communicated to Hamas. They
learned about it through social media, and they were angered by that,
naturally. They said they won’t accept it on those terms. Now, that’s
the narrow response.
The broad response is that 100 percent of the
casualties and the destruction and the devastation and so on could have
been avoided if Israel had lived up to the ceasefire agreement after
the—from November 2012, instead of violating it constantly and then
escalating the violation in the manner that I described, in order to
block the unity government and to persist in their policy of—the
policies of taking over what they want in the West Bank and
keeping—separating it from Gaza, and keeping Gaza on what they’ve called
a "diet," Dov Weissglas’s famous comment. The man who negotiated the
so-called withdrawal in 2005 pointed out that the purpose of the
withdrawal is to end the discussion of any political settlement and to
block any possibility of a Palestinian state, and meanwhile the Gazans
will be kept on a diet, meaning just enough calories allowed so they
don’t all die—because that wouldn’t look good for Israel’s fading
reputation—but nothing more than that. And with its vaunted technical
capacity, Israel, Israeli experts calculated precisely how many calories
would be needed to keep the Gazans on their diet, under siege, blocked
from export, blocked from import. Fishermen can’t go out to fish. The
naval vessels drive them back to shore. A large part, probably over a
third and maybe more, of Gaza’s arable land is barred from entry to
Palestinians. It’s called a "barrier." That’s the norm. That’s the diet.
They want to keep them on that, meanwhile separated from the West Bank,
and continue the ongoing project of taking over—I can describe the
details, but it’s not obscure—taking over the parts of the West Bank
that Israel intends—is integrating into Israel, and presumably will
ultimately annex in some fashion, as long as the United States continues
to support it and block international efforts to lead to a political
settlement.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
And, Noam, as this whole month has unfolded and these images of the
carnage in Gaza have spread around the world, what’s your assessment of
the impact on the already abysmal relationship that exists between the
United States government and the Arab and Muslim world? I’m thinking
especially of all the young Muslims and Arabs around the world who maybe
had not been exposed to prior atrocities in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
NOAMCHOMSKY:
Well, first of all, we have to distinguish between the Muslim and Arab
populations and their governments—striking difference. The governments
are mostly dictatorships. And when you read in the press that the Arabs
support us on so-and-so, what is meant is the dictators support us, not
the populations. The dictatorships are moderately supportive of what the
U.S. and Israel are doing. That includes the military dictatorship in
Egypt, a very brutal one; Saudi Arabian dictatorship. Saudi Arabia is
the closest U.S. ally in the region, and it’s the most radical
fundamentalist Islamic state in the world. It’s also spreading its
Salafi-Wahhabi doctrines throughout the world, extremist fundamentalist
doctrines. It’s been the leading ally of the United States for years,
just as it was for Britain before it. They’ve both tended to prefer
radical Islam to the danger of secular nationalism and democracy. And
they are fairly supportive of—they don’t like—they hate Hamas. They have
no interest in the Palestinians. They have to say things to kind of
mollify their own populations, but again, rhetoric and action are
different. So the dictatorships are not appalled by what’s happening.
They probably are quietly cheering it.
The populations, of course, are quite
different, but that’s always been true. So, for example, on the eve of
the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Egypt, which overthrew the Mubarak
dictatorship, there were international polls taken in the United States
by the leading polling agencies, and they showed very clearly that I
think about 80 percent of Egyptians regarded the main threats to them as
being Israel and the United States. And, in fact, condemnation of the
United States and its policies were so extreme that even though they
don’t like Iran, a majority felt that the region might be safer if Iran
had nuclear weapons. Well, if you look over the whole polling story over
the years, it kind of varies around something like that. But that’s the
populations. And, of course, the Muslim populations elsewhere don’t
like it, either. But it’s not just the Muslim populations. So, for
example, there was a demonstration in London recently, which probably
had hundreds of thousands of people—it was quite a huge
demonstration—protesting the Israeli atrocities in Gaza. And that’s
happening elsewhere in the world, too. It’s worth remembering that—you
go back a couple decades, Israel was one of the most admired countries
in the world. Now it’s one of the most feared and despised countries in
the world. Israeli propagandists like to say, well, this is just
anti-Semitism. But to the extent that there’s an anti-Semitic element,
which is slight, it’s because of Israeli actions. The reaction is to the
policies. And as long as Israel persists in these policies, that’s
what’s going to happen.
Actually, this has been pretty clear since the
early 1970s. Actually, I’ve been writing about it since then, but it’s
so obvious, that I don’t take any credit for that. In 1971, Israel made a
fateful decision, the most fateful in its history, I think. President
Sadat of Egypt offered Israel a full peace treaty, in return for
withdrawal of Israel from the Egyptian Sinai. That was the Labor
government, the so-called moderate Labor government at the time. They
considered the offer and rejected it. They were planning to carry out
extensive development programs in the Sinai, build a huge, big city on
the Mediterranean, dozens of settlements, kibbutzim, others, big
infrastructure, driving tens of thousands of Bedouins off the land,
destroying the villages and so on. Those were the plans, beginning to
implement them. And Israel made a decision to choose expansion over
security. A treaty with Egypt would have meant security. That’s the only
significant military force in the Arab world. And that’s been the
policy ever since.
