emma_goldman
2nd November 2006, 20:15
Interview with Noam Chomsky
Conducted by Michael Shank and Courtney Erwin
August 15, 2006
The Citizen Diplomat: How is the latest crisis in the Middle
East different from ones before? In other words, is there a
new dimension to the relationship between Israel-US and the
Arab world, Arab-Muslim world?
Professor Noam Chomsky: First of all there are three crises
going on involving the US, Israel and the Arab world. The
central one, which is barely discussed, is the US-Israeli
programs of essentially driving the last nail into the
coffin of Palestinian national rights. That is going on both
in Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza and the West Bank are a
unit, everyone agrees to that. In the West Bank the program
is called convergence. And in the US media it's described as
withdrawal. These are all euphemisms. In fact, it's a
program of annexation and cantonization.
I say US-Israel because they're a unit essentially.
Israel is annexing valuable land and the major resources of
the West Bank and taking over the Jordan Valley so what's
left is imprisoned. Of course it controls air space and so
on. The rest is being broken up by infrastructure projects
and settlement into pretty much separated cantons, which
will be unviable, that's the idea. They have little contact
with one another and none with the outside world except
through Israeli passages. They're virtually separated from
whatever small sector of Jerusalem would be left to
Palestinians. Jerusalem is the center, has always been the
center, of Palestinian commercial, educational, cultural
life. So that essentially ends any hope for Palestinian
national rights. All of this is totally illegal, in
violation of Security Council orders, in violation of a
unanimous World Court ruling, despite what is said even the
US justice, who didn't go along, but did agree with this
part that it's all illegal.
That's happening right now. And that's the core of the
problem.
Gaza was devastated under Israeli rule. It's now described
accurately by Israeli human rights activists as the biggest
prison in the world; totally encircled, no way in or out.
And Israel freely carries out regular atrocities there. And
of course after Palestinians voted the wrong way in a free
election last January the US and Israel instantly determined
that they would punish the population -- punish the
population because you didn't vote the way we told you to.
That's a good indication of what Bush's democracy promotion
project that everyone talks about. It exists totally in
rhetoric. In fact, there isn't a particle of truth to it.
And this is a good illustration of 'you vote the wrong way,
we punish you . . . with embargo, with cutting of funding,
with any way we can'.
And the atrocities continued. Just to give you some
examples: In June, forty people were killed by Israeli
forces, 36 in Gaza, four in the West Bank where the killings
aren't as high, it's just mostly takeover. That was June.
On June 24, an incident took place which is nonexistent for
Western opinion but is existent for people who pay attention
to the world.
On June 24, Israeli forces kidnapped two civilians in Gaza
city, the Muammar brothers. They claimed they're militants,
whatever that means, but they can claim anything they like.
They kidnapped them, abducted them, and took them to
Israel. They're now off somewhere hidden in the Israeli
prison system. It was barely mentioned in the west.
Editors knew about it. No doubt they knew about it. Like
there were 87 words in the Washington Post. So it was
certainly known. It was in the Israeli press, IDF handouts,
no question about the fact. But the West just doesn't care
about kidnapping; it's fine, as long as our side does it.
So no reaction, no comment, nothing.
June 25th, the next day, Hamas captured an Israeli soldier.
You can't kidnap soldiers, you can capture them. But by
definition you can't kidnap them as was pointed out a couple
of days ago by a US military historian in the LA Times. So
they captured an Israeli soldier. That led to a huge
reaction in the West, a major atrocity. Israel quickly
launched attacks, serious attacks. In June in Gaza,
thirty-six people were killed. In July it was probably
about 170 according to UN sources. And that was all
approved in the West, in the United States particularly,
because we can't stand outrageous kidnapping.
The kidnapping of civilians is a much worse crime than
capturing a soldier, especially a soldier in an army that's
attacking your country, which is what is happening. But
that doesn't register in the West, particularly the United
States, but the West in general. On July 12th, Hezbollah
captured two Israeli soldiers, killed three, and five others
were killed in Lebanon. That again led to huge outrage. A
major US-Israeli invasion -- of course it's the US --
destroyed half of Lebanon, killed over a thousand people, a
large part of the country's wiped out, all over the place.
That was fine. 'Disproportionate' is the most that anyone
could say. Israel's been kidnapping and abducting Lebanese
for decades. We don't know how many because no one looks.
There was a secret prison discovered in Israel three years
ago, worse than Guantanamo, totally secret. The secret
prison was never even reported in the United States. It was
in Israel and in Europe. And it was full of Lebanese.
Hezbollah's official reason for the captured soldiers was
prisoner exchange and show of solidarity with the
Palestinians under attack. Nobody else in the world does
anything for them, cares about them, certainly not the
tyrants that run the Arab states. Populations want to but
not the leadership; they're clients of the US. So yes, a
show of solidarity with the Palestinians and call for
prisoner exchange. Well, that's out. Then comes the
destruction of Lebanon. It's worth bearing in mind that
this is the fifth Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the last
thirty years. The first one you can maybe claim was
independent but the others were strictly backed by the
United States and were devastating. And no credible pretext.
The worst one, 1982, the pretext was . . . if you read the
US press, the New York Times, they'll tell you that 'Israel
had to defend itself' from rocketing from Palestinians or
attacks from Palestinians. There was nothing. After the
1981 ceasefire, it was quiet from north to south. Israel
kept bombing and killing people and attacking. But that's
okay; they were apparently trying to elicit a response that
would give a pretext for the invasion. When they couldn't
elicit a response, they invaded anyway. The real reason,
which was quite public in Israel at the highest level, was
to put an end to the embarrassing PLO offers for
negotiations. So you've got to kick them out of the
country, make them stop bringing up these embarrassing
efforts to negotiate a two-state settlement. That was their
reason for the 1982 invasion which killed maybe 20,000
people and again wiped out a large part of Lebanon. But
that's all gone.
In 1993, 1996, I won't go into the details but it's kind of
similar. Backed by the US. Sometimes the US called it off.
Like in 1982, after two months of strong support, the
Reagan administration finally ordered them to stop because
the bombing of Beirut was harming US interests. It was
becoming so horrible, even Thomas Friedman said it's bad. At
that point they figured they'd better tell them to stop. In
1996, Clinton again supported it. When they bombed the
UN shelter in Qana, killing over 100 people, Clinton figured
that's harming US interests so he told them to pull back.
So they pulled back.
That's Lebanon. All the years, when Israel was kidnapping
Lebanese, nobody ever proposed that that means there should
be an invasion of Israel or that it justifies terror attacks
in Israel. No sane person would've accepted that. I
wouldn't and I'm sure nobody else would. But when they
capture Israeli soldiers, then you can wipe out the country.
The reason is: Israel's an appendage of the United States.
Now it's bad enough here but it's not very different in
Europe. These are western attitudes. They're rooted in
centuries of imperial violence. We do things to you; you
don't do things to us. Actually if you think about 9-11, a
horrible atrocity, in context it's the same. You can
imagine that worse could've happened on 9-11. Let's do a
thought experiment. Suppose on 9-11 they had actually hit
the White House and killed the President and carried out a
military coup and immediately killed 50–100,000 people,
tortured 700,000, set up a major torture center, an
intelligence center which supported military coups all over
the region, installing vicious murderous dictatorships,
assassinating people all over the place, sent in a bunch of
economists who drove the US economy into the worst
depression in history. Suppose all that had happened. That
would've been worse than 9-11.
That did happen on 9-11. That's what's called in Latin
America the first 9-11: 9.11.1973. The only thing I've
changed, I've changed absolute numbers to per capita
numbers. Which is correct, that's what you should do when
you make a comparison. That was the Pinochet coup, which
the US supported, probably participated in. But that's not
on the radar screen. If you ask people, what about the
first 9-11, you get a blank stare. Because that's the kind
of thing we're supposed to do to other people. They're just
not supposed to do it to us. That's why 9-11 was such a
shock. They don't do that kind of thing to us; that's what
we do to them. And this generalizes. It's happening right
now in the Middle East.
Sure, the terrorists' acts are atrocities. Like Hezbollah
rocketing Haifa is a war crime. But let's take a look at
our own values. By our values it is fine, they should be
doing it. They should be doing much worse.
And there are solutions to all these problems. They're
pretty straight forward. The solution to the core problem,
i.e. Israel-Palestine, the solution's been known for thirty
years. There should be a two-state settlement on roughly
the international border, maybe straighten out some lines,
'minor and mutual adjustments' it was called in official US
terminology back in the 60s. And that's supported by the
whole world practically.
It's supported by Iran for example. They won't publish it
here. What they like in the West is Ahmadinejad's ravings.
But he has a superior, what they call the Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Khamenei. He's his superior. Probably in a
reprimand to Ahmadinejad he stated, declared officially,
that Iran accepts the Arab League proposal. The Arab League
proposal is for full normalization of relations with Israel
when it withdraws to international borders. It goes beyond
the two-state settlement, full normalization. That's Iran.
Palestinians accepted it for decades.
It came to the Security Council in January 1976. Brought by
the major Arab states, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, so-called
confrontation states with the support of the others. The US
vetoed it.
