by Noam Chomsky
The Palestinians mourn the death of Nahum Goldmann. He was a Jewish statesman of a unique personality. He fought for justice and legitimate rights for all peoples.26
3. The Israel-Arab Wars In the U.S., it is intoned with ritual uniformity that Israel’s wars, prior to the 1982 Lebanon invasion, were strictly defensive. Even serious political analysts make such statements, for example, Hans Morgenthau, who wrote that “Four times the Arabs tried to eliminate Israel by war”; it is, furthermore, “an undisputed historical fact” that the wars had to do with “the existence of a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab world.”27 In press reporting, this is also taken regularly as an undisputed historical fact. As one of innumerable examples, consider David Shipler’s explanation of why the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 caused “a crisis of conscience” in Israel:
... this has been a different kind of war for Israel. Never before did Israel go to war when its actual existence was not threatened. Never before was it clearly responsible for initiating the fighting without being provoked by some Arab military move with devastating potential.28
Similarly, Robert Moskin describes Chaim Herzog’s history of the ArabIsraeli wars as “a volume that anyone who wants to understand what Israel has endured will have to read or refer to,”29 implying that the wars have all been “endured” by Israel, a passive victim of Arab aggressiveness.* The assumption that prior to the 1982 Lebanese invasion, Israel’s posture was strictly defensive is shared not only by a wide range of political analysts and journalists, but also by people regarded as critics of Israeli adventurism. Jacobo Timerman, for example, published a critique of the Lebanon invasion that is regarded as quite harsh, and in part is. He begins by asserting that Israel’s “previous wars were in
* Moskin also refers to the role of “Soviet armaments, advisers and agitation” and other Russian conniving as a factor in inciting the militant Arabs, noting that the USSR has supplied weapons (specifically, anti-aircraft missiles) to the Arabs (in contrast, U.S. supply of jet bombers to Israel, used for bombing raids deep within Egypt, merely demonstrates our commitment to peace) and that “In 1970 Soviet pilots were flying combat missions for Egypt” (namely, defensive missions when Israel was carrying out deep penetration bombing raids against civilian targets in Egypt, a fact that he fails to mention). Moskin criticizes Herzog’s book because he “remains neutral about the morality or necessity of the [1982] attack beyond the Litani River,” tacitly implying that one could raise no question about the invasion of southern Lebanon south of the Litani, an assumption adopted quite generally by the American press, which grants Israel the same right of aggression accorded to the United States itself.
defense against aggression… The fact that the invasion of Lebanon was the first war launched by the state of Israel could not go unnoticed.”30 Such statements, which are common, are untrue—indeed, astonishing—certainly with regard to the 1956 Israeli-French-British attack on Egypt and the 1978 invasion of Lebanon (not generally counted as one of the Arab-Israeli wars, perhaps because the aggression was too obvious, or perhaps because only some 2000 Palestinians and Lebanese were killed and 250,000 made refugees, with many towns left in ruins).31 The 1973 war was a clear case of an Arab attack, but on territory occupied by Israel, after diplomatic efforts at settlement had been rebuffed (see chapter 3). Hence it is hardly “an undisputed historical fact” that in this case the war had to do with “the existence of a Jewish state.” On Sadat’s war aims, see chapter 3, note 73 and text. On the 1948 war, see above.
