NOAM CHOMSKY AND ISRAEL
Levin., N. Gordon Jr.
Noam Chomsky has won considerable attention and respect, especially in segments of the American left, for his views on the Middle East. His views have also provoked much opposition. Chomsky has...
...Rejecting these prospects, many have called for withdrawal from the occupied territories and a clear policy of support for United Nations Resolution 242...
...The fact is that the historical essence of mainstream Zionism has been the quest for Jewish social, cultural, and national rebirth on the land in Palestine...
...Palestinian nationalism demanded an Arab state in all of Palestine west of the Jordan, in which Jewish immigration would be *Peace in the Middle East...
...This new consciousness will presumably provide the psychological and the institutional basis for security of Israeli life, property, and culture in a new Palestine...
...In fact, the only existing nation-state whose legitimacy is being challenged, either in the Middle East, or in the pages of Chomsky's book, is Israel...
...Courageous sacrifice for and .selfless idealism among fellow Jews combined inevitably with aggression and cruelty toward the Palestinian Arab enemy...
...After the war, Arab refugees were not allowed to return to the area that had become Israel...
...But I only criticize what exists and ought to function better...
...Relative to the Jewish population of the new Israel, a population soon to be more than doubled by immigration, the Palestinian Arab remnant was too small to constitute effectively a rival national entity able to impose a binational solution on the victorious Jews...
...Such a solution would destroy forever the valuable Zionist political consensus and social cohesion of "Little Israel...
...Moreover, even if it can be shown, as I believe it can, that Chomsky's radical universalism is not even-handedly applied but seeks to exact disproportionate sacrifices from Israel, his serious approach obligates us to ask not simply whether his socialist binational vision will work but whether it ought to work...
...Reflections on Justice and Nationhood, by Noam Chomsky...
...It has frequently been suggested that the Jewish state is to be Jewish only in the sense that France is French or England is English...
...He recognizes, and is quick to seek to undercut, the argument that the Israeli case is strong so long as the Arab-Israeli struggle is perceived as a conflict between a legitimate Israeli state and its Arab neighbor states: On this assumption, the Palestinians are not a party to the conflict between Israel and the Arab states," as an Israeli court ruled in 1969...
...Such limitations are inherent in the concept of a Jewish state that also contains non-Jewish citizens...
...I have never denied myself the right to question them or denounce them...
...This is the situation Chomsky probably has in mind when he says at one point in Peace in the Middle East...
...The Zionist leadership in late 1947 was bound by moral considerations, by world opinion, and by diplomatic self-interest to have tried to make de facto binationalism work within the Jewish state...
...If a state is Jewish in certain respects, then in these respects it is not democratic...
...In a Jewish state, "klein aber mein," there can be no full recognition of basic human rights, and at best, only limited progress toward a just society...
...Chomsky agrees with "Greater Israel" that for Israel there is no retreat possible from the post-1967 reality of two people in the same polity west of the Jordan, but he insists that the resulting binational relationship be equalitariansocialist and not colonial...
...Better to put it out of mind, as is commonly done in the United States as well...
...Now that the cold-war consensus is eroding, American militarists welcome the threat to Israel...
...The United States might therefore conclude that "Israel is no longer a suitable protector...
...Paradoxically, the historical moment when Jews and Arabs perhaps came closest to binationalism in Palestine may have been the fall of 1947 when the UN voted to sanction the partition of Palestine west of the Jordan between a Jewish state (600,000 Jews and 500,000 Arabs) and a Palestinian Arab state (1.2 million Arabs and few if any Jews...
...I never question the existence itself...
...But the discussion ought not to rest here since Chomsky is, in all fairness, under no illusions as to the possibility of effecting his program immediately...
...I HAVE ARGUED that Chomsky criticizes Israeli policy on two levels simultaneously...
...These should return to the states where hundreds of millions of Europeans already live, leaving the 3 million Palestinians and the "Arab Jews" in their own little slice of territory...
...It is to argue simply that "Little Israel" is the solution that does the least harm to the vital interests of all parties involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict west of the Jordan River...
...The "Greater Israel" perspective is as distasteful as Chomsky says it is, but where his response is to seek for a more inclusive or universalistic solution, my response is to say with the advocates of "Little Israel" that just as 1 million Palestinian Arabs should not be noncitizens in a "Greater Israel" so neither should they be included with all Israelis in a socialist binational "Greater Palestine...
...Chomsky's mood swings from a pained confidence in Israeli military predominance for the forseeable future to an emphasis on the self-delusion in Israel's defense doctrine...
...In sum, Chomsky's anti-Israeli utopianism does not help us to solve the fundamental problem of reconciling the maximum of Palestinian Arab self-determination with the security of a "Little Israel...
...But his attitude toward America is also crucial for understanding Chomsky's position here...
...In return Chomsky can be asked not to tar all American foreign policy indiscriminately with the Vietnam brush...