And so it continues. The US and Israel have almost
unilaterally barred a diplomatic settlement for over thirty
years. This current Bush administration happens to be sort
of extreme but not that different from others. Take his
father, George Bush, who is regarded as anti-Israel, too
harsh on Israel. Just take a look at his program, his
program was worse than this. In 1988, the Palestinian
National Council, governing body for the Palestinians,
formally -- they had tacitly accepted before -- but they
formally accepted a two-state settlement, formally, in terms
of the international consensus.
Israel reacted. It was a coalition government, Shimon Peres
and Yitzhak Shamir. They came out in May, 1989, with a
program that said the following: It said first point: there
can be no additional Palestinian state between Israel and
Jordan. Meaning, Jordan already is a Palestinian state, so
there can't be an additional state, so nothing for the
Palestinians. Second, the status of the occupied
territories will be settled in accord with the guidelines of
the state of Israel. And third, Palestinians can have an
election as long as the only topics discussed are these.
And half the intellectual class was in prison under
administrative detention. The only report on this in the
United States is 'look how forthcoming Israel is . . .
they're allowing a free election'.
James Baker, secretary of State, came out a couple of months
later in December with the Baker plan, the Bush-Baker plan,
which completely endorsed this. So the US position under
Bush number one is 'no additional Palestinian state, you've
already got Jordan'. Two, everything will be settled by
Israel. And third you can have an election as long as you
keep to what we tell you to vote on. That's Bush I, the one
who is critical of Israel.
Go through the rest of them, it's about the same. In fact,
if you look at the whole thirty-year record, there's
literally one month which deviates, January 2001. In 2000,
the Camp David negotiations took place. Clinton realized
that what the US and Israel were offering Palestinians was
totally unacceptable to anybody, including Abbas. So he
came out in December with what he called his parameters
which were sort of vague but some of them were forthcoming.
And then there were negotiations, top level negotiations,
Israel, Palestine, in Taba, Egypt, in January for a week.
And they were actually making progress. They were moving
towards some version of the two-state settlement which more
or less conformed to the long-standing consensus. And in
their final press conference they said if they had a little
more time they thought they could work it out, both sides.
But Israel called them off, called off the negotiations . .
. so we don't know what would've happened. Then come Bush
and Sharon and of course throw it out the window. But that
week in Taba is actually the only break in thirty years. Of
course the US propaganda system doesn't include any of this.
Take a poll in the Harvard faculty and almost nobody
would've even heard of it.
On the other hand, if you look at the victims, they know.
It's the same with the US and Iran and the big confrontation
coming up that may blow up the world. We don't know.
Iranians remember something that we're not allowed to think
about. For over half a century, the United States has been
tormenting the people of Iran without a break. It started in
1953 when US and Britain overthrew the parliamentary
government and installed a brutal tyrant, the Shah, who they
supported right through his rule, one of the leading human
rights violators in the world. That's just fine. Carter,
when he visited Iran, December 1978 or so, praised the Shah
because of the love that his people showed for him. As soon
as they overthrew the government, a couple of months later,
the United States tried to instigate a military coup, that
didn't work, then turned to supporting Saddam Hussein.
We're under Reagan now.
Saddam invaded Iran. Iraq had been on the list of states
supporting terrorism. In 1982, Reagan took them off that
list so that the US could start supplying them with large
scale aid, including military aid, including means to
develop weapons of mass destruction. He sent Donald Rumsfeld
there as his emissary to fix it up with their friend Saddam.
And then they supported Iraq throughout this whole war,
killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, many of them
killed with chemical weapons, the means for which were
supplied by the US, not only the US, others too, but the US
in particular.
The fact that this was in 1982 is particularly interesting
because Saddam Hussein is now on trial and will probably
receive the death sentence for crimes that he committed in
1982, the year when the US took him off the list of
terrorist states and openly supported him. Do a Google
search on the western press and see if you can find anyone
mentioning this. It can't be that they don't know it.
There's nothing secret about this, it's all totally public.
But it's not the kind of thing you say if you're a
disciplined western intellectual who is subordinated to
state power. It's not conscious, it's instinctive. You
just don't say things like that, just like you don't say
what I said before. If you know them, the words can't come
out of your mouth.
So that's Iran. The US finally won the war for Iraq. They
loved Saddam with such a passion that he was given authority
to do something that no other state in the world can do,
except Israel, namely Saddam attacked a US ship, destroyer I
think, in the Gulf with missiles, killed 37 American
sailors, and got away with an apology.
Can you imagine anyone else doing that? The only other state
that's ever done that is Israel when they attacked the
Liberty. And there it was sort of ambiguous and there was a
protest at least. This time there wasn't even a protest.
That's fine. Our friend Saddam, he's massacring Kurds, he's
carrying out torture -- all the things they now accuse him
of are true. But it was all done with strong American
support. At that point, the US began preventing Iran from
blocking oil shipments to Iraq. They controlled the gulf,
so the US patrolled it, made sure the oil tankers got
through. It got to the point where a US missile cruiser had
downed an Iranian commercial airliner -- killing 290 people
-- in a commercial airspace, nobody doubts that, over
Iranian territory. Just shot it down and killed the people.
George Bush was President. He was asked about it and he
said I will never apologize for anything the Americans do.
Ship came home, heroes welcomed, metals of honor for the guy
on the flight deck. At that point, Iran realized 'look, we
can't fight the United States' so they essentially
capitulated. You think they've forgotten any of this? No.
Then right after that comes the embargo, the strict embargo
against Iran, to make sure they never recover from the
US-backed war of aggression. Then we go up to today. The
Iran government . . . it's a terrible government; there are
plenty of harsh things you can say about it, which I do in
fact. But they have tried to deal with this. In 2003 we now
know, this is under the sort of moderate Khatami government,
they approached the United States with negotiation offers on
every issue: two-state settlement, Palestine-Israel, nuclear
issues, and so on. The Bush administration didn't even both
rejecting it. It censured the Swiss diplomat who had
brought the offer, for having brought the offer.
And it so continues. They did make an agreement with the
European Union about a year later to suspend uranium
enrichment which they're legally entitled to do, they're a
signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But they agreed to
suspend uranium enrichment in return for promises from EU.
EU promised to provide, the words were 'firm security
guarantees'. What does that mean? That means guarantees
against the threat of invasion by the United States and
Israel. Well those threats themselves are serious
violations of international law. Read Article II of the UN
Charter. In the West of course that's acceptable, you're
allowed to do anything. But they wanted guarantees from the
European Union against attack. Well they lived up to their
side of the bargain but Europe didn't live up to its side of
the bargain, did not make any effort to provide security
guarantees. You don't step on the toes of the master. So
finally Iran returned to uranium enrichment.
How's that described in the west? Iran broke the agreement.
Nobody in their right mind wants Iran to have nuclear
weapons that's for sure. And maybe they're developing them.
Are they developing them? I don't know. One of Israel's
leading historians, Martin van Creveld, wrote in the
International Herald Tribune that he didn't know if they're
developing nuclear weapons but if they're not, they're
crazy. He said after the US invasion of Iraq that the US was
basically telling the world, we'll attack anybody we want as
long as they're defenseless. By now they're surrounded by
aggressive US forces on two of their borders. He said if
they're not developing nuclear weapons as a deterrent
they're crazy.
In fact it was known, it was understood by intelligence
agencies and everyone else, that the invasion of Iraq would
spur proliferation and terror. Because you're telling
countries you better have a deterrent. And what deterrents
are there? Nobody is going to fight the US on the
battlefield. It has half the military expenditures of the
world. It's an outlaw state that pays no attention to
international law. Ask John Bolton, he says that
international law doesn't apply to us. It applies to other
countries but for us it's just a contractual arrangement
which we keep to when it's in our interest. Outlaw state,
half the military expenditures in the world, technologically
far more advanced than any other military, how do you deter
it? Well, two ways: terror, nuclear weapons. So yes,
that's exactly what you're escalating when you invade Iraq.
The current invasion of Lebanon is doing the same. I don't
think that any expert doubts that we're creating new
generations of Jihadi terrorists. And in fact, there's a
background to this too. One of the leading, maybe the
leading, journalists in the Middle East, in the Arab Middle
East, is Rami Khouri, an editor of the Daily Star.
Intelligent guy. He wrote about the background, sensibly. He
said look, the Arab states for years have found no way to
deter Israeli aggression. He said that one consequence of
that has been the growth of paramilitary organizations to
try to defend the population from regular aggression and
oppression and stealing of lands. Hamas, Hezbollah, they
grow out of that situation. It leads to a very dangerous
and hazardous situation. You don't want to have
paramilitary armies running around, out of control of the
weak states. But he said yes, that's the consequence of an
inability to stop Israeli aggression and occupation and the
robbery of lands and so on. And he was too polite to say
US-Israeli aggression, which is what it is of course.
