CHOMSKY ON THE ISRAEL WARS

From Democracy Now:

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah. Well, he's correct that hundreds of rockets have been fired, and naturally that has to be stopped. But he didn't mention, or maybe at least in this comment, that the rockets were fired after the heavy Israeli attacks against Lebanon, which killed -- well, latest reports, maybe 60 or so people and destroyed a lot of infrastructure. As always, things have precedence, and you have to decide which was the inciting event. In my view, the inciting event in the present case, events, are those that I mentioned -- the constant intense repression; plenty of abductions; plenty of atrocities in Gaza; the steady takeover of the West Bank, which, in effect, if it continues, is just the murder of a nation, the end of Palestine; the abduction on June 24 of the two Gaza civilians; and then the reaction to the abduction of Corporal Shalit. And there's a difference, incidentally, between abduction of civilians and abduction of soldiers. Even international humanitarian law makes that distinction.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what that distinction is?

NOAM CHOMSKY: If there's a conflict going on, aside physical war, not in a military conflict going on, abduction -- if soldiers are captured, they are to be treated humanely. But it is not a crime at the level of capture of civilians and bringing them across the border into your own country. That's a serious crime. And that's the one that's not reported. And, in fact, remember that -- I mean, I don’t have to tell you that there are constant attacks going on in Gaza, which is basically a prison, huge prison, under constant attack all the time: economic strangulation, military attack, assassinations, and so on. In comparison with that, abduction of a soldier, whatever one thinks about it, doesn't rank high in the scale of atrocities.

And

The United States regards Israel as virtually a militarized offshoot, and it protects it from criticism or actions and supports passively and, in fact, overtly supports its expansion, its attacks on Palestinians, its progressive takeover of what remains of Palestinian territory, and its acts to, well, actually realize a comment that Moshe Dayan made back in the early ’70s when he was responsible for the Occupied Territories. He said to his cabinet colleagues that we should tell the Palestinians that we have no solution for you, that you will live like dogs, and whoever will leave will leave, and we'll see where that leads. That's basically the policy. And I presume the U.S. will continue to advance that policy in one or another fashion.

Click here to watch, read, or listen to the rest.

I've spent most of my life simply not understanding what the hell the whole Israel thing is all about. The US corporate news narrative simply makes no sense: Israel is pretty much always depicted as rational good guys; Palestinians and other Arabs are depicted as crazy religious bad guys. I don't know about you, but that's just way too pat, way too black and white, for me to buy. It wasn't until I started reading Chomsky and others in the late 90s that I got a narrative that, at least, was internally consistent and made sense. Not that I think Chomsky has the absolute truth about all things Israel, but he is the guy I go running to when events over there start feeling like an Escher drawing.

Probably the most important piece of context that Chomsky hits on is that, despite conventional wisdom in the US that Palestinians and their supporters are insane, these people actually have reasonable grievances against the state of Israel that have much more to do with things like access to water, economic activity, and freedom to travel, than they do with wacky Muslim fanaticism. Underneath the relatively minor concern of religious differences lies a fairly conventional disagreement between peoples competing for land and resources. It must also be understood that after countless billions in US military aid, Israel clearly has an overwhelming advantage in this competition. That is, these days Palestinians are being driven into the dirt under the wildly oppressive Israeli steel boot--of course, that point of view never makes it into the US press, which, in its tireless support for the tiny but powerful Mediterranean state no matter what atrocity they commit, essentially amounts to pro-Israeli propaganda.

Now, with all that as background, it must also be understood that pro-Palestinian terrorists really do kill innocent Israelis on a fairly regular basis. The Israeli reaction to such violence is almost always over-the-top and unacceptable, and they've been keeping up the pressure for some years now, but the threat they face is real. For instance, in the interview Chomsky notes that this latest round of hardcore violence was actually started by Israel when they abducted a couple of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, for which the kidnapping of the Israeli soldier was retaliation--right, right, this has been virtually unreported in America, but then, that's par for the course. On the other hand, Chomsky strongly criticizes the Hezbollah retaliation kidnapping in northern Israel as extraordinarily irresponsible, in that such an action would clearly invite further retaliation which stands to get lots of Lebanese civilians killed. Actually, that's happening right now.

So it's all one big clusterfuck. All parties involved are behaving pretty reprehensibly, but it's pretty clear that, since the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was signed in 1979 which by and large removed any immediate military threat to the Israelis from neighboring Arab states, Israel is the biggest oppressor by far. And we've been both bankrolling their effort and running interference in the UN--just yesterday the US vetoed yet another resolution condemning Israel's actions, a maneuver our diplomats have performend countless times over the years. So, ultimately, it's up to Israel to end the cycle of violence by turning to diplomacy, and we could pretty easily pressure them to do it by withdrawing our support for them at the UN as well as the billions of dollars we give them for their mighty military machine. In other words, America is a pretty massive enabler to what's going on there.

Unfortunately, nobody in power here really wants to admit that horrible truth.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$