The 1967 war also involves complexities often ignored by supporters of Israel here. It is, in fact, intriguing to see how the facts are presented. An interesting example is Michael Walzer’s investigation of “just wars.” Surveying a record of 2500 years, he finds only one example of “legitimate anticipation,” that is, legitimate resort to a preemptive military strike in violation of the standard doctrine on this matter as embodied in the United Nations Charter (see note 31): namely, Israel’s attack in June 1967. This is, furthermore, a “clear case” of resistance to aggression. “It is worth setting down some of the cases about which we have, I think, no doubts: the German attack on Belgium in 1914, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, the Japanese attack on China, the German and Italian interventions in Spain, the Russian invasion of Finland, the Nazi conquests of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, and Holland, the Russian invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Egyptianchallenge to Israel in 1967.”32
Walzer offers no argument or evidence to show that the “Egyptian challenge” to Israel stands on a par with the “clear cases” of aggression cited. He simply states that Israel had a “just fear” of destruction— which, even if true, would hardly substantiate his claim. Israeli generals take a rather different view. The former Commander of the Air Force, General Ezer Weizmann, regarded as a hawk, stated that there was “no threat of destruction” but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was nevertheless justified so that Israel could “exist according to the scale, spirit and quality she now embodies.”33 Citing corroboratory statements by Chief of Staff Chaim Bar-Lev and General Mattityahu Peled, Amnon Kapeliouk wrote that “no serious argument has been advanced to refute the thesis of the three generals.” See chapter 2, section 3. American intelligence held a similar view.34 Furthermore, the interactions leading up to the war included provocative and destructive Israeli actions and threats, which Walzer ignores,35 alongside of Egyptian and other Arab actions such as the closing of the Straits of Tiran, which Egypt claimed to be an internal waterway.
Among others who, unlike Walzer, have doubts about the Egyptian “challenge” as a “clear case” of aggression is Menachem Begin, who had the following remarks to make:
In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.
Begin of course regards the Israeli attack as justified; “This was a war of self-defense in the noblest sense of the term.”36 But then, it may be recalled that the term “self-defense” has acquired a technical sense in modern political discourse, referring to any military action carried out by a state that one directs, serves or “supports.” What is, perhaps, of some interest is that an American democratic socialist dove goes well beyond Menachem Begin in portraying Israel’s actions as defense against aggression. However one evaluates these complex circumstances, it is plainly impossible to regard the “Egyptian challenge” as a “clear case” of aggression, on a par with the Nazi conquests, etc. Rather, this is a “clear case” of the style of apologetics adopted by many supporters of Israel.37
Immediately after the armistice agreements of 1949, Israel began encroachments into the demilitarized zones along with military attacks with many civilian casualties and the expulsion of thousands of Arabs, some of whom later formed terrorist bands that carried out what they presumably regarded as reprisals and what Israel and its supporters regard as unprovoked terrorism; the terms “terrorism” and “reprisal,” as noted earlier, are to a considerable extent terms of propaganda, not description. These actions set the stage for further conflicts with Egypt and Syria. Israeli raids in the Gaza Strip led to fedayeen attacks that served as the pretext for the 1956 invasion, though as is known from captured Egyptian documents and other sources, Egypt was attempting to calm the border region in fear of such an attack.38 The aggressors concocted an elaborate and largely successful propaganda campaign in an effort to show that it was Nasser who was planning an attack, not they, comparing him to Hitler while they effectively mimicked Goebbels.
Many details are provided by Kennett Love, who was then the Middle East correspondent of the New York Times. He describes, for example, how the Times failed to publish his interview with Nasser in which Nasser offered to demilitarize the frontier: “distorted versions of Nasser’s effort to pacify the frontier were splashed across New York’s front pages under headlines representing him as a warm
onger,” including a Times report stating that “Many neutrals say Premier Nasser’s statement [on demilitarizing the frontier] was bellicose and is certain to increase tension.” Two days after the Times killed Nasser’s interview it ran a front-page headline, based on distorted news agency versions of the interview, which read: “Gaza War Threat Voiced by Egypt.”39 The aggressors themselves at the same time were attributing fabricated bellicose statements to Nasser, taking earlier writings of his out of context and grossly changing their sense, etc. The distortions of Western propaganda, which in this case reflect a remarkable degree of moral cowardice quite apart from the falsification of the facts, remained effective even after the outright aggression by Israel, France and England. In particular, it is still widely held that Israel’s aggression was in fact defensive, at worst a “preemptive strike” in response to Nasser’s threats. The incident is an example—one of many—of how facts can be overwhelmed by a powerful propaganda system employing the “free press” as its instrument.