They can understand it in the Arab world. And what else are
you going to do? That is a part of the reason why by the
end of July, after just two weeks of the Israeli invasion
the polls in Lebanon were showing 87 percent support for
Hezbollah resistance. It's known here; leads to interesting
reactions. For example, some maniac at Harvard Law School
named Allen Dershowitz, I don't know if you could even find
it in the Nazi archives, he said, okay, 87 percent of
Lebanese support Hezbollah resistance that means they're all
legitimate targets.
Therefore if Israel's attacking any of them, no matter who
they're attacking, that's fine. Look, 87 percent of them
support resistance against Israel. Try to find an analog to
that. Now that's an extreme, that's not the normal
reaction, that's a reaction out of the paranoid extreme but
it is there and it gets published. But it's not that far
from the general prevailing assumption, not only in the
United States, but in the West. Because that's the kind of
thing we do to them. We've been doing it for centuries so
it must be right.
TCD: In your writings, you've always been explicit about the
US-Israeli relationship, particularly at the UN, the votes,
the history of the votes. In the past couple months, Senate
voted 100-0 in support of Israel, House voted 410-8, and
most remarkably, Senator Reid and Congresswoman Pelosi as
part of 20 Democrats shamed Maliki for speaking out against
Israel. Is there a negative fallout for this kind of
polarization on the Hill and its clear support for Israel?
Chomsky: First of all notice that this has virtually nothing
to do with an Israeli lobby. Pelosi doesn't face any
re-election problem. Most of them don't. Sure it's going
to have a fallout. Again, people outside the west can read
this and they know what it means. It means any atrocity
Israel carries out, the US will support. And they don't even
need to look at the votes, they can just look at the
missiles, and the jet planes and the helicopters and the
bombs and ask where they come from. Where do they come from?
Israel doesn't manufacture F-16s and helicopters.
TCD: So why did Pelosi do it, to look tough on security?
Chomsky: You'd have to ask her but it's consistent over a
long period. It's been true ever since the US-Israeli
alliance was firmed up. And it was firmed up, you know when
it was firmed up, it was in 1967. In 1967, Israel performed
an enormous service for the United States, for the tyrannies
that run the oil producers, for the energy corporations, a
major service. They destroyed secular Arab nationalism. Now
secular Arab nationalism was a terrible danger because
it was threatening to use the resources in the region for
its own people. And that is completely unacceptable. We
see that right now in Bolivia and Venezuela on a smaller
scale. You cannot do that. As George Kennan once put it, we
have to protect "our resources," doesn't matter where they
are. They're our resources and we have to protect them.
Well, Israel wiped out secular Arab nationalism, Nasser was
the symbol. Remember, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were at war at
the time. It was a great achievement. It won enormous
praise in the United States. It won over most of the
intellectual community. They are actually an influential
lobby. They're the ones who write the articles and frame
the newspaper reports and so on, so yes they're important.
That started a love affair with Israel. I don't think it had
much to do with Israel. It's my world, I see what's happening.
I think it had mostly to do with Vietnam and with the new
Left and with the women's movement. What was happening at
that time, what was happening in this country . . . the
United States was failing to crush South Vietnamese
resistance, was failing, which was a bitter blow because
whatever people say now, now they have another story, but at
the time they overwhelmingly supported the war -- not the
population but the educated sectors; some mild criticism
that it was costing too much but little serious criticism.
And Israel showed how to treat Third World people properly.
You just kick them in the face. They won a lot of points
for that.
Another thing that was happening here was a threat to
authority. Young people were not following orders. Women
were calling for rights. All kinds of intolerable things
were happening. And here is somebody who shows how you
handle it: with a mailed fist. They earned a lot of points
for that. You can see it very clearly in the writings right
after that. I reviewed a lot them at the time, in print.
So the Israeli victory was used as a weapon against the new
Left, against the blacks who aren't following the orders,
and so on and so forth. This whole amalgam created both a
strategic alliance and a cultural climate which meant Israel
can do what it wants. That was strengthened at the strategic
level in 1970. In 1970, Jordan was massacring Palestinians
-- Black September -- and it looked at first as if the
Syrians might intervene to protect the Palestinians.
US didn't want that, in the worst way, it was considered a
threat to the oil-producing monarchies which are the main
interest of the United States of course. The United States
at that time was really bogged down in Indochina. They had
just invaded Cambodia, the country was blowing up, and they
couldn't send troops or anything. But they got Israel to
mobilize and to effectively warn Syria that if they moved
they would be attacked. And Israel by far is the most
powerful country there. So Syria backed off and Jordan was
able to kill plenty of Palestinians.
And that was considered a major gift to the United States.
In fact, US aid to Israel went up; I think it quadrupled in
the following year. And things like that continued. By the
late 70s and the 1980s, Israel was also performing a
surrogate function. So for example, in Central America
there were major atrocities going on and Congress did pass
constraints preventing the US from arming the Guatemalan
military, sending too much aid to the contras and so on. So
Israel moved in. This was even true under Carter. Carter
wanted to send the jet planes to Indonesia, which was then
carrying out virtual genocide in East Timor. Well Congress
didn't allow it, so they got Israel to send US jet planes to
Indonesia. They were training the Guatemalan military,
training contras, involved all over the place.
There was a kind of a framework for control of the Middle
East: the Arab tyrannies controlled the states. It's worth
remembering that the US has been the stronger supporter of
Islamic fundamentalism for fifty years. Saudi Arabia is the
most extreme fundamentalist state in the world. Iran is a
vibrant democracy by comparison. Of course they created the
jihadis, didn't totally create them, but they certainly made
them a major force. Same in Israel: Israel essentially
created Hamas and Hezbollah.
That's what happens. You destroy secular nationalist
movements, something replaces them. What replaces them is
pretty ugly often. The framework for controlling the Middle
East was essentially taken over from the British. The
British, who were the previous dominant force, their
official position was, back in the First World War, that
Britain should create an Arab façade of theoretically
independent states, but a façade which Britain would
effectively rule behind various constitutional, I forget the
exact word, but behind a thin cover of independence which
Britain would rule.
The US took that over and added a layer of control, what
were called peripheral states, non-Arab states around the
periphery, which would protect the Arab tyrants from their
own populations. Turkey, Iran under the Shah, Israel joined
in after 1967, which had been predicted. Ten years earlier,
in 1958, US intelligence suggested that a logical corollary
to US opposition to Arab nationalism would be support for
Israel as the one reliable US base right in the middle of
the region. Didn't do much about it after that, but in
1967, they won that position. In 1970, it was intensified.
It continued through the 70s. 1979 the Shah is overthrown.
The Shah fell. Basically there had been an alliance, tacit,
between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Saudi Arabia is
where the oil is. Iran and Israel were the protectors.
Theoretically they were all at war but it didn't mean
anything. They had very close relations. The Shah fell,
that's one of the pillars gone. Turkey's still there. And
in fact, Turkey and Israel had very close relations. From
1958, Turkey probably is, after the United States, probably
the closest ally of Israel, military relations and so on.
Shah was gone. Israel's role became even more important. And
then as I say, secondary services were coming along and
so it continues.
By now, Israel has become, chosen to become, pretty much an
offshore US military base and high-tech center. This has
almost nothing to do with security, we know that. Again you
can't talk about it in the West, but we know it. It became
very clear in 1971, in February 1971. President Sadat of
Egypt, who had just taken over, offered Israel a full peace
treaty, full, almost word by word in accord with official US
policy, in return for withdrawal. Full peace in return for
withdrawal. He didn't mention the Palestinians which wasn't
an issue then. It was an issue for them but not for anyone
else. By withdrawal he meant from the Sinai. He didn't care
much about the rest. Israel was expelling thousands of
farmers from the northeastern Sinai, pretty brutally,
driving them into the desert, destroying the towns and
villages and so on. And they were preparing the area for an
all-Jewish city and other settlements.
The Israeli cabinet considered it. They recognized it to be
a genuine peace offer. But they decided to reject it. It
was a clear case of preferring expansion over security. The
important question is 'what's the US going to do', because
that determines what happens. There was internal debate;
Kissinger won out. He insisted on the policy that he called
stalemate: no negotiations just force. And at that time it
looked as if Israel had such overwhelming force that it
doesn't matter. So yes, for Israel that was a fateful
decision. It meant that they were choosing expansion over
security; they were going to have to rely on the US to
protect them. They had no other choice if there's an
international conflict. A year later, Jordan came out with
essentially the same offer. They didn't even bother
responding. And that's the way it's been since then. And
more and more they then just become an offshoot. It
follows almost inevitably. They can't do anything that US
tells them not to do.
For example, many cases, but just last year . . . Israel's
economy is high-tech military, it's a caricature of the
United States and the big market for them is China. But the
US doesn't want them to send sophisticated armaments to
China. They've tried a couple of times and they've been
shot down every time by the US administration. Last year
they tried again and the Bush administration vetoed and
insisted on humiliating them. The Pentagon would not permit
the Israeli Defense Minister to visit. They passed
legislation to ensure that they don't do that anymore and
furthermore they had to write a letter of apology to the
United States. So they really dragged them through the mud.
That shows who's boss when anything matters, as if it was
a question. But basically they're okay as long as they're
doing what the US government wants them to do. That's the
way it stands.
