Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  The book begins with a moving description of a lunch with Michael Walzer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton three months before the outbreak of the war, when the repression in the West Bank had reached its peak (a fact not mentioned). Both men knew that “Sharon’s war” was soon to come. What could they do to stop it? Timerman suggested “that if the two of us decided to commit suicide and explained in our wills that we were killing ourselves to stop Sharon’s war, perhaps we could succeed in stopping it.” But the idea was rejected, since Sharon would not “have found in his heart the images of so many Jews who believed in moving the conscience of mankind by the generous surrender of their own lives... What would the world, or Israel, or General Sharon himself, have done with our two bodies?... We cut pathetic and ridiculous figures, Michael Walzer and I, in our search for logic and sober judgment,” pathetic in their inability to find a way to prevent the tragic events that they foresaw. For Timerman, “Sharon’s War began that very day.”

  There are certain difficulties in this account. First, Walzer supported the war as a ‘just war,” as we have seen. Thus it is not clear why he should have contemplated suicide to prevent it. Indeed, in the light of his record, it is difficult to imagine circumstances in which he would take any action in opposition to policies of Israel, or even deign to recognize unpleasant truths about the state that he so loyally defends. Second, one can think of some less extreme measures that might have been useful, for example, writing an article warning of what lay ahead, an option that neither man undertook though they have access to a wide audience denied to others who had the same perception. In fact, Timerman considered the idea of organizing a petition among “the men of Princeton” but rejected it on the grounds that Sharon and his associates would not “pay attention to these men of Princeton who have written so many books and shared so many discoveries with mankind,” which seems a bit facile, even if it would have been possible to mobilize “the men of Princeton” in an advance warning against the war.

  Let us turn to the “devastating indictment of the P.L.O sympathizers” which so impressed the New Republic reviewer. Timerman bitterly condemns “the Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia professors who went along with [the PLO] for years”; they were “allies or accomplices,” or simply “vain and frivolous academics who wanted to prove a thesis.” “The principal task of the academics should have been to confront Palestinian terrorism with a clear and convincing picture of the political reality,” but instead “they preferred to feel important glorifying an obsolete and reactionary image, that of terrorist machismo”; “more than one U.S. scholar considered it a privilege to review the world situation with Arafat.” “They seized upon the idea of the historical inevitability of a Palestinian state,” while failing to work “with the moderates among the Palestinians and the Arab world within the bounds of a political strategy.” And with others (e.g., Western Europeans), “they allowed the PLO to avoid the issue with ambivalent insinuations that not even the goodwill with which some of us in Israel heard them could convince us that they accepted anything less than the destruction of our country.” Had these miserable academics met their responsibilities, “they could have forced the creation of a Palestinian state despite the obstructions of Israeli reactionary groups.”

  Again, there are some problems. First, note the typical falsifications with regard to Arab “moderates” and “political strategy”; thus it is unexplained, for example, why PLO support for a two-state settlement since the mid-1970s drove Israel into such a panic, and failed to convince those with Timerman’s “goodwill” that “they accepted anything less than the destruction of our country.” And as well, the typical falsifications with regard to Israeli opinion: it was not certain “Israeli reactionary groups that opposed the creation of a Palestinian state, but the Labor Alignment, along with the Likud. As of 1980, only about 1/10 of the Jewish population in Israel “unconditionally accepted Israel’s recognition of a Palestinian nation” while half that number agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state, and under 3% of the population (and 1/5 of the “Dovish Leaders”) agreed to “recognition of the PLO as the Palestinians’ representative”—even fewer, presumably, would have been willing to recognize a PLO-run Palestinian state in accordance with the wishes of the vast majority in the occupied territories.237 We have already noted how images of the “beautiful Israel” have been cynically manipulated by American liberals to increase military support for Begin’s policies of settlement and aggression (see chapter 4, section 4.2.2). Timerman’s fables about Israeli attitudes lend themselves to exploitation for these ends in exactly the same way, not his intent surely, but a part of the explanation for the relatively favorable reception of his critique.

  Still other questions arise. Just who are these vile professors? No names are mentioned. I cannot think of a single “U.S. scholar,” a single professor at Harvard, Princeton or Columbia—or elsewhere—to whom Timerman’s description even remotely applies, except insofar as some Palestinian scholars did presumably discuss the world situation with Arafat, hardly a crime, one would think, particularly when one eliminates Timerman’ s fanciful constructions about the views expressed. Recall Robert Tucker’s astonishing fantasies; chapter 1, first*.

  There is one important qualification to this remark: Timerman’s description does apply, rather accurately in fact, if we replace a few words: “Israel” for “PLO,” “Golda Meir” for “Arafat,” etc. This is an important fact that could hardly be comprehended within the American intellectual community, apart from a few, or by Timerman, it would appear. But let us keep to his version.

