[Peace-discuss] Palestine: Arguments taking on Chomsky

[Morton K.Brussel]

[I found this article interesting, and Chomsky's response uncompelling, 
sometimes distorted, and arrogant. From a distinguished spokesman of 
the left, I found this disturbing.  What do you think?
Both come from ZNet. mkb]

Apologetics for Injustice in Palestine?
Responding to Chomsky on the one-state solution

by Noah Cohen; August 26, 2004

[This article was written in response to Chomsky's interview with 
Shalom and Podur of March 2004.  Chomsky has written a rejoinder to 
Cohen's article as well.]

It’s particularly interesting in the case of Palestine to see where US 
intellectuals and progressives decide that it’s necessary to be 
"realistic" and where "principled;" where they choose to accept more or 
less the general media consensus about "the boundaries of acceptable 
discourse" and where they reject it. In the case of Palestine, people 
who are generally on record as calling for forthrightness and honesty 
in the demand for justice in political discourse, who criticize a false 
"pragmatism" oriented toward the corporate media and academic political 
consultants and who question generalizing statements about popular 
consensus, suddenly become believers in pragmatism and the limits of 
what the discourse will allow. An interview with Noam Chomsky published 
on Znet under the title "Justice for Palestine?" (Znet, March 30, 2004) 
is an exemplary contribution to this genre of left apologetics. Since 
it contains so many of the arguments generally advanced to legitimize 
some form of continued existence for an Israeli system of colonialism 
and Apartheid—and to shore up rear-guard support for it among US 
progressives—it is worth examining in full. In general, the argument 
rests on two pillars:


  (1) Israel’s history of colonial occupation and expansion must be 
separated from all other colonial histories as a special case and 
special consideration must be given to Zionist colonial settlers as a 
historically vulnerable group;

2) Since this "historically vulnerable group" also has massive military 
power, nuclear weapons, and U.S. military and economic support, calling 
for an end to the colonial regime is unrealistic; it only hurts the 
colonized, and should be redirected to more useful activities.

  The first is a tortured attempt to meet arguments about justice; the 
second is an attempt to make them moot by arguments about realism.

These essentially are the two arguments that Chomsky advances against 
calls for democracy and equal rights for all the people of historic 
Palestine. In this case, their particular form runs as follows: a 
democratic Palestine, in all of historic Palesine, with equal rights 
for everyone would only end up making Jews an oppressed minority (moral 
argument); such calls are unrealistic in any case, and will only be 
used by Zionist extremists to further justify their program of ethnic 
cleansing against Palestinians (pragmatic argument). Palestine is thus 
not like South Africa morally, where in the discourse against Apartheid 
the fact that whites were a minority was not supposed to give them the 
right to maintain special privileges by military force—they were a 
colonial-settler regime, and special privileges were exactly what the 
anti-Apartheid movement was opposing. Somehow in the case of the 
"Jewish state" a colonial-settler minority is supposed to be able to 
maintain a privileged status by force on land seized through military 
aggression. Palestine is not like South Africa pragmatically, since 
calls for an end to the colonial-settler regime are doomed to failure 
because they will never get sufficient international support to be 
effective.

  As in the famous case of Freud’s "leaky-pot logic" of dreams, one 
should ask oneself whether these two arguments don’t rather cancel each 
other out—the first providing the unspoken assumptions and motivations 
of the second.

2.

Here is how the discussion works in Chomsky’s hands. Asked by 
interviewers Stephen S. Shalom and Justin Podur how he views the 
possibility of a "single-state solution, in the form of a democratic, 
secular state," he responds as follows:

"There has never been a legitimate proposal for a democratic secular 
state from any significant Palestinian (or of course Israeli) group. 
One can debate, abstractly, whether it is ‘desirable.’ But it is 
completely unrealistic. There is no meaningful international support 
for it, and within Israel, opposition to it is close to universal. It 
is understood that this would soon become a Palestinian state with a 
Jewish minority, and with no guarantee for either democracy or 
secularism (even if the minority status would be accepted, which it 
would not). Those who are now calling for a democratic secular state 
are, in my opinion, in effect providing weapons to the most extreme and 
violent elements in Israel and the US."