What about the people who write editorials? Is it any
different? For example, take just one case: June 24. Did
anybody care that Israel kidnapped two Palestinians? No. As
I say, there are a few mentions . . .
TCD: You mentioned earlier that the United States is
supporter of Islamic terrorism. And so in the United
States, how do we counteract then the anti-Islamic or
anti-Muslim sentiment or the sentiment where most people
believe that all Muslims are terrorists and that the Middle
East is a breeding ground for terrorism?
Chomsky: The same way you have to counter the idea that
everybody in the world is a Communist if they don't follow
our orders. That's what activism and organizing and
educational programs are about. You have to counter a very
powerful propaganda apparatus. And it's not State
propaganda. This is voluntary propaganda of the
intellectual classes. That's what Hans Morgenthau once
called our conformist subservience to those in power. And
that's the key to it. It's interesting that it comes from
him, the founder of realist international relations theory.
But yeah, he had it correct.
Take a look at the present. Take a look at the way they
compare the destruction of Lebanon to the crimes in Israel.
They're real crimes but how do they compare with the
destruction of Lebanon? How do they describe what's going on
in the West Bank? It's almost universally described as a
courageous program of withdrawal. Now they're going to
withdraw some scattered settlements and converge them into
the area they're annexing. It's a program of annexation and
cantonization and the destruction of Palestinian
nationalism. But it's courageous withdrawal as described
here. In Gaza, Israel's defending itself when it killed 36
people in June and 170 in July, because of the capture of an
Israeli solider. And we know that the US doesn't care about
that and the editors don't care about it. Take a look at
the way they reacted to the kidnapping a day before, or to
many others in the past. That's what the population is
presented with. To overcome that is not easy.
The same with terrorism. Yes, terrorism is terrible. Where
did it come from? You're supposed to just stand up and
scream Islamic fascism. If you want to stir up more
terrorism, that's the way to do it. If you care about
terrorism you're not going to do that. There's no terrorism
specialist that does that, no intelligence agency does. What
you try to do is find out what its roots are. They're
not that obscure, you can find them. Again, just take the
invasion of Iraq. It was anticipated that it would increase
the threat of terrorism. It did beyond what was
anticipated. The number of terrorist incidences I think
tripled the next year. That's exactly what was anticipated.
This invasion is almost certainly going to have the same
effect. We can find the roots. Destroy secular nationalism
and you're going to get Islamic terrorism.
Something similar is happening in the United States. The US
is going through the perhaps the worst period of its
economic history. It's called the golden age, and it is for
my income level but for the majority of the population it's
a disaster. For the majority of the population real wages
have stagnated for twenty-five years. That's never happened
before. It's a growing economy, no major recessions or wars
or anything. And there's growth, but it all goes into a
very few pockets. For a majority it stagnates. Meanwhile
benefits are declining, work hours are going up, services
are collapsing . . . it's not the kind of suffering in a
Palestinian refugee camp but it's unpleasant. And what's
happening is what usually happens: an upsurge in religious
fundamentalism. People are going to turn somewhere. If the
secular systems don't work for them they're going to turn
somewhere else.
So yes, a different scale and so on, but you can see the
similar dynamics right here. Yes, it's going to happen and
we know how to deal with it. Deal with the problems, there
are grievances. You don't support the terrorism of course
but you can understand the grievances.
Take 9-11. We now know from very good scholarship, Fawwaz
Gerges for example, he's the main scholar of the Jihadi
movements, that jihadis strongly opposed 9-11. The radical
clerics were issuing fatwas denouncing Al-Qaeda for carrying
out 9-11. Well, the Bush Administration took care of that,
it mobilized them in support of Al-Qaeda. That's what the
attack on Afghanistan did. They didn't attack Afghanistan
to get rid of terrorism; in fact it increased terrorism as
they expected. And then comes Iraq and everything else. And
they continue to take over Palestinian lands. After a
couple of years, the Jihadis are now not opposing Al-Qaeda
they're supporting it.
It's what happens. That's why leading specialists here,
from the government, say that Osama bin Laden's best ally is
George Bush. It's as if he's following a script. Bush
probably isn't making policy but Rumsfeld, Cheney and the
rest are just following a script that comes from Osama bin
Laden. And the people who stand up and scream Islamic
fascism are just helping out. It's not the way you deal
with terrorism by screaming and shrieking, having tantrums.
And we know that. There are plenty of examples. Take the
British and Northern Ireland. IRA terrorism was pretty
serious. As long as the British responded with violence, it
got worse. It's a gift to the hard-line elements of the
IRA; it's just what they want. Finally, Britain started
paying some attention to the grievances. And they were
real. Soon as Britain started paying attention to them, the
situation started to improve.
I was in Belfast in 1993, it was a war zone. If you go now,
it's not utopia but it's not very different from Boston.
It's settling down. There are problems. But it's a major
improvement. And the reason traces right back to the
willingness to pay some attention to the real grievances.
These acts grow out of something, they don't come from
nowhere. And it's pretty well understood what they come from.
In fact the United States has understood this for forty
years. George W. Bush asked 'why do they hate us'. He
wasn't the first President to ask that. In fact Eisenhower,
we now know from the classified documents, raised with his
staff the question why is there a campaign of hatred against
us among the people of the Arab world? Not the rulers, they
think we're fine, but among the populations. And the
answer, in fact, had been given by the National Security
Council, the planning bureau. They said there's a
perception in the Arab world that the United States supports
oppressive and brutal regimes and blocks democracy and
development and that we do it because of our interest in
gaining control of their oil. They went on to say that the
perceptions were accurate and furthermore that's what we
should do. So you have a campaign of hatred.
Right after 9-11, the Wall Street Journal, to its credit
it's the only paper I know who did it, did an actual survey
among Arabs. Not all Arabs only the Arabs they care about,
the ones they called 'moneyed Muslims' like directors of
banks, heads of local affiliates of multi-national
corporations -- people that are embedded in the whole US,
neo-liberal global project that think America is great. So
they did a survey among them: same hatred, same reasons.
You're supporting oppressive and brutal regimes; you're
blocking democracy and development; and by then there were
further grievances like what the US is doing to the
Palestinians. They understand it's the US. And at that
time, the sanctions against Iraq which were killing hundreds
of thousands of people and they were pretty bitter about
that. So those are the reasons.
Now we've added new reasons. You keep adding reasons and
you're going to get more hatred. The dynamics are very clear.
TCD: You write a lot on media control and media spin. This
fall Al Jazeera is going to open their station. Al Arabiya
has a presence in Washington. What do you think the
American response will be to Al Jazeera and furthermore,
what is the opportunity for additional media sources --
print, television, otherwise -- to have an impact here in
counteracting stereotypes?
Chomsky: There are opportunities but we should look at the
record. And it's a very interesting record. In the 1970s,
after decolonization, there was a brief period when the UN
sort of represented the concerns of the vast majority of the
populations of the world instead of just western elites.
That's when the US turned against the UN very passionately.
Not the population, but the elites. One of the things
they proposed was a new international information order that
would give the Third World some access to the international
information system, breaking the western monopoly. That led
to hysteria in the United States, across the board. This
was coming out of UNESCO. The government essentially
destroyed UNESCO. The media bitterly condemned this proposal
with a flood of lies, including the liberals, claiming they
were trying to oppose freedom of speech, they were going to
register journalists. . . . It was all fabrication. And
they finally beat it down and destroyed it. UNESCO was gone
for years.
There's a very good book about this, published by University
of Minnesota press, by leading media specialists William
Preston, Edward Herman and Herbert Schiller. I don't think
it got a single review. They went through the record, the
lies. The New York Times refused to allow responses. It
was real passionate hysteria that something might break the
Western media monopoly. And the one example of academic
revelation, oh that can't even be mentioned. You can check
and see, the book is probably still in print. It's worth
reading: Hope and Folly it's called.
Let's take Al Jazeera. The US has tried in every possible
way to destroy Al Jazeera. They bombed its headquarters --
they claim it's an accident but nobody believes them -- in
Kabul and then bombed them again in Baghdad. They've been
pressuring the Emir of Qatar heavily to get him to stop it.
And Powell, a great liberal, went after him and told him
to cancel Al Jazeera. He actually came to Washington, the
Emir, and they put him under tremendous pressure here. He
ran the greatest press conference that Washington ever had
-- I don't think it got reported -- in which he was
describing the pressure from Powell and others in the
Administration. He gave the press a kind of a
tongue-and-cheek lecture about this thing called freedom of
press which we believe in. I think they were too
embarrassed to report it. Finally after the pressure got
really severe, the Qatar government, the Emir, agreed to let
it be privatized. The Bush Administration refused. They
said it doesn't matter if it's private or public, you cannot
have it because it's an independent voice and it's reaching
the Arab world. When they ran the so-called free election
in Iraq they made sure to run Al Jazeera out first. Because
you cannot have a free election if there's an independent
press, that's obvious.
That's the record right up to the present. Now, how they're
going to stop this I don't know. You can be pretty sure
they're going to pull out the stops. And this is again
across the board. The Bush guys are an extreme but it's
across the board.
