[The second selection from a talk by Chomsky on US support for Israel.]
...Well, from these considerations, it's pretty straightforward to predict US policy for the last roughly 30 years. Its basic element has been and remains an extreme form of rejectionism. Now I have to explain here that I'm using the term in an unconventional way - namely in a non-racist way. The term, "rejectionist," is used conventionally in an purely racist sense in Western discourse: the term refers to those who reject the national rights of Jews. They're called "rejectionist" (as they are). But if we use it in a non-racist sense, then the term refers to those who reject the national rights of one or the other of the competing forces in the former Palestine. So those who reject the national rights of Palestinians are rejectionists. And the US has led the rejectionist camp in the non-racist sense for the last thirty years. In fact, it is the only significant member of the rejectionist camp that it has led, and still does.
The '67 war was dangerous; it came very close to nuclear confrontation. And it was agreed that there has got to be some diplomatic settlement. The diplomatic settlement that was proposed, by the United States primarily, and the other great powers, was called UN 242. Notice that it was explicitly rejectionist. It calls for recognition of Israel's right to live in peace and security within recognized borders, but says nothing about rights of the Palestinians, apart from a vague allusion to the problem of refugees. UN 242 calls for a settlement among existing states of the region. The agreement was, to put in simple terms, that there should be full peace in return for full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. That's UN 242. And it was official US policy at the time. Withdrawal could involve marginal and mutual adjustment of borders; perhaps straightening a crooked border here and there. But nothing more. And of course any settlement or development within the occupied territories is barred. There is no dispute over the fact that it would be in violation of the Geneva Conventions. On this, world opinion is unanimous, apart from Israel and the US. And in this case the US has been unwilling to articulate publicly its antagonism to international law and the Conventions that were established to bar crimes of the kind carried out by the Nazis, so it abstains from resolutions that pass unanimously apart from Israeli objection and US abstention.
The US held to this interpretation of UN 242 until 1971. In 1971, a very important event took place. President Sadat had taken power in Egypt, and he offered a settlement in terms of UN 242 - in terms of official US policy: full peace in return for full Israeli withdrawal. In fact his stand was even more forthcoming: he offered full peace in return for Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory, leaving open the status of the occupied territories and the Golan Heights. Of course, his proposal also was firmly rejectionist, saying nothing about the Palestinians.
Well, the US had a choice - was it going to accept that or was it going to reject UN 242? It was understood that Sadat's proposal was, as Israel put it, "a genuine peace offer" - a "milestone on the path to peace" as Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli Ambassador to the US, describes it in his memoirs.
The US had a decision to make. There was an internal confrontation. Henry Kissinger won out, and Washington adopted his policy of "stalemate": No negotiations, just force. So the US effectively rejected UN 242 in February 1971 and insisted that it means "withdrawal insofar as the US and Israel decide." That's the operative meaning of UN 242 under US global rule since 1971.
Officially, the US continued to support UN 242 until Clinton. He is the first president to declare that US resolutions are inoperative. But until then, at least verbally, the US accepted UN 242. That was only words, however. In practice the US following the Kissingerian interpretation. For every president, UN 242 in practice meant partial withdrawal as Israel and the United States determine. Carter, for example, forcefully reiterated US support for UN 242 and continues to do so, but also increased aid to Israel to about half of total US aid (as part of the Camp David settlement), thus ensuring that Israel could proceed to integrate the occupied territories within Israel and to prevent any meaningful fulfillment of UN 242 (and to attack its northern neighbor), exactly as was predicted, and as it did.
The rejectionist commitments of the international system changed by the mid 70s. By the mid 70s, an extremely broad international consensus, in fact essentially everyone, came to accept Palestinian national rights alongside of Israel. In January 1976, the Security Council debated a resolution, which included the wording of 242 but added Palestinian national rights in the territories from which Israel would withdraw. The US vetoed it, and therefore it's vetoed from history, so you can't even find it in history books with rare exceptions. The same is true of the events of February 1971. With diligent search one can discover the facts, but they have efficiently been removed from historical memory.
This continued. I won't run through the whole record. The US vetoed a similar Security Council Resolution in 1980, and voted against similar General Assembly resolutions year after year, usually alone (with Israel), occasionally picking up some other client state. Recall that a unilateral US rejection of a General Assembly resolution is, in effect, a double veto: the resolution is inoperative, and it is vetoed from history, rarely even reported. Washington also blocked other negotiating efforts: from the European and Arab states, the PLO, in fact any source. And so things continue up until the Gulf War.
