Peace In the Middle East?: A Review, Page 2
Chomsky also makes much of statements made by various Israeli generals, mostly in the Hebrew press, boasting of Israel's military superiority. Chomsky regards these statements as being as flawlessly accurate as tactical reports. It seems not to occur to him that the generals in question may be making these statements in order to reinforce Israel's detterrance. No military man makes public statements without the knowledge that they will be read by the enemy and will have an effect on the enemy's perception of one's strength. Such statements, in any case, prove nothing.
There are several major omissions in Chomsky's analysis that are worth mentioning here. The first is the Khartoum Conference. After the Six-Day War, Arab leaders met in Khartoum and adopted a platform which rejected all recognition and/or negotiation with the State of Israel. This event, noted by every reputable historian of the conflict as being of some significance, is mentioned nowhere in Chomsky's book. It is impossible that this is anything but a deliberate ommission. It is certainly an understandable one. For Chomsky to cite it would have destroyed his central thesis: that Israeli territorial intransigence is the major cause of the continuing conflict and not Arab rejectionism.
Chomsky also omits any mention of the Eshkol cabinet vote taken soon after the Six-Day War, which stated Israeli willingness to withdrawal from nearly all the occupied territories (Jerusalem was to remain united) in exchange for a comprehensive peace treaty. The Khartoum Conference rendered this offer moot, but it indicates an early willingness to engage in territorial compromise which runs against Chomsky's historiography of frustrated Arabs facing relentless Israeli "creeping annexation".
Chomsky's whitewashing of Arab policies and actions is most glaring in regards to the Palestinian national movement. His portrayal of the Palestinians is in keeping throughout with his early statement that they are "victims more than agents" (p. 9). An assertion which is wholly unsupportable by history. The Palestinians, after all, initiated the '48 War after rejecting the UN's Partition Plan, agitated to push Nasser into war in 1956 and 1967, and actively undertook infiltration into Israeli territory throughout the '50s. Furthermore, one can hardly call the wave of terrorist attacks inaugurated by Yasser Arafat's PLO in the 1970s, including the 1972 Munich atrocity, as being the acts of a people helpless before the winds of history. Chomsky also consistently refuses to mention Palestinian rejecion of any legitimacy to the Zionist movement and does not mention the more ferocious portions of the PLO charter, particularly the clause demanding that all Jews who immigrated to Israel after 1948 be deported. His comments on the use of terrorism by the Palestinians are couched in the most apologetic terms:
One continuing danger, recently emphasized by the brutal massacre at the Lod airport, is that of terror, a weapon of the weak and the desperate... (p. 107)This quote is particularly ironic, since, unfortunately for Chomsky, the assassins at Lod airport were neither weak nor desperate. In fact, they weren't even Palestinian. They were Japanese members of a Leftist terror cell who had been contracted by the PLO and paid for with Soviet funds. In fact, Chomsky does not comment at all on the international and ideological nature of Palestinian terror, perhaps because it might implicate some people and groups dangerously close to home. Nor, indeed, is he willing to recognize any role whatever on the part of Palestinian nationalist ideology, particular its rejection of Jewish peoplehood and national rights, in acts of extraordinary violence. He is eminently willing to ascribe the sins of Israel to evils hardwired into Zionist ideology, but refuses to subject those with whom he is sympathetic to similar scrutiny.
