[Peace-discuss] Approximately the Bush Position

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Noam Chomsky: Obama’s Stance on Gaza Crisis
	“Approximately the Bush Position”
	Democracy Now! January 23, 2009

JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama has made his first substantive remarks on the 
crisis in Gaza since being elected. Obama was speaking at the State Department, 
flanked by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as he named two key envoys. 
Retired Senate majority leader George Mitchell, who negotiated a lasting 
agreement in Northern Ireland, will be Middle East envoy. And Richard Holbrooke, 
who brokered a deal in the Balkans in the mid-1990s, will be envoy to 
Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In his remarks, Obama backed Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza as a defensive 
move against Hamas rocket fire but also said he was deeply concerned about the 
humanitarian situation for Palestinians in Gaza. The twenty-two-day assault 
killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians, at least a third 
children. More than 5,500 were injured. Thirteen Israelis were killed over the 
same period, ten of them soldiers, and four by friendly fire...

AMY GOODMAN: A Hamas spokesperson told Al Jazeera television Obama’s position 
toward the Palestinians doesn’t represent a change. Osama Hamdan said, “I think 
this is an unfortunate start for President Obama in the region and the Middle 
East issue. And it looks like the next four years, if it continues with the same 
tone, will be a total failure.”

Well, for more on this, we are joined by Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics 
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for over half-a-century. He has 
written over a hundred books, including Failed States: The Abuse of Power and 
the Assault on Democracy ... let’s start off by your response to President 
Obama’s statement and whether you think it represents a change.

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s approximately the Bush position. He began by saying that 
Israel, like any democracy, has a right to defend itself. That’s true, but 
there’s a gap in the reasoning. It has a right to defend itself. It doesn’t 
follow that it has a right to defend itself by force. So we might agree, say, 
that, you know, the British army in the United States in the colonies in 1776 
had a right to defend itself from the terror of George Washington’s armies, 
which was quite real, but it didn’t follow they had a right to defend themselves 
by force, because they had no right to be here. So, yes, they had a right to 
defend themselves, and they had a way to do it—namely, leave. Same with the 
Nazis defending themselves against the terror of the partisans. They have no 
right to do it by force. In the case of Israel, it’s exactly the same. They have 
a right to defend themselves, and they can easily do it. One, in a narrow sense, 
they could have done it by accepting the ceasefire that Hamas proposed right 
before the invasion—I won’t go through the details—a ceasefire that had been in 
place and that Israel violated and broke.

But in a broader sense—and this is a crucial omission in everything Obama said, 
and if you know who his advisers are, you understand why—Israel can defend 
itself by stopping its crimes. Gaza and the West Bank are a unit. Israel, with 
US backing, is carrying out constant crimes, not only in Gaza, but also in the 
West Bank, where it is moving systematically with US support to take over the 
parts of the West Bank that it wants and to leave Palestinians isolated in 
unviable cantons, Bantustans, as Sharon called them. Well, stop those crimes, 
and resistance to them will stop.

Now, Israel has been able pretty much to stop resistance in the Occupied 
Territories, thanks in large part to the training that Obama praised by Jordan, 
of course with US funding and monitoring control. So, yes, they’ve managed to. 
They, in fact, have been suppressing demonstrations, even demonstrations, 
peaceful demonstrations, that called for support for the people of Gaza. They 
have carried out lots of arrests. In fact, they’re a collaborationist force, 
which supports the US and Israel in their effort to take over the West Bank.

Now, that’s what Obama—if Israel—there’s no question that all of these acts are 
in total violation of the foundations of international humanitarian law. Israel 
knows it. Their own advisers have told each other—legal advisers have explained 
that to them back in ’67. The World Court ruled on it. So it’s all total 
criminality. But they want to be able to persist without any objection. And 
that’s the thrust of Obama’s remarks. Not a single word about US-backed Israeli 
crimes, settlement development, cantonization, a takeover in the West Bank. 
Rather, everyone should be quiet and let the United States and Israel continue 
with it.

He spoke about the constructive steps of the peace—of the Arab peace agreement 
very selectively. He said they should move forward towards normalization of 
relations with Israel. But that wasn’t the main theme of the Arab League peace 
proposal. It was that there should be a two-state settlement, which the US 
blocks. I mean, he said some words about a two-state settlement, but not where 
or when or how or anything else. He said nothing about the core of the problem: 
the US-backed criminal activities both in Gaza, which they attacked at will, and 
crucially in the West Bank. That’s the core of the problem.