This process of preventing a peaceful diplomatic settlement has a name, exactly the one that one would expect in the age of Orwell: it is called "the peace process."
The Gulf War changed things. At that point the rest of the world realized that the US is making a very clear statement: the US is going to run this area of the world by force, so get out the way. That was the understanding throughout the world. Europe backed off. The Arab world was in total disarray. Russia was gone. No one else counts. The US immediately moved to the Madrid negotiations, where it could unilaterally impose the US rejectionist framework that it had protected in international isolation for 20 years.
That leads in various paths to Oslo, and the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, where the Declaration of Principles (DOP) was accepted with much fanfare in what the press described as "a day of awe," and so on. The DOP merits a close look. It outlines clearly what is coming, with no ambiguity. For what it's worth, I don't say this in retrospect: I wrote an article about it at once, which appeared in October 1993. There have been few surprises since.
The DOP states that the "permanent status," the ultimate settlement down the road, is to be based on UN 242 and UN 242 alone. That's very crucial. Anyone with any familiarity with Middle East diplomacy knew on that day exactly what was coming. First, UN 242 means "partial withdrawal, as the US determines"; the Kissingerian revision. And "UN 242 alone" means UN 242 and not the other UN resolutions which call for Palestinian rights alongside Israel. Recall that 242 itself is strictly rejectionist. The primary issue of diplomacy since the mid-1970s had been whether a diplomatic settlement should be based on UN 242 alone, or UN 242 supplemented with the other resolutions that the US had vetoed at the Security Council, and (effectively) vetoed at the General Assembly. And the second issue was whether 242 would have the original interpretation, or the operative US interpretation after it rejected Sadat's 1971 peace offer. In the DOP, the US announced firmly and clearly that the permanent settlement would be based on UN 242 alone, keeping to Washington's unilateral rejectionism: anything else is off the table. And since this is a unilateral power play, 242 means "as the US decides." There was no ambiguity. One could choose to be deluded - many did so. But that was a choice, and an unwise one, particularly for the victims.
So matters continue. One can't really accuse Israel of violating the Oslo agreements, except in detail. It continued to settle the occupied territories and integrate them within Israel. That means you and I did it, because the US funds it knowingly, and the US provides crucial diplomatic and military support for these gross violations of international law. The successive agreements spell out the details. They are worth a close look. I reviewed the main one in print in 1996, if you happen to be interested. The details are striking, including the purposeful humiliation built into them. And they have been fairly closely implemented.
Looking very closely, through a powerful microscope, we can discern a difference between the two main political groupings in Israel (as in the US). There is, however, a noticeable difference in the US attitude towards them, but the reason is a difference of style more than substance. So take the man who was just appointed two or three days ago as the minister of defense, Ben Eliezer - he's described now as a "Labor hawk." He was the housing minister under Shimon Peres, hailed as the Labor dove. In February 1996, towards the end of Peres's term, the peak of "dovishness," he announced an expanded settlement program in the territories - I'll read it because it's essentially was happening now. This was February 1996. He said, "It is no secret that the government's stand, which will be our ultimate demand, is that as regards the Jerusalem areas - Ma'ale Adumim, Givat Ze'ev, Beitar, and Gush Etzion - they will be an integral part of Israel's future map. There is no doubt about this." He also announced the building of what Israel calls Har Homa, that's the last section around Jerusalem, mostly expropriated from Arabs. That was put on hold under the Netanyahu government because of strong international and domestic opposition. But the Peres project was picked up again by Barak, and proceeded with no protest.
A look at the map will explain what this means. The "Jerusalem area," so defined (as it had already been by Yitzhak Rabin, after Oslo), effectively partitions the West Bank: the city of Ma'ale Adumim was developed primarily for this purpose, and addition of other parts of the "Jerusalem areas" merely firms up the effective partition.
Ben-Eliezer also explained in February 1996 that Labor "builds quietly," with the full protection of the Prime Minister, not ostentatiously like the rival Likud coalition. the Prime Minister can be Rabin, Peres, Barak (who broke all records in construction) or anyone else, but "we build quietly": that's the crucial phrase. And that is the reason why the US always prefers Labor to Likud. Labor does it quietly. They're the "doves." Likud tends to be arrogant and noisy about it, and that makes it harder to pretend that we don't know what we're actually doing. So Labor's always preferable.
