AMERICA AND ISRAEL
Chomsky, Noam
The End of the Affair? Even after the strain of Lebanon, the 'special relationship' endures BY NOAM CHOMSKY The Israeli invasion of Lebanon last summer focused the world's attention once again on...
...Though American liberals had been highly sympathetic to Israel from its founding, there was a positive shift in attitudes in 1967, when Israel demonstrated its overwhelming military power, shattering the Arab armies, quickly conquering the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank, and once again causing the flight of hundreds of thousands of refugees...
...After the victory of 1967, what remained of the vision dissipated, just as it was being fervently endorsed here by large segments of American left-liberal opinion, whose blind support has contributed substantially to Israel's moral decay and, I suspect, its ultimate destruction, as well as to the dehu-manization of the Palestinians...
...Conflicts did arise when Menachem Begin rejected President Reagan's peace proposal, and these conflicts intensified—at least at the rhetorical level—in response to the worldwide outrage over the Sabra and Shatila massacres, carried out under the eyes of the Israeli military by Lebanese units sent into the Palestinian camps for AMERICA AND ISRAEL what Begin's defense minister, Ariel Sharon, called "mopping up...
...This arrangement lasted from the 1949 armistice agreement until 1967, when the remainder, too, was conquered by Israel...
...It will never be recognized...
...The signature of institutions and inFor fifteen years, the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been misunderstood in the United States because of a campaign of vilification and intimidation against anyone questioning the official line dividuals of the partition agreement is invalid...
...The notorious United Nations resolution characterizing Zionism as racism can properly be condemned for profound hypocrisy, given the nature of the states that backed it (including the Arab states...
...But Israel organized terrorist cells within Egypt to carry out attacks on U.S...
...Israel's goal has been to fend off the "catastrophe" of a political settlement in which both Israelis and Palestinians might live in peace and security...
...Civil strife between Arabs and Jews broke out immediately after the November 1947 partition recommendation...
...All of it...
...As has almost invariably been the case when Palestinians were permitted some form of free expression, the elected mayors adopted the standard position that the PLO is the representative of Palestinian nationalism...
...Destruction of the PLO would, it was hoped, serve to demoralize the Palestinians in the occupied territories and elsewhere...
...But the preferences of the indigenous population in the occupied territories have never been taken into serious account in Washington...
...The point was elaborated after the war broke out by Yehoshua Porath, Israel's leading specialist on the Palestinians, in Ha'aretz...
...In November 1947, the General Assembly of the fledgling United Nations recommended the partition of Mandatory Palestine (cis-Jordan) into Jewish and Arab states...
...Some have seen still broader similarities: Israeli doves have observed (in an advertisement in Ha'aretz) that "those who shall sober up from the collective intoxication will have to admit that the Palestinians are the Jews of our era, a small, hunted people, defenseless, standing alone against the best weapons, helpless . . . the whole world is against them...
...clients in Central America, helping to circumvent Congressional restrictions on direct U.S...
...The consequences of these arrangements, and others like them, for the lives of non-Jewish citizens are considerable...
...goal in the Middle East—control over the region's incomparable energy resources...
...Israeli incursions in the north led to the shelling of Israel from the Golan Heights, which provided, in turn, the pretext for their conquest in 1967 (after the cease-fire) and their virtual annexation by the Begin government...
...Amos Oz, for example, refers to them obliquely as "certain adventurist Israeli intelligence operations...
...Thus the Israeli novelist Amos Oz, writing in The New York Times Magazine, asserts: "To this day, only about 5 per cent of the land is privately owned...
...The crucial issue is what is called "the demographic problem," a euphemism developed to express the difficulty of incorporating a large Arab population within a Jewish state...
...Americans who now write ruefully about contemporary Israel as a "Paradise Lost" are victims of propaganda and self-delusion, though they are right to believe that much that was praiseworthy in the society was lost as a result of the 1967 military victory...
...It is worth noting that such bombastic conceptions, replete with references to neocon-servative literature here and reminiscent of the rhetoric of regimes which (in Abba Eban's phrase) we do not dare mention by name, appear in the ideological journal of the World Zionist Organization...
...David Ben-Gurion and others declared they would never agree to a Jewish state "which would eventually mean Jewish domination of Arabs in Palestine...