And you can understand it when you look at his advisers. So, say, Dennis Ross 
wrote an 800-page book about—in which he blamed Arafat for everything that’s 
happening—barely mentions the word “settlement” over—which was increasing 
steadily during the period when he was Clinton’s adviser, in fact peaked, a 
sharp increase in Clinton’s last year, not a word about it.

So the thrust of his remarks, Obama’s remarks, is that Israel has a right to 
defend itself by force, even though it has peaceful means to defend itself, that 
the Arabs must—states must move constructively to normalize relations with 
Israel, but very carefully omitting the main part of their proposal was that 
Israel, which is Israel and the United States, should join the overwhelming 
international consensus for a two-state settlement. That’s missing.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Noam Chomsky, I’d like to ask you about the enormous civilian 
casualties that have shocked the entire world in this last Israeli offensive. 
The Israelis claim, on the one hand, that it’s the unfortunate result of Hamas 
hiding among the civilian population, but you’ve said in a recent analysis that 
this has been Israeli policy almost from the founding of the state, the attack 
on civilian populations. Could you explain?

NOAM CHOMSKY: They say so. I was just quoting the chief of staff—this is thirty 
years ago, virtually no Palestinian terrorism in Israel, virtually. He said, 
“Our policy has been to attack civilians.” And the reason was explained—you 
know, villages, towns, so on. And it was explained by Abba Eban, the 
distinguished statesman, who said, “Yes, that’s what we’ve done, and we did it 
for a good reason. There was a rational prospect that if we attack the civilian 
population and cause it enough pain, they will press for a,” what he called, “a 
cessation of hostilities.” That’s a euphemism meaning cessation of resistance 
against Israel’s takeover of the—moves which were going on at the time to take 
over the Occupied Territories. So, sure, if they—“We’ll kill enough of them, so 
that they’ll press for quiet to permit us to continue what we’re doing.”

Actually, you know, Obama today didn’t put it in those words, but the meaning is 
approximately the same. That’s the meaning of his silence over the core issue of 
settling and takeover of the Occupied Territories and eliminating the 
possibility for any Palestinian meaningful independence, omission of this. But 
Eban [inaudible], who I was quoting, chief of staff, would have also said, you 
know, “And my heart bleeds for the civilians who are suffering. But what can we 
do? We have to pursue the rational prospect that if we cause them enough pain, 
they’ll call off any opposition to our takeover of their lands and resources.” 
But it was—I mean, I was just quoting it. They said it very frankly. That was 
thirty years ago, and there’s plenty more beside that.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Obama’s call to open up Gaza, to end the blockade of Gaza on 
the Israelis, do you see that as any kind of a meaningful turn?

NOAM CHOMSKY: It would—those are nice words. And if he did it, that would be 
fine. But there isn’t any indication that he means it. In fact, this morning on 
the—Israel has already made it clear, stated explicitly, its foreign minister 
Tzipi Livni, that they’re not going to live up to the ceasefire until Gaza 
returns to them a captured soldier. Well, that avoids the fact that Israel is 
far in the lead, not in capturing soldiers, but in kidnapping civilians, 
hijacking ships, bringing them to Israel as hostages. In fact, one day before 
this Israeli soldier was captured at the border, Israeli forces entered Gaza and 
kidnapped two civilians and took them to Israel, where they were hidden away in 
the prison system sometime. So, and in fact, according to reports I just 
received from Israel—I can’t give you a source—they say that the radio news this 
morning has been reporting steadily that Amos Gilad, who’s the go-between 
between Israel and Egypt, notified the Egyptians that Israel is not interested 
in a ceasefire agreement, but rather an arrangement to stop the missiles and to 
free Gilad Shalit. OK, I presume that will be in the newspapers later. So, yes, 
it’s nice to say, “Let’s open the borders,” but not avoiding the conditions that 
are imposed, in fact, not even mentioning the fact that the borders have been 
closed for years because the United States has backed Israeli closure of them.

And again, his main point, which he started with, Israel, like any democracy, 
has a right to defend itself. That is true, but deceitful, because it has a 
right to defend itself, but not by force, especially when there are peaceful 
options that are completely open, the narrow one being a ceasefire, which the US 
and Israel would observe for the first time, and the second and the deeper one, 
by ending the crimes in the Occupied Territories.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, the timing of all of this—can you talk about Election 
Day here in the United States, November 4th, what exactly happened there, and 
then the fact that it went from Election Day to three days before the 
inauguration of Barack Obama, Israel’s announcement of the unilateral ceasefire?