...In 1947 the Palestinian Arabs chose war over de facto binationalism, at a time when it was temporarily in the objective interests of both Jews and Arabs, even if for different reasons, to have tried to make a variant of binationalism work in the projected Jewish state...
...a federal state, comprising an alliance of cantons (autonomous districts), some with Jews in the majority, and some with Arabs...
...Chomsky's radical evenhandedness seems assured by his joint condemnation of the Jewish state and the Arab states as institutional embodiments of false consciousness, but this evenhandedness is merely rhetorical...
...Israel can hardly hope to make peace on its terms with the Arab states for the simple reason that these terms do not make provision for the rights of the Arabs of Palestine, now largely in exile or under military occupation, as they see their rights...
...Foreign Minister Abba Eban, supposedly a dove, can thus insist that the Palestinians "have no role to play" in any peace settlement...
...Yet perhaps Zionist history is more receptive to Chomsky's binational socialist vision than are the contemporary political realities of Israel...
...There are distinctions to be made among possible American policies in the world...
...They want instead to recover the more ethnically homogeneous and morally cohesive "Little Israel" of pre-1967...
...In the 1973 Yom Kippur War] This it failed to do...
...The regime must foster the rapprochement, accord, and cooperation of the Jewish people and the Arabs in Palestine...
...But if "Little Israel" advocates are the Israeli equivalents of Qaddafi, who are the Arab equivalents of Begin, Sharon, and the proponents of "Greater Israel...
...For their part, the Zionists remained ambivalent as to whether binationalism or partition would be the best means—assuming an inevitable erosion of the British commitment to Zionism—of preserving and numerically expanding the Jewish community in Palestine...
...It is true that Chomsky seeks to distinguish his program from that of the PLO...
...A Palestinian counterpart, founded on bitterness, frustration and despair and dominated by its neighbors, will be a mirror-image, perhaps even a distorted image...
...Any individual will be free to live where he wants, to be free from religious control, to define himself as a Jew, an Arab, or something else, and to live accordingly...
...Only the United States after all has both the power and a sufficient backlog of trust, on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide, to help and prod the Israelis to act in their own enlightened self-interest and make necessary territorial withdrawals in return for security guarantees...
...One may sympathize with them and respect their motives, but in fact, their program is unrealistic...
...It seems to me a plain fact that neither view can be adopted by people with any compassion or sense of justice...
...Israel was more universalistic because the 140,000 Palestinian Arabs remaining within its borders were given citizenship as individuals within a polity defined formally, if not always in practice, as inclusive for all citizens regardless of ethnicity...
...Their case against the security arguments and religious-national claims of "Greater Israel" is not based on Chomsky's universalism but on the very Zionist exclusivism that he rejects...
...The Arab minority in "Little Israel," about 17 percent of the population, is small enough to be included individually in the polity of a state that remains Zionist in its basic ethos...
...New York: Pantheon Books, late fall 1974...
...The Arabs suffered military defeat and by the time an armistice was established in 1949 the Israelis had gained control of a national territory far larger than that which had been granted them under partition...
...the highest body in the state: the federal council, consisting of two houses—(a) one representing nationalities in which Jews and Arabs will have equal representation, and (b) one in which representatives of the cantons will participate in proportion to their respective populations...
...A moving passage in Albert Memmi's The Liberation of the Jew recognizes the inescapable tension in Zionism between the claims of NOAM CHOMSKY AND ISRAEL 283 particularistic Jewish liberation and the claims of universalism...
...Given the strong historical connection between Arab nationalism and Arab radicalism in Palestine and elsewhere, Chomsky's concern is well taken...
...Far from seeing any constructive role for American power, or for advocates of "Little Israel" among American Jews and Israeli doves, Chomsky moves instead to a vision of internationalist transcendence, which means that America, American Jews, and Israeli doves can do nothing for peace in 1975...
...The leaders of the Palestinian Arab community and the elites of the surrounding Arab states all rejected the 1947 partition plan outright and determined to put the issue of Jewish statehood to the test of war...
...national autonomy of each people, with exclusive authority in matters of education, culture, and language...
...To stand with Israeli doves and affirm "Little Israel" against these alternatives is not to declare the moral legitimacy of exclusivism in any or all historical situations...
...The demographic basis for real binationalism in the Jewish state was destroyed by the results of the war...
...Basically, Chomsky believes that a successful return to "Little Israel" would reinforce Israeli exclusivism and would be unjust to the Palestinian Arabs who would continue to be denied a return as refugees to land and property lost in 1948-49 and who would be consigned either to Hussein's Jordan or to a reactionary, xenophobic Palestinian statelet...
...But each of these lines of criticism of Israel is linked in Chomsky's analysis to a related tactic of American imperialism...
...An Israeli state had emerged in which the remaining Palestinian Arab minority had shrunk to 140,000...
