Peace In the Middle East: A Review, Page 3
II.
The fifth chapter of Peace in the Middle East?, the only one which differs in a substantial way from the others, is essentially a long polemic by Chomsky against his critics and, it seems at times, the entire Jewish Left-Liberal population of the United States. Chomsky is not a man well suited to debate, and his rhetoric jumps from strident to hysterical in a fascinatingly short time. Clearly, we are dealing here with a surprisingly fragile ego for a man of his accomplishments. There is also a remarkable amount of outright lying in this chapter, far more so then the others, where Chomsky's sins are mostly ones of omission and bias rather than outright falsification. Chomsky has a bizarre tendancy (which continues to this day) to argue that he did not say what, in fact, he quite clearly did say and was rather emphatic about. This relentless bad faith that typifies Chomsky's style of argumentation strikes me as a combination of cowardice and arrogance. Chomsky seems to be both terrified of having to defend some of his more grotesque conclusions, and to be simultaneously convinced that he is demonstrably smarter than everyone else and none of us will be swift enough to catch him in his rhetorical sleights of hand. I think this may be due to Chomsky's perception of himself as preaching to two audiences. One, the radical Left audience who come to Chomsky specifically for his uncompromising extremism; and the second, a more mainstream audience before whom he fears being discredited by that same extremism. This attempt to speak in two voices leads to some fascinating moments of cognitive dissonance and outright, baldfaced lying. Taken all together, this final chapter displays a Chomsky more recognizable to us today than the one we meet in the previous essays: petulant, patronizing, insulting, and almost spectacularly dishonest. It isn't pretty stuff, but it says a lot about what can happen when men begin to believe the rumors of their own genius.
Most of the chapter is spent denouncing a series of specific figures on the American Left, almost all of them Jews, and disparaging their criticisms of Chomsky and his fellow travelers on the subject of Israel. Chomsky does not spend time beating around the bush, he calls them all a bunch of damn liars and keeps doing so for thiry-odd pages:
Irving Howe wrote [of New Left doctrine on Israel] that "Jewish boys and girls, children of the generation that saw Auschwitz, hate democratic Israel and celebrate as revolutionary the Egyptian dictatorship." ...He gave no examples of any celebration of the Egyptian dictatorship. In fact, he did not refer at all to the scanty New Left literature on the subject he was discussing. Nathan Glazer went still further: "It is clear", he asserted, "that the New Left has an overwhelming and unbendable tendency to support the Arabs and to oppose Israel." Glazer presented no evidence whatsoever to support this categorical judgement and was unpurterbed when presented with substantial evidence showing that it was false. (p. 132)We are presented with only Chomsky's word on this "substantial evidence", and on the exagerrative quality of Howe's comments. Considering the plethora of balderdash encountered in the previous four chapters, I am afraid I am not prone to giving Chomsky the benefit of the doubt on this one. At any rate, Chomsky's assertion offends the common sense. The idea that the New Left would be anything other than hostile to Israel, as an ally of the United States and enemy both of Third World radicalism and Soviet expansionism is a categorical absurdity.
More hilarious, however, is the following:
[I.F] Stone and I, according to [Seymour] Lipset, haveThis has to be the most incompetent use of the straw-man argument I have ever witnessed. Firstly, Lipset's use of quotation marks is, in my opinon at least, quite obviously intended to mock the ludicrousness of such ideas and not to imply that they are a direct quotation from the works of either Stone or Chomsky. In any case, Chomsky is hardly one to be accusing anyone of not correctly sourcing their writings. Secondly, when Chomsky claims he has never written what Lipset says he wrote, he is lying outright. Not only has he written such things, he has written them in this book.
"a commitment which currently involves defining the al-Fatah terrorists as 'left-wing guerrillas' and Israel as 'a collaborator with imperialism', if not worse. One doubts whether even the most sophisticated presentation of Israel's case could ever regain their support."