NOAM CHOMSKY: On Election Day, November 4th, Israel violated—violently violated 
a ceasefire that had held, free will, in fact, a sharp reduction in rockets, 
probably not even from Hamas. It had been established in June or July. On 
November 4th, Election Day, presumably because the attention was shifted 
elsewhere, Israeli forces entered Gaza, killed half a dozen, what they call, 
militants, and the pretext was they found a tunnel in Gaza. Well, you know, from 
a military point of view, that’s an absurdity. If there was a tunnel and if it 
ever reached the Israeli border, they’d stop it right there. So this was 
obviously just a way to break the ceasefire, kill a couple of Hamas militants 
and ensure that the conflict would go on.

As for the bombing, it was very carefully timed. And, in fact, they’ve told us 
this. They’ve told us it was meticulously timed for months before the invasion, 
a very target-selected timing, everything. It began on a Saturday, timed at 
right before noon, when children were leaving schools, people milling in the 
streets of the densely populated city, perhaps the most densely in the world. 
That’s when it began. They killed a couple hundred people in the first few minutes.

And it ended—it was timed to end right before the inauguration. Now, presumably 
the reason was—Obama had kept silent about the atrocities and the killings, a 
horrible, horrible story, which you can see on Al Jazeera and little bits of it 
here. He had kept silent on the pretext that there’s only one president. Well, 
on Inauguration Day, that goes. There’s two—there’s a new president. And Israel 
surely wanted to make it—to ensure that he would not be in a position where he 
would have to say something about the ongoing atrocities. So they terminated it, 
probably temporarily, right before the inauguration. And then he could go on 
with what we heard today...

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, I want to turn for a second to George Mitchell, who 
President Obama has tapped as the special envoy to the Middle East. Mitchell is 
the retired Senate majority leader, best known for helping to broker Northern 
Ireland’s landmark Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which ended decades of bloody 
conflict. In 2000, Mitchell was appointed by former president Bill Clinton to 
head a committee investigating ongoing Israeli-Palestinian violence. Sallai 
Meridor, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, welcomed Obama’s appointment of 
Mitchell, saying Israel holds him in, quote, "high regard”... Noam Chomsky, your 
response?

NOAM CHOMSKY: In Ireland, Mitchell did quite a commendable job. But notice that 
in Ireland, there was an objective, and he helped realize that objective: 
peaceful reconciliation. Britain took into account for the first time the 
grievances of the population, and the terror stopped. OK? And the terror was 
quite real.

In Israel, again, you have to look at what he avoided. He says, “Yes, we want to 
have a Palestinian state.” Where? OK? He said not a word about—lots of 
pleasantries about everyone should live in peace, and so on, but where is the 
Palestinian state? Nothing said about the US-backed actions continuing every 
day, which are undermining any possibility for a viable Palestinian state: the 
takeover of the territory; the annexation wall, which is what it is; the 
takeover of the Jordan Valley; the salients that cut through the West Bank and 
effectively trisect it; the hundreds of mostly arbitrary checkpoints designed to 
make Palestinian life impossible—all going on, not a word about them.

So, OK, we can have—in fact, you know, the first Israeli government to talk 
about a Palestinian state, to even mention the words, was the ultra right-wing 
Netanyahu government that came in 1996. They were asked, “Could Palestinians 
have a state?” Peres, who had preceded them, said, “No, never.” And Netanyahu’s 
spokesman said, “Yeah, the fragments of territory that we leave to them, they 
can call it a state if they want. Or they can call it fried chicken.” Well, 
that’s basically the attitude.

And Mitchell had nothing to say about it. He carefully avoided what he knows for 
certain is the core problem: the illegal, totally illegal, the criminal 
US-backed actions, which are systematically taking over the West Bank, just as 
they did under Clinton, and are undermining the possibility for a viable state.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Noam Chomsky, for Americans who want to figure out how to move 
now with the new Obama administration to end these atrocities that are occurring 
in the Middle East, what do you suggest? And also, what’s your viewpoint of the 
divestment movement? Many young people are urging something similar to South 
Africa, to begin pressing increasingly for divestment from Israel.

NOAM CHOMSKY: The position that people who are interested in peace ought to take 
is very straightforward. I mean, a majority of the American population, 
considerable majority, already agree with the full Arab League peace plan, not 
the little sliver of it that Obama mentioned. The peace plan calls for a 
two-state settlement on the international border, maybe with minor 
modifications. That’s an overwhelming national consensus. The Hamas supports it. 
Iran has said, you know, they’ll go along with it.

Is divestment a proper tactic? Well, you know, if you look back at South Africa, 
divestment became a proper tactic after years, decades of education and 
organizing, to the point where Congress was legislating against trade, 
corporations were pulling out, and so on. That’s what’s missing: the education 
and organizing which makes it an understandable move. And, in fact, if we ever 
got to that point, you wouldn’t even need it, because the US could be brought in 
line with international opinion.

	###