This becomes most glaring in regard to the war between Jordan and in the PLO in 1970. Chomsky refers obliquly to this brutal conflict, in disarmingly neutral terms:
There are tensions, which in 1970 erupted into a bloody war, between Palestinian Arabs and the largely Bedouin forces of Hussein. (p. 90)He has little more than this to say on the issue, as well he might not, since the destruction of the PLO in Jordan was entirely the fault of the PLO and the destabilizing effect of the campaign of international terrorism it undertook from Jordanian bases. This campaign culminated in an attempt by the PLO to assassinate King Hussein and take over the kingdom. Even this did not tempt Hussein to retaliate, and only when Arafat turned down an offer from Hussein to form a coalition government, with Arafat as Prime Minister, and a Palestinian terror group blew up three jets in Amman airport, did Hussein proceed to crush the PLO and its subsidiery organizations. Seemingly desperate to evoke sympathy for the movement, Chomsky declares the following:
[T]he Palestinian guerrilla movements appear to have been severely weakened, if not virtually destroyed...The commander of the Palestine Liberation Army stated in an interview in Beirut that "the PLO is about to be destroyed. Its offices, establishments, and apparatus ghave been all but paralysed, and its exitence has been rendered only symbolic." (p. 98)This passage was written simultaneously with the PLO relocation to Beirut and the Bekaa Valley with large infusions of Soviet financial and military aid, where it became, if anything, even more powerful. Chomsky is most certainly aware of these facts, he omits them in order to continue his illusory assertion that the Palestinians are the perpetual victims of the Middle East conflict, pure of heart and motive and relentlessly wronged by powerful and ruthless collaborators with American imperialism.
Chomsky's most glaring omission, however, and this is most certainly deliberate, is his lack of emphasis on Soviet imperialism and its relationship to pan-Arab nationalism. He concentrates mostly on American and other Western "imperial" interests (I have already expressed my contempt for this particular term in this context, but none the less it is necessary to use it if only to illustrate Chomsky's point of view), saying nothing much of consequence about Soviet influence in the region.
During and after World War II, the United States took over the dominant role in controlling these [oil] resources, displacing Great Britain...We may assume, with fair confidence, that the United States will make every effort to ensure that this great prize will be available, and to the extent possible, under the control of American oil companies. (p. 9)This is, of course, extraordinary balderdash. The Soviet Union's ambitions in the Middle East were as they were elsewhere: expansion and dominance. The Soviets engineered both the 1956 and 1967 Wars, the former by supplying Nasser with a massive, and thus highly destabilizing, arms deal, and the latter by deliberately feeding the Syrians false intelligence about Israeli troop movements. They sponsored Nasser's bloody invasion of Yemen and both funded and armed the PLO and its related groups, a fact that Chomsky also never deigns to mention. Indeed, the Yom Kippur War would have been impossible without Russian arms and advice, which essentially built the Egyptian and Syrian armies anew from the bottom up. One would think that, considering their role in starting two wars and aiding and abetting mightily in another, not to mention sponsoring the most powerful terrorist organization in the region, Chomsky might have a bit more to say on the subject of Soviet brinksmanship.
A third factor is that the Soviet Union appears to have rather limited ambitions in the Middle East, so far as can now be determined. Evidently, it wants the Suez Canal opened, and it will no doubt attempt to maintain its dominant position in Egypt, but there is no indication that it is intending to initiate or support further military action in the Middle East. (p. 98)
Furthermore, Chomsky seems totally uninterested in the pan-Arab movement in its entirety. A shocking omission, considering its centrality to the conflict with Israel from the middle fifties onward. Gamal Abdel Nasser is mentioned a handful of times, Assad is not mentioned at all. The nature of pan-Arab ideology, with its expansionist doctrine and total negation of Israel, is also left unexplored. Not altogether surprising, since that might also prejudice the reader in Israel's favor, were the extent of Nasser's imperial ambitions to be made explicit.
So much for Chomsky as geopolitical analyst. As a political historian, he fares no better. And in this case, we are certainly dealing with deliberate distortionism, as Chomsky has longstanding family and institutional connections to the Zionist movement, as he never tires of reminding us.
I grew up with a deep interest in the revival of Hebrew culture associated with the settlement of Palestine. I found myself on the fringes of the left wing of the Zionist youth movement, never joining because of certain political disagreements, but enormously attracted...to what I saw as a dramatic effort to create...some form of libertarian socialism in the Middle East. (p. 45-46)Chomsky's recounting of his personal history is most likely accurate. His recounting of Zionist political history is not. He portrays the Zionist Left as wholly opposed to the idea of Jewish statehood, with only Vladimir Jabotinsky's dread Revisionists (the villians of choice for all Leftwing historians of Zionism) insisting upon it, due to their "semi-fascist" ideology.
