Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  Note that this consensus was rejectionist, in that it denied the national rights of Palestinian Arabs, referring to them solely in the

  *The resolution was accepted by Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, and in 1972 by Syria, with the condition that Palestinian “rights” must be recognized. context of a refugee problem. For this reason, the PLO has refused to accept the resolution. This refusal may be a tactical error, but it is easy to understand its motivation. One would hardly have expected the World Zionist Organization, in 1947, to have accepted a UN resolution concerning Palestine that referred to Jewish interests only in terms of a refugee problem, denying any claim to national rights and any status to the Zionist movement or its organizations.

  The U.S. has refused any direct contacts with the PLO on the grounds of its unwillingness to accept UN 242 and to recognize the existence of the State of Israel, basing this refusal on a “Memorandum of Agreement” concluded with Israel by Secretary of State Kissinger in September 1975. This policy raises two questions. The narrower one is that the status of the Memorandum is dubious. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kissinger specified that its terms are not “binding commitments” of the United States and warned against creating such commitments. Furthermore, “Congress specifically dissociated itself from the related memoranda of agreement,” including this one.5 More broadly, whatever one thinks about the attitude of the PLO towards UN 242, it is quite clear, as we shall see, that it has been far more forthcoming than either Israel or the U.S. with regard to an accommodationist settlement. Nevertheless, the refusal of Israel to recognize the PLO, or to accept Palestinian national rights in any meaningful form, is not invoked as a reason to refuse contacts with Israel. Unless we adopt rejectionist assumptions, then, the argument supporting the American refusal to enter into direct contacts with the PLO has no force.

  From the mid-1970s, the terms of the international consensus have been modified in one significant respect: the right of the Palestinians to national self-determination has been recognized, and the consensus now includes the concept of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with perhaps some minor border rectifications. The newer form of the international consensus overcomes the earlier rejectionism and falls under the rubric of “accommodation” in the sense of this term described above. Within the international consensus, there has been little discussion of whether such a settlement—henceforth, a “two-state settlement”—reflects higher demands of abstract justice; rather, it has been taken to be a politically realistic solution that would maximize the chances for peace and security for the inhabitants of the former Palestine, for the region, and for the world, and that satisfies the valid claims of the two major parties as well as is possible under existing conditions. One can imagine various subsequent developments through peaceful means and mutual consent towards a form of federation or other arrangements.

  The existence of this international consensus, and the nature of the rejectionist forces that block its realization, are well-understood outside of the U.S., and are also recognized by knowledgeable observers here. For example, Seth Tillman (see note 5) concludes his recent study of U.S. policies in the Middle East by noting “the emergence of a consensus among moderates in the Arab world, the United States, and Europe—with some minority support in Israel as well—on the approximate terms of a viable and equitable comprehensive settlement in the Middle East,” namely, along the lines just sketched. He notes that “the essentials of the consensus of moderates are well known, approximating in most respects the official policy of the United States” since 1967. “Outside of Israel, the United States, a few ‘rejectionist’ Arab states, and certain groups within the PLO, support for a settlement along these lines approaches worldwide unanimity,” he observes.6 A simpler but quite accurate formulation would be that U.S.-Israeli rejectionism has consistently blocked the achievement of “a viable and equitable comprehensive settlement.”

  I will assume the international consensus, as just sketched, to be reasonable in essence. Let us consider, then, three basic positions as points of reference: the international consensus in its more recent form, and the two varieties of rejectionism. Note that I do not mean to imply that these are the only possible solutions that merit consideration. In fact, in my view, they are not optimal. Furthermore, from 1967 to the October 1973 war, there were realistic alternatives that would have been far preferable for all concerned, I believe. These were rejected at the time, and after the 1973 war the short-term possibilities narrowed to essentially those sketched, within the framework of accommodation.7

  Perhaps I should qualify these remarks, saying rather that I will assume the international consensus to have been reasonable in essence during the period under review here. It might be argued that as a result of U.S.-Israeli rejectionism, a peaceful political settlement is no longer possible, that the U.S.-financed program of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories has “created facts” that cannot be changed short of war. If persistent U.S. rejectionism brings about this state of affairs, as sooner or later it will if U.S. policy does not change course, the primary objective for Americans concerned with peace and justice will no longer be to try to bring the U.S. in line with the international consensus, now irrelevant, but to block American support for the next step: expulsion of a substantial part of the Arab population on some pretext, and conversion of Israel into a society on the South African model with some form of Bantustans, committed to regional disruption, etc. I will put these questions aside until the final chapter.

  2. The Stands of the Major Actors

  A

  dopting this as the basic framework for discussion, we can turn to consideration of the attitudes and policies of the major actors since 1967, considering in turn the U.S., Israel, the Palestinians under Israeli occupation, and the Arab states and the PLO. I will

  intersperse this historical account with some comment on the ways in which the history has been interpreted in the U.S., an important matter bearing on the ideological support for Israel discussed earlier, and thus bearing crucially on the development of policy and the prospects for the future.

