by Noam Chomsky
Israel’s internal economy and social structure are coming to resemble that of its patron and paymaster, with growing inequality and the collapse of social support systems, along with a sense of social solidarity generally One grave internal problem is the cost—economic, social, and cultural—of sustaining a large and growing ultra-religious (“Haredi”) population, which draws heavily on educational and welfare programs but contributes little to the economy. In a 1997 study, economists from the Hebrew University and Boston University found that Israel’s workforce participation for men is well below that of Western Europe and the U.S., and declining as “ultra-Orthodox non-participation…is permanent and increasing at a geometric rate.” If the tendencies persist, they will “make Israel’s welfare system insolvent and bankrupt municipalities with large ultra-Orthodox populations.” Refusal to work among the Orthodox is a specific Israeli phenomenon, not the case elsewhere or historically in anything like the manner of contemporary Israel. With the religious population doubling every 17 years, “economic bankruptcy is imminent,” the economists conclude, though the ultraOrthodox Rabbi who chairs the Knesset finance committee feels that all is under control because “this country is living with miracles.”10
Conflicts between the secular and religious populations are becoming more intense, exacerbated by class and ethnic correlations. Population growth is increasing among Palestinians and ultra-religious Jews, declining among secular and privileged sectors, as in Europe. Many Israelis find the looming “civil war” more ominous even than the dangerous international conflicts that are likely to persist.
As in the U.S., the Israeli political system is converging in a narrow center-right spectrum with little differentiation, and the traditional parties (Likud, Labor) are virtually collapsing. Their current leaders, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, have “two identical maps,” political commentator Yosef Harif observes: “from a political point of view there is no difference today between Netanyahu and Barak”—not that matters were very different before, apart from the differences of style that trace to the differing constituencies of the political blocs. Netanyahu’s plan is “Allon Plus,” an amplification of the traditional Labor Party Allon Plan that grants Israel effective control over desirable regions and resources of the occupied territories. Barak’s “alternative” is what he calls “the expanded Allon Plan,” which amounts to about the same thing. Barak demands that “we must not uproot settlements” or “abandon the Jewish settlement in Hebron,” and it is “forbidden for us to agree to a Palestinian state.” “One listens to the ideas of Barak and hears the voice of Netanyahu,” the reporter observes, paraphrasing the Biblical passage. Considering their records, commentator Avi Shavit, speaking for the left, asks “why do we hate Benjamin Netanyahu so much,” particularly since he “bears responsibility for less bloodshed and less harm to human rights than the two patrons of peace who occupied the prime minister’s chair before him,” Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the former “anointed as Messiah” in delusional fantasies of the left, Shavit comments.11
With regard to the Palestinians, the U.S. and Israel continue to implement the extreme rejectionist program they have maintained since the early 1970s, in international isolation until the Gulf war gave the U.S. free rein to institute its version of the “peace process”: keeping unilateral control, rejecting Palestinian rights, and moving to implement a variant of South Africa’s homeland policies, though without many of the advantages that South Africa conferred on the Bantustans. The steps are reviewed in the text that follows and the chapters that update the story from 1983 to the present.
At the time of writing (March 1999), the most recent stage in the “peace process” is the Wye Memorandum signed at the White House on October 23, 1998, and approved by the Israeli Cabinet on November 11. In agreeing, the Cabinet declared that “The Government will continue to pursue its policy of strengthening and developing the communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza district, on the basis of a multi-annual plan,” including “security roads” for Jews throughout the territories and preservation of Israel’s “national interests”: “security areas, the areas around Jerusalem, the areas of Jewish settlement, infrastructure interests, water sources, military and security locations, the areas around north-south and west-east transportation arteries, and historic sites of the Jewish people.” Immediately following the accord, settlers established more than 12 new settlements throughout the West Bank, heeding the call of Israel’s Foreign Minister, Ariel Sharon, to “grab” as much West Bank land as possible. By January 1999, the “land grab” was accelerating, including isolated settlements that would be the first candidates for eventual evacuation under any settlement that is not a complete caricature. Standard practices are being followed, among them, razing Palestinian houses in the search for “Jewish archaeological remains” and establishing “nature reserves,” later to be converted to Jewish housing.
Of particular significance is new post-Wye development in the Givat Ze’ev Bloc northwest of Jerusalem, in pursuance of the Bush-Clinton— Rabin-Peres programs of cutting off what will be left to the Palestinians from the region around Jerusalem (let alone Jerusalem itself, the center of their cultural, social, and economic existence) and from the territory to the south.12
The UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on Israel to observe the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bans settlement in the occupied territories. The resolution was passed 115 to 2, the usual two.13
The Wye agreement changes territorial arrangements in trivial ways— which are not easy to determine, since it is the first redeployment accord without a map indicating areas to be transferred to Palestinian administration.14 But it is presumably a step towards something like the 50-50 split of the territories that was Rabin’s goal in the Oslo negotiations, at least if Israel is sensible enough to abandon useless lands where the population may rot in peace in scattered and isolated enclaves. The most significant and innovative aspect of the Memorandum is its barely concealed call for state terror to achieve the goals of the U.S.-Israel program. That breaks new ground for international agreements. The Memorandum emphasizes that the Palestinian security forces, which have a shocking record of torture and terror, must act to ensure the security of Israelis. The CIA will supervise them as they carry out arrests, hold mock trials, collect arms, and “criminalize” incitement against the agreements. They must operate on the principle of “zero tolerance for terror” (against Israelis), a concept that is broadly construed, as anyone familiar with the record of the CIA will understand.
