Noam Chomsky Israel Quotes

People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.

The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.

Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.

Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

How, then, does one become an activist? The easy answer would be to say that we do not become activists; we simply forget that we are. We are all born with compassion, generosity, and love for others inside us. We are all moved by injustice and discrimination. We are all, inside, concerned human beings. We all want to give more than to receive. We all want to live in a world where solidarity and companionship are more important values than individualism and selfishness. We all want to share beautiful things; experience joy, laughter, love; and experiment, together.

Israel's demonstration of its military prowess in 1967 confirmed its status as a 'strategic asset,' as did its moves to prevent Syrian intervention in Jordan in 1970 in support of the PLO. Under the Nixon doctrine, Israel and Iran were to be 'the guardians of the Gulf,' and after the fall of the Shah, Israel's perceived role was enhanced. Meanwhile, Israel has provided subsidiary services elsewhere, including Latin America, where direct US support for the most murderous regimes has been impeded by Congress. While there has been internal debate and some fluctuation in US policy, much exaggerated in discussion here, it has been generally true that US support for Israel's militarization and expansion reflected the estimate of its power in the region. The effect has been to turn Israel into a militarized state completely dependent on US aid, willing to undertake tasks that few can endure, such as participation in Guatemalan genocide. For Israel, this is a moral disaster and will eventually become a physical disaster as well. For the Palestinians and many others, it has been a catastrophe, as it may sooner or later be for the entire world, with the growing danger of superpower confrontation.

The Palestinians were offered two options: 1) to accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers’ rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder.

The Nakba took place where Israel is today, not in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. Any conversation about reconciliation with both communities should take this fact as a starting point.

Israelis like to believe, and tell the world, that they were running an “enlightened” or “benign” occupation, qualitatively different from other military occupations the world had seen. The truth was radically different. Like all occupations, Israel’s was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation.

Another thing they talk about a lot is water—and that’s a very crucial thing, which is not discussed very much in the United States but it’s probably the main reason why Israel is never going to give up the West Bank. See, this is a very arid region, so water is more important than oil, and there are very limited water resources in Israel. In fact, a lot of the wars in the Middle East have been about water—for instance, the wars involving Israel and Syria have usually been about the headwaters of the Jordan, which come from Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. And as a matter of fact, one of the main reasons why Israel is holding on to the so-called “Security Zone” it seized in southern Lebanon [in the 1982 invasion] is that that area includes a mountain, Mount Hermon, which is a big part of the watershed that brings water to the region.

In the case of Israel-Palestine, a one-state solution will arise only on the U.S. model: with extermination or expulsion of the indigenous population.

From Ferguson to Athens, via Mexico, it is clear that many governments are reproducing the tools that Israel uses to repress and oppress the Palestinians. The replication of those same tactics, methods, and often weapons serves as proof that the Palestinians are now used as guinea pigs for experimentation.

The seventh myth was that Israel intended to conduct a benevolent occupation but was forced to take a tougher attitude because of Palestinian violence. Israel regarded from the very beginning any wish to end the occupation—whether expressed peacefully or through struggle—as terrorism. From the beginning, it reacted brutally by collectively punishing the population for any demonstration of resistance.

Since 1949, the United States has passed to Israel more than $100 billion in grants and $10 billion in special loans.36 Other bodies not part of the administration annually transfer to Israel $1 billion. This is larger than the amount of money transferred by the United States to North Africa, South America, and the Caribbean put together.

Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.

[Israel's military occupation is] in gross violation of international law and has been from the outset. And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral responsibility for these crimes. So George Bush No. 1, when he was the U.N. ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated Washington's condemnation of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He happened to be referring specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in violation of the provisions of international law governing the obligations of an occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure "to acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention." [...] However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was developing, between official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is that by then, by late 1971, the United States was already providing the means to implement the violations that Ambassador Bush deplored. [...] on December 5th [2001], there had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland, on the 4th Geneva Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible for monitoring and controlling the implementation of them. The European Union all attended, even Britain, which is virtually a U.S. attack dog these days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the parties to the Geneva Convention. They had an official declaration, which condemned the settlements in the occupied territories as illegal, urged Israel to end its breaches of the Geneva Convention, some "grave breaches," including willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, unlawful depriving of the rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that's a serious term, that means serious war crimes. The United States is one of the high contracting parties to the Geneva Convention, therefore it is obligated, by its domestic law and highest commitments, to prosecute the perpetrators of grave breaches of the conventions. That includes its own leaders. Until the United States prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that means war crimes. And it's worth remembering the context. It is not any old convention. These are the conventions established to criminalize the practices of the Nazis, right after the Second World War. What was the U.S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The U.S. boycotted the meeting [..] and that has the usual consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media.