When you pursue a policy of repression and
expansion over security, there are things that are going to happen.
There will be moral degeneration within the country. There will be
increasing opposition and anger and hostility among populations outside
the country. You may continue to get support from dictatorships and
from, you know, the U.S. administration, but you’re going to lose the
populations. And that has a consequence. You could predict—in fact, I
and others did predict back in the '70s—that, just to quote myself,
"those who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters
of its moral degeneration, international isolation, and very possibly
ultimate destruction." That's what’s—that’s the course that’s happening.
It’s not the only example in history. There
are many analogies drawn to South Africa, most of them pretty dubious,
in my mind. But there’s one analogy which I think is pretty realistic,
which isn’t discussed very much. It should be. In 1958, the South
African Nationalist government, which was imposing the harsh apartheid
regime, recognized that they were becoming internationally isolated. We
know from declassified documents that in 1958 the South African foreign
minister called in the American ambassador. And we have the
conversation. He essentially told him, "Look, we’re becoming a pariah
state. We’re losing all the—everyone is voting against us in the United
Nations. We’re becoming isolated. But it really doesn’t matter, because
you’re the only voice that counts. And as long as you support us,
doesn’t really matter what the world thinks." That wasn’t a bad
prediction. If you look at what happened over the years, opposition to
South African apartheid grew and developed. There was a U.N. arms
embargo. Sanctions began. Boycotts began. It was so extreme by the 1980s
that even the U.S. Congress was passing sanctions, which President
Reagan had to veto. He was the last supporter of the apartheid regime.
Congress actually reinstated the sanctions over his veto, and he then
violated them. As late as 1988, Reagan, the last holdout, his
administration declared the African National Congress, Mandela’s African
National Congress, to be one of the more notorious terrorist groups in
the world. So the U.S. had to keep supporting South Africa. It was
supporting terrorist group UNITA in Angola. Finally, even the United States joined the rest of the world, and very quickly the apartheid regime collapsed.
Now that’s not fully analogous to the Israel
case by any means. There were other reasons for the collapse of
apartheid, two crucial reasons. One of them was that there was a
settlement that was acceptable to South African and international
business, simple settlement: keep the socioeconomic system and allow—put
it metaphorically—allow blacks some black faces in the limousines. That
was the settlement, and that’s pretty much what’s been implemented, not
totally. There’s no comparable settlement in Israel-Palestine. But a
crucial element, not discussed here, is Cuba. Cuba sent military forces
and tens of thousands of technical workers, doctors and teachers and
others, and they drove the South African aggressors out of Angola, and
they compelled them to abandon illegally held Namibia. And more than
that, as in fact Nelson Mandela pointed out as soon as he got out of
prison, the Cuban soldiers, who incidentally were black soldiers,
shattered the myth of invincibility of the white supermen. That had a
very significant effect on both black Africa and the white South Africa.
It indicated to the South African government and population that
they’re not going to be able to impose their hope of a regional support
system, at least quiet system, that would allow them to pursue their
operations inside South Africa and their terrorist activities beyond.
And that was a major factor in the liberation of black Africa.
AMYGOODMAN:
Noam, we have to break, and we’re going to come back to this
discussion. We’re talking to Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political
dissident, linguist, author, Institute Professor Emeritus at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back with Professor Chomsky in a minute.
[break]
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guest is Professor Noam
Chomsky. I want to turn to President Obama speaking Wednesday at a news
conference in Washington, D.C.
PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA:
Long term, there has to be a recognition that Gaza cannot sustain
itself permanently closed off from the world and incapable of providing
some opportunity, jobs, economic growth for the population that lives
there, particularly given how dense that population is, how young that
population is. We’re going to have to see a shift in opportunity for the
people of Gaza. I have no sympathy for Hamas. I have great sympathy for
ordinary people who are struggling within Gaza.
AMYGOODMAN: That’s President Obama yesterday. Noam Chomsky, can you respond?
NOAMCHOMSKY:
Well, as always, for all states and all political leaderships, we have
to distinguish rhetoric from action. Any political leader can produce
lovely rhetoric, even Hitler, Stalin, whoever you want. What we ask is:
What are they doing? So exactly what does Obama suggest or carry out as a
means to achieve the goal of ending the U.S.-backed Israeli siege,
blockade of Gaza, which is creating this situation? What has it done in
the past? What does it propose to do in the future? There are things
that the U.S. could do very easily. Again, don’t want to draw the South
African analogy too closely, but it is indicative. And it’s not the only
case. The same happened, as you remember, in the Indonesia-East Timor
case. When the United States, Clinton, finally told the Indonesian
generals, "The game’s over," they pulled out immediately. U.S. power is
substantial. And in the case of Israel, it’s critical, because Israel
relies on virtually unilateral U.S. support. There are plenty of things
the U.S. can do to implement what Obama talked about. And the question
is—and, in fact, when the U.S. gives orders, Israel obeys. That’s
happened over and over again. That’s completely obvious why, given the
power relationships. So things can be done. They were done by Bush two,
by Clinton, by Reagan, and the U.S. could do them again. Then we’ll know
whether those words were anything other than the usual pleasant
rhetoric.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Talking about separating rhetoric from actions, Israel has always claimed that it no longer occupies Gaza. Democracy Now! recently spoke to Joshua Hantman,
who’s a senior adviser to the Israeli ambassador to the United States
and a former spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Ministry. And Hantman
said, quote, "Israel actually left the Gaza Strip in 2005. We removed
all of our settlements. We removed the IDF
forces. We took out 10,000 Jews from their houses as a step for peace,
because Israel wants peace and it extended its hand for peace." Your
response?