The reason traces back to different electoral constituencies. Labor is the party of managers, professionals, intellectuals-generally the more secular and Westernized sectors who understand very well the norms of Western hypocrisy-and are therefore easier to deal with, hence more admired in the West. The policies differ somewhat; as noted, Labor has often been more aggressive in construction (and also military actions) than Likud, sometimes the reverse, but that is secondary.
Without going into the details, you'll notice that in all of the current discussion about the remarkable negotiations and the "forthcoming" and "generous concessions" of Clinton and Barak, there are some notable omissions. One is maps. Try finding a map in one of the US newspapers describing what's happening. Well, the reason there aren't any maps, I suppose, is because what's being implemented under the Camp David proposal, and Clinton's last plan and Barak's plan, is pretty much what Ben Eliezer described. The places I mentioned are pretty much those being incorporated within Israel, along with others. A second crucial omission is that there cannot be "generous concessions" because there cannot be territorial concessions at all, any more than when Russia withdrew from Afghanistan or Germany from occupied France.
What's called "Jerusalem" extends extensively in all directions, separating Ramallah to the north from Bethlehem to the south, and effectively partitioning the West Bank. Ma'ale Adumim is called in the US press "a neighborhood of Jerusalem"; in fact, it is a city constructed by the US and Israel, primarily during the Oslo period, well to the east of Jerusalem. Its planned borders are supposed to reach to a few kilometers from Jericho. Jericho itself is now surrounded by a seven-foot deep trench to prevent people from getting in and out-and the same is planned for other cities. That means that the "Jerusalem" salient effectively bisects the West Bank, separating the Palestinian sections into two enclaves; and the whole Palestinian region is separated from the traditional center of Palestinian life in Jerusalem (now vastly expanded, with Israeli settlement only). There's another salient to the North, which effectively separates the northern and central regions. Discussion of Gaza is vague, but judging by settlement and development patters, something similar is probably planned. Remember that all the settlements are within vast infrastructure projects designed to integrate them within Israel and remove West Bank Palestinians from sight, contained within their enclaves.
These are the forthcoming and generous concessions. They're well understood. I'll just end with the comment by one of the leading Israeli doves, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was the chief negotiator under Barak and is indeed a Labor dove - pretty much at the extreme. In an academic book written in 1998 in Hebrew, just before he entered the government, he pointed out, perfectly accurately, that the goal of the Oslo negotiations is to establish a situation of "permanent neocolonial dependency" for the occupied territories. In Israel, it's commonly described as a Bantustan solution-if you think about South African policy, it's similar in essentials.
It's worth noting that among the leading supporters of this solution have been Israeli industrialists. About ten years ago, before the Oslo agreement, they were calling for a Palestinian state of roughly this kind-and for quite good reasons. For them, a permanent neocolonial dependency makes a lot of sense. Kind of like the US and Mexico or the US and El Salvador, with maquiladoras, assembly plants, along the border on the Palestinians side. This offers very cheap labor and terrible conditions, and there is no need to worry about pollution and other annoying constraints on profit making. And the people don't have to be brought into Israel, always dangerous. Who knows? Some of those derided as "beautiful souls" might see the way they are treated and call for minimally decent working conditions and wages. It is far better for them to be across the border, in their own "state," like Transkei. Not only does that relieve the threat of protection of human rights and improve profits, but it is also a useful weapon against the Israeli working class. It offers ways to undermine their wages and benefits. And furthermore it offers means to break strikes, a device commonly used by US manufacturers, who develop excess capacity abroad that can be used to break strikes here: the Caterpillar strike a few years ago is an illustration. For example, there was an effort to privatize the ports and the Israel union went on strike. Industrialists had a problem. They could use an Egyptian port or a port in Cyprus to break the strike, but they're too far away. On the other hand, if they had a port in Gaza, that would be ideal. With the collaboration of the authorities in the neocolonial dependency, port operations could be transferred there. The strike of Israeli workers could be broken, and the ports transferred to unaccountable private hands. That's a good reason to be in favor of a Palestinian state in a condition of permanent neocolonial dependency. The story should be familiar in Toledo.
Israel itself is - not surprisingly - becoming very much like the United States. It now has tremendous inequality, very high levels of poverty, stagnating or declining wages and deteriorating working conditions-rather like the United States, more so than most other industrial societies. As in the United States, the economy is based crucially on the dynamic state sector, sometimes concealed under the rubric of military industry. It's not really surprising that the US should favor arrangements in its outpost that look pretty much like the United States itself...
--Noam Chomsky, from "Prospects for Peace in the Middle East,"
The University of Toledo, March 4, 2001
<http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/prospects_for_peace.htm>