The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill civilians, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their

While Arab governments and Palestinian leaders were willing to participate in a new and more reasonable UN peace initiative in 1948, the Israelis assassinated the UN peace mediator, Count Bernadotte, and rejected the suggestion of the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), a UN body, to reopen negotiations. This intransigent view would continue; Avi Shlaim has shown in The Iron Wall that, contrary to the myth that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss peace, it was Israel that constantly rejected the peace offers that were on the table.

I started with reading Chomsky and slowly became very interested in anything that had to do with Israel/Palestine. Reading Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, John Berger, Tanya Reinhart, Ilan Pappé, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Kurt Vonnegut, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein . . . all became part of my daily routine.

The United States is just "too big to hold to account," whether by judicial inquiry, boycott and sanctions, or other means.

When a politician uses the word "folks," we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

One can seek ambiguities and incompleteness, but not in the case if the United States and Israel, which remain in splendid isolation, not only in words.

Inflicting pain on civilians for political ends is another long-standing doctrine of state terror, in fact its guiding principle.

But the imperial mentality is so deeply embedded in Western culture that this travesty passes without criticism, even notice.

Unmasking the paradigm of parity, the charade of a genuine debate in the Israeli society, and revealing the strategy behind Israeli policy in the last forty years is a task the one-state movement should take upon itself in the near future.

Rashid was crushed in his wheelchair when one of Israel’s huge US-supplied bulldozers demolished his home with the family inside. Thanks to prevailing moral standards, such acts are also excluded from the canon of terrorism (or worse, war crimes), by virtue of wrong agency.3

While George W. Bush was in power, the killing of women and babies in Gaza could be justified by the American administration as being part of a holy war against Islam (a practice not alien to the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan) under the banner of fighting terrorism.

In his important work on the subject, Stephen Sizer has revealed how Christian Zionists have constructed a historical narrative that describes the Muslim attitude to Christianity throughout the ages as a kind of a genocidal campaign, first against the Jews and then against the Christians.12 Hence, what were once hailed as moments of human triumph in the Middle East—the Islamic renaissance of the Middle Ages, the golden era of the Ottomans, the emergence of Arab independence and the end of European colonialism—were recast as the satanic, anti-Christian acts of heathens. In the new historical view, the United States became St. George, Israel his shield and spear, and Islam their dragon.

Of the approximately nine hundred thousand Palestinians living in the territories designated by the UN as a Jewish state, only one hundred thousand remained on or near their lands and homes. Those who remained became the Palestinian minority in Israel. The rest were expelled, or fled under the threat of expulsion, and a few thousand died in massacres.

The mechanisms of denial in Israel are very effective, because they are a comprehensive means of indoctrination, covering the whole of a citizen's life from the cradle to the grave. It ensures the state that its people do not get confused by facts and reality, or, at least, that they view reality in such a way that it does not create any moral problems.

For historians the evidence in the archive of the regime committing the ethnic cleansing prevents a clear picture from emerging, since the aim of the regime from the beginning was to obscure its intentions, and this is manifested in the language of the orders and that of the post-event reports. This is why evidence of victims and victimizers is so vital.

Thus, the ghettoization of the Palestinians in Gaza did not reap any dividends. The ghettoized community continued to express its will for life by firing primitive missiles into Israel. Ghettoizing or quarantining unwanted communities, even if they were regarded as dangerous, has never worked in history as a solution. The Jews know it best from their own history

The convention is understandable on the doctrinal principle that though the U.S. government sometimes makes mistakes, its intentions are by definition benign, even noble. In the world of attractive imagery, Washington has always sought desperately to be an honest broker, yearning to advance peace and justice. The doctrine trumps truth, of which there is little hint in the speech or the mainstream coverage of it.