Note the quotation marks around the phrases "left-wing guerrillas" and "a collaborator with imperialism", the implication being, presumably, that these phrases were taken from our writings...All of this is complete fabrication. The alleged quotations do not exist. I have discussed Fatah, not identifying it as a left-wing movement, which would be nonsensical, but pointing out that it contains left-wing elements, as, of course, it does...Neither Stone nor I have ever written anything expressing the commitment Lipset attributes to us (without reference), though it is easy enough to find explicit refutations of these views. (p. 132-133)
In particular, [Safran] fails to see the significance of the rise of El-Fatah, which many observers believe to be a genuine expression - the first - of the national consciousness of the masses of Palestinian Arabs...Chomsky then proceeds to analogize Fatah to the Vietnamese communist guerrillas. Now, it may be that Chomsky considers "mass-based", popular, anti-imperialist, FLN-styled Third World liberation movements to be conservative in nature, but I am inclined to doubt it.
The explicit goal of El-Fatah is to involve the masses in struggle, now that they have recognized the futility of looking to the Arab states for salvation...
In short, it seems accurate to say that Israel now faces a liberation movement modelling itself consciously on others that have proven successful...a conscious mass-based liberation movement... (emphasis mine - Benjamin) (p.61-64)
As to Israel as a "collaborator of imperialism", while Chomsky has stated (as I quoted in the introduction) that such a description is "not accurate", I must say that, while this may be his ideological position, in practice it is clearly a bad faith argument. Chomsky is quite explicit about considering America an imperialist power. He also hands us reams of pages describing America's military and political support for Israel, support which he explicitly states as serving America's interest, i.e. the interests of an imperial power. How this does not qualify as accusing Israel of being a "collaborator of imperialism" is beyond me.
Without question, this section is the low point of the book, a deplorable piece of deliberate falsehood combined with a heady dose of character assassination. I think only Noam Chomsky could convince himself that he could write such lies and get away with it when the evidence to refute them is contained in the same book. Perhaps he thinks we're all too dumb or lazy to flip a few pages back and check out his claims for ourselves. At any rate, it certainly is no testament to the man's alleged genius that he feels the need to engage in such obvious lying in order to buttress his arguments.
Chomsky is, if anything, even more brazen in the footnotes to this chapter, denying outright the existence of anti-semitism among black radical groups.
...I did comment on the zeal with which some American Zionist sociologists seek out statements in obscure periodicals to 'prove' that the black groups are anti-Semitic, and I noted the exagerrated conclusions that are drawn as to the significance of these instances...I have yet to see any instances of anti-Semitism or even anti-white "reverse racism"... (p. 180)It is unclear to me how Chomsky manages to define The Autobiography of Malcolm X or Soul on Ice as "obscure periodicals". One can only conclude from this astonishing paragraph that Chomsky is either lying, willfully blind, or so self-hating that he is simply unable to recognize anti-semitism when he sees it. Reading passages like this, it is not hard to see how Chomsky in his later years became so sanguine about the subject of Holocaust denial.
Nothing, however, echoes with more resounding bad faith than Chomsky's self-martyrization in the face of his critics.
Were American resisters and deserters enemies of the United States, or were they defending the interests of the American people and their professed ideals? The semantic trap is obvious. Apologists for state power are always quick to identify opposition and resistance to state policy as an attack on the society and its people. In the case at hand, support for policies of the Israeli state may or may not be "support for Israel" in any reasonable sense of this notion, and criticism of these policies must also be analysed on its merits. (p. 155)This is a familiar argument to anyone who has argued with an anti-war protestor. They are not anti-American, they claim, they simply disagree with their government's policies. By the same token, they say, someone who criticizes Israel is not axiomatically anti-semitic. This is, in my opinion, a monumentally dishonest argument, particularly in Chomsky's case, for the simple reason that Chomsky is not criticizing specific policies but rather arguing that the existence of Israel is, within itself, unjust and the country ought to be dismantled. In the same manner of war protestors who proclaim their country a racist, imperialist monster from its origins and then claim to be only criticizing specific policies, Chomsky's stance on Israel is not political but existential.
