Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  Another thing they talk about a lot is water—and that’s a very crucial thing, which is not discussed very much in the United States but it’s probably the main reason why Israel is never going to give up the West Bank. See, this is a very arid region, so water is more important than oil, and there are very limited water resources in Israel. In fact, a lot of the wars in the Middle East have been about water—for instance, the wars involving Israel and Syria have usually been about the headwaters of the Jordan, which come from Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. And as a matter of fact, one of the main reasons why Israel is holding on to the so-called “Security Zone” it seized in southern Lebanon [in the 1982 invasion] is that that area includes a mountain, Mount Hermon, which is a big part of the watershed that brings water to the region. Actually, the invasion of Lebanon was probably an attempt, among other things, to get ahold of the Litani River, a little farther to the north—but they were driven back by Shiite resistance and couldn’t hold on to it, so they had to pull back.

  Well, economic facts are classified in Israel, so you can’t be sure of the exact numbers, but most of the studies on this, including some American studies, indicate that Israel is getting about a third of its water from the West Bank. And there really is no alternative to that, short of some sort of technological innovation—like, maybe someday someone will invent a technique of desalination, so they could use seawater. But at the moment, there is no other alternative: there are no underground water sources except the West Bank sources, Israel didn’t get the Litani River, they obviously aren’t going to get the Nile—so there just is no other water source for them, except the West Bank sources.

  And in fact, one of the occupation policies that the Arabs in the West Bank have found most onerous is that Israel forbids them to dig deep wells. Well, that’s very hard on Arab agriculture—I mean, an Arab farmer on the West Bank has the same water allotment for farming that a Jewish city-dweller in Tel Aviv has just for drinking. Think about that: the drinking-water for a Jewish city resident is the same as the total water for an Arab farmer, who’s got to do irrigation, and take care of livestock, and do everything else you do on a farm. And the Arabs are not allowed to sink deep wells, they’re only allowed to sink shallow wells that you do without equipment—the deep wells are Jewish wells, only for Jewish settlers, and they get something like twelve times as much water, or some huge amount more water. 59

  Okay, so water’s a big issue that comes up in the documents, there’s the “demographic problem,” there are historical reasons, and some other things too—but the fact is, there is very little talk about security concerns.

  Imperial Ambitions and the Arab Threat

  MAN: Well, I don’t know about these cabinet records—but the fact is that when Israel was originally conceived in 1948, it was immediately lunged upon by virtually everybody on its borders: all of the Arab countries immediately tried to destroy it, and prevent its very existence. Wouldn’t you say the Israeli people are justified in remembering that history still, as they set national policies today?

  Well, you’re right that that’s the standard line about what happened. But it’s not true. Keep in mind the background facts. In November 1947, the U.N. General Assembly made a recommendation for a three-way partition of Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a small internationally-administered zone that would have included Jerusalem [the area was under British imperial control]. 60 Now, I should stress that this was a General Assembly recommendation, and General Assembly recommendations have no force: they are only recommendations. Israel insists that they have no force, I should say—Israel is by far the greatest violator of General Assembly recommendations, beginning in December 1948, when Israel rejected the General Assembly call for allowing Palestinian refugees the right of return [they had fled violence that broke out in Palestine beginning in November 1947]. In fact, Israel was accepted into the United Nations on condition that it accept that requirement, and it claimed that it would accept it—but then it immediately refused to carry through on that promise. 61 And it goes on right until today: I don’t know how many, but probably hundreds of General Assembly recommendations have been rejected by Israel.

  Anyway, such a recommendation was made by the General Assembly in November 1947, and at that point war broke out in Palestine among the Palestinians and the Zionists [Jewish nationalists]. The Zionists were by far the more powerful and better organized force, and by May 1948, when the state of Israel was formally established, about 300,000 Palestinians already had been expelled from their homes or had fled the fighting, and the Zionists controlled a region well beyond the area of the original Jewish state that had been proposed by the U.N. 62 Now, it’s then that Israel was attacked by its neighbors—in May 1948; it’s then, after the Zionists had taken control of this much larger part of the region and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been forced out, not before.

  And furthermore, there’s very good scholarship on this that’s come out in Israel now which shows, I think pretty conclusively, that the intervention of the Arab states was very reluctant, and that it was to a large extent directed not against Israel, but against King Abdullah of Trans Jordan (what’s now Jordan), who was basically a client ruler for the British. And the Arab states in fact did it because they felt that Abdullah was just a pawn of Britain, and they had good reason to believe that he was assisting the British in reconstructing their imperial system in the region in various ways [Britain had arranged to turn formal administration of Palestine over to the United Nations in May 1948]. It’ll be a hundred years before any of this material enters mainstream American scholarship, I should say—but it’s very good scholarship, and it’s important. 63

