Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  2. Lucas, The Modern History of Israel, p. 101.

  3. Sykes, Crossroads to Israel, p. 5. My emphasis.

  4. Ibid., pp. 109-10, 123.

  5. Vol. 1, pp. 218, 221. The Recommendations of the Commission are reprinted in George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (G. F. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1946, Appendix H); also Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest.

  6. Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians, pp. 141-2, citing a 1938 speech.

  7. See Porath, The Palestinian National Movement, for a careful analysis of the revolt.

  8. Frederick Morgan, Peace And War: A Soldier’s Life (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1961; relevant parts reprinted in Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest). Yehuda Bauer, Flight and Rescue: Brichah (Random House, New York, 1970). The Harrison Report is reprinted as an appendix in Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (Columbia, New York, 1982).

  9. See TNCW, p. 433. In this case, preferences are clear, since a choice is available. Despite extensive pressures to compel immigration to Israel, most, particularly from European Russia, now prefer immigration to the U.S. Another relevant case is that of the Ethiopean [PW79]Jews (Falashas), who have been subject to savage persecution with little attempt on Israel’s part to do anything for them or to “gather them in.” They of course are Black; also, Israel had close relations with Ethiopia through much of the worst period of persecution. For some recent comment, see Simcha Jacobovici, alleging that “for at least six years all major Jewish organizations, uncharacteristically adhering to Israel’s line on a diaspora matter, have suppressed information about the Falashas’ plight and have refused to undertake major initiatives to save them,” in sharp contrast to Russian Jews (Op-Ed, New York Times, April 23,1983).

  10. Saul S. Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed (Wayne State, Detroit, 1973, pp. 222f.); Dinnerstein, op. cit., p. 223 and elsewhere; Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1978, p. 56). On the reluctance of American Zionists to consider resettlement of Jews outside of Palestine during the war years and before, see Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue (Rutgers, New Brunswick, 1970, pp. 13f., 69ff., 109, 123f., 237f., 264f., 298f.). See also Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust (Wayne State, Detroit, 1981, pp. 123f.); Uri Davis, Israel: Utopia Incorporated (Zed, London, 1977, pp. 24-5); TNCW, p.466, among others. There is a scathing indictment of the policies of the Zionist leadership in Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, Part I (Neturei Karta of USA, Brooklyn, 1977); the publisher is affiliated with the Jerusalem Neturei Karta, the organization of Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews that has its roots in the pre-Zionist Jewish settlement and that now supports secular democracy rather than a Jewish state.

  11. Morris L. Ernst, So Far So Good (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1948, pp. 175-6).

  12. Bernard Weinraub, New York Times, Jan. 4, 1982. For further discussion and controversy over this matter, see Bernard Weinraub, New York Times, Jan. 20; Richard Bernstein, New York Times, Feb. 9, 1983.

  13. Lucas, Modern History of Israel, p. 192.

  14. Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians.

  15. There is interesting discussion of the interactions among the various Arab and Jewish parties during this period in Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians, and Rubin, The Arab States & Palestine.

  16. Uri Milshtein,Davar, Oct. 23, 1981; Sykes, Crossroads to Israel, p. 337. For a contemporary record of Irgun-LEHI terrorism in December 1947, see Peace in the Middle East?, pp. 64-5, citing a report by the Council on Jewish-Arab Cooperation, which concludes that these actions were undertaken to create conflict in peaceful areas. See TNCW, pp. 464-5 and references cited for additional examples of Zionist terrorism, including major massacres. Little of this is known here; the information appears in standard Israeli (Hebrew) sources.

  17. Israel Segal, “The Deir Yassin File,” Koteret Rashit, Jan. 19, 1983; Toldot Milhemet Hakomemiut, prepared by the Historical Branch of the General Staff, Israel Defense Forces (Ma’arachot, Israel, 1959; citation from the 14th edition, 1966, p. 117). English translations of a number of other documents concerning the Deir Yassin and other Irgun massacres are provided in a privately printed anthology by Israel Shahak, Begin And Co. As They Really Are (Jerusalem, 1977). This was, in fact, only one of a number of such massacres, though it was the worst. See also TNCW, pp. 464f. Units of Palmach participated in the attack, though not in the massacre. The village “had refused permission for foreign Arab volunteers to use it as a base for operations against the Jewish life-line into Jerusalem” (Jon Kimche). On the massacre, see the report from the scene by Jacques de Reynier, head of the International Red Cross delegation in Palestine, and remarks by Zionist historian Jon Kimche, reprinted in Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest; also Israeli military historian Meir Pail, an eye-witness, cited in TNCW, p. 465, and much more extensively in Shahak, Begin And Co. See also section 9.3.