You might look back at the Zionist movement—there were plenty of Jews killed by other Jews. They killed collaborators, traitors and people they thought were traitors. And they weren’t under anything like the harsh conditions of the Palestinian occupation. As plenty of Israelis have pointed out, the British weren’t nice, but they were gentlemen compared with us. The Labor-based defense force Haganah had torture chambers and assassins. I once looked up their first recorded assassination in the official Haganah history. It’s described there straight. It was in 1921. A Dutch Jew named Jacob de Haan had to be killed, because he was trying to approach local Palestinians to see if things could be worked out between them and the new Jewish settlers. His murderer was assumed to be the woman who later became the wife of the first president of Israel. They said that another reason for assassinating him was that he was a homosexual.

It can be seen, then, that a public debate on the issue of the Nakbah, whether conducted in Israel itself or in the United States, its imperial protector, could open up questions concerning the moral legitimacy of the Zionist project as a whole. The mechanism of denial, therefore, was crucial, not only for defeating the counter-claims made by Palestinians in the peace process, but, far more importantly, for disallowing any significant debate on the very essence and moral foundations of Zionism.

Since the terms "aggression" and "terrorism" are inadequate, some new term is needed for the sadistic and cowardly torture of people caged with no possibility of escape, while they are being pounded to dust by the most sophisticated products of U.S. military technology. That technology is used in violation of international and even U.S. law, but for self-declared outlaw states that is just another minor technicality.... ...The United States is just "too big to hold to account," whether by judicial inquiry, boycott and sanctions, or other means.

Desegregating the activity of civil society in the West, as well as inside Israel, illustrates the very essence of a one-state solution when the one-state movement is still in its embryonic stage. An activity around themes, and not according to national, religious, or ethnic identity, can be the unique contribution of the one-state movement. But again themes can sound too abstract and fluid for a movement that seeks desperately to change the public mind after years of being conditioned by a distorted historical narrative, manipulated media coverage, and a lethal futuristic vision.

Thus, the circle is being closed, almost before our very eyes. When Israel took almost 80 percent of Palestine in 1948, it did so through settlement and the ethnic cleansing of the original Palestinian population. The country now has a consensual government that enjoys wide public support, and wants to determine by force the future of the remaining 20 percent. It has, as have all its predecessors, from Labor and Likud alike, resorted to settlement as the best means for doing this. This entails the destruction of an independent Palestinian infrastructure. These politicians sense-and they may not be wrong in this—that the public mood in Israel would allow them to go even further, should they wish to do so.

The Iran/Contra cover-up The major elements of the Iran/Contra story were well known long before the 1986 exposures, apart from one fact: that the sale of arms to Iran via Israel and the illegal Contra war run out of Ollie North’s White House office were connected. The shipment of arms to Iran through Israel didn’t begin in 1985, when the congressional inquiry and the special prosecutor pick up the story. It began almost immediately after the fall of the Shah in 1979. By 1982, it was public knowledge that Israel was providing a large part of the arms for Iran—you could read it on the front page of the New York Times. In February 1982, the main Israeli figures whose names later appeared in the Iran/Contra hearings appeared on BBC television [the British Broadcasting Company, Britain’s national broadcasting service] and described how they had helped organize an arms flow to the Khomeini regime. In October 1982, the Israeli ambassador to the US stated publicly that Israel was sending arms to the Khomeini regime, “with the cooperation of the United States…at almost the highest level.” The high Israeli officials involved also gave the reasons: to establish links with elements of the military in Iran who might overthrow the regime, restoring the arrangements that prevailed under the Shah—standard operating procedure. As for the Contra war, the basic facts of the illegal North-CIA operations were known by 1985 (over a year before the story broke, when a US supply plane was shot down and a US agent, Eugene Hasenfus, was captured). The media simply chose to look the other way. So what finally generated the Iran/Contra scandal? A moment came when it was just impossible to suppress it any longer. When Hasenfus was shot down in Nicaragua while flying arms to the Contras for the CIA, and the Lebanese press reported that the US National Security Adviser was handing out Bibles and chocolate cakes in Teheran, the story just couldn’t be kept under wraps. After that, the connection between the two well-known stories emerged. We then move to the next phase: damage control. That’s what the follow-up was about. For more on all of this, see my Fateful Triangle (1983), Turning the Tide (1985), and Culture of Terrorism (1987).