The Israeli occupying army carried out bloody atrocities in the Gaza Strip, killing “at least 275 Palestinians immediately after capturing the Strip during a brutal house-to-house search for weapons and fedayeen in Khan Yunis” and killing 111 Palestinians in “another massive bloodletting” at the Rafah refugee camp in “disorders” after “Israeli troops stormed through the hovels, rounding up refugees for intelligence screenings.” General E. L. M. Burns, Commander of the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), commented that this furnished “very sad proof of the fact that the spirit that inspired the notorious Deir Yassin massacre of 1948 is not dead among some of the Israeli armed forces.” The head of the Gaza observer force, Lt.-Col. R. F. Bayard of the U.S. Army, reported that treatment of civilians was “unwarrantedly rough” and that “a good number of persons have been shot down in cold blood for no apparent reason.” He also reported that many UN relief officials were missing and presumed executed by the Israelis and that there had been extensive looting and wanton destruction of property. Israel claimed that the killings were caused by “refugee resistance,” a claim denied by refugees (there were no Israeli casualties).* Love cites Moshe Dayan’s diaries confirming the looting, which caused “much shame to ourselves,” and indicating that there had been practically no resistance.40 The aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon war was similar, though in this case the occupying army left it to its local clients to carry out the worst massacre. It is an unfortunate fact that occupying armies often behave in this fashion,41 but then, they usually do not bask in the admiration of American intellectuals for their unique and remarkable commitment to “purity of arms.”
Encroachments in the demilitarized zones in the north for water diversion projects and agricultural development† led ultimately to the shelling of Israel from the Golan Heights by those described here as “Syrian-killers-for-the-fun-of-it” in a typical misrepresentation of the facts.42 Swedish UNTSO Commander General Carl von Horn wrote that “it [was] unlikely that these [Syrian guns] would ever [have] come into action had it not been for Israeli provocation,” including armed
* For an eyewitness account from an Israeli source of atrocities committed by the Israeli occupying army until “Ben-Gurion himself gave orders to stop the looting, murder and robbery,” see Mark Gefen, Al Hamishmar, April 27, 1982—a timely (though ignored) report, considering what was to follow shortly. †Israeli encroachments and attacks in this area were in part motivated by a desire to take control of the waters of the Jordan and prevent diversion within Arab territories. This led to conflict between Israel and both the UN and the U.S. The American-planned Johnston project designed to arrange for sharing of the Jordan waters was undermined by Israeli opposition, and “the Israeli raid on Syria in December 1955 annihilated the very wreckage of his work” (Love. Suez, p. 277). The occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967 settled this issue.
encroachments into areas farmed by Palestinians.43 General (Res.) Mattityahu Peled points out that after the Israeli conquest of the Golan Heights in 1967, the Syrian artillery was barely moved. There was no subsequent shelling because the cease-fire arrangements were clarified. Prior to 1967, Israel followed a “planned strategy” designed to impose its interpretation of the 1949 Armistice Agreements, including settlement in the demilitarized zones which infringed on the rights of the local inhabitants, leading to shelling in reprisal. The conquest of the Heights did not change the military situation, but showed that negotiated settlement is possible, as had been true before too, he argues. If Israel were truly to accept UN Resolution 242, returning the Golan Heights to Syria, demilitarization of the Heights would cause no security problem, he argues further, as the facts he reviews suggest.44
It is also generally overlooked that Arabs too have reason to fear shelling from the Golan Heights. By 1970, there were already nearly 100 casualties in the Jordanian city of Irbid resulting from Israeli air attacks and shelling from the Golan Heights.45
Syrian shelling served as the pretext for the conquest of the Golan in 1967 in violation of the cease-fire, and for subsequent actions leading to its virtual annexation by the Begin government in December-January 198l-82.46
4. After the 1967 Conquest Apart from the Syrian border, the years following Israel’s retreat from the Sinai were relatively tranquil. The Egyptian border was quiet and the Jordanian border, nearly so. Within Israel, vast areas of Arab land were expropriated and converted to Jewish settlement, used in part to settle Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from Arab countries in the aftermath of the 1947-49 war.47 Arab citizens were thus compelled to become a work force for Jewish enterprises (including kibbutzim), a phenomenon that became quite noticeable by the 1960s.