  So anyway, the area that’s now Jordan was being ruled by a British client, and the other Arab states in the region regarded the Jordanian military, quite correctly, as just a British army with kind of a guy with Arab headgear leading them. And they were very much concerned about the fact (which they knew at some level, even if they didn’t know all of the details) that Abdullah and the Zionists were cooperating in a plan to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state—which in fact did happen, Abdullah and the Zionists did carry out that plan of partitioning the area that was to be the Palestinian state between them. 64 And furthermore, Abdullah also had much greater plans of his own: he wanted to take over Syria, and become the king of “Greater Syria.” And there was apparently a plan in which Israel was going to attack Syria, and then Abdullah was going to move into Syria to defend the Syrians and end up afterwards holding the whole pie, by pre-arrangement. Well, that plan never quite got worked out, as history shows—but the other Arab states had wind of it, so then they moved in against Israel to try to block Abdullah’s goals. 65

  And there were powerful reasons for that, remember: this was the period of decolonization, and the major concern of the people of the region at the time was to get the British out—and Abdullah was just a pawn of the British, and they didn’t want to see British imperialism reestablished. Of course, they didn’t want the state of Israel around either, and they opposed it—but that was probably a minor consideration in the attack; really a minor consideration, actually. In fact, in 1949 both Syria and Egypt made very explicit proposals for a peace treaty with Israel, and Israel rejected them—Israel didn’t want such a peace treaty. 66

  Alright, the reason all of this material is only coming out recently is there are rules in Israel about not releasing archives until several decades later—so the history is usually written about thirty or forty years late (and then of course, it’s also very distorted for other reasons). But there’s really nothing in any of the things I’ve said that should be a great surprise to anyone who really knows the history—yes, now there are archival records and new scholarship to back it up, and I think it’s very convincing scholarship and will come to be recognized as the right story. But it’s really no great surprise: something like that was always understood. For example, the agreement between Ben-Gurion
[first Israeli Prime Minister] and Abdullah to partition Palestine has been known for years—that’s come out in memoirs, everybody’s talked about it, and so on. 67 But you’re right, it’s not part of the standard line in the United States—it just happens to be the correct story.

  MAN: But just to challenge you on some of this—I thought that what Israel was trying to preserve in the agreement to partition Palestine was the idea that Jordan would not send troops into Israel. That’s why they were really cooperating with Abdullah—Ben-Gurion and the rest of the Israeli leadership at the time were very concerned about the fact that there were huge trained armies in Jordan, which were a big threat to them.

  No, on the contrary—they weren’t much concerned about that. In fact, Ben-Gurion actually had to intervene to prevent his armies from taking over part of what’s now the West Bank [in October 1948], because the Jordanian Legion had already been essentially destroyed and was out of arms, and the Israeli military command thought they could easily take over more territory. See, Yigal Allon, who was the commander of the Israeli army, didn’t know about this agreement with Abdullah to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state—and there was a bitter battle between Ben-Gurion and the army, in which Ben-Gurion had to hold the army back in order to honor this secret agreement he had entered into. 68 So really there was no military threat from Jordan, not at all.

  MAN: But the Israeli army held back at that point because Ben-Gurion still had some hope that perhaps peace would prevail if they held back.

  No—in fact we know very well what Ben-Gurion wanted, because he left ample diaries and so on. And his position, which he was very clear and explicit about—and there’s a lot of documentation about this in my book The Fateful Triangle—was that Israel should not accept any boundaries, regardless of whether there was peace or not, because the limits of what he called “Zionist aspiration” are much broader: they include southern Syria, Transjordan, big areas which he laid out. And he said, we’ll kind of hold off now, but somehow we’ll ultimately get them all—in fact, with regard to Lebanon, Ben-Gurion was proposing that Israel take over Southern Lebanon on some pretext as late as the mid-1950s. 69 So we know all about what he wanted, and like the rest, it’s very different from the stories you always hear.

  Prospects for the Palestinians

  WOMAN: Then is there any hope at all for justice for the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been displaced from their homeland over the years—as well as for those who are still in Israel and the Territories?

  Well, the objective reality is that most of the Palestinian refugees will never go back to Palestine—that’s just a fact of life, just like the American Indians will never get back what they had on the American continent. So in that respect, there’ll never be justice. And there’s just no way out of that: if there was ever any prospect of Palestinians in any large number going back to what was formerly Palestine, Israel would probably blow up the world, which they’re capable of doing. 70 And that’s never going to happen.

  So the only question is, what kind of limited form of justice can be achieved? And that’s tricky. I mean, if Israel can’t suppress the Intifada at a reasonable cost, the United States and Israel might shift from their rejectionist stance and become willing to accept some variety of Palestinian self-determination. And if that happens, then you’ll have to look seriously at what you mean by a “two-state settlement”—and the reality is, it’s not very easy to envision, for some of the reasons I’ve mentioned: there are resource problems, there are problems of integration of the areas, there are border-setting issues. Remember that the U.N. resolution partitioning Palestine [in 1947] did not strictly speaking call for two states, it called for an economic confederation—and that was quite realistic. 71 Anybody who’s been there knows that two states don’t make much sense—because the regions are just too closely integrated, and the borders are too crazy, and when you look even more seriously you see even further that it wouldn’t work. So the only thing that makes any sense is some sort of confederation. But you can pretty well predict what will happen: there will be two states, except only one of the states will really exist, the other one will just collect garbage.