...This judgment must include the overwhelming majority of Israel's doves who believe exactly what Chomsky attributes to American Jews...
...But this is not the heart of the matter...
...The fact that over half of the world's Jews have found a way to fuse Jewishness with national loyalty to such liberal nations as England, France, and the United States is a positive achievement that Zionism has no right to question or denigrate...
...People will be united by bonds other than their identification as Jews or Arabs (or lack of any such identification...
...Talk of establishing such a binational polity in Palestine surfaced at various moments during the British Mandate years but with no successful results...
...Note the radical disdain with which Chomsky describes, only to reject, the sole type of negotiated settlement that could conceivably bring peace to the Middle East in the forseeable future...
...Critical to such an adjustment is that formal equality for Arabs under Israeli law be made real equality in legal practice...
...One can imagine an imposed solution with a return of civil control to Egypt and perhaps Syria in occupied territories and a superpower guarantee of demilitarization, and perhaps a federation of parts of the West Bank (a "Palestinian entity") with Jordan, along the lines of Hussein's proposals...
...But beyond this we may ask if Chomsky is simply being disinterestedly pessimistic about the political potential of "Little Israel...
...have been arguing that the historical evidence suggests the impracticality of binational socialism for all of Palestine...
...A IV ny consideration of the prospects for Israel's survival in the Middle East today inevitably involves some analysis of the realities of power...
...For Arieli and other Israeli doves such as Jacob Talmon and Yitzhak Ben-Aharon there is a direct connection between the protection of civil rights, social democracy, Zionist cohesion in Israel, and the recovery of the demographic situation NOAM CHOMSKY AND ISRAEL 279 of 1949-67, which, as we have seen, meant a large Jewish majority in "Little Israel...
...I hope it is evident by this time that Chomsky's views isolate him totally from any meaningful political contact with viable Israeli left and center-left opinion...
...For the Palestinians, the most tragic victims of the endless conflict, such a solution offers little...
...But the real concern of NOAM CHOMSKY AND ISRAEL 281 Ben-Gurion in the early and mid-1930s was that Great Britain might create a unified Palestine in which Jewish society and immigration would become subject to the will of a Palestinian Arab majority...
...Chomsky agrees with the PLO that Israeli statehood should end, but he insists that the succeeding socialist binationalist state should protect the individual and communal rights of Israelis...
...is Chomsky's effort to present a radical and universalistic answer to the post-1967 politicaldemographic dilemmas confronting Jews and Arabs in Palestine west of the Jordan...
...On this foundation, then, of particularism and violence on both sides there were created in Palestine between 1947 and 1949 not binationalism but two nationally defined states: a Jewish state called Israel with a small Arab minority and an exclusively Arab state called Jordan, a Palestinian Arab and Hashemite-Bedouin fusion...
...A " t the heart of Peace in the Middle East...
...Jewish settlers would employ cheap Arab labor, so today's Israeli doves believe a democratic and overwhelmingly Jewish "Little Israel" is morally superior to "Greater Israel...
...There is, second, the attack on "Little Israel" before 1967: exclusive, particularistic, and discriminatory in Chomsky's eyes...
...I have emphasized the gap between Chomsky and the great majority of "Little Israel" advocates on the Israeli left and center-left...
...This is a convenient position for Israelis to assume, since once it is adopted, moral issues vanish...
...It is a measure of the bias and irrationality of American opinion that Qaddafi is regarded as a fanatic, whereas his counterparts are considered moderates...
...At one point Chomsky quotes from an advocate of "Little Israel": Professor Yehoshua Arieli, at the convention of the Movement for Peace and Security in February 1972, warned that current trends would lead to increased dependence on the United States, the consolidation of a "vested interest" of war profiteers, reliance on Arabs for unskilled manual labor, the deterioration of the democratic structure of the country: "If the status quo continues, the internal situation is likely to veer sharply toward nonhomogeneity, nonidentification with the goals of the Jewish State [meaning internal democracy, social justice, and the fundamental values of independent Jewish labor], a lower intellectual level, internal disunity, and fragmentation...
...In theory, then, Chomsky challenges all variants of exclusivistic particularism in the Arab-Israeli conflict by proposing a fusion of the universal and the particular for both sides in Palestine...
...Chomsky quotes Ben-Gurion speaking at an internal party discussion in 1930: The regime in Palestine must at all times assure both the Jews and the Arabs the possibility of unhampered development and full national independence, so as to rule out any domination by Arabs of Jews, or by Jews of Arabs...
...Yet the book does have a consistent message: that the separate Jewish and Palestinian Arab nationalisms should be transcended in a new context of socialist-binationalism in all of old Palestine west of the Jordan River...
...An immigrant who receives French citizenship is French...
...and—most significantly for purposes of any consideration of Chomsky's position on binationalism— advocates of "Little Israel" seek to bring the Jewish-Arab demographic situation as close as possible to what it had been in pre-1967 Israel by returning the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to some moderate Arab authority...
