Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  94. Mark Helprin, “American Jews and Israel: Seizing a New Opportunity,” New York Times Magazine, Nov. 7, 1982.

  95. See note 34. Hertzberg is responding to the President of the ZOA, who alleges that support for his (basically, Likud) position is far broader, excluding only “a tiny, unrepresentative minority of the American Jewish community, a fringe element,” in Hertzberg’s paraphrase. See also Julius Berman’s response to Helprin, p. 72*.

  96. Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians, p. 116.

  97. As noted by Amnon Kapeliouk, Le Monde diplomatique, July 1982; see Shulamit Har-Even, Ha’aretz, June 30, 1982 (reprinted in Palestine/Israel Bulletin, Sept. 1982); also B. Michael, Ha’aretz, June 22, 1982, citing the official IDF spokesman. To cite an example almost at random, a single Israeli air raid on Beirut in July, before the really massive bombing began, killed 209 people, “almost all of them civilian” (Robert Fisk, London Times, July 13, 1982).

  98. Kapeliouk, Israel, p. 41.

  99. B. Michael, Ha’aretz, July 16, 1982, citing official police statistics in response to the claim by Defense Minister Sharon that the number of victims was 1392—a number that turned out to include 285 IDF soldiers, 392 Arabs from the occupied territories (some of them killed in preparing alleged terrorist attacks), 326 victims of terrorism of unspecified origin in various other countries, etc. Sharon repeated the same figure in a safer format, a New York Times Op-Ed (Aug. 29, 1982), writing that “since 1965, 1,392 civilians have died and 6,400 have been wounded as a result of P.L.O. terrorist raids against our people.” Recall Avneri’s description of Sharon as a “compulsive liar,” like his “pocket edition,” Menachem Milson. The characterization is, in fact, not uncommon in the Israeli press, but in the Times Sharon is safe from refutation.

  100. TNCW, pp. 296-7. In this interchange, 6 Israelis and 450 Arabs, nearly all Lebanese civilians, were reported killed.

  101. Migvan (Labor Party), October/November 1982, quoting Aluf Hareven of the Van Leer Institute, in a debate on “Zionism - 82” held at Tel Aviv University.

  102. See TNCW, pp. 458f., and discussion below.

  103. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Allen & Unwin, London, 1932, p. 248; first published in 1921). See TNCW, chapter 2, for further discussion in a broader context.

  104. See note 64, above.

  105. On Israel’s immediate rejection of the Fahd plan, see Norman Kempster, Los Angeles Times—Boston Globe, Aug. 10, 1981, and the brief story in the New York Times on the same day.

  106. Daniel Bloch, Davar, Nov. 13, 1981. We return to a fuller discussion in chapter 7.

  107. Yoel Marcus, Yediot Ahronot, Nov. 6, 1981.

  108. See Palestine/Israel Bulletin, April 1982, citing Haolam Haze, February 3, and the Jerusalem Post, February 1, 1982.

  109. “How Syria’s Peace Plan Was Swept under the Carpet,” Ha’aretz, Feb. 12, 1982; Israeli Mirror.

