Impasse in the Middle East

...Chomsky is often heavy-handed...

...the reader can do without obvious ironies that simply slow up his narrative...

...The development of those policies over the past half-century, and their role in the continuing victimization of the Palestinian people, is the theme of Noam Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle...

...In this, says Chomsky, both major Israeli political groupings, Labor and the Likud, have been backed by the United States, which is eager to maintain its "strategic asset"—now the world's fourth-strongest military power—as a Middle East bulwark against the Soviet Union...

...Did he do his own translating...

...rather, he writes like what he is—an angry academic...

...It could be "a final solution from which few will escape...

...But Chomsky's analysis is on target...

...Chomsky will be accused of anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and that worst sin of any American Jew, "self-hate...

...I also miss a sense of time and place...

...H Chomsky concludes with a short chapter, "The Road to Armageddon," in which he addresses the threat that Israel might use nuclear warheads at some future point...

...People like Arthur Goldberg, Irving Howe, and The New Republic's Martin Peretz (whom Chomsky singles out for special shellacking) will condemn or dismiss it...

...William Steif a former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers, has reported extensively from the Middle East...

...The author offers a cogent critique of the American media, the Syrian role, and the Israeli Defense Force's "humanitarianism," which wasn't humanitarian at all...

...I found citations of many friends and acquaintances in both the American and Israeli press, and saw only one obvious error—the misspelling of a reporter's name...

...But The Fateful Triangle is a powerful and thoroughly documented tract...

...I have no idea, after reading Chomsky's book, whether he has ever been on the main street of Sidon, or in the rubble-strewn remnants of Palestinian refugee camps-like Ain el-Hilweh or Rashidieh...

...He tags this the "Samson complex"—Samson's revenge on the Philistines, in which the strong man brought the Temple to ruins and "killed more Philistines than he had in a lifetime"—and argues that this is "not something to be taken lightly...

...The Fateful Triangle should cause a profound reassessment of American policy...

...After brief introductory remarks, Chomsky devotes more than 460 pages to just six chapters, each looking at an aspect of policy development: If The Fateful Triangle begins by discussing the origin of the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel, focusing on American pressure groups, American liberal and ideological support for Israel, and the concept of Israel as a "strategic asset," which translates as "client state...

...Chomsky reports on opposition within Israel to the Begin-Sharon-Shamir policies, and quotes Hebrew University Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz, editor of Encyclopedia He-braica, on the Sabra-Shatila atrocity: "The massacre was done by us...

...It should, but I doubt that it will...

...Even so have we organized the assassins in Lebanon in order to murder the Palestinians...

...11 Chomsky's summary of the history of Palestine and Israel, from the British Mandate and the early Zionists to the present, stresses the Israeli rationalization for what he calls "the use of terror" against Arab civilian targets...

...1! A chapter entitled "Aftermath" gives a blow-by-blow account of the Israeli invasion of Beirut, the Sabra-Shatila massacre, the Reagan "peace" plan, and the results of "Peace for Galilee...

...In Chomsky's book, the chief victims appear to be Palestinians, but today he could also include the Lebanese, both Moslem and Christian...

...He dredges up the terrorist backgrounds of Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, and Yitzhak Shamir, noting that "the PLO has the same sort of legitimacy that the Zionist movement had in the pre-state period...

...And he is by no means a master of the incisive word or the deft phrase...

...Another quibble: Chomsky doesn't tell us enough about himself or how he came to his intense interest in the Middle East...

...It demonstrates the increasing brutality of Israel and its sponsor, the United States, in the Middle East...

...11 In a 148-page chapter entitled "Peace for Galilee," the invading Israelis' slogan in June 1982, Chomsky recounts the awful massacres Lebanese Phalangists and Palestinians visited on one another in the 1970s, the ceasefire that preceded the Israeli invasion, and the Israeli pretext for the invasion...

...But it is also his academic quality—his scholarly eagerness to nail down every point—that gives The Fateful Triangle its punch...

...He notes that most Americans believe the Arab states (except for Egypt since 1977) and the Palestinian Liberation Organization have steadfastly rejected recognition of Israel...

...So will many sectors of the American media that have been taken into camp by the Washington-Tel Aviv axis...

...He relies heavily on Israel's lively and outspoken press, but does he read Hebrew...

...He demonstrates that it is the Israelis who have rejected all Arab overtures because they were intent on creating a Greater Israel, encompassing the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and possibly even the "North Bank" to the Litani or Awali Rivers in Lebanon...

...Many American liberals will hate this book...

...by William Steif Each day's news brings fresh evidence of the disastrous policies the United States and its surrogate, Israel, pursue in the Middle East...

...Actually, he shows, there have been Arab-PLO overtures toward a Middle Eastern settlement, including recognition of Israel, since well before the 1973 Yom Kippur War...

...The book contains 956 numbered footnotes, plus dozens of asterisked notes, and sometimes these are more interesting than the main text...

...The Phalangists are mercenaries, exactly as the Ukrainians and the Croatians and the Slovakians were the mercenaries of Hitler, who organized them as soldiers to do the work for him...

...That fact, he says, is "recognized at some level within Israel and, I think, accounts for the bitter hatred of the PLO which, rational people must concede, has been recognized by Palestinians as 'their sole representative' whenever they have had a chance to express themselves...

...11 In an analysis of "rejectionism," Chomsky turns that idea on its head...

...The reader needs occasional mental pictures of places like Galerie Semaan, a crossing point between East and West Beirut, as well as at least a glimpse of the studied elegance of former Lebanese Prime Minister Saeb Sal-am's house in West Beirut...