Conducted by Michael Shank and Courtney Erwin
August 15, 2006
The Citizen Diplomat: How is the latest crisis in the Middle
East different from ones before? In other words, is there a
new dimension to the relationship between Israel-US and the
Arab world, Arab-Muslim world?
Professor Noam Chomsky: First of all there are three crises
going on involving the US, Israel and the Arab world. The
central one, which is barely discussed, is the US-Israeli
programs of essentially driving the last nail into the
coffin of Palestinian national rights. That is going on both
in Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza and the West Bank are a
unit, everyone agrees to that. In the West Bank the program
is called convergence. And in the US media it's described as
withdrawal. These are all euphemisms. In fact, it's a
program of annexation and cantonization.
I say US-Israel because they're a unit essentially.
Israel is annexing valuable land and the major resources of
the West Bank and taking over the Jordan Valley so what's
left is imprisoned. Of course it controls air space and so
on. The rest is being broken up by infrastructure projects
and settlement into pretty much separated cantons, which
will be unviable, that's the idea. They have little contact
with one another and none with the outside world except
through Israeli passages. They're virtually separated from
whatever small sector of Jerusalem would be left to
Palestinians. Jerusalem is the center, has always been the
center, of Palestinian commercial, educational, cultural
life. So that essentially ends any hope for Palestinian
national rights. All of this is totally illegal, in
violation of Security Council orders, in violation of a
unanimous World Court ruling, despite what is said even the
US justice, who didn't go along, but did agree with this
part that it's all illegal.
That's happening right now. And that's the core of the
problem.
Gaza was devastated under Israeli rule. It's now described
accurately by Israeli human rights activists as the biggest
prison in the world; totally encircled, no way in or out.
And Israel freely carries out regular atrocities there. And
of course after Palestinians voted the wrong way in a free
election last January the US and Israel instantly determined
that they would punish the population -- punish the
population because you didn't vote the way we told you to.
That's a good indication of what Bush's democracy promotion
project that everyone talks about. It exists totally in
rhetoric. In fact, there isn't a particle of truth to it.
And this is a good illustration of 'you vote the wrong way,
we punish you . . . with embargo, with cutting of funding,
with any way we can'.
And the atrocities continued. Just to give you some
examples: In June, forty people were killed by Israeli
forces, 36 in Gaza, four in the West Bank where the killings
aren't as high, it's just mostly takeover. That was June.
On June 24, an incident took place which is nonexistent for
Western opinion but is existent for people who pay attention
to the world.
On June 24, Israeli forces kidnapped two civilians in Gaza
city, the Muammar brothers. They claimed they're militants,
whatever that means, but they can claim anything they like.
They kidnapped them, abducted them, and took them to
Israel. They're now off somewhere hidden in the Israeli
prison system. It was barely mentioned in the west.
Editors knew about it. No doubt they knew about it. Like
there were 87 words in the Washington Post. So it was
certainly known. It was in the Israeli press, IDF handouts,
no question about the fact. But the West just doesn't care
about kidnapping; it's fine, as long as our side does it.
So no reaction, no comment, nothing.
June 25th, the next day, Hamas captured an Israeli soldier.
You can't kidnap soldiers, you can capture them. But by
definition you can't kidnap them as was pointed out a couple
of days ago by a US military historian in the LA Times. So
they captured an Israeli soldier. That led to a huge
reaction in the West, a major atrocity. Israel quickly
launched attacks, serious attacks. In June in Gaza,
thirty-six people were killed. In July it was probably
about 170 according to UN sources. And that was all
approved in the West, in the United States particularly,
because we can't stand outrageous kidnapping.
The kidnapping of civilians is a much worse crime than
capturing a soldier, especially a soldier in an army that's
attacking your country, which is what is happening. But
that doesn't register in the West, particularly the United
States, but the West in general. On July 12th, Hezbollah
captured two Israeli soldiers, killed three, and five others
were killed in Lebanon. That again led to huge outrage. A
major US-Israeli invasion -- of course it's the US --
destroyed half of Lebanon, killed over a thousand people, a
large part of the country's wiped out, all over the place.
That was fine. 'Disproportionate' is the most that anyone
could say. Israel's been kidnapping and abducting Lebanese
for decades. We don't know how many because no one looks.
There was a secret prison discovered in Israel three years
ago, worse than Guantanamo, totally secret. The secret
prison was never even reported in the United States. It was
in Israel and in Europe. And it was full of Lebanese.
Hezbollah's official reason for the captured soldiers was
prisoner exchange and show of solidarity with the
Palestinians under attack. Nobody else in the world does
anything for them, cares about them, certainly not the
tyrants that run the Arab states. Populations want to but
not the leadership; they're clients of the US. So yes, a
show of solidarity with the Palestinians and call for
prisoner exchange. Well, that's out. Then comes the
destruction of Lebanon. It's worth bearing in mind that
this is the fifth Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the last
thirty years. The first one you can maybe claim was
independent but the others were strictly backed by the
United States and were devastating. And no credible pretext.
The worst one, 1982, the pretext was . . . if you read the
US press, the New York Times, they'll tell you that 'Israel
had to defend itself' from rocketing from Palestinians or
attacks from Palestinians. There was nothing. After the
1981 ceasefire, it was quiet from north to south. Israel
kept bombing and killing people and attacking. But that's
okay; they were apparently trying to elicit a response that
would give a pretext for the invasion. When they couldn't
elicit a response, they invaded anyway. The real reason,
which was quite public in Israel at the highest level, was
to put an end to the embarrassing PLO offers for
negotiations. So you've got to kick them out of the
country, make them stop bringing up these embarrassing
efforts to negotiate a two-state settlement. That was their
reason for the 1982 invasion which killed maybe 20,000
people and again wiped out a large part of Lebanon. But
that's all gone.
In 1993, 1996, I won't go into the details but it's kind of
similar. Backed by the US. Sometimes the US called it off.
Like in 1982, after two months of strong support, the
Reagan administration finally ordered them to stop because
the bombing of Beirut was harming US interests. It was
becoming so horrible, even Thomas Friedman said it's bad. At
that point they figured they'd better tell them to stop. In
1996, Clinton again supported it. When they bombed the
UN shelter in Qana, killing over 100 people, Clinton figured
that's harming US interests so he told them to pull back.
So they pulled back.
That's Lebanon. All the years, when Israel was kidnapping
Lebanese, nobody ever proposed that that means there should
be an invasion of Israel or that it justifies terror attacks
in Israel. No sane person would've accepted that. I
wouldn't and I'm sure nobody else would. But when they
capture Israeli soldiers, then you can wipe out the country.
The reason is: Israel's an appendage of the United States.
Now it's bad enough here but it's not very different in
Europe. These are western attitudes. They're rooted in
centuries of imperial violence. We do things to you; you
don't do things to us. Actually if you think about 9-11, a
horrible atrocity, in context it's the same. You can
imagine that worse could've happened on 9-11. Let's do a
thought experiment. Suppose on 9-11 they had actually hit
the White House and killed the President and carried out a
military coup and immediately killed 50–100,000 people,
tortured 700,000, set up a major torture center, an
intelligence center which supported military coups all over
the region, installing vicious murderous dictatorships,
assassinating people all over the place, sent in a bunch of
economists who drove the US economy into the worst
depression in history. Suppose all that had happened. That
would've been worse than 9-11.
That did happen on 9-11. That's what's called in Latin
America the first 9-11: 9.11.1973. The only thing I've
changed, I've changed absolute numbers to per capita
numbers. Which is correct, that's what you should do when
you make a comparison. That was the Pinochet coup, which
the US supported, probably participated in. But that's not
on the radar screen. If you ask people, what about the
first 9-11, you get a blank stare. Because that's the kind
of thing we're supposed to do to other people. They're just
not supposed to do it to us. That's why 9-11 was such a
shock. They don't do that kind of thing to us; that's what
we do to them. And this generalizes. It's happening right
now in the Middle East.
Sure, the terrorists' acts are atrocities. Like Hezbollah
rocketing Haifa is a war crime. But let's take a look at
our own values. By our values it is fine, they should be
doing it. They should be doing much worse.
And there are solutions to all these problems. They're
pretty straight forward. The solution to the core problem,
i.e. Israel-Palestine, the solution's been known for thirty
years. There should be a two-state settlement on roughly
the international border, maybe straighten out some lines,
'minor and mutual adjustments' it was called in official US
terminology back in the 60s. And that's supported by the
whole world practically.
It's supported by Iran for example. They won't publish it
here. What they like in the West is Ahmadinejad's ravings.
But he has a superior, what they call the Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Khamenei. He's his superior. Probably in a
reprimand to Ahmadinejad he stated, declared officially,
that Iran accepts the Arab League proposal. The Arab League
proposal is for full normalization of relations with Israel
when it withdraws to international borders. It goes beyond
the two-state settlement, full normalization. That's Iran.
Palestinians accepted it for decades.
It came to the Security Council in January 1976. Brought by
the major Arab states, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, so-called
confrontation states with the support of the others. The US
vetoed it.