...The armies of the Arab states entered the war immediately after Israel's founding...
...Ne'emen has since been appointed to the Begin Cabinet, with special responsibilities for settlement in the occupied territories...
...The Israeli-American Middle East specialist Amos Perlmutter alleges that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon hopes to evict all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and drive them into Jordan...
...In the 1970s, Israel and Iran under the Shah were perceived as effective agents of American control over the oil-producing regions of the Gulf...
...In 1976, Israel permitted free elections in West Bank towns after banishing two candidates regarded as pro-PLO...
...diplomats and from oil companies operating in the Arabian peninsula were disregarded...
...And forever...
...An increasingly visible alliance between Israel and South Africa, Taiwan, and the military dictatorships of the southern cone in South America has also proven attractive to major American interests...
...Labor has pursued a more ambiguous scheme that would leave the bulk of the native population under Jordanian administration (but effective Israeli control) or stateless, rather than directly incorporated into Israel...
...Most of the fighting took place within the proposed Palestinian state, and when it ended almost half of it was incorporated into Israel, while the remainder was taken over by Transjordan (later Jordan) and Egypt...
...Even the mid-September invasion of West Beirut elicited no meaningful protest from the U.S...
...These protests have often involved officers returning from the front...
...Liberal humanitarians offered their sympathy and support to Israel, now clearly the major military power of the region, as it turned from crushing its enemies to subjugating those who remained under its control...
...They support Begin in revenge against their oppressors in the Labor coalition...
...In the pre-state period, the nuclei of Israel's two present political groupings were often in bitter conflict...
...The United States backed Israel in its rejection of the 1971 Sadat offer...
...Against all evidence, the Begin government insists that the elected leadership attained power as a result of PLO intimidation and violence...
...A 1958 National Security Council memorandum, recently declassified, noted that a "logical corollary" of opposition to radical Arab nationalism "would be to support Israel as the only strong pro-West power left in the Near East...
...But restricted to those policies, the resolution cannot be criticized as inaccurate...
...statehood...
...American policy has oscillated between two poles since the 1967 war...
...military and economic aid to Israel, which may well amount to about $1,000 per year for each Israeli when all forms of assistance are taken into account...
...Ambassador to Egypt Herman Eilts, but instead the Camp David undertaking brought Kissinger's earlier efforts to fruition...
...The self-defense forces (Haganah) based in the labor movement also engaged in terrorist violence, though on a more limited scale than the outright terrorist army of Begin and its LEHI (Stern Gang) offshoot...
...Israel, for example, holds the world record for rejecting them...
...Security Council resolution calling for a peaceful two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus...
...But the story is even more complex: The central institutions of American liberalism have led the way in building the "blindly chauvinistic and narrowminded" support for Israeli policy that Peled deplores...
...He dismissed the claim that the invasion of Lebanon, dubbed "Peace for Galilee," was launched to protect Israeli settlements from PLO attack, noting that the PLO had strictly observed the cease-fire instituted in July of last year...
...East Jerusalem was annexed, and the city's borders were extended into the Arab West Bank, while Arabs were expelled from some sections of the Old City...
...The unique relationship between Israel and the United States is often attributed to the influence of the American Jewish community on public opinion and political life...
...As I have tried to show, the vision never was exactly what has been represented to Americans: To a certain extent, the vision dissolved when a Jewish state was established, some of the reasons being just those foreseen by a number of early Zionists...
...The record is long and bloody, as in the case of most nationalist movements—and has generally been suppressed in the United States, where terror is cynically described as an invention of the PLO...
...The failure of these and subsequent Arab efforts led Sadat to undertake his trip to Jerusalem...
...The results have been much suffering in the region and repeated risks of global war...
...As noted, the Rogers Plan, modified along the lines of the vetoed Security Council resolution of January 1976, reflects a clear international consensus that includes the PLO and the major Arab states...
...More concretely, the special relationship is expressed in the unparalleled U.S...
...That is untrue, certainly with regard to the 1956 Israeli-French-British attack on Egypt and the 1978 invasion of Lebanon, which is not generally counted as one of the Arab-Israeli wars, but should be...
...Over the years, the Israeli leadership has been trained to assume that almost any of its actions will be accepted in the United States, while the Palestinians will be blamed for the suffering they endure...
...The better-organized Jewish settler army had the advantage in the military conflict...