Of course, it was the United States and Israel that had rejected diplomacy and the PLO that had been offering compromise for years, but Lewis’s reversal of the facts was quite normal and unchallenged in the mainstream.

The hideous revelations elicited a different reaction from the Most Moral President in the World, the usual one: great sympathy for Israelis, bitter condemnation of Hamas, and calls for moderation on both sides. In his August press conference, President Obama did express concern for Palestinians “caught in the crossfire” (where?) while again vigorously supporting the right of Israel to defend itself, like everyone. Not quite everyone—not, of course, Palestinians. They have no right to defend themselves, surely not when Israel is on good behavior, keeping to the norm of quiet for quiet: stealing their land, driving them out of their homes, subjecting them to a savage siege, and regularly attacking them with weapons provided by their protector.

to accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers’ rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder.

Part of this myth related to assertions about the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)—assertions promoted by liberal Zionists in both the US and Israel and shared with the rest of the political forces in Israel. The allegation is that the PLO—inside and outside of Palestine—was conducting a war of terror for the sake of terror. Unfortunately, this demonization is still very prevalent in the West and has been accentuated after 2001 by the attempt to equate Islam, terrorism, and Palestine.

The country now has a consensual government that enjoys wide public support, and wants to determine by force the future of the remaining 20 percent. It has, as have all its predecessors, from Labor and Likud alike, resorted to settlement as the best means for doing this. This entails the destruction of an independent Palestinian infrastructure. These politicians sense—and they may not be wrong in this—that the public mood in Israel would allow them to go even further, should they wish to do so. They could emulate the ethnic cleansing of 1948, this time not only by driving the Palestinians out of the occupied territories, but, if necessary, also driving out the one million Palestinians living within the pre-1967 borders of Israel. In such an atmosphere, then, the Nakbah is not so much denied in Israel as cherished.

* In 2012 fatah and Hamas forged unity agreement and accepted all of the demands of the quartet. Obama administration also approved this agreement threatened the long-term goal of dividing Gaza from the West Bank. Something had to be done, three Israeli boys were murdered in the West Bank the Netanyahu government had strong evidence that once they were dead but use the opportunity to launch a rampage in the West Bank. During the 18 day rampage Israeli soldiers arrested 419 Palestinians and killed six, Hamas finally reacted with its first rocket strikes in 19 months. This provided the pretext for operation protective edge on July 8 by the end of July 15 hundred Palestinians had been killed 70% of them were civilians including hundreds of women and children. Three civilians in Israel were killed. Large areas of Gaza were turned into rubble. Gauzes main power plant was attacked, which is a war crime rescue teams and ambulances were repeatedly attacked for hospitals were attacked another war crime. Are you in school was attacked harbouring 3300 refugees who had fled the ruins of their neighbourhoods on the orders of the Israeli army

Hamas leaders have made it repeatedly clear that they would accept a two state settlement in accord with the international consensus that has been blocked by United States and Israel for 40 years. Ceasefires have been regularly observed by Hamas until Israel violate them with violence

Over 90% of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human consumption this was made worse when Israel attacked water sewage systems. A Large population of Palestinian children are affected by the man-made man nourishment regime caused by that is really imposed a blockage. Prevalence of anaemia in children under two years in Gaza is 72.8%