...Some variant of a second class or a colonial binationalist status for these Arabs seems probable in a "Greater Israel...
...This solution is clearly anathema to Chomsky: Israel will have to come to terms somehow with the fact that it is a Jewish state governing a society that is in part non-Jewish...
...I have not tracked down so many myths in order to straddle this one with my eyes closed...
...But if Chomsky opposes PLO extremism, he does support the basic PLO goal of ending Israeli statehood...
...Israel's doves say that, given the violent history of Jewish-Arab confl-ct in the Middle East, the highest attainable level of Zionist universalism is most likely to be achieved, to be accepted as a moral obligation by Zionism, in a state accepted as legitimate and defined permanently by Zionist values and institutions...
...Binationalism for BenGurion in 1930 was first of all a defense of the institutional independence of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine, a Palestine in which the Arab majority was hostile to the Zionist presence and in which the British commitment to Zionism was becoming increasingly ambiguous...
...June 1967 found Israeli forces in control of all Palestine west of the Jordan and the 1 million or more Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under Israeli military authority...
...The "Little Israel" response to the post-1967 situation of de facto binationalism is provided by a coalition of Israeli left and centerleft political elements, including such diverse figures as Yitzhak Ben-Aharon and Abba Eban...
...The basic logic of the approach would be support for reaction throughout the Arab world and continued suppression of the Palestinians and other disruptive forces...
...The actions taken by its governments have often shocked me...
...He is really engaged in utopian thinking, in an effort to challenge all existing assumptions about the Arab-Israeli conflict with a transcendent program...
...Just as he is unwilling to join the Israeli doves, so he is unwilling to oppose an American policy of support for "Greater Israel" with an American policy of support for "Little Israel...
...He attacks the PLO aim of destroying all Zionist institutions by cautioning the PLO to be aware that Israel is not Algeria...
...Rejecting Chomsky's view that socialist values mandate a binationalist transcending of exclusivism, Israel's doves argue, explicitly or implicitly, that socialist values are more likely to be realized if a secure Jewish majority is freed from the morally corrupting task of ruling as an occupier over 1 million Palestinian Arabs, and can then return to the traditional Zionist aim of making the socioeconomic reality of "Little Israel" more just for Jewish majority and Arab minority alike...
...The Arabs, it will be urged, cannot be trusted...
...Israel is not to be let off easily with a negotiated settlement guaranteeing even the security won by "Little Israel" in 1948-49...
...Chomsky clearly does not advocate waiting peacefully until that utopian day when Israeli and Arab men of the left voluntarily join hands...
...NOAM CHOMSKY AND ISRAEL 277 fall of 1947 in the projected Jewish partition state that is roughly 60 percent Jewish and 40 percent Palestinian Arab...
...Chomsky writes: It seems to me not impossible that after the experience of building and living in New Montenegros and Lithuanias, Jews and Arabs may turn to a better way, one which has always been a possibility...
...Chomsky is concerned to see that Israel not be made legitimate and secure in a power balance sanctioned by international guarantees...
...I II...
...that "It seems to me that the situation of today is more like that of 1947 than of any intervening period...
...This society, in the former Palestine, should permit all Palestinians the right of return, along with Jews who wish to find their place in this national homeland...
...It is also to say that the Israelis have a right to continue to express in security their particular variant of Jewish national identity...
...284 N. GORDON LEVIN, JR...
...There is, first, the attack on "Greater Israel" since 1967: expansive, repressive, militaristic and arrogant in Chomsky's eyes...
...There is simply no precedent in Zionist history for a voluntary retreat from whatever level of Jewish self-determination and exclusivism had been attained in Palestine...
...Chomsky's rejection of Israeli statehood and of American power is so total that in neither case is he willing to make moral distinctions among the policies realistically open to either Israel or the United States...
...For its part, official Israeli policy has tended toward immobility between the claims of "Greater Israel" and "Little Israel...
...Little Israel" believes that the program of "Greater Israel" will not protect a Jewish Israel but will tragically destroy the essential Zionist ethnic and political solidarity of Israel in the process of "protecting" it by annexation...
...Whenever the United States tries through the Rogers Plan or Kissinger's diplomacy to settle the immediate conflict by encouraging Israeli withdrawals in return for security guarantees, Chomsky sees only a more subtle form of American imperialism and anti-Palestinian intent at work...
...Israel might embark on a program of "Israelization" to prepare the Israeli Arabs for more complete citizenship...
...matters of religion: under the control of autonomous religious congregations, organized as free statutory bodies...
...This is a matter of principle, not a departure from some ideal norm toward which the society strives...
...Assuming that all American foreign policy behavior and motives can be described with reference to the Vietnam War, the radical revisionist looks backward from Vietnam to deny the connection between American power and the survival of democracy in Western Europe after World War II, and looks forward from Vietnam to deny the connection between American power in the Mediterranean and the survival of Israel's freedom...