Reading these comments, one wonders how Chomsky understands the words 
"legitimate" and "significant." Do Palestinians ever qualify? Both the 
PDFLP and the PFLP explicitly proposed a "democratic secular state" in 
all of historic Palestine as early as 1969, and the foremost official 
representatives of the larger PLO umbrella organization expressed this 
goal within the same year. This continued to be the vision of the core 
left within the PLO for years to come. More importantly, the 
Palestinian idea of liberation expressed in the PLO charter of 1968 
rejected the colonial construction of ethnic and religious division: 
all the historic people of Palestine, regardless of religion, were 
considered Palestinians; all were entitled to freedom of worship. The 
PLO rejected not Jewish people, but colonial settlers and the state 
created for their exclusive interests. The "democratic, secular state" 
espoused by a significant portion of the Palestinian movement 
throughout the 1970s was an implicit concession to the settler 
community—a generous attempt to include settlers and their descendants 
in a liberated Palestine, provided that they were willing to renounce 
special privileges. This generosity was never answered by any 
significant movement within Israel. Does this Israeli rejection 
condition then the limits of justice for which Palestinians and their 
supporters should struggle?

What’s clear is that Israelis will necessarily determine the limits of 
the discourse for Chomsky; anything that they do not accept is 
"unrealistic." Pressed again on the subject, Chomsky becomes even more 
emphatic:

"The call for a ‘democratic secular state,’ which is not taken 
seriously by the Israeli public or internationally, is an explicit 
demand for the destruction of Israel, offering nothing to Israelis 
beyond the hope of a degree of freedom in an eventual Palestinian 
state. The propaganda systems in Israel and the US will joyously 
welcome the proposal if it gains more than even marginal attention, and 
will labor to give it great publicity, interpreting it as just another 
demonstration that there is ‘no partner for peace,’ so that the 
US-Israel have no choice but to establish ‘security’ by caging barbaric 
Palestinians into a West Bank dungeon while taking over the valuable 
lands and resources. The most extreme and violent elements in Israel 
and the US could hope for no greater gift than this proposal."

This last threat is rather curious. When I visited Palestine in the 
summer of 2003, the Israelis were in the process of caging Palestinians 
into a system of open-air prisons in the name of "security," and were 
busily annexing their land to settlements, even as representatives of 
the Palestinian Authority were meeting with Sharon and Bush to discuss 
the "Road Map to Peace." None of this required anyone proposing a 
"democratic, secular state"—since that, according to Chomsky, wasn’t 
even on the table.

  3.

It’s especially disturbing to see Chomsky so consistently placing the 
limits of activism at the limits of the prevailing discourse—what is 
"taken seriously" by "the Israeli public" or "the US public" or 
"internationally"

In his article "The Bounds of Thinkable Thought" (The Progressive, 
1986), Chomsky argued that a genuine criticism of U.S. imperial 
policies in Vietnam had been kept out of the mainstream political 
debate largely through a process of self-censorship oriented toward the 
boundaries of acceptable discourse. According to Chomsky, anyone not 
wishing to be considered "beyond the pale" knew that it was necessary 
to funnel all opposition to U.S. policy through the discourse of 
"winability"—not to challenge U.S. goals in Vietnam, but rather to 
challenge tactics and strategy. The prevailing discourse allowed for 
two positions:

1) the U.S. was successfully defending democracy in Vietnam, and could 
win the war by intensifying its military operations;

  2) the U.S. was attempting to defend democracy in Vietnam, but its 
possibilities for success were increasingly poor, and casualties both 
to U.S. soldiers and to the Vietnamese made the war unsupportable from 
the perspective of a cost-benefit analysis. According to this model, 
even those within the mainstream debate who may not have supported the 
basic assumptions of the discourse—e.g. those who recognized that the 
U.S. was in Vietnam in order to pursue U.S. regional hegemony, against 
the interests of the people who lived there—learned to couch their 
opposition within the acceptable terms. This was done to preserve 
"credibility" and to serve the pragmatic goal of ending the war.