And so it continues. The US and Israel have almost
unilaterally barred a diplomatic settlement for over thirty
years. This current Bush administration happens to be sort
of extreme but not that different from others. Take his
father, George Bush, who is regarded as anti-Israel, too
harsh on Israel. Just take a look at his program, his
program was worse than this. In 1988, the Palestinian
National Council, governing body for the Palestinians,
formally -- they had tacitly accepted before -- but they
formally accepted a two-state settlement, formally, in terms
of the international consensus.
Israel reacted. It was a coalition government, Shimon Peres
and Yitzhak Shamir. They came out in May, 1989, with a
program that said the following: It said first point: there
can be no additional Palestinian state between Israel and
Jordan. Meaning, Jordan already is a Palestinian state, so
there can't be an additional state, so nothing for the
Palestinians. Second, the status of the occupied
territories will be settled in accord with the guidelines of
the state of Israel. And third, Palestinians can have an
election as long as the only topics discussed are these.
And half the intellectual class was in prison under
administrative detention. The only report on this in the
United States is 'look how forthcoming Israel is . . .
they're allowing a free election'.
James Baker, secretary of State, came out a couple of months
later in December with the Baker plan, the Bush-Baker plan,
which completely endorsed this. So the US position under
Bush number one is 'no additional Palestinian state, you've
already got Jordan'. Two, everything will be settled by
Israel. And third you can have an election as long as you
keep to what we tell you to vote on. That's Bush I, the one
who is critical of Israel.
Go through the rest of them, it's about the same. In fact,
if you look at the whole thirty-year record, there's
literally one month which deviates, January 2001. In 2000,
the Camp David negotiations took place. Clinton realized
that what the US and Israel were offering Palestinians was
totally unacceptable to anybody, including Abbas. So he
came out in December with what he called his parameters
which were sort of vague but some of them were forthcoming.
And then there were negotiations, top level negotiations,
Israel, Palestine, in Taba, Egypt, in January for a week.
And they were actually making progress. They were moving
towards some version of the two-state settlement which more
or less conformed to the long-standing consensus. And in
their final press conference they said if they had a little
more time they thought they could work it out, both sides.
But Israel called them off, called off the negotiations . .
. so we don't know what would've happened. Then come Bush
and Sharon and of course throw it out the window. But that
week in Taba is actually the only break in thirty years. Of
course the US propaganda system doesn't include any of this.
Take a poll in the Harvard faculty and almost nobody
would've even heard of it.
On the other hand, if you look at the victims, they know.
It's the same with the US and Iran and the big confrontation
coming up that may blow up the world. We don't know.
Iranians remember something that we're not allowed to think
about. For over half a century, the United States has been
tormenting the people of Iran without a break. It started in
1953 when US and Britain overthrew the parliamentary
government and installed a brutal tyrant, the Shah, who they
supported right through his rule, one of the leading human
rights violators in the world. That's just fine. Carter,
when he visited Iran, December 1978 or so, praised the Shah
because of the love that his people showed for him. As soon
as they overthrew the government, a couple of months later,
the United States tried to instigate a military coup, that
didn't work, then turned to supporting Saddam Hussein.
We're under Reagan now.
Saddam invaded Iran. Iraq had been on the list of states
supporting terrorism. In 1982, Reagan took them off that
list so that the US could start supplying them with large
scale aid, including military aid, including means to
develop weapons of mass destruction. He sent Donald Rumsfeld
there as his emissary to fix it up with their friend Saddam.
And then they supported Iraq throughout this whole war,
killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, many of them
killed with chemical weapons, the means for which were
supplied by the US, not only the US, others too, but the US
in particular.
The fact that this was in 1982 is particularly interesting
because Saddam Hussein is now on trial and will probably
receive the death sentence for crimes that he committed in
1982, the year when the US took him off the list of
terrorist states and openly supported him. Do a Google
search on the western press and see if you can find anyone
mentioning this. It can't be that they don't know it.
There's nothing secret about this, it's all totally public.
But it's not the kind of thing you say if you're a
disciplined western intellectual who is subordinated to
state power. It's not conscious, it's instinctive. You
just don't say things like that, just like you don't say
what I said before. If you know them, the words can't come
out of your mouth.
So that's Iran. The US finally won the war for Iraq. They
loved Saddam with such a passion that he was given authority
to do something that no other state in the world can do,
except Israel, namely Saddam attacked a US ship, destroyer I
think, in the Gulf with missiles, killed 37 American
sailors, and got away with an apology.
Can you imagine anyone else doing that? The only other state
that's ever done that is Israel when they attacked the
Liberty. And there it was sort of ambiguous and there was a
protest at least. This time there wasn't even a protest.
That's fine. Our friend Saddam, he's massacring Kurds, he's
carrying out torture -- all the things they now accuse him
of are true. But it was all done with strong American
support. At that point, the US began preventing Iran from
blocking oil shipments to Iraq. They controlled the gulf,
so the US patrolled it, made sure the oil tankers got
through. It got to the point where a US missile cruiser had
downed an Iranian commercial airliner -- killing 290 people
-- in a commercial airspace, nobody doubts that, over
Iranian territory. Just shot it down and killed the people.
George Bush was President. He was asked about it and he
said I will never apologize for anything the Americans do.
Ship came home, heroes welcomed, metals of honor for the guy
on the flight deck. At that point, Iran realized 'look, we
can't fight the United States' so they essentially
capitulated. You think they've forgotten any of this? No.
Then right after that comes the embargo, the strict embargo
against Iran, to make sure they never recover from the
US-backed war of aggression. Then we go up to today. The
Iran government . . . it's a terrible government; there are
plenty of harsh things you can say about it, which I do in
fact. But they have tried to deal with this. In 2003 we now
know, this is under the sort of moderate Khatami government,
they approached the United States with negotiation offers on
every issue: two-state settlement, Palestine-Israel, nuclear
issues, and so on. The Bush administration didn't even both
rejecting it. It censured the Swiss diplomat who had
brought the offer, for having brought the offer.
And it so continues. They did make an agreement with the
European Union about a year later to suspend uranium
enrichment which they're legally entitled to do, they're a
signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But they agreed to
suspend uranium enrichment in return for promises from EU.
EU promised to provide, the words were 'firm security
guarantees'. What does that mean? That means guarantees
against the threat of invasion by the United States and
Israel. Well those threats themselves are serious
violations of international law. Read Article II of the UN
Charter. In the West of course that's acceptable, you're
allowed to do anything. But they wanted guarantees from the
European Union against attack. Well they lived up to their
side of the bargain but Europe didn't live up to its side of
the bargain, did not make any effort to provide security
guarantees. You don't step on the toes of the master. So
finally Iran returned to uranium enrichment.
How's that described in the west? Iran broke the agreement.
Nobody in their right mind wants Iran to have nuclear
weapons that's for sure. And maybe they're developing them.
Are they developing them? I don't know. One of Israel's
leading historians, Martin van Creveld, wrote in the
International Herald Tribune that he didn't know if they're
developing nuclear weapons but if they're not, they're
crazy. He said after the US invasion of Iraq that the US was
basically telling the world, we'll attack anybody we want as
long as they're defenseless. By now they're surrounded by
aggressive US forces on two of their borders. He said if
they're not developing nuclear weapons as a deterrent
they're crazy.
In fact it was known, it was understood by intelligence
agencies and everyone else, that the invasion of Iraq would
spur proliferation and terror. Because you're telling
countries you better have a deterrent. And what deterrents
are there? Nobody is going to fight the US on the
battlefield. It has half the military expenditures of the
world. It's an outlaw state that pays no attention to
international law. Ask John Bolton, he says that
international law doesn't apply to us. It applies to other
countries but for us it's just a contractual arrangement
which we keep to when it's in our interest. Outlaw state,
half the military expenditures in the world, technologically
far more advanced than any other military, how do you deter
it? Well, two ways: terror, nuclear weapons. So yes,
that's exactly what you're escalating when you invade Iraq.
The current invasion of Lebanon is doing the same. I don't
think that any expert doubts that we're creating new
generations of Jihadi terrorists. And in fact, there's a
background to this too. One of the leading, maybe the
leading, journalists in the Middle East, in the Arab Middle
East, is Rami Khouri, an editor of the Daily Star.
Intelligent guy. He wrote about the background, sensibly. He
said look, the Arab states for years have found no way to
deter Israeli aggression. He said that one consequence of
that has been the growth of paramilitary organizations to
try to defend the population from regular aggression and
oppression and stealing of lands. Hamas, Hezbollah, they
grow out of that situation. It leads to a very dangerous
and hazardous situation. You don't want to have
paramilitary armies running around, out of control of the
weak states. But he said yes, that's the consequence of an
inability to stop Israeli aggression and occupation and the
robbery of lands and so on. And he was too polite to say
US-Israeli aggression, which is what it is of course.