In the essays that follow and elsewhere, I have argued that socialist binationalism offers the best long-range hope for a just peace in the region. (p. 33)Chomsky is eminently clear on this point: Israel as it is currently constituted is an insult to universal principles of justice and human rights. He desires it to be destroyed in its current form and reconstituted as a utopian binational entity. His criticisms, therefore, are precisely the opposite of what he claims they are. They are, in fact, "an attack on the society and its people", for he does not believe that Israeli society is worthy of continued existence. The fact that he claims to be shocked and dismayed that some of his fellow Jews, and liberal Gentiles for that matter, might disagree with demolishing a society of several million people for the sake of ideological abstractions simply cannot be taken seriously. As for his sniveling and petulent attempts to weasel his way out of acknowledging the extremism of his own statements, I can only say that I have rarely seen such undignified cowardice in an intellectual of standing. His statements are shameful enough, the fact that he makes them and then lacks even the requisite courage to stand by them under public criticism and argue their merits in good faith is nothing short of obscene.
Under any agreement that can be imagined for the near future, Israel will remain a Jewish state - that is, a state based on the principle of discrimination. (p. 37)
[T]here is, perhaps, a slender hope...This can only mean a programme of socialist binationalism, which might take various forms. (p. 129-130)
Israel is a Jewish state with non-Jewish citizens. By law and administrative practice it must be - and is - a state based on discrimination and exclusivism. (p. 153)
Like many other left-liberal American Zionists...Howe always skirts the crucial question...How can a Jewish state with non-Jewish citizens be a "democratic state", let alone a socialist society? (p. 161)
For my own edification, I must note my objections to Chomsky's stance on this matter. It does us no good to ignore such assaults. I live in Israel and feel obliged to defend its right to exist against its critics, however foolish I may believe them to be. There is no question that there are issues with Israel's Arab citizens and their place in a Jewish state. There is racism and there is discrimination. It is not Apartheid by any stretch of the imagination. It is also nothing particularly unusual in states with large national minorities. Particularly when, as in Israel's case, that minority considers itself an inseperable part of a hostile regional majority. I would gladly put Israel's record in regards to its Arab minority up against that of any of the states of Europe or Asia, or even the United States, and certainly against the record of the Arab states, many of whom brutally persecute their national or religious minorities if they have not exprelled them outright.
I also violently disagree with Chomsky that Israel is a state based in discrimination. It is a state based on identification with the Jewish people. Contrary to Chomsky, I do not see this as a cosmic evil fundamentally different from France, Japan, Turkey, or a multitude of other countries, including our myriad Arab and Muslim neighbors. Indeed, in comparison to many other countries Israel is immensely liberal, granting its minorities substantial legal and religious autonomy. I am not naive, however, it is very difficult to be an Arab in Israel, especially at moments like this, when the conflict is so inflamed and bitter. There is no question that aspects of Israel's culture and society will and ought to be changed. I believe this can happen within the framework of a Jewish state. Israel can fulfill the human rights of its minorities while also expressing the national rights of the Jewish people. I would argue, furthermore, that Israel's existence is essential to both the national and human rights of the Jewish people. I agree with Hannah Arendt that the experience of the Jews in World War II bears out the position that the guarantee of human rights is impossible without first the guarantee of national rights. Were the Arab peoples living in a single Arab state surrounded by twenty-odd Jewish ones, I rather think they would feel the same way.
Thus, I must dissent from Chomsky's position that only socialist binationalism is a just solution to the conflict, as it would deny the Jewish people the sole expression of their national, collective rights, and thus also their essential rights as human beings. Furthermore, seeing as how no socialist binational state has ever existed in history, let alone between two warring ethnic groups with a history of violent enmity, I am not inclined to trust to the feasibility of such a project, even if argued in the best of faith and by the most airtight logic. On both counts, Chomsky fails miserably.
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