As Chomsky observed, this means that the basic assumptions at work in 
U.S. propaganda for its various wars of expansion and domination are 
never significantly challenged within mainstream debate. This makes it 
difficult to build a movement that opposes basic policies. Even a 
limited "pragmatic" victory for the opposition—e.g. success in shifting 
U.S. policy away from troop deployment in Vietnam—can be effectively 
absorbed within the overall system of empire. The subsequent writing of 
history created what was called the "Vietnam syndrome"—narrowly 
understood as a tactical problem in winning ground wars against 
guerilla resistance in foreign lands—and George Bush the First was thus 
able to declare the "syndrome" broken after the intensive aerial 
bombardment of Iraq and the deliberate massacre of tens of thousands of 
retreating troops and fleeing civilians on the Basra highway in 1991. 
By then the "Vietnam syndrome" did not include the deliberate massacre 
of civilians and other war-crimes, but only significant losses to U.S. 
forces.

 From someone with this analysis regarding Vietnam, it’s all the more 
distressing to see Chomsky’s repeated insistence on what the discourse 
will allow in the case of Palestine. To say that one should not speak 
on behalf of a democratic Palestine with equal rights for everyone 
because there is no broad support for that position and it will only 
play into the hands of Israel’s right wing supporters is rather like 
the equivalent argument continually advanced within certain sectors of 
the anti-war movement in the case of Vietnam (and still continually 
advanced today): Talking about U.S. goals in Vietnam as 
"imperialism"—or worse, speaking of "the right of the Vietnamese people 
to defend themselves against U.S. invasion"—will only make us all look 
like a bunch of left-wing fanatics out of touch with the rest of 
America; that’s exactly what the pro-war crowd wants us to do; we had 
better confine ourselves to criticizing the "winability" of the war and 
decrying U.S. casualties.

Now listen to Chomsky on the right of return:

"there is no detectable international support for it, and under the 
(virtually unimaginable) circumstances that such support would develop, 
Israel would very likely resort to its ultimate weapon, defying even 
the boss-man, to prevent it. … In my opinion, it is improper to dangle 
hopes that will not be realized before the eyes of people suffering in 
misery and oppression. Rather, constructive efforts should be pursued 
to mitigate their suffering and deal with their problems in the real 
world."

The right of return—a fundamental human right that Palestinian refugees 
posses both collectively and individually, and that cannot be bargained 
away on their behalf by anyone—is thus dispensed with in a few 
sentences referring to prevailing "international support." Notice the 
kindly paternalism with which Chomsky refuses to "dangle hopes that 
will not be realized before the eyes" of the Palestinian people—as if 
the right of return were something that he, or "we," could offer or 
withdraw to an oppressed community that is entirely passive and 
dependent on his benevolence, and not a right for which the Palestinian 
refugee community has organized itself in an international struggle. 
The right of return is not a "hope" which Chomsky can "dangle before 
the eyes" of Palestinians; it is a right which they possess and which 
they are actively fighting to realize. He can either support their 
struggle or fail to support it.

It is a striking fact about the entire interview that Palestinians 
nowhere occur as a people with historical agency. When Chomsky tells us 
that a majority of Israelis and US citizens now support a two-state 
solution, he fails to mention that the very recognition of the 
existence of the Palestinian people—in the face of half a century of 
genocidal Israeli attempts to negate their society, their history and 
their culture—is a direct product of Palestinian resistance against 
overwhelming military, economic and political odds. It also seems that 
Chomsky’s assessments of "international support" are very much out of 
touch with the global opinion on the streets. Wherever one finds masses 
of people showing serious opposition to U.S. and European systems of 
empire—whether against imperial wars, or against the instruments of 
economic conquest—the Palestinian resistance has captured the 
imagination and sympathy of the global community. "Globalize the 
Intifada!" is now a rallying cry from Europe to South America.