  18. Lucas, Modern History of Israel, pp. 252, 460.

  19. Mordechai Nisan, Professor of Political Science in the School for Overseas Students of the Hebrew University, in Elazar, ed., Judea, Samaria and Gaza, p. 193. Nisan is an admirer of the use of terror (against Arabs). See TNCW, p. 304.

  20. Erskine Childers, Spectator, May 12, 1961; reprinted in Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest. See also his essay in Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, ed., The Transformation of Palestine (Northwestern, Evanston, 1971), citing mainly Zionist sources on the terror and expulsion, and reviewing some of the remarkable propaganda exercises undertaken to disguise the facts.

  21. Eli Tabor, Yediot Ahronot, Nov. 2, 1982.

  22. Al Hamishmar, April 16, 1982. See p. 49 and note 49 below. On the 1948 and 1967 expulsions, see Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch. About 200,000 fled across the Jordan in 1967.

  23. Yoram Peri, Between Battles and Ballots, p. 58; Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians. p. 337. Flapan gives a detailed account of these interactions; see also Rubin, The Arab States & Palestine. Michael Widlanski reports from Jerusalem that recently discovered British diplomatic documents reveal that Britain exerted pressure on Transjordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq to refrain from coming to formal or informal peace agreements with Israel after the 1949 armistice, fearing that peace might lead to an Israeli-dominated neutralist bloc (at this time, Israel had not yet chosen sides in the Cold War system) that might oppose British interests in the Middle East. The documents also allegedly show that Britain used the Arab League to limit the influence of the USSR, France, the U.S. and Israel at the time. Michael Widlanski, Cox News Service, Winnipeg Free Press, Jan. 24, 1983. On conflicts between the U.S. and Britain in the Middle East at the time, see TNCW, introduction and chapters 2, 11, and references cited.

  24. Shalom Network Newsletter (Berkeley), Oct./Nov. 1981, reprinted from the London Jewish Chronicle. See chapter 6, section 6.4*.

  25. Reprinted in Israel & Palestine (Paris), Oct/Nov. 1981.

  26. World Jewish Congress News & Views, Sept. 1982; Jewish Past & Opinion, Sept. 17, 1982; SOUTH, November 1982.

  27. New Leader, Dec. 24, 1973. For a fuller quote, see my Peace in the Middle East?, p. 187.

  28. David K. Shipler, “A Crisis of Conscience Over Lebanon,” New York Times, June 18, 1982. One expects such a version of history from outright propagandists; e.g., Nathan I. Nagler, Chairman of the New York Region, Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, who refers to the “five attempts at military means” of the Arabs who “invaded Israel, bent on her destruction” (letter, New York Times, June 19, 1982). It is more interesting that it is regularly expounded by serious journalists and scholars.

  29. J. Robert Moskin, review of Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars. New York Times Book Review, Nov. 28, 1982. The Times weekly book review section appears to be reserved for “supporters of Israel” as a matter of editorial policy, a topic that merits a special study, particularly, in the light of the role of the Review in influencing the distribution of books in U.S. libraries, bookstores, etc.

 
; 30. Jacobo Timerman, The Longest War (Knopf, New York, 1982; lengthy sections appeared in the New Yorker, Oct. 18, 25). Timerman also repeats other standard myths, and sometimes fabricates new ones. We return to some examples in the next chapter.

  31. The attack was in response to a PLO terrorist operation that left 34 Israelis dead in an interchange of fire on a coastal road after a bus had been seized. Putting aside the question of proportionality or of the merits of the principle of international law (binding on members of the United Nations) that the use of force is permissible only in the case of selfdefense against armed attack, the Israeli retaliation was irrelevant to the terrorist incident that provoked it since the terrorist operation by seaborne commandos was launched from a point north of the area invaded by Israel. The border had previously been relatively quiet, apart from Israeliprovoked military interchanges. See the next chapter.

  32. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (Basic Books, New York, 1977, p. 292), my emphasis.

  33. Ha’aretz, March 29, 1972; for a more extensive quote, See Cooley, Green March, Black September, p. 162.

  34. Le Monde hebdomadaire, June 8-14, 1972; Kimche, There Could Have Been Peace, p. 258.

  35. See Cooley, Green March, Black September; Charles Yost, Foreign Affairs, January 1968; and many other sources.

  36. Menachem Begin, August 8 speech at the National Defense College, excerpts in the New York Times, Aug. 21, 1982, reprinted from the Jerusalem Post.