...First, I would want to ask how, in an era when all Arab leaders constantly inform us of the unity of a pan-Arab national identity, it is legitimate to equate a possible new Israeli exile to an alien Europe with the existing Palestinian exile either to another part of Palestine or to a neighboring Arab country...
...Note how quickly Chomsky moves away from the nation-state perspective...
...Other statements by Chomsky reveal that he harbors a fundamental moral disdain for Israel's doves and that his negative assessment of their political prospects is at least as wishful as it is objective...
...Since it is a matter of principle within a Jewish state, there will be no remedy through slow progress...
...The problem of the Palestinians, on the other hand, is difficult to face honestly and openly...
...regarding the status of the local Arabs, for instance, or the North African immigrants, or their excessive clerical indulgence...
...This question is important since unlike the Lithuanians and the Montenegrans, for whose nationalism Chomsky has such disdain, the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs both retain real freedom of choice on the question of national independence...
...American Jews might help in this process, but they will certainly not be moved to do so by Chomsky's unrelenting assault on their commitment to Israel's very survival...
...If one defines progress in "Little Israel" as a moderate process of adjustment in which Arab cultural autonomy is protected at the same time that many younger Israeli Arabs become more "Israelized," then one has described a course that is possible and not unlike the process of Americanization of ethnic groups in the United States...
...280 N. GORDON LEVIN, JR...
...we can rely only on ourselves...
...For these reasons, Chomsky has no real interest in seeing Talmon, Arieli, and Ben Aharon succeed with their anti-annexationist policy...
...The legal status of the 1 million Palestinian Arabs who came newly under Israeli authority in 1967, and who are presumably to be absorbed into "Greater Israel," is often left ambiguous by Israeli annexationists...
...286 N. GORDON LEVIN, JR...
...CHOMSKY'S APPROACH to "Little Israel" is ambivalent...
...For Chomsky makes it clear that he believes anyone who advocates a return to "Little Israel" and the status quo ante 1967 has "no compassion or sense of justice...
...Or Israel might declare itself binational and give the Israeli Arabs constitutional parity as a separate nationality within the state...
...All oppressive or discriminatory structures should be dis278 N. GORDON LEVIN, JR...
...It would follow then that Israel's doves, who oppose any largescale refugee return to pre-1967 Israel, are the Israeli equivalents of Qaddafi...
...Israel's war for independence and survival exhibited the connection, evident historically since the days of the Second Aliyah, * between Zionist exclusivism toward the Palestinian Arabs and Zionist inclusivism and democratic-socialist solidarity for fellow Jews...
...It will be based on the fundamental principle, already cited, "that whatever the number of the two peoples may be, no people shall dominate the other or be subject to the government of the other...
...To his precise counterparts in the American Jewish community, it seems equally obvious that the Arabs should stay in the Arab countries...
...But over and above the mythicizing of the endeavor, its exaggerated claims, inherent in all liberations by the way, its excesses and its injustices, henceforth it possesses a definitive historical justification...
...Paradoxically, it could be argued that this solution left Israel simultaneously both more universalistic and more particularistic than the projected Jewish partition state could have been...
...If the Palestinian plea for justice NOAM CHOMSKY AND ISRAEL 285 can be answered only by the undoing of even "Little Israel," then so be it...
...Chomsky's opposition to a "Little Israel" solution is entirely clear, though one would also wish to ask if there are not many nations in the world whose essential right to exist Chomsky has never questioned, and whose records on basic human rights are far inferior to that of Israel...
...Israeli doves do not want a colonial binationalist "Greater Israel...
...In this Hobbesian context the incentives for Zionists to respect binationalism were largely removed, and among the Israelis in general the moral restraints upon the passions of exclusivism and hatred for the Arabs were weakened...
...Note that at the core of Arieli's opposition to "Greater Israel" is his desire to preserve the relatively exclusive Jewish character and the Zionist ethos of pre-1967 Israel...
...On the one hand, he seems to say that Israeli doves are moral men, doing the best they can in a difficult situation, but that their cause is politically hopeless: Left-liberal Israeli commentators have pointed out that the consequences of maintaining the present borders are "becoming either a binational state or another Rhodesia...
...A citizen of the Jewish state, however, does not become Jewish...
...Any federal law and any change in the federal constitution can be enacted only with the agreement of both houses...
...I will go even further: I know and recognize the objections to the very principle of Jewish liberation...
...But Israeli particularism emerges from a tragic Jewish experience, in a region far removed from either the full protections or the full obligations of liberal universalism...
...This force cannot be overlooked, nor can its claims be lightly dismissed...
...In the "Greater Israel" thinking of the Israeli right and center-right, traditional national and religious claims to Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) are combined with pragmatic conceptions of national security and with technocratic notions of expansionist economic integration...