  Timerman claims that these disgraceful academics, who “risked nothing,” pandered to the Palestinian (or Third World) taste for terrorism instead of patiently explaining to the PLO that this would lead to disaster. Again, some references would have been helpful. I know of none—though possibly a diligent search would yield a marginal example in some Maoist journal. These professors, Timerman says, were “obsessed by their competition with academics who supported Israel” (who are subjected to no criticism by Timerman), as if there were some “great debate” in academic circles, or anywhere in the United States, between “supporters of Israel” and “supporters of the PLO,” a ludicrous picture, as anyone familiar with the U.S. would know at once, including his editors and reviewers, if not Timerman himself. There were, in fact, a handful of critics of Israeli policies within the academic profession, no one of whom questioned the right of existence of Israel, to my knowledge. These few, who incidentally had few opportunities to publish here on these matters, consistently warned the PLO of the dangers of its resort to terrorism while sharply condemning this practice, and condemned the early rejectionist diplomacy of the PLO as intolerable on moral grounds as well as self-destructive. They needed no instruction from Timerman on this score.

  I was in fact one of these few, so I will keep to my own writings on the subject, though there are few enough critics so that a full record would not be difficult. My first article on the topic appeared in Liberation and the New Outlook (Tel Aviv) in 1969, and is reprinted in Peace in the Middle East? as chapter 1. It contains an extensive discussion of the “suicidal” and deeply immoral character of the resort to terror, drawing from Israeli doves who were making the same point. My next article (reprinted as chapter 2 of the same book) was a talk given at a conference of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG) in 1970, where I condemned the PLO reliance on “armed struggle” on moral and political grounds, emphasizing precisely its “suicidal” character for the Palestinians given the actual balance of forces, warning against “romantic illusions about these matters,” and also condemning the official PLO rejectionist program, which, even if it could succeed—which, as I emphasized, it could not—would be “intolerable to civilized opinion.” Exactly the same remained true in subsequent years (see p. 159*), and is true of the handful of other critics of Israel’s policies whose writings or public talks are familiar to me. T
imerman’s story is fantasy from beginning to end.

  But useful fantasy, of a sort illustrated several times above. Like Irving Howe and others, Timerman is relying on the convention that critics of established doctrine can be freely denounced without argument or evidence, or even explicit reference. Like Mark Helprin in the New York Times Magazine and numerous others, he invents a “great debate” and lambasts the non-existent advocates of the point of view of the enemy. This creates “balance” and allows the author to take “the middle ground” of sanity while proceeding with the illusions and fabrications of current propaganda concerning the U.S., Israel and the Palestinians. Timerman accuses Begin of “girding himself for a typical Israeli political debate in which accusations require no proof and weigh more than ideas or analysis.” I do not know whether this is a fair comment with regard to Israel, but it surely holds with regard to its supporters here, and to Timerman himself.

  It should, however, be noted that in the case of Timerman, these concoctions are, in a strange way, a contribution to truth. Had he not presented and emphasized them, his book, with its impressionistic but sometimes accurate critique of Begin’s Israel, would have suffered the usual fate of work that lies outside the bounds of mainstream ideology or that presents factual material that tends to undermine it. The text would certainly not have appeared in the New Yorker or any other journal that reaches a substantial audience, and could not have been accepted as a contribution to the “great debate,” were it not for its tales about pro-PLO academics and its reiteration of familiar fabrications about Israel and the Palestinians; nor could it have been regarded as “a contribution of lasting significance,” or even recognized as existing. So, in a certain sense, one should welcome this remarkable record of falsification, given the ideological climate in the United States.

  For completeness, I should note that when we escape the confines of the U.S. ideological system, the contributions of this critical tract to Israeli propaganda do not go unnoticed. Thus in London, Elfi Pallis observes that Timerman “falls victim to Israeli mythology”:

  Looking at the land of Kibbutz Gesher Haziv in Galilee, he reflects “how in the past this was a desert.” Galilee, of course, has never been a desert, and Kibbutz Gesher Haziv farms the fields that used to belong to the Palestinian villagers of al-Zeeb, now refugees in Lebanon.

  “Two-legged beasts” living in “nests of terrorists” that must be “cleansed,” we may add. And again in London, David Gilmour comments on Timerman’s belief “that Israel’s crimes only began with Begin and that before him its moral integrity remained intact,” listing a series of earlier examples that demonstrate the contrary, a few of them mentioned above. Gilmour also cites Timerman’s statement that “for the first time Israel has attacked a neighbouring country without being attacked,” commenting accurately that “Even Begin no longer pretends that” (see chapter 4, section 3). He also takes note of Timerman’s approval of a letter that Professor Jacob Talmon wrote to Begin in which he said: “However lacerating are the pain and the shame we feel for the affronts that our perverse and anachronistic policy, which is devoid of a future, causes among our neighbors, much greater and even [decisive] is the fear of the consequences of such behavior for us, the Jews; for our dream of a social and moral rebirth…”238Gilmour comments: “there is something a little ridiculous about the sight of Ashkenazi intellectuals earnestly debating their own identity while Israeli aeroplanes are destroying Beirut with phosphorus bombs.”239

  Timerman’s personal statement is not without value, and should be read, but it lends little support to the belief that a “great debate” is raging in the United States, or that more than a very narrow spectrum of opinion is represented here among the articulate intelligentsia.

