[Doug - my ISP shut down my account while I was out of town last month. Could you post this to the list for me? Thanks.]
>[just because you post it, doesn't mean you totally agree. Chomsky
>by the way has said corporations are fascist and is of the view
>America was fascist during World War II.]
>http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_septoct_2002/chomsky.html
>
>The Crimes of 'Intcom'
>By Noam Chomsky
>
>...One does not read that for 25 years the United States has barred
>the efforts of the international
>community to achieve a diplomatic settlement of the
>Israeli-Palestinian conflict along the lines
>repeated, in essence, in the Saudi proposal adopted by the Arab
>League in March 2002. That
>initiative has been widely acclaimed as a historic opportunity that
>can only be realized if Arab
>states agree at last to accept the existence of Israel. In fact,
>Arab states (along with the
>Palestine Liberation Organization) have repeatedly done so since
>January 1976, when they joined the
>rest of the world in backing a U.N. Security Council resolution
>calling for a political settlement
>based on Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories with
>"appropriate arrangements ... to
>guarantee ... the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political
>independence of all states in
>the area and their right to live in peace within secure and
>recognized borders"...
I had thought that the Arab states and the PLO made it clear back in 1976 that, in their eyes, Israel was not a "state". "States" have rights to live in peace within secure and recognized borders. "Zionist entities" do not. Am I misremembering the history, or is Chomsky lying to us? Brad DeLong
---
Israel's UN ambassador Chaim Herzog accused the PLO of drafting the January 1976 Security Council resolution calling for recognition of Israel by all states in the region including a Palestinian state. All the Arab states backed the resolution, including Syria. It was not much different from the later Saudi "Fahd plan" of 1981.
The resolution was in line with the PLO's then-current "theory of stages" in which the Arabs would recognize Israel as the first step towards some future recapture of all Palestine. This was recognized by most people as ideological cover for a recent decisive shift among the PLO leadership towards a two-state solution.
If you're into comparisons, Israel's position at the time under the Rabin government was that Israel would never negotiate with the PLO even if it renounced terrorism and recognized Israel. Israel therefore boycotted the Security Council session and the US vetoed the resolution.
Seth