We don’t have time to go through the history, which is a revealing one. But in brief, the pattern goes way back to the earliest recorded history. So go back to classical Greece and ask who had to drink the hemlock and commit suicide. It was the guy who was corrupting the youth of Athens by asking too many questions, Socrates. Roughly at the same time, if you look at the biblical record, there were people who are called prophets, a misleading translation of an obscure Hebrew word. They were what we might call dissidents. They were criticizing the evil acts of the kings, giving geopolitical analysis, warning of what was going to happen as a result of these terrible policies, calling for mercy for widows and orphans, clearly wild men in the wings. They were not welcomed. They were treated harshly—imprisoned, driven into the desert, condemned as haters of Israel, in this case, the prophet Elijah. That’s the origin of the phrase “Jewish self-hatred” used today to condemn Jewish critics of Israeli policy by prominent Israeli political figures like Abba Eban and, commonly, by defenders of these policies here. Centuries later, the prophets were honored. But not at the time. At the time, the people who were honored were the flatterers at the Court, those who were later called false prophets. The experts in legitimation. And so it goes right through history. An interesting story.

Heading toward 2020, we will all most probably face a racist, ultra-capitalist, and more expanded Israel still busy ethnically cleansing Palestine. There is however a good chance that such a state will become a global pariah and the people around the world will ask their “leaders” to act and end any relations they have with it. What they should not hear are the past slogans, which are no longer relevant in the struggle for a more just and democratic Palestine.

The United States and Israel soon began planning a military coup to overthrow the unacceptable elected government, a familiar procedure. When Hamas preempted the coup in 2007, the siege of Gaza became far more severe, along with regular Israeli military attacks.

I have always been skeptical about academic boycotts. There may be overriding reasons, but in general I think that those channels should be kept open. As for boycotts in general, they are a tactic, not a principle. Like other tactics, we have to evaluate them in terms of their likely consequences.

We can debate the extent to which Israel relies on U.S. support, but there can be little doubt that its crushing of Palestinians and other violent crimes are possible only because the United States provides it with unprecedented economic, military, diplomatic, and ideological support. So if there are to be boycotts, why not of the United States, whose support of Israel is the least of its crimes? Or of the UK, or other criminal states? We know the answer, and it is not an attractive one, undermining the integrity of the call for boycott.

Again, I don’t think we can push the South Africa analogy too far because at this point there are too many differences like the huge internal Black activism inside South Africa, no possible counterpart to that in Israel, the military defeat of South Africa by Cuba, there is nothing like that

It is very clear that the South African post-apartheid model cannot work in Israel, in other words, you cannot buy the Israelis by persuading them to give up their racist ideology in return for maintaining their economic privileges. This is not going to work. In a very bizarre way, Israeli apartheid, if we can call it that, or racist ideology, is far more religious and dogmatic than the white supremacist one in South Africa. Although it had its churches and its own version of theocratic and religious justifications, basically it was a matter of keeping the privileges [intact] and once they were secured in the post-apartheid system you win over quite a lot of people among the white population, which is not going to work in Israel. You will not convince the high-tech sector in Israel that they can be as rich as they are now but they have to live in a more democratic system.

A reader of Noam Chomsky’s political writings would conclude that the world’s most evil nations are the United States and Israel. They are the target of nearly all his invective. For example, he has denied that Israel is a democracy or that it could even become one.22 Typical of his statements about the evil nature of America was his comment during the war in Vietnam that the U.S. Defense Department is “the most hideous institution on earth.”23 As regards the Jews and Zionism, Chomsky is so hate-filled that in 1980 he defended the publication of a book written by a French neo-Nazi who claimed that the Holocaust was a fiction made up by Zionists. Chomsky’s defense was subsequently published as the introduction to the book. He claims that he was merely defending the French professor’s academic freedom. But when Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times asked Chomsky to comment on the professor’s views, Chomsky noted that he had no views he wished to state. As Martin Peretz, editor of the New Republic, has noted: “On the question, that is, as to whether or not six million Jews were murdered,Noam Chomsky apparently is an agnostic”24 (for a further analysis of Chomsky, and the phenomenon of Jewish antisemitism, see this chapter’s EPILOGUE: SELF-HATING JEWS: EXPLAINING JEWISH ANTISEMITISM).

Since 1949, the United States has passed to Israel more than $100 billion in grants and $10 billion in special loans. Other bodies not part of the administration annually transfer to Israel $1 billion. This is larger than the amount of money transferred by the United States to North Africa, South America, and the Caribbean put together.