...At the same time, internal political changes have been taking place within Israel...
...Henry Kissinger, who assumed that Israel's might was unchallengeable, takes considerable pride in his memoirs in having blocked State Department efforts to achieve some sort of peaceful resolution of the conflict...
...Nevertheless, the Reagan plan might gain Arab support, given the likely alternative—outright annexation of the occupied territories by Israel...
...The second, which should properly be called the Kissinger Plan, was put into effect when Kissinger took over management of Middle Eastern affairs late in 1970: Israel would become a militarized state, bound to Washington, exercising some control over the occupied territories, and guarding the region in the interests of American power...
...Labor leaders have entertained somewhat similar ideas...
...In 1970, the Palestinians were driven from Jordan to Lebanon after a bloody conflict in which thousands died at the hands of King Hussein's army...
...client state while removing it from the Middle East conflict...
...In contrast, even after the state was established in 1948, Herut leader Menachem Begin declared, "The partition of the Homeland is illegal...
...Israel could possibly even reach an agreement on border rectification...
...Since the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948, the question has been considered closed, but earlier fears of oppression of an exploited Arab population have been borne out...
...Possibly, Ne'eman added in a Jerusalem Post article, "Israel could integrate the strip south of the Litani [River], with its friendly citizens, into Israel's development plans...
...In contrast, the foreign ministers of the European Economic Community condemned the Israeli invasion of Lebanon as "a flagrant violation of international law as well as of the most elementary humanitarian principles...
...Israeli doves have been subjected to similar treatment here, and often complain that their position within Israel suffers from lack of support in the United States...
...Many estab-lishmentarians have spoken in similar terms...
...Whether they will have any significant impact on policy depends, as usual, on the response in the United States...
...The Labor government, often described in the United States as "dovish," announced it would not negotiate with Palestinians on any political issue, and would not negotiate with the PLO even if it were to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel, adopting a position comparable to that of the minority Rejection Front within the PLO...
...When Anwar el Sadat became president of Egypt in 1970, he moved at once to implement two policies: peace with Israel and conversion of Egypt into an American client state...
...The main elements of the PLO had been moving, and continued to move, toward acceptance of a Palestinian state that would coexist in peace with Israel...
...Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital...
...In later years, the indigenous Arab population resisted the idea, accepted as natural in the West, that it had a moral obligation to sacrifice its land to compensate for the crimes committed by Europeans against Jews...
...More recently, Israel has provided armaments and advisers for brutal and corrupt U.S...
...At that point, U.S...
...In October 1973, Sadat made good his threats...
...General Assembly resolutions are considered to be non-binding...
...He hoped a Geneva conference of major powers would be convened to settle the conflict, according to U.S...
...The similarities extend to the use of terror...
...A recent survey by Israel's leading polling institute, reported in Time magazine, found that more than 98 per cent of the population favors an independent Palestinian state, which 86 per cent would prefer to have run solely by the Palestinian Liberation Organization...
...The Arabs of Palestine were overwhelmingly opposed to establishment of a Jewish state and to Zionist immigration, which often led to dispossession from their lands...
...partition resolution of November 1947...
...These segments of the population had long regarded the Labor Party and its institutions as an oppressive bureaucracy, representing the nation's managerial class and the hated kibbutzim—often islands of wealth and luxury alongside of "development towns," notorious for their lack of development, which have been set aside for the Oriental Jews, an exploited underclass...
...General Peled stated in Paris that "the Israelis have become the Mongols of the Middle East, who sow destruction and misery...
...Israel and the United States stand virtually alone in opposing a political settlement that recognizes the national rights of both peoples...
...On the same day, Israel and the United States voted against a General Assembly resolution calling for an end to hostilities in Lebanon and on the Israeli-Lebanese border...
...The Reagan peace plan is clearly at odds with the expansionist objectives of the Begin government, but it can be construed as compatible with the opposition Labor Party proposals (which I will discuss below...
...We would hardly regard similar arrangements in a "white state" or a "Christian state" as an illustration of unique moral standards and democratic socialism...
...The mayors also have unsuccessfully sought a political settlement in accord with the international consensus that has been rejected by Israel and the United States...
...Eretz Yisrael will be restored to the people of Israel...