The Memorandum does contain a sentence stating that “without derogating from the above, the Palestinian Police will…implement this Memorandum with due regard to internationally accepted norms of human rights and rule of law.”
There is no reciprocity: the security of Palestinians is not an issue, and even the meaningless and shameful comment just quoted does not apply to Israel, despite its brutal record of terror, torture, and violation of elementary legal and human rights obligations, too well-documented to review. Included are hundreds of killings of Palestinians since Oslo, most of them “unlawful” according to Amnesty International (AI), and exceeding killings of Israelis by a considerable margin (though less than before, when the ratio was extreme). AI reports further that “there continues to be almost total impunity for unlawful killings of Palestinians,” not to speak of house demolitions, expulsion from Jerusalem and elsewhere, imprisonment without trial, systematic torture of prisoners, etc.—all well-documented by major human rights organizations, including Israeli organizations, but of no concern to the framers of the latest stage of the rejectionist program. No less striking is the praise of the Clinton-Gore Administration for the harsh and illegal measures employed by the Palestinian security forces to suppress opposition to the accords and ensure security for Israelis.15
Amnesty International published an assessment of the human rights situation since Oslo as the Wye Memorandum was signed.16 AI estimates 1600 Palesti
nians routinely arrested by Israeli military forces every year, half “systematically tortured.” AI notes once again, as other major human rights organizations regularly have, that Israel is alone in having “effectively legalized the use of torture” (with Supreme Court approval), determining that in pursuit of Israel’s perceived security needs “all international rules of conduct could be broken.” AI reports similar practices on the part of the Palestinian Authority, including execution of two Palestinians for “incitement against the peace process.” The State Security Courts that conduct such abuses have been endorsed by the U.S. State Department as demonstrating Arafat’s “commitment to the security concerns of Israel,” with the support of Vice-President Al Gore.
Clinton’s achievement in bringing the two parties together to agree on the Wye Memorandum was hailed with the usual awe. He proved himself to be the “Indispensable Man,” the New York Times headline read, praising him for the “Crucial Salvage Mission.” Clinton is “staking out the moral high ground” by insisting on the terms of the Wye Memorandum. He “preached accommodation to immutable realities”— “immutable” because they are demanded by U.S. power. He crowned his moral achievement with “an uplifting, optimistically American speech,” while “tethering the vaunted U.S. idealism, which some Israelis and some Palestinians believe to be diplomatic naiveté, is the promise of a fat new American purse.” Nevertheless, the idealism and moral high ground cast a radiant glow over the proceedings.17
Particular cases illustrate the reality of U.S. policy. When some atrocity occurs, Palestinians are placed under harsh curfew, no matter who is responsible. A striking illustration was the massacre of 29 Arabs praying in a Mosque by the right-wing American religious settler Baruch Goldstein in February 1994, followed by severe curfew of Palestinians and killing of many more Palestinians. Visitors to the Kiryat Arba suburb where Goldstein settled can walk to the shrine established for him, where they can worship in praise of the “martyr” who died “clean of hands and pure of heart,” as the words on the gravestone read. In one of the innumerable other curfews, in September 1998, a day-old infant died in Hebron and another, three months old, died in her mother’s arms, both on their way to the hospital, when Israeli soldiers refused to let them pass through security barriers that had been set up to ensure that Jewish settlers could observe ritually prescribed seven days of mourning without disturbance. The soldiers made “a mistake in judgment” the military spokesperson stated, ending the matter18
A few days later, Osama Barham, who now holds the record for imprisonment without charge by Israeli military authorities, reached the end of five years of administrative detention, then extended by the military without any court decision. A secular journalist, Barham is suspected of membership in Islamic Jihad, without evidence—or concern from the overseers. Barham can consider himself lucky by comparison to those sent to the Israel-run torture chamber Al-Khiam in Lebanon, administered by the mercenary army Israel established in the “security zone” it occupies in violation of a unanimous UN Security Council resolution of March 1978 ordering it to withdraw immediately and unconditionally; U.S. tolerance renders the decision moot. The first news in nine months from Al-Khiam was brought by Hassan, released after 12 years of regular torture, he reports, confirming ample evidence since 1982. Hassan may have been lucky too, as compared with the 71 Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli jails as hostages for future negotiations after having been kidnapped in Lebanon, with the authorization of Israel’s courts.19
Israeli military operations in Lebanon continue, while its occupying forces come under more successful attack by the increasingly sophisticated Hizbollah resistance (called “terror” in the U.S., sometimes in Israel). Israeli military operations are not confined to the “security zone.” In February 1999, three Israeli officers from an elite command unit operating north of the zone were killed in a Hizbollah ambush. Israel warned that it would attack Lebanese civilian targets in retaliation, as, in fact, it has regularly done in the past. Since the end of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. some 25,000 Lebanese and Palestinians have been killed, according to Lebanese officials and international relief agencies, along with 900 Israeli soldiers.20
The achievement of imposing its rejectionist program in near international isolation is impressive enough. But U.S. power won an ideological victory that is in some ways even more dramatic. By now, its rejectionist “peace process” is adopted as the framework of a just settlement worldwide, even among those who only a few years ago were calling for recognition of Palestinian rights and Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories (in accord with UN 242 of November 1967, as interpreted throughout the world, including the U.S. until 1971).