  2.1 The United States As far as the U.S. is concerned, there has been internal conflict over the issue throughout the period. At one extreme, the Rogers Plan, announced by Secretary of State William Rogers in December 1969, reflected the international consensus of the time. At the other extreme, Henry Kissinger advocated the rejectionist position: a “Greater Israel” should refuse any accommodation, and should maintain control over the occupied territories. This position was never explicitly formulated, at least in publicly available documents, but the policies pursued conform to it quite closely and it even emerges with relative clarity from the murky rhetoric of Kissinger’s memoirs, as we shall see directly. Kissinger succeeded in taking control over Middle East affairs by 1970, and the rejectionist “Greater Israel” position became U.S. policy in practice. It has remained so in essence ever since, with post-1973 modifications to which we return. Echoes of these conflicting positions remain today. As noted in the preceding chapter, major sectors of American corporate capitalism, including powerful elements with interests in the Middle East, have supported the international consensus, as have others. But this position has lost out in the internal policy debate in favor of the concept of an Israeli Sparta serving as a “strategic asset.” The persistent policy debate concerns the question of whether the fundamental U.S. interests are better served by this rejectionism, or by a move towards the international consensus, with a peaceful resolution of the conflict. In the latter view, the radical nationalist tendencies that are enflamed by the unsettled Palestinian problem would be reduced by the establishment of a Palestinian mini-state that would be contained within a JordanianIsraeli military alliance (perhaps tacit), surviving at the pleasure of its far more powerful neighbors and subsidized by the most conservative and pro-American forces in the Arab world, in the oil-producing monarchies, which have been pressing fo
r such a settlement for some years. This would, in fact, be the likely outcome of a two-state settlement. The internal policy debate has certainly been influenced, at the congressional level substantially so, by the highly effective pressure groups described above.

  A number of prominent supporters of Israel, particularly in left-liberal circles, have adduced the fact that oil companies tend to favor the international consensus as support for their own rejectionism.8 This makes about as much sense as the fringe right-wing argument that if Soviet leaders happen to advocate some proposal for their own purposes (say, ratification of Salt II), then we should oppose it. The further claim that Israel is being “sold out” for oil is hardly consistent with the plain facts. The levels of U.S. aid to Israel, apart from all else, tell us just to what extent Israel has been “sold out.” In fact, it is the Palestinians who have consistently been “sold out” in the U.S., with no objection from left-liberal proponents of such arguments, in favor of a militarized Israel that will serve the U.S. interest of controlling the petroleum reserves of the Middle East and will provide the subsidiary services noted above. The policy debate in elite circles takes for granted, on all sides, the goal of maintaining U.S. control over Middle East petroleum resources and the flow of petrodollars. The question is a tactical one: how best to realize this goal.

  U.S. policy, then, has in practice been consistently rejectionist, and still is, despite continuing internal conflict that is barely reflected in public discourse, with its overwhelmingly rejectionist commitments and assumptions.

  2.2 Israel Within Israel, the policy debate has been much narrower in scope. There are two major political groupings in Israel, the coalition dominated by the Labor Party (the Labor Alignment, Ma’arach), and the Likud coalition dominated by Menachem Begin’s Herut Party. The Labor Party governed with various partners until 1977, the Likud coalition since then.

  2.2.1 The Rejectionist Stands of Labor and Likud Contrary to illusions fostered here, the two major political groupings in Israel do not differ in a fundamental way with regard to the occupied territories. Both agree that Israel should effectively control them; both insistently reject any expression of Palestinian national rights west of the Jordan, though the Labor Alignment contains a margin of dissidents. Thus, both groupings have been consistently rejectionist. Furthermore, both have departed from the accommodationist assumptions sketched above in another respect as well. The State of Israel, as the courts have determined, is not the state of its citizens. Rather, it is “the sovereign State of the Jewish people,” where “the Jewish people consists not only of the people residing in Israel but also of the Jews in the Diaspora.” Thus, “there is no Israeli nation apart from the Jewish people,” in this sense.9 Almost 1/6 of the citizens of the State of Israel are not Jews. But let us put this matter aside for now.

  The professed reason for the rejectionism of the two major political groupings is security, but from this fact we learn nothing, since every action of every state is justified in these terms. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Israel faces a serious security problem. As the matter is posed and discussed in the United States, Israel’s security problem is the paramount issue. This presupposed framework of discussion again reflects the profound racism of the American approach to the topic. Evidently, the indigenous population also has a “security problem”; in fact, the Palestinians have already suffered the catastrophe that Israelis justly fear. The familiar rhetoric concerning the issue only reveals more clearly the underlying racism. Thus it is argued that the Arabs already have 22 states, so the Palestinians have no valid claim to selfdetermination, no claim comparable to that of the European Jews who established the State of Israel in 1948; at a similar moral level, a fanatic anti-Semite could have argued in 1947 that there are, after all, many European states, and Palestinians of the Mosaic persuasion could settle there if they were not satisfied with minority status in an Arab region. Another argument is that there are numerous Palestinians in Jordan, even in the government, so that should be the Palestinian state—and by similar logic, the problem could be solved by settling Israeli Jews in New York, where there are many Jews, even the Mayor and city officials, not to speak of their role in economic and cultural life. Or it is argued against the Palestinians that the Arab states have not supported their nationalist efforts, a stand that contrasts so markedly with the loving attitude that Europeans have shown towards one another during the centuries of state-formation there. Other familiar arguments are at about the same moral and intellectual level.