4.

Against the call for justice and equal rights for everyone—a call that 
we are being told is at once unjust and too idealistic—Chomsky offers 
his realistic compromise of justice: a two-state solution based on the 
Geneva Accords. (That is to say, if only the US would back it—which it 
just might do if we deluded pro-Palestine activists would devote our 
energies to that realistic solution.) Here is Chomsky’s calculus of 
compromise:

"Which compromises should be accepted and which not? There is, and can 
be, no general formula. Every treaty and other agreement I can think of 
has been a ‘compromise’ and is unjust. Some are worth accepting, some 
not. Take Apartheid South Africa. We were all in favor of the end of 
Apartheid, though it was radically unjust, leaving highly concentrated 
economic power virtually unchanged, though with some black faces among 
the dominant white minority. On the other hand, we were all strenuously 
opposed to the ‘homelands’ (‘Bantustan’) policies of 40 years ago, a 
different compromise. The closest we can come to a formula—and it is 
pretty meaningless—is that compromises should be accepted if they are 
the best possible and can lead the way to something better. That is the 
criterion we should all try to follow. Sharon’s two-state settlement, 
leaving Palestinians caged in the Gaza Strip and about half of the West 
Bank, should not be accepted, because it radically fails the criterion. 
The Geneva Accords approximates the criterion, and therefore should be 
accepted, in my opinion."

It’s notable that Chomsky recognizes, in the case of South Africa, that 
the compromise ultimately reached falls short of justice: even the 
official end of Apartheid does not undo the immense inequality in the 
concentration of wealth and power among white South Africans. In the 
case of Palestine, "realism" demands that Palestinians strive not even 
for this much, since Chomsky’s solution is to impose some version of 
what the anti-Apartheid movement rejected in South Africa 40 years ago: 
a militarized state "for Jews only" next to a system of demilitarized 
Bantustans. Make no mistake—in spite of all of Chomsky’s claims, this 
really is the solution offered by the Geneva Accords.

5.

It’s good that, at least in this case, we know what the "realistic" 
demand for a two-state solution looks like. In the usual variants of 
this argument from pragmatism, there is the added wrinkle that the 
spokesman only believes in a highly idealized, utopian two-state 
solution, which he can’t quantify exactly with details. It’s usually a 
two-state solution that isn’t like any of the proposals advanced so 
far; one that "really gives both sides equal rights" and has them 
living happily ever after "along side one another" and "in peace." Here 
Chomsky at least does give us something specific and historical—a 
solution based on the Geneva Accords.

  What the Geneva Accords are in reality—what they actually are meant to 
accomplish for Israel—is best expressed by one of their foremost 
negotiators and spokesmen, Amram Mitzna (the Israeli Labor candidate 
famous in the US as a candidate for "peace," and infamous among 
Palestinians as the man who instituted the bone-crushing policy against 
Palestinian children during the first Intifada). The following passages 
are culled from Mitzna’s article on the Geneva Accords published in 
Haarezt ("They are Afraid of Peace," October 16, 2003). I quote them 
here at some length because they demonstrate, better than any 
discussion I might give, that "negotiation" is here merely a 
continuation of colonial war by other means:

  "If the prime minister decided to implement the Geneva initiative, he 
would go down in history for confirming the state of Israel as a Jewish 
and democratic state, by agreement. That would be even more important 
than the declaration of the state in 1948, since that was unilateral 
and recognized by only a few other countries at the time." …

"For three years the prime minister brainwashed the public on the 
grounds that only force will bring victory.

"He and his colleagues made the public believe that there truly is 
'nobody to talk to,' that 'the IDF can win' and that if we use more 
force, the Palestinians will break.