...Washington plainly gave the green light for the invasion and, despite an occasional show of displeasure, extended its support throughout the terrible events that followed: the destruction of Palestinian society in southern Lebanon, the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets, the brutal siege of Beirut, and much else...
...Previously, its leaders—particularly those from the labor movement that dominated the Palestinian Yishuv (Jewish settlement)—at times opposed the concept of a Jewish state on the grounds that "the rule of one national group over the other" could not be justified...
...As I have noted, Arab moves toward accommodation have often caused panic among Israeli political leaders, whether of the Labor Party or Likud...
...Once that was accomplished, Israel could proceed to snuff out resistance in the occupied territories, and ultimately annex them without fear of retaliation from southern Lebanon...
...It has required a considerable propaganda effort to invert the facts and portray Israel and the United States as seekers of peace and accommodation in the face of violent arid unwavering Arab "rejectionism...
...The courts have ruled that Israel is not the state of its citizens, but rather "the sovereign State of the Jewish people," where "the Jewish people consists not only of the people residing in Israel but also of the Jews in the Diaspora...
...Until some Arab state showed a willingness to separate from the Soviets, or the Soviets were prepared to dissociate from the maximum Arab program, we had no reason to modify our policy" of stalemate, despite the State Department's wishes...
...These Israeli actions, along with terrorist acts of Palestinian infiltrators, set the stage for further conflicts with Egypt and Syria...
...Echoes of these conflicting positions are heard today...
...Israel, Porath argued, had to attack precisely because the cease-fire had held...
...In the United States, it is intoned with ritual uniformity that Israel's wars, before the 1982 Lebanon invasion, were strictly defensive...
...Whether there would have been a way to reconcile competing claims and needs in Palestine is not clear...
...Paradoxically, Sadat's 1971 proposal was more favorable to Israel than the one he brought with him on his November 1977 trip to Jerusalem, which officially established him as "a man of peace...
...Even after the strain of Lebanon, the 'special relationship' endures BY NOAM CHOMSKY The Israeli invasion of Lebanon last summer focused the world's attention once again on the troubled Middle East and the special relationship between Israel and the United States...
...Israel has always been and remains a vibrant democracy on the Western model for its Jewish citizens, but Israeli democracy has always embodied a fundamental contradiction: Israel is a Jewish state with a minority of non-Jewish citizens...
...The United States remained ambivalent, apparently preferring a trusteeship of some sort, until the Jewish state was established in May 1948 and granted almost instant recognition by President Truman...
...In the 1960s, the American intelligence community regarded Israel as a barrier to Nasserite pressure on the Persian Gulf's oil-producing states, a conclusion reinforced by Israel's smashing military victory over the Arabs in 1967...
...As long as the United States remains committed to an Israeli Sparta as a "strategic asset" and frustrates the international consensus on a political settlement, the prospects are for further tragedy: repression, terrorism, war, and possibly even a conflict that will engage the superpowers, culminating in a true final solution from which few will escape...
...Unfortunately for Sadat, his efforts came just when Israel had persuaded Washington that it was a great-power asset...
...The legal structures, administrative practices, and development programs of the Israeli government and society reflect the inevitable contradiction inherent in this arrangement, though the reality is generally obscured in admiring left-liberal commentary...
...the Israeli army "must be prepared for a long stay in Lebanon," during which "Israel will have an opportunity of reaching a state of socioeconomic or technological development in the nearby region which, geographically and historically, is an integral part of Eretz Yisrael...
...He was dismissed with contempt, and warnings of impending war from U.S...
...Shortly after the 1967 war, the Labor government began to integrate the occupied territories with Israel...
...In 1936-1939, they attempted a nationalist revolt, which the British crushed...
...Writing last March in Ha'aretz, Yoel Marcus observed: "Behind the official excuse of 'we shall not tolerate shelling or terrorist actions' lies a strategic view which holds that the physical annihilation of the PLO has to be achieved...
...after the October 1973 war, for example, Yitzhak Rabin urged that Israel try to "gain time" in the hope that the United States would eventually pursue "more aggressive policies visa-vis the Soviet Union...
...For years there has been an international consensus in support of a peaceful two-state settlement based approximately on the pre-1967 borders...
...His vision is that Israel alone can withstand the collapse of Western civilization under the assault led by the Soviet Union, now that Europe has become ineffectual and the United States has proven too weak to resist...