...Zionist socialism eschewed Trotsky's socialist universalism and sought instead to create a new socialist society among Jews in Palestine as an example to other nations...
...Unlike Chomsky, Israel's doves are committed to Jewish statehood, to "Little Israel" but definitely to an Israel...
...Whatever potential for social and political binationalism may have existed within the proposed Jewish state in 1947 disappeared with the bitter war of 1948-49...
...security can only be guaranteed through force...
...In the context of a regional conflict with the Arab states, Israel's moral position is strong—apart from the issue of the occupied territories, and problems here could be attributed to the Arab refusal to negotiate...
...and it seems probable that the polity of the projected Jewish partition state of 1947 would have looked something like the binational framework that Ben-Gurion described in 1930...
...The society will not be a Jewish state or an Arab state, but rather a democratic multinational society...
...The latter should be absorbed into the homeland of more than 100 million Arabs, leaving to the Jews and the Israeli Arabs in their midst the little slice of territory that is all they ask...
...just as no scandal, no error can make us doubt the necessity of decolonization...
...A large critical mass of Arabs inside Israel might well create more of a psychological proclivity for violent collective action, especially in response to urgings from the Arab states...
...There are, after all, many European states, and there is no reason why the people of Palestine, who committed no crime, should be dispossessed by European settlers of the Mosaic persuasion...
...The point is not that Ben-Gurion was hypocritical in 1930...
...The demographic structure of "Little Israel," and the fact that the Israeli Arabs have been acculturated to Israel for a generation, permits then an Israeli compromise between the claims of universalism and particularism: the members of the Arab minority are citizens in the polity but they cannot change the Zionist definition of the state...
...This is patently impossible, however...
...The projected Jewish state would have had a population almost evenly divided between Jews and Arabs and would have been binational de facto, and almost inevitably de jure as well, since its constitutional structure would have had to meet the reality of two peoples existing within the same state...
...Chomsky's answer is a vision of socialist binationalism, a concept he sees as challenging simultaneously the values and programs of "Greater Israel," "Little Israel," and the PLO...
...but Israel in 1949 was also more particularistic than the Jewish partition state would have been because in fact its large Jewish majority was able to define the context of Israeli citizenship according to Zionist values and institutions...
...Put another way, the bitter war of 1948-49, fought as it was in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, produced an exaggerated expression of the best and the worst in Zionism...
...But when the Arab-Israeli conflict is posed in terms of national conflict, it is quite unlikely that these aims can be achieved...
...Instead, Israel was established as a Jewish state and the Israeli Arabs, as they came to be called, had to content themselves with legal citizenship as individuals in a state whose essential character was to be determined by its large Jewish majority...
...Chomsky argues that Ben-Gurion was sincere when he made this statement and I agree, but I do not accept Chomsky's interpretation that the primary motivation behind BenGurion's binationalism in 1930 was his radical and class-based opposition to the Revisionist Zionist program of making the Arabs secondclass citizens in a Jewish Palestine...
...Little Israel" advocates know as well that if they hope to influence Israeli politics and policy, they must be able convincingly to argue that the security, the moral cohesion, and the Jewish character of Israel are best assured by a policy of enlightened self-interest on the territories, a policy that would trade occupied land for the best security arrangements possible...
...The first program is unacceptable to the Israeli Arabs, the second to the Israeli Jews...
...For Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, for Jewish refugees from persecution in Arab countries, and for Jews able to escape the Soviet Union, Israel is both a refuge and a source of renewed human dignity...
...In the Middle East Chomsky argues that a de facto Jerusalem, Amman, Riyadh, and Teheran axis existed during the 1969-73 period, and he charges that "Greater Israel" played a critical role in efforts by America to assure antiradical stability and control over oil in the Persian Gulf...
...That much is obvious...
...One of the unpleasant consequences of victory for Israel in 1967 has been the painful necessity for Zionism to confront again the question only apparently resolved by the Palestine refugee exodus of 1948-49: how should two culturally different, traditionally hostile, and numerically balanced peoples coexist under the same political sovereignty...
...Ben-Gurion himself moved from binationalism to partition when the latter position became a real option...
...Turning to Israel one finds in agreement with Chomsky's goals only a small group on the far left without political influence...
...Chomsky agrees with "Little Israel" that an indefinite continuation of military rule over 1 million Palestinian Arabs is politically and morally corrosive, but he insists that the remedy be in the direction of more universalistic equality among Jew and Arab rather than in a return to a more exclusive "Little Israel...
...The point rather is that since the primary intent of Ben-Gurion's binationalism was the protection of the greatest degree of Jewish independence available at that time, his 1930 binationalism cannot be used legitimately by Chomsky today as historical precedent for a return to binationalism at a time when it would mean a significant renunciation of Jewish sovereignty...
...Peace and time may confound much of Chomsky's pessimism in this area...