"They told the citizens that if we are strong, the terror will end. But 
the situation only worsened. The assassinations became the government’s 
only policy and instead of eradicating terror threaten to wipe out all 
that remains of the country.

"The terror is intensifying, the economy continues to collapse, and 
society to break down, and the demographic reality threatens the 
existence of Israel as a Jewish state. But none of that has made the 
government change course and try a different tack." …

"…We conducted battles for Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and Gush Etzion. 
We fought for the permanent borders of the state of Israel, for the 
very existence of the state and its character, and we reached many 
achievements.

"For the first time in history, the Palestinians explicitly and 
officially recognized the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish 
people forever. They gave up the right of return to the state of Israel 
and a solid, stable Jewish majority was guaranteed. The Western Wall, 
the Jewish Quarter and David’s Tower will all remain in our hands.

"The suffocating ring was lifted from over Jerusalem and the entire 
ring of settlements around it—Givat Ze’ev, old and new Givon, Ma’ale 
Adumim, Gush Etzion, Neve Yaacov, Pisgat Ze’ev, French Hill, Ramot, 
Gilo and Armon Hanatziv will be part of the expanded city, forever. 
None of the settlers in those areas will have to leave their homes."

Two things are clear from Mitzna’s discussion: 1) the second Intifada 
has been far more successful than anyone would imagine from the press 
here in the US, or from Chomsky’s discussion, in threatening the 
continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state; 2) the Geneva Accords 
were meant to accomplish by means of negotiation what the Sharon regime 
has failed to accomplish by means of force—to break the Palestinian 
resistance, to give full and permanent international legitimacy to ‘48 
occupied land, and to increase by one huge bound the amount of ‘67 
occupied territory that would belong to this now fully legitimate 
"Israel." As Mitzna puts it, it is a matter of trying "a different 
tack."

At the same time, the Geneva Accords would be an international treaty 
giving legal legitimacy to a set of conditions on the ground that set 
the stage for Israel’s then inevitable ongoing colonial expansion. The 
agreement would ensure that the "Palestinian state" has no means of 
defending itself against Israeli aggression and that Israel would 
maintain the de facto power to invade at any time. The dense 
settlements around Jerusalem, which contain the highest concentration 
of settlers in the West Bank, and which effectively cut the West Bank 
in half, would be conceded as part of "Israel" forever. The only 
guarantee that Israel would not continue to expand these settlements, 
build more of them, and re-invade militarily whenever Palestinians 
attempt to defend themselves from these encroachments is a vague 
promise that the majority of Israelis "really want to live in peace." 
Once again, neither the history of Israel nor the general history of 
colonial projects is supposed to guide us in assessing the realism of 
this "realistic" scenario.

A far more realistic assessment of all such treaty negotiations was 
written during the Oslo process by Norman Finkelstein. Entitled 
"History’s Verdict: the Cherokee Case," the article is a sustained 
comparison between the Zionist project in Palestine and the US 
colonial-settler project of dispossessing the Cherokee people of all of 
their native land through a combination of settler encroachment, 
military assault and treaty negotiations. Within this process, settlers 
steal land; natives defend themselves; self-defense is widely published 
as "savagery" or "terrorism"; this propaganda is then used to justify 
military attacks as acts of "self-defense;" and finally treaty 
negotiations are employed to enlist a certain number of the indigenous 
people—either those who are simply exhausted by the sustained military 
assault, or those who can be bribed into collaborating—to cede more of 
their land to the settlers with the guarantee that the remaining land 
will be theirs "in perpetuity." Perpetuity lasts for about 10 to 20 
years, and then the cycle begins again (if it doesn’t simply continue 
unabated). The treaty negotiations are particularly useful in dividing 
the colonized within themselves over their possible hopes; stopping 
resistance struggles under the guise of a negotiated peace; and finally 
giving a spurious appearance of legitimacy to the entire process.

6.