...Sadat's repeated signals that he would be compelled to resort to war if his efforts at a peaceful settlement were rebuffed made no impression on Washington...
...It was, in fact, not until 1942 that the Zionist movement officially committed itself to the establishment of a Jewish state...
...Variants of the Kissinger Plan have conA crucial issue is the 'demographic problem/ a euphemism developed to express the difficulty of incorporating a large Arab population within the Jewish state sistently won out in internal policy debate...
...To subject them to it, the Commission warned, "would be a gross violation of the principle [of self determination]," a judgment disregarded by the great powers, including the United States...
...The two factions also differed in their political aspirations when it became practical to envision the establishment of a Jewish state...
...Recall that the current prime minister and foreign minister of Israel are former terrorist commanders with violent histories of atrocities that include the killing of Jews as well as Britons and many Arabs, while the secretary-general of the Jewish Agency until 1981 was a man who murdered several dozen Arab citizens under guard in an undefended Lebanese village during the land-clearing operations of October 1948...
...When one looks beneath the surface, one finds that the Utopian vision of Israel has always been fundamentally flawed...
...Obviously, Reagan's initiative does not meet the wishes of the inhabitants of the occupied territories...
...As Israel does not want the PLO as a partner for talks or as an interlocutor for any solution in the West Bank, the supporters of confrontation with the PLO hold that the logical continuation of the struggle with the PLO in the territories is in Lebanon...
...in fact, it opposed efforts by the British Mandatory authorities to improve the conditions of Arab workers—while the Revisionists, the precursors of the present Herut (the central element in the Likud coalition), cast themselves in the mold of European fascism, with an ideology that called for submission of the mass to a single leader, strikebreaking, chauvinist fanaticism, and the rest of the familiar paraphernalia of the 1930s...
...These and other "national institutions" serve solely the interests of Jews...
...These developments have aroused much concern among older, more European-oriented Israelis, many of whom see all this as a direct consequence of the 1967 military victory...
...Sadat had explicitly decided at that time that the route to progress was through Washington, and that position was shared by the Saudis and others...
...Still another motive for the summer's invasion was the Begin government's determination to place Israel in a position to dictate the terms of any political settlement in Lebanon...
...In the early 1950s, relations between Israel and the United States were often strained, and it appeared for a time that Washington might cement closer ties with Egyptian President Nasser, who had some direct CIA support in governing his country...
...In the early history of Zionism, the notion of & Jewish state was regarded as problematic...
...The obvious purpose of the Israeli attack was to disperse the refugees once again and destroy the organization that represents Palestinian nationalism...
...But Oz and others who advance such evidence of Israeli democratic socialism do not tell the full story of the "one way or another" in which the land remains "public property": Through a complex system of legal and administrative arrangements, public land is under the effective control of the Jewish National Fund, an organization committed to use charitable funds (specifically, tax-free contributions from the United States) in ways that are determined to be "directly or indirectly beneficial to persons of Jewish religion, race, or origin...
...It also led, predictably, to much heavier dependence on the United States, ever more faithful service to U.S...
...installations (and also on Egyptian public facilities) in an effort to drive a wedge between Cairo and the United States...
...To achieve this, we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat...
...Menachem Begin succeeded in mobilizing a majority of Israel's Oriental Jewish population behind his chauvinistic and aggressive policies...
...Retired Israeli General Mattityahu Peled observed in 1975 that the "state of near hysteria" in the United States and the "blindly chauvinistic and narrowminded" support for the most reactionary policies within Israel encourage many in power there to adopt postures of "calloused intransigence...
...So long as Washington continues to underwrite Israeli encroachments into the occupied territories and the destruction of any vestige of Palestinian political organization or cultural expression, the United States will have no standing to criticize Israel for pursuing such policies...
...chauvinism, religious fanaticism, and grandiose conceptions of Israel's global mission...
...Supporting the British partition proposal of 1947, Labor Party leader Ben-Gurion said, "The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjor-dan...
...By the end of World War II, the question was no longer asked...
...In its impact on world affairs and on American culture, the relationship between the United States and Israel has been a curious one...
...media, the largely conservative elected Palestinian leadership is "radical," while the collaborators appointed by the Israeli occupation forces are "moderates...