  110. Jerusalem Post, International Edition, Feb. 14-20, 1982; cited in Palestine/Israel Bulletin, April 1982.

  111. For example, Amos Oz, “Has Israel Altered its Visions?,” New York Times Magazine, July 11, 1982 (see chapter 2, note 64). Compare the picture portrayed by Mark Helprin in the same journal; see note 94. See also note 88. See also Amos Oz, “From Jerusalem to Cairo,” Encounter, April 1982, for an intriguing method of evading the historical record. Oz claims that “there is no symmetry” between Israel and the PLO, because “the PLO resembles the militant position in Israel,” namely, the position that “disregard[s] the identity of the Palestinian problem” (note that this “militant position,” contrary to what he asserts, is the mainstream position in Israel, adopted by both political groupings, and has been such since the days of Weizmann and Ben-Gurion). How does he conclude that the PLO resembles this position? By totally ignoring the record of their actual proposals, as reviewed briefly above, and restricting himself to their unwillingness to recognize the legitimacy of Zionism or to support partition “as a fundamental and right solution,” rather than a compromise imposed by circumstances (a stand in which they mimic Ben-Gurion and others, contrary to Oz’s claims). He also grossly misrepresents Sadat, claiming that his “visit to Jerusalem” represented a conceptual revolution.” With this technique of presenting a completely false picture of the history of socialist Zionism including the stand of the Labor governments and the current position of the Labor Alignment, and ignoring the diplomatic efforts of the Arabs including the PLO in favor of irrelevant commentary about the PLO attitude towards the “legitimacy” of Zionism, Oz is able to maintain the pose of the tragic victim, so willing to make peace if only the Arabs were not committed to their militancy. This pose has been a great success among western intellectuals, though Israeli doves naturally find it extremely offensive; and pernicious, in that it makes a major contribution to reinforcing attitudes and policies in the west (primarily, the U.S.) that contribute directly to settlement and oppression in the occupied territories, aggression in Lebanon, and so on.

  112. Jerusalem Post, March 6, 1981. Rabin, who was Prime Minister at the time, conceded the facts but said that the boats were captured before the proposed gesture, and that this was simply an excuse for the PLO to back out of the agreement. Shimon Peres, who was Defense Minister at the time, declined to comment.

  113. See TNCW, p. 458, citing Livia Rokach’s very important study, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism (AAUG, Belmont, 1980), based largely on Sharett’s Personal Diary, (Yoman Ishi, Hebrew, Ma’ariv, 1979).

  114. Tillman, The United States in the Middle East, pp. 215-8. Congressman Findley was the senior Republican member of the House Middle East Subcommittee. See New York Times, Nov. 27, 1978 for a brief report; there is no further mention of the matter in the Times. Tillman cites Arafat’s statement to Findley with no qualifications, making no mention of the allegation that Findley transmitted it inaccurately or that the PLO retracted it. According to Tillman, “Thwarted by the lack of American response to its signals of willingness to compromise and angered by the Camp David agreement and Egypt’s separate peace with Israel, the PLO reverted to bluster and threat and stepped up acts of terror”; p. 218.

  115. Israel & Palestine (Paris), July-August 1982; Brezhnev’s statement is cited from his address to the 26th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1981. See also Shmuel Segev, Ma’ariv, March 2, 1983, noting the re-endorsement of this position at the PLO National Council meeting in Algiers in February 1983. I noticed no reference to these facts (or much else reported here) in the U.S. press, apart from quotes from Arafat and Sartawi in an article from Tunis by Lally Weymouth, special to the Boston Globe, Dec. 21, 1982. There is an oblique and inaccurate reference to the facts in the New York Times at the end of a story on a different topic by Thomas Friedman, who writes that the Brezhnev plan “indirectly recognized the right of Israel to live in peace,” and was endorsed by the PLO; there was nothing “indirect” about it. It is doubtful that even this reference would have appeared in the Times had it not been for the context, a story worth emphasis as illustrating PLO intransigence; see note 116.

  116. Israel & Palestine, July-August 1982. Sartawi’s relations with the PLO had been stormy. While he was regularly defended by Arafat against the “radicals” and rejectionists, his conflicts with them were sufficiently harsh so that he occasionally resigned from the National Council, with varying interpretations as to what had in fact occurred. See TNCW, pp. 443-4 for a mid-1981 example. See also Thomas L. Friedman, “A P.L.O. Moderate Resigns In Protest,” New York Times, Feb. 21, 1983, reporting at length Sartawi’s resignation from the National Council once again after he was prevented from addressing the group (the resignation was not accepted; see Trudy Rubin, Christian Science Monitor, March 11, 1983; it is also worth noting that Labor Party leader Shimon Peres had succeeded in preventing him from speaking at the Socialist International meeting, just prior to his assassination). Some PLO officials stated that Arafat did not object “to the substance of his ideas but that the P.L.O. leader feared it would lead
to a dispute that could upset the entire conference and scuttle his own quiet maneuvering to gain approval for more meetings with Israelis,” but Friedman questions this interpretation in the light of the statement by the official PLO representative that Sartawi “did not represent the views of the Palestinian leadership.” Peled is far more marginal in Israeli politics than Sartawi was within the PLO. Peled had been associated with the tiny Sheli party, a dovish Zionist party that has no current members in the Knesset, but broke relations with it after the Lebanon war when some of its leaders denounced his meetings with Arafat and gave their support to “crimes against humanity” in Lebanon (Peled, interview; see note 81). These facts are suppressed by those who point to Sartawi’s troubled relationship with the central PLO decision-making body as proof of PLO iniquity.