They can understand it in the Arab world. And what else are
you going to do? That is a part of the reason why by the
end of July, after just two weeks of the Israeli invasion
the polls in Lebanon were showing 87 percent support for
Hezbollah resistance. It's known here; leads to interesting
reactions. For example, some maniac at Harvard Law School
named Allen Dershowitz, I don't know if you could even find
it in the Nazi archives, he said, okay, 87 percent of
Lebanese support Hezbollah resistance that means they're all
legitimate targets.
Therefore if Israel's attacking any of them, no matter who
they're attacking, that's fine. Look, 87 percent of them
support resistance against Israel. Try to find an analog to
that. Now that's an extreme, that's not the normal
reaction, that's a reaction out of the paranoid extreme but
it is there and it gets published. But it's not that far
from the general prevailing assumption, not only in the
United States, but in the West. Because that's the kind of
thing we do to them. We've been doing it for centuries so
it must be right.
TCD: In your writings, you've always been explicit about the
US-Israeli relationship, particularly at the UN, the votes,
the history of the votes. In the past couple months, Senate
voted 100-0 in support of Israel, House voted 410-8, and
most remarkably, Senator Reid and Congresswoman Pelosi as
part of 20 Democrats shamed Maliki for speaking out against
Israel. Is there a negative fallout for this kind of
polarization on the Hill and its clear support for Israel?
Chomsky: First of all notice that this has virtually nothing
to do with an Israeli lobby. Pelosi doesn't face any
re-election problem. Most of them don't. Sure it's going
to have a fallout. Again, people outside the west can read
this and they know what it means. It means any atrocity
Israel carries out, the US will support. And they don't even
need to look at the votes, they can just look at the
missiles, and the jet planes and the helicopters and the
bombs and ask where they come from. Where do they come from?
Israel doesn't manufacture F-16s and helicopters.
TCD: So why did Pelosi do it, to look tough on security?
Chomsky: You'd have to ask her but it's consistent over a
long period. It's been true ever since the US-Israeli
alliance was firmed up. And it was firmed up, you know when
it was firmed up, it was in 1967. In 1967, Israel performed
an enormous service for the United States, for the tyrannies
that run the oil producers, for the energy corporations, a
major service. They destroyed secular Arab nationalism. Now
secular Arab nationalism was a terrible danger because
it was threatening to use the resources in the region for
its own people. And that is completely unacceptable. We
see that right now in Bolivia and Venezuela on a smaller
scale. You cannot do that. As George Kennan once put it, we
have to protect "our resources," doesn't matter where they
are. They're our resources and we have to protect them.
Well, Israel wiped out secular Arab nationalism, Nasser was
the symbol. Remember, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were at war at
the time. It was a great achievement. It won enormous
praise in the United States. It won over most of the
intellectual community. They are actually an influential
lobby. They're the ones who write the articles and frame
the newspaper reports and so on, so yes they're important.
That started a love affair with Israel. I don't think it had
much to do with Israel. It's my world, I see what's happening.
I think it had mostly to do with Vietnam and with the new
Left and with the women's movement. What was happening at
that time, what was happening in this country . . . the
United States was failing to crush South Vietnamese
resistance, was failing, which was a bitter blow because
whatever people say now, now they have another story, but at
the time they overwhelmingly supported the war -- not the
population but the educated sectors; some mild criticism
that it was costing too much but little serious criticism.
And Israel showed how to treat Third World people properly.
You just kick them in the face. They won a lot of points
for that.
Another thing that was happening here was a threat to
authority. Young people were not following orders. Women
were calling for rights. All kinds of intolerable things
were happening. And here is somebody who shows how you
handle it: with a mailed fist. They earned a lot of points
for that. You can see it very clearly in the writings right
after that. I reviewed a lot them at the time, in print.
So the Israeli victory was used as a weapon against the new
Left, against the blacks who aren't following the orders,
and so on and so forth. This whole amalgam created both a
strategic alliance and a cultural climate which meant Israel
can do what it wants. That was strengthened at the strategic
level in 1970. In 1970, Jordan was massacring Palestinians
-- Black September -- and it looked at first as if the
Syrians might intervene to protect the Palestinians.
US didn't want that, in the worst way, it was considered a
threat to the oil-producing monarchies which are the main
interest of the United States of course. The United States
at that time was really bogged down in Indochina. They had
just invaded Cambodia, the country was blowing up, and they
couldn't send troops or anything. But they got Israel to
mobilize and to effectively warn Syria that if they moved
they would be attacked. And Israel by far is the most
powerful country there. So Syria backed off and Jordan was
able to kill plenty of Palestinians.
And that was considered a major gift to the United States.
In fact, US aid to Israel went up; I think it quadrupled in
the following year. And things like that continued. By the
late 70s and the 1980s, Israel was also performing a
surrogate function. So for example, in Central America
there were major atrocities going on and Congress did pass
constraints preventing the US from arming the Guatemalan
military, sending too much aid to the contras and so on. So
Israel moved in. This was even true under Carter. Carter
wanted to send the jet planes to Indonesia, which was then
carrying out virtual genocide in East Timor. Well Congress
didn't allow it, so they got Israel to send US jet planes to
Indonesia. They were training the Guatemalan military,
training contras, involved all over the place.
There was a kind of a framework for control of the Middle
East: the Arab tyrannies controlled the states. It's worth
remembering that the US has been the stronger supporter of
Islamic fundamentalism for fifty years. Saudi Arabia is the
most extreme fundamentalist state in the world. Iran is a
vibrant democracy by comparison. Of course they created the
jihadis, didn't totally create them, but they certainly made
them a major force. Same in Israel: Israel essentially
created Hamas and Hezbollah.
That's what happens. You destroy secular nationalist
movements, something replaces them. What replaces them is
pretty ugly often. The framework for controlling the Middle
East was essentially taken over from the British. The
British, who were the previous dominant force, their
official position was, back in the First World War, that
Britain should create an Arab façade of theoretically
independent states, but a façade which Britain would
effectively rule behind various constitutional, I forget the
exact word, but behind a thin cover of independence which
Britain would rule.
The US took that over and added a layer of control, what
were called peripheral states, non-Arab states around the
periphery, which would protect the Arab tyrants from their
own populations. Turkey, Iran under the Shah, Israel joined
in after 1967, which had been predicted. Ten years earlier,
in 1958, US intelligence suggested that a logical corollary
to US opposition to Arab nationalism would be support for
Israel as the one reliable US base right in the middle of
the region. Didn't do much about it after that, but in
1967, they won that position. In 1970, it was intensified.
It continued through the 70s. 1979 the Shah is overthrown.
The Shah fell. Basically there had been an alliance, tacit,
between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Saudi Arabia is
where the oil is. Iran and Israel were the protectors.
Theoretically they were all at war but it didn't mean
anything. They had very close relations. The Shah fell,
that's one of the pillars gone. Turkey's still there. And
in fact, Turkey and Israel had very close relations. From
1958, Turkey probably is, after the United States, probably
the closest ally of Israel, military relations and so on.
Shah was gone. Israel's role became even more important. And
then as I say, secondary services were coming along and
so it continues.
By now, Israel has become, chosen to become, pretty much an
offshore US military base and high-tech center. This has
almost nothing to do with security, we know that. Again you
can't talk about it in the West, but we know it. It became
very clear in 1971, in February 1971. President Sadat of
Egypt, who had just taken over, offered Israel a full peace
treaty, full, almost word by word in accord with official US
policy, in return for withdrawal. Full peace in return for
withdrawal. He didn't mention the Palestinians which wasn't
an issue then. It was an issue for them but not for anyone
else. By withdrawal he meant from the Sinai. He didn't care
much about the rest. Israel was expelling thousands of
farmers from the northeastern Sinai, pretty brutally,
driving them into the desert, destroying the towns and
villages and so on. And they were preparing the area for an
all-Jewish city and other settlements.
The Israeli cabinet considered it. They recognized it to be
a genuine peace offer. But they decided to reject it. It
was a clear case of preferring expansion over security. The
important question is 'what's the US going to do', because
that determines what happens. There was internal debate;
Kissinger won out. He insisted on the policy that he called
stalemate: no negotiations just force. And at that time it
looked as if Israel had such overwhelming force that it
doesn't matter. So yes, for Israel that was a fateful
decision. It meant that they were choosing expansion over
security; they were going to have to rely on the US to
protect them. They had no other choice if there's an
international conflict. A year later, Jordan came out with
essentially the same offer. They didn't even bother
responding. And that's the way it's been since then. And
more and more they then just become an offshoot. It
follows almost inevitably. They can't do anything that US
tells them not to do.
For example, many cases, but just last year . . . Israel's
economy is high-tech military, it's a caricature of the
United States and the big market for them is China. But the
US doesn't want them to send sophisticated armaments to
China. They've tried a couple of times and they've been
shot down every time by the US administration. Last year
they tried again and the Bush administration vetoed and
insisted on humiliating them. The Pentagon would not permit
the Israeli Defense Minister to visit. They passed
legislation to ensure that they don't do that anymore and
furthermore they had to write a letter of apology to the
United States. So they really dragged them through the mud.
That shows who's boss when anything matters, as if it was
a question. But basically they're okay as long as they're
doing what the US government wants them to do. That's the
way it stands.