...In January 1976, the United States felt obliged to veto a U.N...
...President Wilson's King-Crane Commission reported in 1919 that the Palestinian Arabs were "emphatically against the entire Zionist program...
...The resolution, which called for security guarantees and recognized borders, was backed by Syria, Jordan, Egypt, the PLO, and the Soviet Union...
...The recommendation was accepted by most of the Zionist movement (though not, as noted, by Begin's Herut and its military arm), and rejected with near unanimity by the Arabs of Palestine...
...opinion deplored by General Peled and other Israeli doves could probably not have been maintained...
...MustaphaDudin, who heads the Israeli-imposed "Village Leagues," received a rousing two-tenths of 1 per cent approval rating in the same poll, though Israel claims that his is the voice of the "silent majority" that has been intimidated by the PLO...
...Israeli attacks caused heavy civilian casualties and led to the expulsion of thousands of Arabs, some of whom later formed terrorist bands that carried out what they presumably regarded as reprisals and what Israel and its supporters call unprovoked terrorism...
...The President would revive, in effect, a plan proposed by Jordan's King Hussein in 1972 and angrily rejected at the time by Golda Meir's Labor government...
...At the core of the Reagan proposal is a federation with Jordan of parts of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967...
...To the great surprise of Israel, the United States, and virtually everyone else, Egypt and Syria were remarkably successful in the early stages of the war, and Saudia Arabia— reluctantly, it appears—joined in an oil boycott of the United States, the first major use of the "oil weapon...
...In February 1971, he offered Israel a comprehensive peace treaty based on the pre-1967 borders and security guarantees...
...Since the fall of the Shah, Israel, in its role as a Middle East Sparta in the service of American power, has received substantially increased support from Washington...
...Last June, the United States stood alone in vetoing a Security Council resolution calling for the simultaneous withdrawal of Israeli and Palestinian forces from Beirut...
...The invasion had long been anticipated within Israel, and the reasons were widely understood...
...While it is convenient (and not altogether unfair) to blame Arab intransigence for the conversion of Israel into a garrison state, honesty compels us to recognize that the primary cause lies elsewhere—in the policies of the Labor government and its successor, in the support offered to them by the United States, and in the blind backing of Israeli policies by "supporters" in this country, who have much to answer for...
...At the ideological level, the special relationship is reflected in the persistent illusions Americans hold about the nature of Israeli society and the Arab-Israeli conflict...
...The first example, to my knowledge, was the Haganah assassination of a religious anti-Zionist Jew in 1924...
...They agree that Israel should effectively control them, and both reject any expression of Palestinian national rights west of the Jordan...
...The religious settlers in the West Bank, operating freely with army support, take open pride in creating a pogrom-like atmosphere among the Arabs, who must be trained not to "raise their heads...
...Their opposition to Zionist aspirations was never a secret...
...In September 1970, the thesis was confirmed again when Israel—acting in behalf of the United States, which could not intervene directly— blocked Syrian efforts to rescue Palestinians who were being massacred by King Hussein's army in Jordan...
...One was the Rogers Plan, put forward in December 1969 by President Nixon's first Secretary of State, William Rogers, who called for a settlement of the sort proposed by Sadat and rejected by Israel and the United States in 1971...
...What, then, has become of the Labor Zionist vision of a democratic socialist Utopia...
...former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, for example, has urged that Israel "create in the course of the next ten to twenty years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to East Jordan...
...Likud aims for outright annexation...
...global interests, and association with some of the most reactionary elements in American society, including religious fundamentalists and fervent Cold Warriors...
...Shortly after the armistice agreements of 1949, Israel began encroachments into the demilitarized zones...
...They frequently resorted to terrorist violence against Jews...
...It will not bind the Jewish people...
...There have been mass demonstrations, press conferences, and many public statements...
...Paramilitary outposts were established first, followed by permanent civilian settlements...
...About 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled in what Chaim Weizmann called "a miraculous clearing of the land: the miraculous simplification of Israel's task...
...In the simpleminded view of the U.S...
...We shall accept a state [within] the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them...
...Syria entered Lebanon at the invitation of a powerless Lebanese government in 1976, first supporting the Christian Maronites against the Palestinians and their Muslim allies, then turning against the Maronites, who were backed by Israel...