  117. Ha’aretz, July 10, 1981, cited in a July 1982 publication (Who will stop them?, Hebrew), of the Committee Against the War in Lebanon, Jerusalem.

  118. Migvan, Labor Party Monthly, August 1982. For further discussion of these matters, see TNCW, Tillman, The United States in the Middle East, and the regular reporting in such journals as the New Outlook, Israel & Palestine, and Palestine/Israel Bulletin.

  119. Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians, pp. 70ff. Within the mainstream, he notes, Moshe Sharett (then Shertok) disagreed with this view, arguing that it was pointless to deny that the leadership is the “legal representative” of the Palestinians and to refuse to negotiate with them (pp. 149-50).

  4. Israel and Palestine: Historical Backgrounds

  I

  t is widely believed that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982 opened a new chapter in the U.S.-Israel “special relationship.” That seems dubious; the U.S. remains committed to

  ensuring Israel’s military dominance in the region, so that further aggression resulting from the imbalance of force is not unlikely. No less crucially, the U.S. remains committed—rhetoric aside—to financing Israel’s settlement programs in the occupied territories. The latter commitment, however it may be disguised, is expressed with considerable clarity in the aid increases requested by the President and increased further by Congress after the Lebanon war. This U.S. commitment eliminates the possibility for a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Arab conflict and for any recognition of the elementary rights of the Palestinians. It is nevertheless true that the events of summer 1982 shook one pillar of the special relationship, the ideological element in the “support for Israel” (again, I note here the misleading terminology; see chapter 1), though the other two major elements, the diplomatic and material support for a Greater Israel, remained unchanged—in fact, were strengthened—as 1982 drew to a close.

  Israel’s 1982 invasion can only be understood in the context of the Arab-Jewish conflicts in Palestine, then beyond, that developed from what the indigenous population saw as “the Zionist invasion” and what the settlers regarded as “the return to their homeland.” These developing interactions were complex, and often tragic. It would take a lengthy and detailed study to do them justice. The preceding chapter was concerned with the attitudes and policies of a broad range of actors within a narrow historical period: following the 1967 war. This chapter will extend the time frame while narrowing the focus to developments within the former Palestine (cis-Jordan). The discussion is, needless to say, far from comprehensive; I will review some facts that seem to me to have a direct bearing on understanding the current situation.1

  1. The Pre-State Period The Arabs of Palestine were overwhelmingly opposed to a Jewish state, or to large-scale Jewish immigration, which often led to their dispossession from their lands. “They had not been consulted at any level in the preparation of European plans for the disposal of their homeland and felt in no way bound peaceably to accept their implementation.”2 This attitude is generally described as “intransigence” or even “anti-Semitism” in the American literature, which tends to accept as the natural point of departure the position expressed by Lord Arthur Balfour, author of the Balfour declaration of 1917 which committed Britain to “facilitate” the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” on the condition that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine...” Two years later, he wrote a memorandum discussing the contradictions in the various pledges given during the war, noting that a French-controlled administration was simply imposed on the Syrians.3 Expressing views held widely across the political spectrum, he continued:

  The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American [King-Crane] Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