So far, U.S. and Israeli leaders have been unwilling to move as far towards accommodating Palestinian rights as South African advocates of Apartheid did towards Blacks 35 years ago. Their solution was “Black states,” to which the unwanted populations could be confined, to serve as a cheap labor force when needed. Presumably, the U.S. and Israel will sooner or later realize that they can gain by adopting a more progressive stand of the South African variety. If so, they will agree to call the Palestinian enclaves a “state” and perhaps even allow them a degree of industrial development (as South Africa did), so that U.S.- and Israeli-owned manufacturers, joining with rich Palestinians, can exploit cheap and easily exploitable labor, subdued by repression.
Calls for a Palestinian state are being heard, though it is instructive to look at them closely At the extreme pro-Palestinian end of mainstream discourse, Anthony Lewis, joining in the standard denunciations of Netanyahu, contrasted him with “the unsentimental old soldier” Yitzhak Rabin, who, with his “sheer intellectual honesty,” was willing to sign the Oslo agreements. But unlike Rabin, Netanyahu “opposes any solution that would give the Palestinians a viable state—tiny, disarmed, poor, dominated by Israel, but their own.” That is “the heart of the matter,” the crucial distinction between the saintly Rabin and the bad Netanyahu. And because of Netanyahu’s recalcitrance, “Oslo is dying.”21
In fact, Rabin, and his successor Shimon Peres while in office, forcefully rejected any idea of a Palestinian state, while the Netanyahu government has been more ambivalent on the matter (see below). But no doubt Rabin would sooner or later have come to grant the Palestinians a state that is “tiny, disarmed, poor, dominated by Israel, but their own.” There is no more reason to doubt that Netanyahu would also agree to that, as his Minister of Information has already stated. Similarly all but the most extreme fanatics in the Arab and Islamic world would probably be willing to grant the Jews a state that is “tiny disarmed, poor, dominated by Palestine, but their own.” And they might even take “the heart of the matter” to be the unwillingness of some ultra-extremist to adopt this forthcoming stand.
A thought experiment suggests itself. One might ask what the reaction would be to a presentation of “the heart of the matter” in the terms just stated. The answer tells us a good deal about the ideological victory of U.S. power.
Recently Hillary Clinton indicated her interest in running for the Senate in New York. In an article headlined “New York’s Palestinian State,” James Dao of the New York Times asked whether she had made a “monumental political gaffe” in advocating a Palestinian state. What she had said to a group of young Israelis and Arabs a year earlier is that “I think that the territory that the Palestinians currently inhabit, and whatever additional territory they will obtain through the peace negotiations,” should “evolve into a functioning modern state”—a state that would, surely, be “tiny disarmed, poor, dominated by Israel.”
White House aides had immediately “disowned comments by Hillary Rodham Clinton about the need for a Palestinian state and insisted that she was speaking only for herself,” and she came under considerable attack. But when announcing her candidacy, she received some support as well. A political science professor was quoted as saying that “supporting a Palestinian state used to be the peacenik posi
tion, an extreme left-wing position.” But perhaps now no more. Perhaps adopting the stand of South African racists 35 years ago can no longer be condemned so easily as “the peacenik position, an extreme left-wing position.”22
Struggles for freedom and rights are never over, and this one is not either. All of the contesting parties in the region face very serious and possibly lethal threats. It cannot be said that the dominant outside power has helped to smooth the way towards a meaningful solution of their problems, or even towards reduction of the dangers. But that story has not come to an end either, and there are many options open to concerned people who hope to seek and pursue a far more constructive and honorable course.
Notes—Preface 1. Sections of this Preface are based on “No Longer Safe,” Z Magazine, August 1993. See my Deterring Democracy (Verso, 1991; updated edition, Hill & Wang, 1992), chapter 1, and sources cited.
2. See David Hoffman, “Making Iran Public Enemy No. 1,” Washington Post Weekly, Mar. 22-28, 1993, reporting from Jerusalem on Israel’s efforts and those of two of its US. propaganda agencies, the AntiDefamation League and the American Jewish Committee. Also Israel Shahak, “How Israel’s strategy favours Iraq over Iran,” Middle East International, Mar. 19, 1993.
3. John Murray Brown, Financial Times, Mar. 23,1993.
4. Gazit, Yediot Ahronot, April 1992, cited by Israel Shahak, Middle East International, Mar. 19, 1993.
5. Eli Kamir, Ma’ariv, Nov. 12; Dorit Gabai, Ma’ariv, Dec. 21, 1997.