  Dropping racist assumptions, there are two security problems to be dealt with. The international consensus in fact provides the most satisfactory, if quite imperfect, response to this dual problem in the contemporary period. In the unlikely event that it is realized, a major security problem will remain—namely, for the Palestinian state, confronted with one of the world’s major military powers and dependent on the most conservative elements in the Arab world for survival. Whatever security problems Israel would then face do not compare with those it has been in the process of creating for itself by its commitment to expansionism and confrontation, which guarantees endless turmoil and war, and sooner or later, probable destruction.

  Though Israel’s security concerns—by now, in large part selfgenerated—are not to be dismissed, they do not provide an impressive basis for U.S.-Israeli rejectionism, even if we were to accept the familiar tacit assumption that the security of the Palestinians is of null import. In fact, there are other motives for Israel’s rejectionism that appear to be more compelling. The territories provide Israel with a substantial unorganized labor force, similar to the “guest workers” in Europe or migrant workers in the U.S. They now play a significant role in the Israeli economy, performing its “dirty work” at low pay and without rights (it might be noted that child labor among Arabs, particularly those from the occupied territories, has caused something of a scandal in Israel, though without affecting the practice, but not here). The process of proletarianization of Arab labor in the territories, in part through land restrictions, mimics what happened in Israel itself. Shai Feldman of the Center for Strategic Studies of Tel Aviv University comments accurately that “at present, important sectors of Israel’s economy cannot function without manpower provided by the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” including tourism, construction, and to some extent, agriculture.10

  The territories are also a controlled market for Israeli goods, with export sales of about $600 million per year according to the military government. These sales are paid for in hard currency, since the territories in turn export about $100 million a year in agricultural products to Jordan and the Gulf states and receive hard currencies from them from various payments and remittances. Income to Israel from West Bank tourism may amount to about $500 million, so that the potential loss to Israel of abandoning the territories may come to over $1 billion per year. Noting these facts, Thomas Stauffer of the Harvard Center of Middle East Studies observed that there is a crucial difference between Israel’s interest in these territories and in the Sinai, which had little economic value once the oil fields had been returned.11 In addition, there was of course a major gain for Israel in the Sinai settlement, in that the most powerful state in the Arab world was removed from the Arab-Israeli conflict, so that Israel could pursue its programs in the occupied territories and Lebanon without undue concern over any military deterrence. It is, then, extremely misleading to think of the withdrawal from occupied Sinai as providing any sort of precedent for the West Bank; as for the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, they have been virtually excluded from the discussion of potential political settlement, within Israel or the United States.

  Furthermore, Israel is now heavily dependent on the West Bank for water, a more significant commodity than oil in the Middle East. Its own water supplies are exploited to the maximum limit, and it is now estimated that about 1/3 of Israel’s water is from West Bank sources.12 An Israeli technical expert writes that “cutting Judea and Samaria [the W
est Bank, in Israeli parlance] off from the rest of the country” will lead to serious consequences with regard to water management; “There is no solution in sight for the water deficiency problem from the natural water resources of the area,” he writes, so that “the eventual solution must be sought in the import of water from external, still unutilized resources, and in brackish and seawater desalination on a large scale” (which to date, has not proven feasible). The only unexploited source nearby is the Litani river in southern Lebanon, which Israel has long coveted and will sooner or later place under its control, quite probably, if the U.S. supports Israel’s steps to impose the political arrangements of its choice in southern Lebanon.13

  One consequence of the Lebanon war was that Israel’s national water company took over “total control of the scarce and disputed water resources in the West Bank,” an important move towards further integration of the territories. Zvi Barel comments that the decision contradicts the Camp David principle that control over water should fall under the autonomy provisions, and that knowledgeable sources attributed the decision to political factors, not technical considerations as was claimed.14 It may be that this step was taken in defiance after the announcement of an unwelcome U.S. “peace plan” on September 1, 1982, to which we return. It is, incidentally, noteworthy that the U.S. September 1982 peace plan makes special mention of Israel’s rights to “fair safeguards” with regard to West Bank water, the only exception specifically noted to the “real authority” that is to be granted the Palestinian inhabitants.15

  In the past, there has been considerable conflict over utilization of the waters of the Jordan and its tributaries, and it is likely that this will continue. One potential point of conflict has to do with the Yarmuk River, a tributary of the Jordan. The Israeli press reports that current Jordanian projects will decrease the flow of Yarmuk waters to the Jordan, where they are utilized by the Israeli water system. Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan “travelled yesterday along the border with Jordan near the Yarmuk, opposite the Jordanian water project. It was not possible to learn his reaction to the Jordanian project.”16 It is unlikely that Israel will permit such a project within Jordan on any significant scale.