  37. For a number of other examples from the same pen, see TNCW.

  38. See TNCW, pp. 331, 463, and sources cited, particularly, Ehud Yaari, Egypt and the Fedayeen (Hebrew; Givat Haviva, 1975), based on captured Egyptian documents; Kennett Love, Suez: The Twice-fought War (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1969, pp. 92f., 408f.); Donald Neff, Warriors at Suez (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1981). See Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, for information from Prime Minister Moshe Sharett’s diaries. There is also important material in the memoirs of the commanders of the UN forces on the borders, who characteristically took up this post sympathetic to Israel but ended their tours quite critical of its encroachments and resort to unprovoked violence.

  39. Such reconstruction of unwanted facts is not unusual. For another example of skillful re-editing, by which the Times succeeded in converting a London Times report with an unwanted message into its precise opposite (to be picked up in the Times version by Newsweek with some additional fillips and to enter official history), see N. Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End, Boston, 1979, vol. 1, pp. 135f.). The same section gives numerous other examples of successful news management, of particular interest in this case because of their efficacy in enabling the Human Rights Administration to participate actively in one of the major acts of mass murder in recent years. These two volumes give many other examples of behavior which is, in fact, fairly systematic, though not exceptionless, as explained and illustrated there. See also TNCW, chapters 3, 4 and elsewhere, and references cited. For more on this subject, and particularly discussion of the mechanisms, see Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network (South End, Boston, 1982).

  40. Neff, Warriors at Suez, pp. 420-1; Love, Suez, pp. 551f.

  41. To cite one case that has not exactly become common knowledge in the U.S., the American occupying army in Japan engaged in rape, pillage and murder, according to Japanese sources (see Saburo Ienaga, The Pacific War, Pantheon New York, 1978, pp. 236f.). For discussion of other examples of the treatment of prisoners, collaborators, and other victims of liberation by the U.S. and its allies, also largely unknown here, see Chomsky and Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. II, pp. 32-48.

  42. Alfred Friendly, “Israel: Paradise Lost,” Manchester Guardian weekly, July 11, 1982.

  43. Carl Van Horn, Soldiering for Peace, cited along with other evidence from UN and Israeli sources by Fred J. Khouri, Arab Perspectives, January 1982. See also Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch.

  44. Mattityahu Peled, “A burden rather than an asset,” Ha’aretz, Oct. 30, 1980.

  45. John K. Cooley, Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 30, 1970.

  46. See p. 21, and section 5.2, below.

  47. For documentation, see Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (Monthly Review, New York, 1976). On the possible role of Israeli terrorism in the flight from Iraq, see TNCW, p. 462, referring to reports in the Israeli press by Iraqi Jews and the account by Wilbur Crane Eveland, who was military attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad at the time, in his Ropes of Sand (Norton, New York, 1980, p. 48). See also Rabbi Moshe Schonfeld, Genocide in the Holy Land (Neturei Karta of the USA, Brooklyn, 1980, pp. 509ff.); see note 10.

  48. For discussion and references, see TNCW, chapter 9 (1974, 1982); also Rafik Halabi, The West Bank Story (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1981) and references of note 1. There are important personal accounts by Raymonda Tawil (My Hope, My Prison, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1980) and Raja Shehadeh (The Third Way, Quartet, London, 1982); Shehadeh, a West Bank lawyer, is also the principal author of an informative study of the legal devices and practices of the military administration: Raja Shehadeh, assisted by Jonathan Kuttab, The West Bank and the Rule of Law (International Commission of Jurists, Geneva, 1980). See also Emanuel Jarry, Le Monde diplomatique, Sept. 1981, and Danny Rubinstein, New Outlook, June/July 1982. On the sharp intensification of repression under the Sharon-Milson repression from November 1981, see Only Do Not Say That You Did Not Know; chapter 3, note 52.

  49. For specific references and much further discussion, see Kapeliouk, Israel. On “the Judaization of the Galilee,” see TNCW, chapter 9. The most detailed study of the settlement program is William Wilson Harris, Taking Root: Israeli Settlement in the West Bank, the Golan and GazaSinai, 1967-1980 (Research Studies Press, Wiley, New York, 1980).