  These examples give some idea of the range of opinion expressed as Israel conducted its attack on Lebanon, or, if one prefers the New York Times version, its “liberation” of Lebanon. These examples, however, illustrate the attitudes of elite “opinion-makers” and may not be a reflection of prevailing attitudes among the population that is the intended target for indoctrination. Indeed, there is reason to believe that popular attitudes are rather different, to judge by personal experience and also poll results. One poll indicates that there appear to be “two U.S. publics,” one described as “better informed” and the other as “less informed.” The “better informed” feel that the invasion of Lebanon was justified, by 52 to 38 percent; the “less informed” hold that it was not justified, by 43 to 28 percent. One recalls the attitude studies that showed a correlation between educational level and support for the Vietnam war, or the current ones that show that nearly 3/4 of the general population regard the war as “more than a mistake; it was fundamentally wrong and immoral,” a position held by only 45% of “opinion makers” and probably by a far smaller proportion of the “elite,” to judge by earlier studies.240

  Such results are subject to various interpretations. One, which I think is plausible, is that the term “better-informed” should be construed as “more effectively indoctrinated,” i.e., more subject to the distortions of the ideological system. People who are less susceptible to its influences, perhaps because of lack of exposure, are more readily able to perceive aggression and massacre as aggression and massacre, not understanding them to be, in reality, self-defense and extraordinary precautions to safeguard civilians. As a case in point, consider the standard attitude towards the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Few people know much about it, but it is overwhelmingly understood to be exactly what it is: a case of brutal aggression and massacre. Those subjected to effective Communist indoctrination will regard this view as naive and deluded, as “moral preference masquerading as political analysis” (see p. 467*), accepting the more sophisticated interpretation that the leader of the socialist camp is fulfilling its internationalist duty to defend freedom and human rights from terrorists serving the interests of the CIA and Western imperialism. Our own systems of indoctrination, while quite different in form and technique, often have the same kind of effect on sophisticated opinion.

  A poll conducted by Decision/Making/Information, a research institute directed by White House pollster Richard B. Wirthlin, indicated that 3/4 of the population favored the establishment of a Palestinian state—in accordance with the international consensus and in sharp opposition to the rejectionist stands of Israel and the U.S. government. 65% felt that there would be no peace in the Middle East unless a Palestinian state is established.* The poll also revealed a sharp decline in sympathy for

  * Popular support for a Palestinian state has been expressed before. For example, a survey of participants in the Foreign Policy Association’s “Great Decisions ’76” program showed that 66% approved of the right of Palestinians to an independent state while 19% objected (New York Times, July 11, 1976). There is a survey of a number of polls by Allan C. Kellum, publisher of the Washington report Mideast Observer, in The Link (AJME, New York, Dec. 1982). Polls taken after the Beirut massacres showed that 50-60% were in favor of

  Israel (down from 59% a year earlier to 39%) and increase in sympathy for the Palestinians (up from 13% to 23%). 69% disapproved of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and of those who felt that the invasion was justified by the PLO presence in Lebanon, nearly half changed their minds when told that the Palestinians had observed the cease-fire while Israel had not. 35% felt that the U.S. should take unspecified “disciplinary measures” against Israel because of its invasion of Lebanon. 50% said “no” when asked if the U.S. “should give aid to Israel,” and the 44% “yes” vote decreased when in a follow-up question the actual quantities of aid were cited.241 It would be interesting to see what the responses would be if it were known for what purposes the aid is used, or if information were provided about the nature and uses of tax-free charitable contributions, or other devices that are used to funnel aid to Israel.

  This poll was taken after the Beirut massacre, and State Department “experts say it is not clear whether the shif
t in American attitudes is transitory or whether it is part of a more lasting trend.”242 It is, however, clear enough that the specialists in what Walter Lippmann called “the manufacture of consent” have their work cut out for them.

  These results are particularly striking in the light of the fact that virtually no one who can gain access to a large public advocates the positions that appear to be backed by most of the population: abandonment of U.S.-Israeli rejectionism, and reduction or suspension of aid, particularly military aid. On the contrary, at this very time Congress was debating whether to increase aid to Israel even beyond the increase already proposed by the Reagan Administration; if there was any articulate criticism of this strange spectacle, it was that the Reagan

  suspending or reducing arms sales to Israel, while over half favored a Palestinian state. Administration was “politicizing” the aid process by placing barriers before even further increases. And while the public appears ready to accept the international consensus on a two-state settlement, the government and most of articulate opinion continue to maintain the traditional rejectionist position, either supporting the Labor Party or Reagan’s September peace plan. As noted earlier, public opposition to the Lebanon invasion was regarded by the Reagan administration as “a problem” that had to be somehow overcome (see section 4.7). It is rare for such a gulf to exist between articulate opinion and policy on the one hand, and public opinion on the other. The question merits a closer study, and may be suggestive for people who would like to see the issue truly enter the arena of democratic politics.