...As Seth Tillman commented in a recent study, "Outside of Israel, the United States, a few 'rejec-tionist' Arab states, and certain groups within the PLO, support for a settlement along these lines approaches unanimity...
...Egypt has been incorporated into the U.S...
...Israel refused to take part in the Security Council deliberations, which had been called at Syrian initiative...
...Protest over the invasion has been unprecedented not only in the United States but also in Israel...
...involvement...
...in 1971, he had made no mention of Palestinian national rights, allegedly the stumbling block of the Camp David "peace process" that would follow later in the decade...
...Furthermore, the resolution ought not to have referred to Zionism as such, perhaps, but rather to the policies of the state of Israel...
...With the loss of its physical strength, in their opinion, the PLO will lose not only its hold over the territories but also its growing international status...
...Sadat's offer caused much distress in Israel—"panic," in the view of Israeli writer Amos Elon—and was promptly rejected...
...In the past year, the Begin government has effectively dismantled these Palestinian political structures, attempting to impose the authority of selected Quislings, through the so-called Village Leagues...
...His aim, he writes, "was to produce a stalemate until Moscow urged compromise or until, even better, some moderate Arab regime decided that the route to progress was through Washington...
...Arafat's success in imposing discipline on the PLO constituted "a veritable catastrophe in the eyes of the Israeli government," since the growing international legitimacy of a more responsible PLO would make it difficult for Israel to continue to refuse to negotiate with it...
...Though the PLO tried at first to keep clear of Lebanon's internal strife, it was drawn into the civil war by 1976, and engaged in murderous conflict with Israeli-supported Christian elements...
...The Labor Party even refused to permit conservative Arab "notables" to form an anti-PLO grouping...
...by May, its forces had occupied substantial parts of the territory assigned to the Palestinian state...
...Much of the development budget is in the hands of the Jewish Agency, which professes similar commitments...
...The hapless and dependent Palestinians have a significant role in the Israeli economy, performing undesirable but necessary work at low pay and without workers' rights...
...But this reality was suppressed in the United States in favor of the image of David confronting a brutal Goliath...
...Israel has been able, as a consequence, to concentrate its military forces to the north and to continue its creeping annexation of the occupied territories, except for the Sinai, now returned to Egypt and doing duty as a buffer zone...
...by now, more than half the land in the occupied territories has been taken over on one pretext or another, and current plans call primarily for urban development rather than new settlements...
...The Israelis' latest claim that they are acting in legitimate self-defense was accepted by the U.S...
...increasing international isolation and, correspondingly, alliance with such pariah states as South Africa...
...Furthermore, the Russians backed the international consensus, which included a commitment to the security of Israel within recognized borders...
...These considerations, rather than the official rationale of "national security," account for the Likud and Labor position on the territories...
...As many Israeli doves had expected and feared, the 1967 war led to significant changes within Israel: a growing dependence on force and violence...
...The occupied territories also provide a controlled market for Israeli goods and a crucial source of water (a commodity more vital even than oil in the Middle East...
...These terrorist initiatives, too, have generally been kept from Americans...
...Government and large segments of the American press and intelligentsia, but in this case, an unprecedented negative reaction developed in the United States...
...Yuval Ne'eman, a physicist and Knesset member, urged in June that Israel "establish a new order in Lebanon...
...In this sense, according to the courts, "there is no Israeli nation apart from the Jewish people," but the fact remains that about one-seventh of the citizens of Israel are non-Jews...
...system and retired from the Arab-Israeli conflict...
...But with the coming of the war and the genocidal Nazis these became minority views within Zionism, though they persisted until the U.N...
...Kissinger's account is remarkable, even by his own standards, for the geopolitical fantasies it entertains...
...Since the late 1950s, Washington has increasingly come to accept the Israeli thesis that a powerful Israel is a strategic asset for the United States, serving as a barrier against radical nationalist threats to American interests in the Middle East and against Soviet influence in a region of great economic and strategic importance...
...Pre-state Zionism exhibits a number of striking similarities to current divisions within the PLO between the Rejectionists, who refuse to accept any compromise with Israel, and the mainstream around Yasser Arafat, who have officially accepted the idea of establishing a state in any territory of the former Palestine evacuated by Israel, though they too refuse to abandon their "dream": a unitary democratic secular state to be achieved, they assert, through a long-term process of peaceful interaction with Israel...