  50. Elisha Efrat, “Spatial Patterns of Jewish and Arab Settlements in Judea and Samaria,” in Elazar, ed., Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

  51. Kapeliouk, Israel, p. 65, pp. 44-5, pp. 296f.

  52. Amnon Kapeliouk, Le Monde, May 15, 1975, translated in Middle East International, July 1975.

  53. Al Hamishmar, Aug. 22, 29, 1975; A. Droyanov, Sefer Tel Aviv, 1936, vol. 1, sections reprinted in Matzpen, July 1975. See my article “The Interim Agreement,” New Politics, Winter, 1975-6, for these and other references.

  54. Jewish Post & Opinion, Sept. 26, 1975.

  55. See TNCW, pp. 280-1, for discussion.

  56. Danny Rubinstein, Davar, March 16, 1981. See also Benvenisti’s proposal for “mutual recognition of the national aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians” in the Jerusalem Post, April 7, 1981. Benvenisti was then a candidate for the Knesset on the Citizens Rights List.

  57. David Richardson, “De facto dual society,” interview with Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem Post, Sept. 10, 1982. For more details on Benvenisti’s research and conclusions, see David K. Shipler, New York Times, Sept. 12, 1982. Shipler gives the figure of 55-65 percent of the West Bank under Israeli government control. See also Ian Black, Manchester Guardian Weekly, Sept. 19, 1982; Anthony Lewis, New York Times, Nov. 1, 1982, reporting on a briefing by Benvenisti in Washington. See also Lesley Hazelton, “The Israelis’ ‘Irreversible’ Settlements,”Nation, Dec. 18, 1982, describing the vast extent of the settlement projects and noting, inter alia, that Labor “is trying to prove itself as settlement-conscious as Likud.” Government officials agree that Benvenisti’s data are accurate, Hazelton reports. See also Amos Elon, “Ariel for example,” Ha’aretz, Nov. 11, 1982. describing a new town south of Nablus.

  58. Philip Geyelin, “On Israeli Settlements, Reagan Really Isn’t Trying,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 27, 1982.

  59. Chaim Bermant, “Financial Influence,” Jerusalem Post, Dec. 19. 1982.

  60. Wolf Blitzer, “Lessons from aid victory,” Jerusalem Post, Dec. 24, 1982. For detailed background, see G. Neal Lendenmann, “Aid Levels to Israel,” American-Arab Affairs, Winter 1982-3.

  61. Chaim Herzog, “Good for the
Jews?,” Jerusalem Post, Dec. 24, 1982.

  62. Interview with Jacobo Timerman in the dissident journal Haolam Haze, Dec. 22, 1982. On earlier Israeli relations with the Argentine neo-Nazis, including military aid, see TNCW, pp. 291-2.

  63. Economist, Nov. 13, 1982; Feb. 19, 1983. See chapter 2, section 2.2.3.

  64. Davar. Nov. 11, 1982; interview in Trialogue, journal of the Trilateral Commission, Winter 1983.

  65. Uzi Shimoni, “The Allon Plan—an expression of Zionist and security activism,” Davar, Dec. 21, 1982.

  66. Anthony Lewis, New York Times, Nov. 1, 1982.

  67. And sold for hard currency; see p. 46. The figure that Richardson cites seems too high. Shmuel Sandier and Hillel Frisch, in Elazar, ed., Judea, Samaria and Gaza, give the figure of about 12%.

  68. Sasson Levi, in Elazar, ed., Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

  69. Bernard Nossiter, New York Times, April 3, 1982.

  70. New York Times, Sept. 1, 1981. See TNCW, chapter 13, for details and references.

  71. Irving Howe, “The Campus Left and Israel,” New York Times Op-Ed, reprinted in Howe and Carl Gershman, eds., Israel, the Arabs, and the Middle East (Bantam, New York, 1972).

  72. Danny Rubinstein, Davar, Nov. 5, 12, 1982.

  73. Ha’aretz, Nov. 18, 1982; Israeli Mirror.

  74. David K. Shipler, New York Times, April 4, 1983, citing Meir Cohen’s remarks to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on March 16 (the Jerusalem Post commented that the lack of reprimand by his Herut party “inevitably” gives the impression that “he articulates the tacit premises of official policy”; cited by Jewish Post & Opinion, March 30); Francis Ofner, “Sketching Rabin’s Moves towards Peace,” Christian Science Monitor, June 3, 1974, dispatch from Tel Aviv. See TNCW, p. 234, for more on Rabin’s views.