  The people of “the independent nation of Palestine” never accepted the legitimacy of this point of view, and resisted it in a variety of ways. They repeatedly resorted to terrorist violence against Jews. The most extreme case was in late August 1929, when 133 Jews were massacred. The “most ghastly incident” was in Hebron, where 60 Jews were killed, most of them from an old Jewish community, largely antiZionist; the Arab police “stood passively by while their fellow Moslems moved into the town and proceeded to deeds which would have been revolting among animals,” and a still greater slaughter was prevented only by the bravery of one member of the vastly undermanned British police.4 Many were saved by Muslim neighbors.*

  * The massacre followed a demonstration organized at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem to counter “Arab arrogance”—“a major provocation even in the eyes of Jewish public opinion” (Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians, p. 96). See

  The opposition of the indigenous population to the Zionist project was never a secret. President Wilson’s King-Crane Commission reported in 1919 that “the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine” and estimated that the latter—”nearly nine-tenths of the whole—are emphatically against the entire Zionist programme.” The Commission warned that to subject them to this program “would be a gross violation of the principle [of self-determination], and of the people’s rights, though it kept within the forms of law,” a conclusion disregarded by the great powers, including the U.S. The Commission, while expressing “a deep sense of sympathy for the Jewish cause,” recommended limitation of Jewish immigration and abandonment of the goal of a Jewish state.

  The Recommendations had no influence on policy and are barely even mentioned in standard histories. Where mentioned, they are generally dismissed. Thus the ESCO Foundation study (see note 1), while recognizing that the opinions summarized in the Commission report “undoubtedly reflected the prevalent political attitude in Syria and Palestine,” nevertheless disparages the report on various grounds; crucially,

  Sheean, in Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest, for a detailed eyewitness account. This provocation was organized by Betar, the youth movement of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist organization, which is the precursor of Begin’s Herut, the central element in the Likud coalition. The very name, “Betar,” reflects the cynicism of this fascist-style movement, which, in Flapan’s words, described Hitler “as the saviour of Germany, Mussolini as the political genius of the century, and often acted accordingly. The name is an acronym for “Brith Yosef Trumpeldor” (“the Covenant of Joseph Trumpeldor”). Trumpeldor was killed defending the northern settlement of Tel Hai from Bedouin attackers; Jabotinsky “opposed the Labour call for mobilisation to help the threatened settlements” (Flapan, p. 104).

  because �
��it gave due consideration to only one part of the issue,” namely Arab views, and did not give “equal consideration to the Jewish problem.” Or to state the facts from a different point of view, the Commission’s report gave due consideration only to the views of inhabitants of the land (recall that much of the indigenous Jewish minority was anti-Zionist), without giving equal consideration to the plans of European Zionists.5

  In 1936-9, the Palestinian Arabs attempted a nationalist revolt after the failure of a long strike, which was ignored and ineffectual. David Ben-Gurion, eminently a realist, recognized its nature. In internal discussion, he noted that “in our political argument abroad, we minimize Arab opposition to us,” but he urged, “let us not ignore the truth among ourselves.” The truth was that “politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside.” The revolt “is an active resistance by the Palestinians to what they regard as a usurpation of their homeland by the Jews... Behind the terrorism is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self-sacrifice.”6

  The revolt was crushed by the British, with considerable brutality, after the 1938 Munich agreement permitted them to send sufficient military force.7

  In later years, the indigenous Arab population rejected the idea, accepted as natural in the West, that they had a moral obligation to sacrifice their land to compensate for the crimes committed by Europeans against Jews. They perhaps wondered why a more appropriate response would not have been to remove the population of Bavaria and turn it into a Jewish state—or given the self-righteous moralizing they hear from the United States, why the project could not have been carried out in Massachusetts or New York. Many profess to find their lack of concern for the problems of the Jews incomprehensible or profoundly immoral, asking why the Palestinian Arabs, unlike the Jewish immigrants, were unwilling to accept a “territorial compromise,” something less than what they hoped but a fair settlement, given conflicting demands. Perhaps the assessment is legitimate, but it is surely not hard to understand why the indigenous population should resist this conclusion. If someone were to take over your home, then offer you a few rooms in a “fair compromise,” you might not be overwhelmed by his generosity, even if he were homeless, destitute, and persecuted.