In normal circumstances, as Edward Said recommended in his seminal Culture and Imperialism, painful dialogue with the past should enable a given society to digest both the most evil and the most glorious moments of its nation's history. But this could not work in a case where a moral self-image is considered to be the principal asset in the battle for public opinion, and thus the best means of surviving in a hostile environment. The way out for the Jewish society in the newly founded state was to erase in the collective memory the unpleasant chapters of the past, and leave intact the gratifying ones. It was a conscious mechanism put in place and motion in order to solve the impossible tension arising from the two contradictory messages of the past.

Imposing the will of one side through the agencies of the UN could not have been a recipe for peace, but rather for war. The Palestinian side viewed the Zionist movement much as the Algerians did the French colonialists. Just as it was unthinkable for the Algerians to agree to share their land with the French settlers, it was unacceptable for the Palestinians to divide Palestine with the Zionist movement.

A special committee was established to give Hebraized versions of the original Arab names to the new settlements-thus, Lubya became Lavi and Safuria was turned into Zipori. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, explained that this was part of an attempt to prevent future claims to these villages. This process was supported also by the Israeli archeologists who authorized the names, not so much as a takeover of a title, but rather as a form of poetic justice that restored to "ancient Israel" its ancestral map. Place names were taken from the Bible and attached to the destroyed villages.

As the current U.S.-Israel assault raged, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained that Israel’s tactics in the current attack, as in its invasion of Lebanon in 2006, are based on the sound principle of “trying to ‘educate’ Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population.” That makes sense on pragmatic grounds, as it did in Lebanon, where “the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians—the families and employers of the militants—to restrain Hezbollah in the future.”10 And by similar logic, bin Laden’s effort to “educate” Americans on 9/11 was highly praiseworthy, as were the Nazi attacks on Lidice and Oradour, Putin’s destruction of Grozny, and other notable educational exercises.

And it may be that history, as Michel Foucault tried to convince us, is a list of discrete, disconnected processes whose joint impact is not linked to any one of them but to their fusion into one big explosion. In that case, history is not just a linear movement of endless American support for Israel against, and at the expense of, the Palestinian cause but a more distorted, curved line of ups and downs that indicate possible changes in the future. Moreover, a concerted effort to bring about such a change is a worthy goal—inside and outside the United States. But what we have this year is the ominous call at the 2006 AIPAC convention for the United States to attack and invade Iran.38

This had been made clear months before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, when the US had rejected Iraq’s offer of negotiations over weapons of mass destruction. In the offer, Iraq proposed to destroy all such chemical and biological weapons, if other countries in the region also destroyed their weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein was then Bush’s friend and ally, so he received a response, which was instructive. Washington said it welcomed Iraq’s proposal to destroy its own weapons, but didn’t want this linked to “other issues or weapons systems.” There was no mention of the “other weapons systems,” and there’s a reason for that. Israel not only may have chemical and biological weapons—it’s also the only country in the Mideast with nuclear weapons (probably about 200 of them). But “Israeli nuclear weapons” is a phrase that can’t be written or uttered by any official US government source. That phrase would raise the question of why all aid to Israel is not illegal, since foreign aid legislation from 1977 bars funds to any country that secretly develops nuclear weapons.

Israel’s value to the United States depends on the fact that it is threatened with destruction: that makes them completely dependent on the United States for survival, and therefore extremely reliable—because if the rug ever is pulled out from under them in a situation of real conflict, they will get destroyed.

The fact that Israel actually benefits from violating international law and receives “red carpet” treatment from the West means that we all have a role to play in ending the injustice that the Palestinians are facing.

As for the myth of the extended hand of peace, the documents show clearly an intransigent Israeli leadership that refused to open up negotiations over the future of post-Mandatory Palestine or consider the return of the people who had been expelled or fled. While Arab governments and Palestinian leaders were willing to participate in a new and more reasonable UN peace initiative in 1948, the Israelis assassinated the UN peace mediator, Count Bernadotte, and rejected the suggestion of the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), a UN body, to reopen negotiations. This intransigent view would continue; Avi Shlaim has shown in The Iron Wall that, contrary to the myth that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss peace, it was Israel that constantly rejected the peace offers that were on the table.