...Whatever else they may be, the men of al-Fatah are not universalists...
...But armed Palestinian Arab intransigence led to a total war involving civilians on both sides...
...Thus was born that Zionist fusion of Jewish equalitarianism and exclusivism that characterized the nature of the Zionist approach to the Palestinian Arabs from the beginning and had its fullest expression both in the concept of Avoda Ivrit (Hebrew Labor) and in the closed Jewish moral solidarity of the kibbutz...
...The Palestinian Arabs are increasingly becoming an organized force, certain to press their demands in conflict with the Arab states and with Israel as well...
...Indeed, Chomsky explicitly rejects just such an American and "Little Israel" course: While a settlement along the lines of the Rogers Plan and the United Nations resolution might bring stability, I believe that it will perpetuate conditions that have prevented the realization of the just hopes and the highest ideals expressed within each of the warring societies...
...These policies naturally carry a severe social cost and require an acquiescent, passive, frightened population...
...We must ask, do any significant political elements exist on either side of the Arab-Israeli divide that are prepared to permit their basic nationalism to be transcended by socialist binationalism...
...Moreover, during this war approximately 600,000 Palestinian 276 Arabs fled or were expelled from the territory that became Israel in 1949...
...But the real depth of Chomsky's moral animus to "Little Israel" is revealed in another passage: To a Colonel Qaddafi, it seems entirely obvious that the European Jews should return to Europe...
...In response let me begin at the most practical level...
...Broadly speaking, two answers—" Greater Israel" and "Little Israel"—have emerged in Israeli politics since 1967 to resolve the interrelated moral, strategic, and socioeconomic dilemmas created by this return to a situation of roughly equal numbers of Jews and Palestinian Arabs coexisting under the same sovereignty...
...Chomsky clearly acknowledges the utopian quality of his hopes, but, regardless of the immediate impracticality of socialist binationalism, he is not willing anywhere in Peace in the Middle East...
...Greater Israel" is seen by Chomsky as a willing adjunct to the American Empire...
...Chomsky claims that in the United States American Jewish hysteria over Israel has been used by conservatives to split the liberal community and to revitalize an American Cold War consensus lost in Vietnam...
...He asks that all previous national states and identities in Palestine be superseded by a new socialist universalistic framework protecting the particular culture of Jews and Arabs in the very act of transcending both...
...genocide awaits if we relax our guard...
...At one point he delivers the following judgment of the basic motives behind American foreign policy in the Cold War era: The United States has a great need for an international enemy so that the population can be effectively mobilized, as in the past quartercentury, to support the use of American power throughout the world and the development of a form of highly militarized, highly centralized state capitalism at home...
...BY CHOOSING WAR over partition in late 1947 the Palestinian Arab leadership had lost an opportunity, never to be regained, to impose a dual Arab-Jewish character on the small Jewish state...
...The overwh,,iii ing majority of Israel's doves on the left and center-left remain Jewish nationalists...
...Each people will have the right to participate in self-governing national institutions...
...It is true that Ben-Gurion did, to his credit, oppose Revisionist extremism...
...With this brief polemic Chomsky joins those revisionist historians who believe that legitimate moral and security concerns have played no role in the exercise of American power over the past three decades...
...The "Greater Israel" perspective is held by a coalition advocating permanent annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to Israel...
...Chomsky takes heart from the fact that Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders were occasionally recorded in favor of binationalism during the British Mandate period...
...There can be no immediate resolution of Chomsky's dilemma...
...yet Memmi, whose The Colonizer and the Colonized spoke for Arab liberation from French rule, speaks finally for Israel's legitimacy as a state: I do not underestimate any of the difficulties, imperfections or errors of this young state...
...Chomsky has now published Peace in the Middle East?, * a collection of his essays on the Arab-Israeli conflict, written between 1969 and early 1974...
...Any policy directed to these ends will lead to a continued destruction, to a strengthening of the reactionary and repressive forces on all sides, and perhaps to a form of recolonization by the great powers...
...An equilibrium between these two states lasted until it was unfortunately shattered, perhaps forever, by the June War of 1967...
...If there is some form of institutional discrimination against him, if he is not "truly French" in the eyes of the law or administrative practice, this will be regarded as a departure from the democratic ideal...
...The book is at once a critical analysis of post-1967 Israeli expansion, a challenge to the legitimacy of the pre-1967 state of Israel, and a radical-left attack on the nation-state system in both the Middle East and the whole world...
...Chomsky argues that the exercise of Arab power is legitimate if its aim is limited to forcing an awareness in world opinion, and finally in Israel itself, of the folly and injustice of continued Israeli statehood: Israel asks only peace, normal relations with its neighbors, and its continued existence as a state...
...This fact, rarely faced in a serious way, has always been the Achilles heel of political Zionism...
...What real human interests besides a satisfaction of Arab honor would be served now by a massive Palestinian Arab return to Israel proper...