...Saudi Arabia was, in fact, not only willing to "separate from the Soviets," but did not even have diplomatic relations with them...
...Top Israeli military commanders have conceded that Israel faced no serious military threat and anticipated a quick victory even if the Arabs struck first...
...the resolution was approved, with no abstentions, 127-to-2...
...Reagan also called for a freeze on Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, but as Israeli commentators were swift to point out, that proposal had only limited significance...
...One Israeli analyst from Yuval Ne'eman's Tehiya Party has proposed that the Arabian peninsula be Ottomanized as well, and that Israel retake the Sinai and dismember Egypt, too, into separate states...
...That is, not only must its fingers and hands in the West Bank be amputated (as is being done now with an iron fist), but its heart and head in Beirut must be dealt with...
...Sadat, now joined by other Arab leaders, continued to press for a full-scale settlement...
...The territories supply Israel with a substantial unorganized labor force, similar to the "guest workers" of Europe or the migrant workers in the United States...
...The Labor Party was a party of Jewish workers—not of all workers...
...The current Reagan plan is also rejectionist, for it opposes a Palestinian state, remains vague about boundaries and security for the Palestinians, and contemplates no role for the PLO, which has the same kind of legitimacy among Palestinians that the World Zionist Organization had among Jews in the years before Israel achieved Noam Chomsky, professor of modern languages and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of many books, including "Peace in the Middle East" and "Towards a New Cold War...
...For fifteen years or so, discussion of these issues has been made difficult and often impossible in the United States because of a remarkably effective campaign of vilification and intimidation directed against anyone who questioned the official line...
...In the 1960s, Israel served as a U. S. agent in black Africa, using secret funds from Washington to assist President Mobutu in Zaire, Idi Amin in Uganda, and the absurd but murderous Emperor Bokassa in the Central African Republic...
...Kissinger launched diplomatic efforts aimed at accepting Egypt as a U.S...
...policy shifted...
...This is not only true of Begin's Likud government...
...Contrary to the impression widely held in the United States, Israel's two major political groupings are in basic accord about the occupied territories...
...Some hope to transform Jordan into the "Palestinian state" that it already is made out to be in Israeli propaganda...
...There were many other sub-conflicts...
...the rest is public property, in one way or another," including the lands of the kibbutz in which he lives...
...There is some truth to this, but it is far from the whole story...
...Government...
...But there is little to suggest that the United States intends to use the ample means available to it to bring about even this rejectionist settlement...
...The "boundaries of Zionist aspirations" in Ben-Gurion's vision encompassed southern Lebanon ("the northern part of western Israel"), southern Syria, today's Jordan, cis-Jordan (Mandatory Palestine), and Sinai...
...Correspondingly, it is likely to erode if Israel comes to be seen as a burden rather than as an asset in the pursuit of the primary U.S...
...If there is little reaction here, Israel is likely to pursue broader and more brazen goals, including a kind of "Ottomaniza-tion" of the region which would dismember Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq into little more than ethnic religious encampments dominated by Israel in alliance with Turkey and possibly even post-Khomeini Iran...
...If we apply the term rejectionist, as we should, to those who would deny the right of self-determination either to the Israelis or the Palestinians, then it is accurate to say that for some years the United States and Israel have headed the rejectionist camp...
...The two political groupings do differ in the arrangements they would prefer to impose...
...Had it not been for Israel's perceived geopolitical role as an American client and ally, the climate of U.S...
...Attitudes also seem to be more reactionary among the young, so that the prospects are for an intensification of chauvinism and violence...
...Meanwhile, the PLO carried out terrorist acts in Israel, and Israel conducted regular military forays into Lebanon that included the shelling of refugee camps, the bombardment of coastal cities by gunboats, the outright invasion of 1978 (leading to establishment of a collaborationist Christian enclave in the south in defiance of the United Nations), and finally the occupation of large parts of Lebanon in the summer of 1982...
...Recent votes at the United Nations demonstrate the unique character of the bond...
...On the day the United States and Israel stood alone against the world at the United Nations, a midterm national conference of the Democratic Party adopted a statement described in The New York Times as "highly sympathetic to Israel's recent attacks in Lebanon," qualified only by an expression of regret over "all loss of life on both sides...
Vol. 46 • December 1982 • No. 12