There is unmistakable racism in the way in which Chomsky evaluates the 
realism of different scenarios: he tells us that it’s entirely 
unrealistic to imagine that Jewish people could live safely as a 
minority in a Palestinian state based on principles of democracy and 
equal rights. More disturbingly, this concern over the possible fate of 
Jews as a minority in a Palestinian state is so significant in his mind 
as to justify opposition to ending an actual situation in which Jewish 
people live as privileged colonizers on Palestinian land. Here we are 
supposed to apply the author’s concept of realism. On the other hand, 
it’s supposed to be realistic, in spite of all proven history to the 
contrary, for Palestinians to expect that a neighboring Israel, under a 
two-state solution, will respect their territory even though they have 
no arms to defend themselves. Or, even more amazing, that the US, under 
pressure from US citizens, could be expected to protect them. His hope 
for this rests apparently on the good will of Israelis and US citizens. 
(Even in the aftermath of decades of genocidal US policies in other 
countries, and protest movements that have never reached a level 
capable of stopping a US invasion.) Here idealism is supposed to apply.

In deciding what is realistic, we are supposed to ignore the most 
obvious historical facts: that Palestine had centuries of religious 
co-existence before Zionism—a co-existence to which all parties in the 
history of the Palestinian struggle for liberation have officially 
committed themselves; that the US, Europe and now Israel have an 
unbroken history of violating treaties and international agreements 
(including the highest conventions of international law) respecting 
territorial integrity—especially the territorial integrity of native 
peoples—and that this process has generally ended in near total 
genocide wherever such peoples have put down their arms and ceased to 
defend themselves.

7.

Chomsky’s concept of "realism" has a striking resemblance to the 
colonial discourse of "manifest destiny": Good or bad, right or 
wrong—so the argument goes—these are the facts on the ground; this is 
the way of history. In the name of this "realism," activists and 
intellectuals in the international community have simultaneously 
asserted themselves as pro-Palestinian, and yet taken it upon 
themselves to concede every fundamental right to which the Palestinian 
people lay claim. In pointing to the Geneva Accords as a legitimate 
compromise, Chomsky concedes all of the following rights on their 
behalf:
	• 	 the right to reclaim sovereignty over the land stolen from them in 
1948;
	• 	 the right of refugees even to return to this land;
	• 	 the right to reclaim the most densely settled land in the West 
Bank;
	• 	 the right to freedom of movement within the new Palestinian 
"state" (since the West Bank settlements—to be declared permanently a 
part of "Israel"—cut that territory into isolated cantons, and these 
cantons are in turn separated from Gaza);
	• 	 the right to full sovereignty over borders and airspace;
	• 	 the right to maintain an independent military capable of 
self-defense;
	• 	 the right to full control of resources.

In general, this means that the "best possible compromise," that 
promises to "lead to something better," requires first that 
Palestinians officially concede all of the material conditions on which 
the right to self-determination depends. It’s hard to see how these 
concessions could possibly lead to "something better."

More importantly for our purposes—however one evaluates the realistic 
possibilities available to the Palestinian people in their struggle for 
liberation—it’s impossible to see how anyone in the international 
community can help their struggle by conceding ground on matters of 
fundamental principle. Honesty in these matters is our minimum 
responsibility; if we believe that colonialism, racism and Apartheid 
are unjust, we should oppose them systematically on principle and fight 
them with every means at our disposal.

Faced with the apologetics of pragmatism, a friend long active in the 
struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, and now equally active in 
the struggle for justice in Palestine, put the matter succinctly: Since 
when is it the role of solidarity activists from the society of the 
oppressor to make concessions on behalf of the oppressed?

Noah Cohen works as an activist with the New England Committee to 
Defend Palestine in Boston, MA. He has traveled extensively in the 
Middle East, Palestine included, and has been fighting for the rights 
of the people of Palestine through the Palestinian struggle for the 
right-of-return and a single-state solution.
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