4.1 The Settlement Policies of the Labor Governments Immediately after the 1967 war, the Labor government began its moves to integrate the occupied territories within Israel. East Jerusalem was immediately annexed, and the city’s borders were considerably extended into the Arab West Bank (a program called “the thickening of Jerusalem”), with considerable Jewish settlement and expulsion of Arabs from some sections of the Old City. Paramilitary settlements were established, then permanent civilian settlements, in the occupied territories. A harsh military occupation was instituted and has since been maintained.48
Settlement in the occupied territories began immediately after the war, sometimes without government authorization, though this regularly came later. Five weeks after the war, a settlement was established on the Golan Heights, and shortly after, at Kfar Etzion in the West Bank. Amnon Kapeliouk observes that by December 1969, the Meir government had established as one of its “essential goals” the “acceleration of the installation of military settlements and permanent agricultural and urban settlements in the territory of the homeland” (the official wording). Secretary of Defense Moshe Dayan, who played a central role in these Labor government projects, stated that “the settlements established in the territories are there forever, and the future frontiers will include these settlements as part of Israel.” These future frontiers, then, were to stretch from the Golan Heights in the north to the southernmost part of the Sinai at Sharm el-Sheikh (Israeli “Ophira”; Dayan’s statement that he “preferred Sharm el-Sheikh without peace to a peace without Sharm el-Sheikh” later became famous, during the period when the Labor government was evading Arab peace initiatives), and from Gaza and northeastern Sinai to the Jordan river, all areas where settlements were established under the Labor government.
Alongside of the inevitable “security argument,” it was commonly held that it would be wrong, perhaps even racist, to deny to Jews the right to settle in these areas (the West Bank, furthermore, was the heartland of “the historic land of Israel”). There was, however, no reciprocity. Arabs in the occupied territories could not settle in Israel; for example, those who had been expelled from Jaffa in April 1948. Arabs could not buy land in Israel, Dayan explained, “because that would disturb the territorial continuity of the Jewish population” (it would be virtually im
possible anyway because of the legal devices that effectively restrict land use to Jews, to which we return). But Jewish settlements in the densely-populated Gaza area, in contrast, were designed to “break the territorial continuity” of Arab settlement to prevent “eventual selfdetermination” for the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, Ha’aretz explained, and the same considerations soon applied in the West Bank as well. Similar arguments were advanced in the course of Labor’s program of “Judaization of the Galilee” within Israel proper, where it was felt to be necessary to establish Jewish settlements to break up the concentrations of Arab citizens. In the occupied territories, Israel was to establish “permanent rule,” Dayan held.
Foreign Minister Abba Eban, a Labor dove, took note of the fact that according to international law, settlement was permissible only in the name of military security; but he and others recognized that it was not motivated by such considerations, while continuing to support it. Eban rejected “the conception that maintains that the basic criterion for settlement in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] must be the strict necessity of obtaining secure boundaries,” adding that for him the “key expression” was “the territory of the homeland,” as indicated in the December 1969 government program. Dayan, with his customary frankness, stated that “from the point of view of the security of the State, the establishment of the settlements has no great importance”; rather, it was necessary to create “political faits accomplis on the principle…that no place of settlement or agricultural use will be abandoned.” In his extensive study of Israel’s post-1967 settlement program, W. W. Harris shows that the Allon Plan, which provided the basic framework for the policy, at first actually envisaged absorption of about 40% of the West Bank and annexation of the Gaza Strip, and by 1977 (ten years after it was first proposed in July 1967) it included some additional encroachments into the West Bank as well as extensive settlement in the Golan Heights (then well-advanced) and an Israeli takeover of a strip of the Sinai from the Mediterranean to Sharm el-Sheikh.49 Much material of the sort just cited is in Hebrew sources or relatively inaccessible studies and was little noted in the United States, even denied, though the facts of settlement were clear enough to those who chose to be aware of what was happening.