What about the people who write editorials? Is it any
different? For example, take just one case: June 24. Did
anybody care that Israel kidnapped two Palestinians? No. As
I say, there are a few mentions . . .
TCD: You mentioned earlier that the United States is
supporter of Islamic terrorism. And so in the United
States, how do we counteract then the anti-Islamic or
anti-Muslim sentiment or the sentiment where most people
believe that all Muslims are terrorists and that the Middle
East is a breeding ground for terrorism?
Chomsky: The same way you have to counter the idea that
everybody in the world is a Communist if they don't follow
our orders. That's what activism and organizing and
educational programs are about. You have to counter a very
powerful propaganda apparatus. And it's not State
propaganda. This is voluntary propaganda of the
intellectual classes. That's what Hans Morgenthau once
called our conformist subservience to those in power. And
that's the key to it. It's interesting that it comes from
him, the founder of realist international relations theory.
But yeah, he had it correct.
Take a look at the present. Take a look at the way they
compare the destruction of Lebanon to the crimes in Israel.
They're real crimes but how do they compare with the
destruction of Lebanon? How do they describe what's going on
in the West Bank? It's almost universally described as a
courageous program of withdrawal. Now they're going to
withdraw some scattered settlements and converge them into
the area they're annexing. It's a program of annexation and
cantonization and the destruction of Palestinian
nationalism. But it's courageous withdrawal as described
here. In Gaza, Israel's defending itself when it killed 36
people in June and 170 in July, because of the capture of an
Israeli solider. And we know that the US doesn't care about
that and the editors don't care about it. Take a look at
the way they reacted to the kidnapping a day before, or to
many others in the past. That's what the population is
presented with. To overcome that is not easy.
The same with terrorism. Yes, terrorism is terrible. Where
did it come from? You're supposed to just stand up and
scream Islamic fascism. If you want to stir up more
terrorism, that's the way to do it. If you care about
terrorism you're not going to do that. There's no terrorism
specialist that does that, no intelligence agency does. What
you try to do is find out what its roots are. They're
not that obscure, you can find them. Again, just take the
invasion of Iraq. It was anticipated that it would increase
the threat of terrorism. It did beyond what was
anticipated. The number of terrorist incidences I think
tripled the next year. That's exactly what was anticipated.
This invasion is almost certainly going to have the same
effect. We can find the roots. Destroy secular nationalism
and you're going to get Islamic terrorism.
Something similar is happening in the United States. The US
is going through the perhaps the worst period of its
economic history. It's called the golden age, and it is for
my income level but for the majority of the population it's
a disaster. For the majority of the population real wages
have stagnated for twenty-five years. That's never happened
before. It's a growing economy, no major recessions or wars
or anything. And there's growth, but it all goes into a
very few pockets. For a majority it stagnates. Meanwhile
benefits are declining, work hours are going up, services
are collapsing . . . it's not the kind of suffering in a
Palestinian refugee camp but it's unpleasant. And what's
happening is what usually happens: an upsurge in religious
fundamentalism. People are going to turn somewhere. If the
secular systems don't work for them they're going to turn
somewhere else.
So yes, a different scale and so on, but you can see the
similar dynamics right here. Yes, it's going to happen and
we know how to deal with it. Deal with the problems, there
are grievances. You don't support the terrorism of course
but you can understand the grievances.
Take 9-11. We now know from very good scholarship, Fawwaz
Gerges for example, he's the main scholar of the Jihadi
movements, that jihadis strongly opposed 9-11. The radical
clerics were issuing fatwas denouncing Al-Qaeda for carrying
out 9-11. Well, the Bush Administration took care of that,
it mobilized them in support of Al-Qaeda. That's what the
attack on Afghanistan did. They didn't attack Afghanistan
to get rid of terrorism; in fact it increased terrorism as
they expected. And then comes Iraq and everything else. And
they continue to take over Palestinian lands. After a
couple of years, the Jihadis are now not opposing Al-Qaeda
they're supporting it.
It's what happens. That's why leading specialists here,
from the government, say that Osama bin Laden's best ally is
George Bush. It's as if he's following a script. Bush
probably isn't making policy but Rumsfeld, Cheney and the
rest are just following a script that comes from Osama bin
Laden. And the people who stand up and scream Islamic
fascism are just helping out. It's not the way you deal
with terrorism by screaming and shrieking, having tantrums.
And we know that. There are plenty of examples. Take the
British and Northern Ireland. IRA terrorism was pretty
serious. As long as the British responded with violence, it
got worse. It's a gift to the hard-line elements of the
IRA; it's just what they want. Finally, Britain started
paying some attention to the grievances. And they were
real. Soon as Britain started paying attention to them, the
situation started to improve.
I was in Belfast in 1993, it was a war zone. If you go now,
it's not utopia but it's not very different from Boston.
It's settling down. There are problems. But it's a major
improvement. And the reason traces right back to the
willingness to pay some attention to the real grievances.
These acts grow out of something, they don't come from
nowhere. And it's pretty well understood what they come from.
In fact the United States has understood this for forty
years. George W. Bush asked 'why do they hate us'. He
wasn't the first President to ask that. In fact Eisenhower,
we now know from the classified documents, raised with his
staff the question why is there a campaign of hatred against
us among the people of the Arab world? Not the rulers, they
think we're fine, but among the populations. And the
answer, in fact, had been given by the National Security
Council, the planning bureau. They said there's a
perception in the Arab world that the United States supports
oppressive and brutal regimes and blocks democracy and
development and that we do it because of our interest in
gaining control of their oil. They went on to say that the
perceptions were accurate and furthermore that's what we
should do. So you have a campaign of hatred.
Right after 9-11, the Wall Street Journal, to its credit
it's the only paper I know who did it, did an actual survey
among Arabs. Not all Arabs only the Arabs they care about,
the ones they called 'moneyed Muslims' like directors of
banks, heads of local affiliates of multi-national
corporations -- people that are embedded in the whole US,
neo-liberal global project that think America is great. So
they did a survey among them: same hatred, same reasons.
You're supporting oppressive and brutal regimes; you're
blocking democracy and development; and by then there were
further grievances like what the US is doing to the
Palestinians. They understand it's the US. And at that
time, the sanctions against Iraq which were killing hundreds
of thousands of people and they were pretty bitter about
that. So those are the reasons.
Now we've added new reasons. You keep adding reasons and
you're going to get more hatred. The dynamics are very clear.
TCD: You write a lot on media control and media spin. This
fall Al Jazeera is going to open their station. Al Arabiya
has a presence in Washington. What do you think the
American response will be to Al Jazeera and furthermore,
what is the opportunity for additional media sources --
print, television, otherwise -- to have an impact here in
counteracting stereotypes?
Chomsky: There are opportunities but we should look at the
record. And it's a very interesting record. In the 1970s,
after decolonization, there was a brief period when the UN
sort of represented the concerns of the vast majority of the
populations of the world instead of just western elites.
That's when the US turned against the UN very passionately.
Not the population, but the elites. One of the things
they proposed was a new international information order that
would give the Third World some access to the international
information system, breaking the western monopoly. That led
to hysteria in the United States, across the board. This
was coming out of UNESCO. The government essentially
destroyed UNESCO. The media bitterly condemned this proposal
with a flood of lies, including the liberals, claiming they
were trying to oppose freedom of speech, they were going to
register journalists. . . . It was all fabrication. And
they finally beat it down and destroyed it. UNESCO was gone
for years.
There's a very good book about this, published by University
of Minnesota press, by leading media specialists William
Preston, Edward Herman and Herbert Schiller. I don't think
it got a single review. They went through the record, the
lies. The New York Times refused to allow responses. It
was real passionate hysteria that something might break the
Western media monopoly. And the one example of academic
revelation, oh that can't even be mentioned. You can check
and see, the book is probably still in print. It's worth
reading: Hope and Folly it's called.
Let's take Al Jazeera. The US has tried in every possible
way to destroy Al Jazeera. They bombed its headquarters --
they claim it's an accident but nobody believes them -- in
Kabul and then bombed them again in Baghdad. They've been
pressuring the Emir of Qatar heavily to get him to stop it.
And Powell, a great liberal, went after him and told him
to cancel Al Jazeera. He actually came to Washington, the
Emir, and they put him under tremendous pressure here. He
ran the greatest press conference that Washington ever had
-- I don't think it got reported -- in which he was
describing the pressure from Powell and others in the
Administration. He gave the press a kind of a
tongue-and-cheek lecture about this thing called freedom of
press which we believe in. I think they were too
embarrassed to report it. Finally after the pressure got
really severe, the Qatar government, the Emir, agreed to let
it be privatized. The Bush Administration refused. They
said it doesn't matter if it's private or public, you cannot
have it because it's an independent voice and it's reaching
the Arab world. When they ran the so-called free election
in Iraq they made sure to run Al Jazeera out first. Because
you cannot have a free election if there's an independent
press, that's obvious.
That's the record right up to the present. Now, how they're
going to stop this I don't know. You can be pretty sure
they're going to pull out the stops. And this is again
across the board. The Bush guys are an extreme but it's
across the board.