  In fact, I suspect that’ll be the next proposal, and it’ll all come under the banner of a “two state” settlement—and that’s going to be a lot harder to argue about, because then people will really have to think behind the headlines to see what’s going on. But achieving some kind of meaningful federation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, with really divided sovereignty—that’s going to be extremely hard, we just have to face that. And that’s about the only kind of solution that makes any sense, I think—it’s the only limited form of justice I can see.

  MAN: There’s also the different mentality between the Arabs and Jews that figures into it too, don’t you think—isn’t that always going to get in the way of peace?

  They’re the same kind of people, they have the same kind of mentality. They bleed when they’re cut, they mourn when their children are killed. I’m not aware of any difference between them.

  Legitimacy in History

  WOMAN: Do you think the passage of time can give legitimacy to Israel, even if maybe it was started out on the wrong sort of basis, displacing the indigenous population in a racist manner and so on?

  Well, yeah—the general answer to your question just has to be yes. If not, we’d have to go back to the days of hunter-gatherer societies, because all of history has been illegitimate.

  I mean, take a case close to the Palestinians, which we as Americans ought to think about—take the United States. Now, I think the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel has been bad, but in comparison to the treatment of the native population here by our forefathers, it’s been a paradise.

  Here in the United States, we just committed genocide. Period. Pure genocide. And it wasn’t just in the United States, it was all up and down the Hemisphere. Current estimates are that north of the Rio Grande, there were about twelve to fifteen million Native Americans at the time Columbus landed, something like that. By the time Europeans reached the continental borders of the United States, there were about 200,000. Okay: mass genocide. Across the whole Western Hemisphere, the population decline was probably on the order of from a hundred million people to about five million. 72 That’s pretty serious stuff—it was horrifying right from the beginning in the early seventeenth century, then it got worse after the United States was established, and it just continued until finally the native populations were basically stuck away in little enclaves. The history of treaty violations by the United States is just grotesque: treaties with the Indian nations by law have a status the same as that of treaties among sovereign states, but throughout our history nobody ever paid the slightest attention to them—as soon as you wanted more land, you just forgot the treaty and robbed it; it’s a very ugly and vicious history. 73 Hitler in fact used the treatment of the Native Americans as a model, explicitly—he said, that’s what we’re going to do with the Jews. 74

  In fact, a book came out in Germany recently called, in German, The Five Hundred Year Reich—actually, it’s part of a big effort that’s beginning to develop around the world to try to turn 1992 into a year of memory of genocide, instead of a year of celebration of the 500th anniversary of what’s called Columbus’s “discovery” of America. And in Germany, people understand that title: Hitler was going to establish a “Thousand Year Reich,” and the point of the book is that the colonization of the Western Hemisphere was essentially Hitlerian—and it’s lasted for five hundred years. 75

  I should add, actually, that throughout American history this genocide has been accepted as perfectly legitimate. So for example, there were people who spoke up for blacks and opposed slavery—there were the Abolitionists and there was the Civil Rights Movement. But you won’t find much support for the American Indians. And the same was true of scholarship: for instance, in Samuel Eliot Morison’s history of Columbus—you
know, big Harvard historian—he talks about what a great man Columbus was, terrific person and so on, and then he has this little line saying, of course Columbus did set off a program of what he calls “complete genocide,” and he was a major mass-murderer himself. But then he says, that was only a minor flaw, he was really a terrific seaman, this and that and the other thing. 76

  In fact, let me tell you a personal story to indicate just how far out of history all of this really is. A few Thanksgivings ago I took a walk with some friends and family in a National Park, and we came across a tombstone which had just been put in along the path. It said: “Here lies an Indian woman, a Wampanoag, whose family and tribe gave of themselves and their land that this great nation might be born and grow.” Okay, “gave of themselves and their land”—in fact, were murdered, scattered, dispersed, and we stole their land, that’s what we’re sitting on. You know, there can’t be anything more illegitimate: the whole history of this country is illegitimate. Our forefathers stole about a third of Mexico in a war in which they claimed that Mexico attacked us, but if you look back it turns out that that “attack” took place inside of Mexican territory [the U.S. acquired the area from Texas to California after the Mexican War in 1848]. 77 And it goes on and on. So you know, what can be legitimate?

  Take the development of the state system in Europe. The state system in Europe, which was finally sort of established in 1945, is the result of savage wars and murders and atrocities going back hundreds and hundreds of years. In fact, the main reason why the plague of European civilization was able to spread all over the world in the past five hundred years is that the Europeans were just a lot more vicious and savage than anyone else, because they’d had a lot more practice murdering one another—so when they came to other places, they knew how to do it, and were very good at it. Well, the European state system has continued to be an extremely bloody and brutal arrangement, right to today. I mean, there are wars all over the Third World just because the national boundaries the European invaders imposed on these places have nothing to do with anything, except where one European power could expand at the expense of other European powers.