NOAMCHOMSKY:
Well, several points. First of all, the United Nations, every country
in the world, even the United States, regards Israel as the occupying
power in Gaza—for a very simple reason: They control everything there.
They control the borders, the land, sea, air. They determine what goes
into Gaza, what comes out. They determine how many calories Gazan
children need to stay alive, but not to flourish. That’s occupation,
under international law, and no one questions it, outside of Israel.
Even the U.S. agrees, their usual backer. That puts—with that, we end
the discussion of whether they’re an occupying power or not.
As for wanting peace, look back at that
so-called withdrawal. Notice that it left Israel as the occupying power.
By 2005, Israeli hawks, led by Ariel Sharon, pragmatic hawk, recognized
that it just makes no sense for Israel to keep a few thousand settlers
in devastated Gaza and devote a large part of the IDF,
the Israeli military, to protecting them, and many expenses breaking up
Gaza into separate parts and so on. Made no sense to do that. Made a
lot more sense to take those settlers from their subsidized settlements
in Gaza, where they were illegally residing, and send them off to
subsidized settlements in the West Bank, in areas that Israel intends to
keep—illegally, of course. That just made pragmatic sense.
And there was a very easy way to do it. They could have simply informed the settlers in Gaza that on August 1st the IDF
is going to withdrawal, and at that point they would have climbed into
the lorries that are provided to them and gone off to their illegal
settlements in the West Bank and, incidentally, the Golan Heights. But
it was decided to construct what’s sometimes called a "national trauma."
So a trauma was constructed, a theater. It was just ridiculed by
leading specialists in Israel, like the leading sociologist—Baruch
Kimmerling just made fun of it. And trauma was created so you could have
little boys, pictures of them pleading with the Israeli soldiers,
"Don’t destroy my home!" and then background calls of "Never again."
That means "Never again make us leave anything," referring to the West
Bank primarily. And a staged national trauma. What made it particularly
farcical was that it was a repetition of what even the Israeli press
called "National Trauma ’82," when they staged a trauma when they had to
withdraw from Yamit, the city they illegally built in the Sinai. But
they kept the occupation. They moved on.
And I’ll repeat what Weissglas said. Recall,
he was the negotiator with the United States, Sharon’s confidant. He
said the purpose of the withdrawal is to end negotiations on a
Palestinian state and Palestinian rights. This will end it. This will
freeze it, with U.S. support. And then comes imposition of the diet on
Gaza to keep them barely alive, but not flourishing, and the siege.
Within weeks after the so-called withdrawal, Israel escalated the
attacks on Gaza and imposed very harsh sanctions, backed by the United
States. The reason was that a free election took place in Palestine, and
it came out the wrong way. Well, Israel and the United States, of
course, love democracy, but only if it comes out the way they want. So,
the U.S. and Israel instantly imposed harsh sanctions. Israeli attacks,
which really never ended, escalated. Europe, to its shame, went along.
Then Israel and the United States immediately began planning for a
military coup to overthrow the government. When Hamas pre-empted that
coup, there was fury in both countries. The sanctions and military
attacks increased. And then we’re on to what we discussed before:
periodic episodes of "mowing the lawn."
AMYGOODMAN: We only—Noam, we only have a minute.
NOAMCHOMSKY: Yeah.
AMYGOODMAN:
Very quickly, at this point, a lot of the U.S. media is saying the U.S.
had been sidelined, it’s now all about Egypt doing this negotiation.
What needs to happen right now? The ceasefire will end in a matter of
hours, if it isn’t extended. What kind of truce needs to be accomplished
here?
NOAMCHOMSKY:
Well, for Israel, with U.S. backing, the current situation is a kind of
a win-win situation. If Hamas agrees to extend the ceasefire, Israel
can continue with its regular policies, which I described before: taking
over what they want in the West Bank, separating it from Gaza, keeping
the diet and so on. If Hamas doesn’t accept the ceasefire, Netanyahu can
make another speech like the one you—the cynical speech you quoted
earlier. The only thing that can break this is if the U.S. changes its
policies, as has happened in other cases. I mentioned two: South Africa,
Timor. There’s others. And that’s decisive. If there’s going to be a
change, it will crucially depend on a change in U.S. policy here. For 40
years, the United States has been almost unilaterally backing Israeli
rejectionism, refusal to entertain the overwhelming international
consensus on a two-state settlement. AMYGOODMAN:
Noam, we have to leave it there, but we’re going to continue our
conversation post-show, and we’re going to post it online at
democracynow.org. Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident,
linguist and author, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Source: Democracy Now
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