...Two extreme answers suggest themselves...
...yet it does not follow necessarily, as Chomsky argues, that "there will be no remedy through slow progress...
...Chomsky correctly asks that American Jews give his views on Israel a fair hearing and he insists that Vietnam not be forgotten in a mood of pro-Israel hysteria...
...Just as the Zionist socialists of the Second Aliyah believed that their equalitarian values of exclusive Jewish labor were morally superior to a traditionally colonialist Palestine in which 282 N. GORDON LEVIN, JR...
...But even "Little Israel" is alleged by Chomsky to be connected with American imperial machinations...
...Also, I would ask why Chomsky believes that it would be preferable for Arab refugees to return after 27 years to Israeli Haifa and Beersheba rather than for the refugees to be resettled by Arab oil billions among their own people in just the manner that Israel has absorbed over 1 million immigrant Jews, many from Arab countries...
...Having given up their right to use the collective power of their state in their self-defense, the Israelis, in Chomsky's view, should come to rely instead on a new consciousness of radical universalistic tolerance, a consciousness to sweep over all Palestine from a combined Arab and Jewish left...
...Israel's motives combined fears for the security of the new state, a desire to utilize abandoned Arab land and property for the expected tide of Jewish immigration, and a hope of realizing a relatively homogeneous Jewish nation where Jews could live with confidence in a democratic framework...
...It would seem that Chomsky and the PLO disagree about how but not if Israel is to cease being an independent Jewish state...
...Apparently Chomsky's definition of the just rights of the Palestinians demands that the clock be turned back to before the UN partition of 1947 and that Israel be denied the right of legitimate statehood...
...Considering Chomsky's views has brought me closer not to him but to Israel's particularistic doves who argue that Israel must withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in return for security guarantees, because indefinite occupation means that Israel ceases to be even a formally universalistic democratic polity, and that Israel almost inevitably faces morally destructive future cycles of Palestinian Arab rebellion and Zionist repression...
...There are, after all, many Arab states, and there is no reason why Israeli Jews should be denied their rights by Arabs who happen to regard themselves as Palestinians...
...For Chomsky, the Rogers Plan and similar approaches represent American fallback positions to be used when it is clear that a hegemonic "Greater Israel" cannot protect America's regional interests: To establish the validity of the premise that was the foundation of its policy and American support for it, Israel had to win a quick and decisive victory...
...In the period before an internationalist left can succeed in transcending the nationalistic roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Chomsky apparently intends to be highly selective as to whose violence he will legitimate...
...to sanction even the short-run use of Israeli state power as a basis for a negotiated settlement...
...But it has long been clear that the rights and interests of the Palestinians are the concern of none of the contestants, apart from some inconsequential rhetoric...
...Unless great power pressure is employed—an unlikely as well as ugly prospect—the argument against withdrawal will always be persuasive within Israel...
...Chomsky clearly has his doubts about the potential for radical universalism in the PLO, and he finds it necessary to ask the PLO to renounce all hopes for a violent triumph over Israel involving "the destruction by force of a unified society, its people, and its institutions—a consequence intolerable to civilized opinion on the left or elsewhere...
...In all of Palestine west of the Jordan, with the Arabs comprising over 40 percent of the population, the "Little Israel" solution disappears and one must choose among traditional colonialism, secular univeralism, and binationalism...
...I understand the concept of political binationalism to mean the creation of a state constitution that reflects the existence, within its polity, of two culturally and ethnically distinct people, each with equal constitutional rights, as a collective people, to participate in defining or vetoing the policies of the state...
...mantled, and discriminatory practices should be condemned rather than reinforced...
...The essence of Zionism is Jewish solidarity, uniqueness, and self-assertion...
...Indeed, early Zionism often internalized the particularistic criticism of Jews made by anti-Semites, that Jews were rootless cosmopolitans, and it projected onto Palestine the vision of a transformed Jew, a worker-pioneer close to his own soil...
...subject to the will of the Arab majority and in which the existing Jewish population would become tolerated members of a minority with no legal national or collective rights...
...Ironically, after June 1967 the demographic picture for all of Palestine west of the Jordan has come to look on a larger scale almost exactly as it would have looked in the *Second Aliyah: Second wave of Zionist immigration, mostly from Czarist Russia, 1904-14...
...which will be...
...The Zionist response to anti-Semitism has not been a demand for universalistic liberalism or socialism but rather the call for Jews to recreate a Jewish national existence in Palestine...
...Its inhabitants will not be driven out or freely leave or abandon a high degree of self-government...
...These "Little Israel" elements seek to protect Israeli security with minor border changes and demilitarized zones...
...Several issues are raised by this passage, not the least of which is how Chomsky expects Israelis to trust their fate to a framework of socialist binationalism if the security arguments of the "Greater Israel" advocates are as impregnable as he claims them to be...
Vol. 22 • July 1975 • No. 3