In opposing the Revisionist demand for a Jewish state in the 1930s, Ben-Gurion, a labour leader as well as a spokesman for Jewish nationalism, was also expressing a very different conception of what kind of society the new Palestine was to be. (p. 40)Chomsky's claims here, that the socialist Zionists did not want a Jewish state and essentially adopted the Revisionist position due to "the complex internal strife in Palestine in 1936-9, World War II, and the realization of the meaning of Nazi success for the Jewish communities in Europe." (p. 42) are completely false, and in my opinion, quite obviously deliberately falsified.
[T]he centrist socialists in the Zionist movement had abandoned any interest in a solution based on political parity by the early 1940s, and the Revisionist demands became the official position of the Zionist movement. (p. 42)
In reality, both the Left Zionists (with the exception of HaShomer HaZair and a handful of other groups on the extreme Left of the Kibbutz Movement) and the Revisionists favored Jewish statehood from the beginning. The question was not if but when and how. To understand their disagreement, one has to look to the founder of Zionist ideology, Theodore Herzl. Herzl advocated a full-scale evacuation of Europe's Jews to the Land of Israel. Literally, a wholesale transfer in one fell swoop. Obviously, this was quickly recognized as unrealistic by almost all but Herzl, who spent the rest of his life trying to obtain an imperial charter to this end. The opposition to Herzl, led by the likes of Chaim Weizmann, proposed a slow colonization of the land. This would be accompanied by the building of various institutions, the revival of the Hebrew language and culture, and a host of other endeavors of renewal and rebirth. Eventually, this Jewish society would ascend to sovereignty. This state would have a Jewish majority and would be open to unlimited Jewish immigration from around the world. It was hoped and believed that, by the time statehood occured, the Arabs, having seen the benefits brought by the Zionist settlement, would have reconciled themselves to Jewish statehood. Ben-Gurion later extended this concept to include the integration of the Jewish state into the united Arab Middle East which everyone thought was coming in the thirties and forties. Essentially, it would be a completely sovereign Jewish Commonwealth within a loose federation of Arab states. (The best information on Ben-Gurion's positions in this regard are to be found in his very interesting book, My Talks with Arab Leaders, which Chomsky seems to have skipped in favor of scouring back issues of The Guardian.)
Jabotinsky, a far more radical and uncompromising nationalist (his writings often remind me of Malcolm X), was having none of this. He believed the Jewish situation in Europe was catastrophic and that time could not be wasted in slow colonization. He revived Herzl's mass evacuation plan and that remained the position of the Revisionist Movement until Jabotinsky's death in the 1940s. He was also completely opposed to any partition of the land, and desired to include Jordan as part of the Jewish state which would be founded in the wake of the Jewish transfer. At no time did the socialist Zionists adopt the Revisionist's mass evacuation plan or any of Jabotinsky's territorial demands.
In short, Chomsky is full of it on this point. And rather obviously so. His motives are fairly transparent. As an advocate of "socialist binationalism", in other words, the end of the Jewish state, he seeks to disarm his critics by attempting to place himself within the mainstream of Zionist opinion. This is nothing less than breathtakingly dishonest. There were sections of the Zionist Movement which advocated binationalism, but they were, as is Chomsky, on the fringes of the movement, and with the founding of the state quickly faded into history. It should be noted that when the time came to sign Israel's Declaration of Independence, these factions did not hesitate to do so, along with all the other major political parties, Zionist and non-Zionist.
There is, of course, a great deal more, but these are the major flaws in Chomsky's analysis. As to the big picture, this is, of course, a matter of opinion. I personally find Chomsky's point of view that Israeli militarism and American imperialism are the major stumbling blocks in the way of a peace settlement in the region to be absurd on their face. Others may well disagree with me, but to prove their points, they would have to display a great deal more knowledge and perception than the amateurish gadflyism on display in this volume.
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