The Bindlestiff Interviews Noam Chomsky
Meet The Bindlestiff, a reporter wandering our planet in search of humanism, solidarity and esprit de corps — a roving archivist of ideals that, once upon a time, inspired millions. He interviewed Noam Chomsky a year ago when Israel was bombing Gaza heavily. And yesterday (March 23, 2022) The Bindlestiff returned to the Professor with a follow-up question. We present this first dispatch in what The Chiseler sincerely hopes will become a tradition that abides.
The Bindlestiff: This latest assault against Gaza seems contradictory: both part and parcel of Israel’s enduring agenda and more obviously cynical, bearing no relationship to the usual talking points about national defense, etc. Is it wrong to overestimate public opinion as surprisingly informed, seeing through Israel’s state propaganda more swiftly this time around?
Noam Chomsky: Each time Israel launches some barbaric act of terror, its sophisticated Hasbara system faces a more difficult task of justification, and its grip on popular opinion weakens. The horrors of Israel’s latest war against the civilian society in its Gaza prison are impossible to suppress, so propaganda seeks to restrict attention solely to Hamas rockets attacking innocent Israel in an act of unprovoked aggression: every country has a right to defend itself, and in self-defense Israel has been remarkably restrained considering the nature of the Hamas attack.
That still works in some circles, but fewer than before. Though the media do not convey anything like the hideous reality of Israel’s murderous strangulation of Gaza or the regular brutality of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, nevertheless a fair amount is seeping through, a good deal more than before, enough for many to dismantle the propaganda line.
Yes, Hamas is a pretty awful organization and Palestinians deserve much better. But there are ways to deal with its rocket launches. The narrow answer is to eliminate the reason for them. Many are aware that they were fired in retaliation for Israeli crimes in Jerusalem, particularly the military attack on worshippers in Al-Aqsa. Hamas announced a deadline saying that unless the attacks stopped by then it would retaliate with rockets.
The more fundamental approach is to end Israel’s vicious imprisonment of Gaza, which has rendered it virtually unlivable, without even potable water, let alone any hope for decent survival. A brutal jailer and torturer is hardly in a position to ask how to defend himself from occasional resistance by the prisoners. I think more and more people are coming to understand that, despite intensive suppression of the background, which continues.
Along with the limited reporting of the barbarity of Israel’s periodic assaults, the deepening recognition of Israel’s exploits in the illegally occupied territories and within its borders is making it harder to sustain the image of the embattled guardian of democracy and righteousness in the region.
The Bindlestiff: Is the solidarity among geographically divided Palestinians (East Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank, and within Israel) wholly unprecedented?
Noam Chomsky: Not unprecedented, but taking new forms as circumstances change. One change, which has received some notice, is the further “Judaization” of the few cities where there still are remnants of the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, “mixed cities,” so-called. Resentment of the further marginalization and repression of the Palestinian minority seems to have been a factor in the protests there against the Israeli actions in Greater Jerusalem, initially dispossession of still more Arab families in Sheikh Jarrah, then the assault on Al-Aqsa worshippers, among other events. One was Israel’s decision to prevent East Jerusalem participation in forthcoming Palestinian elections for the first time, in violation of its commitments under the Oslo accords, another step in Israel’s imposition of its nationalist-religious agenda in the Greater Jerusalem it has established, a core part of the Greater Israel project it has imposed throughout the West Bank.
The Bindlestiff: I won’t ask for predictions, but are there specific opportunities available, here and now, to those committed to seeing a semblance of justice for Palestinians?
Noam Chomsky: There definitely are opportunities. For the first time, there are calls in mainstream media for cancellation of US military aid to Israel along with congressional legislation calling for conditioning such aid (Betsy McCollum). These are openings that can be pursued well beyond. This unparalleled aid to Israel is in violation of US laws that bar aid to military units engaged in systematic human right abuses. The IDF provides many candidates. Many Americans can come to understand that. Even a threat to the huge flood of aid could have major policy repercussions.
A more far-reaching issue that should be highlighted is Israel’s nuclear weapons programs. The US pretends not to know that they exist, for good reasons. Abandon the pretense, and serious questions arise about whether all US aid to Israel is illegal under US law because of Israel’s development of nuclear weapons outside the framework of international arms control agreements. By bipartisan agreement, and media complicity, that crucial matter has been effectively suppressed.
And it is crucial. A lot is at stake, quite apart from the legality of US aid to Israel. One obvious matter is a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. That has been strongly supported for years by the Arab states, Iran, the Global South (G-77), with general support in Europe. It is regularly vetoed by the US, most recently Obama. The unspoken reason, of course, is what I have just described: protecting Israel’s illegal nuclear weapons system, and arguably illegal US aid to Israel.
A ME NWFZ with effective inspections is entirely feasible, as we have seen before Trump dismantled the Joint Agreement on Iranian nuclear programs (JCPOA). It would go far beyond the JCPOA in ending alleged concerns about an Iranian nuclear threat. It would end any shred of justification for the vicious US sanctions on Iran, to which Europe is compelled to conform. It would end a very serious threats of escalation to major war. It would lay the basis for punishing Israel for its campaign of assassination and sabotage against Iran, and its threats of much worse.
In brief, such initiatives could have major consequences. All matters that would be of much concern to Americans if they knew about them.
There is a lot more that can be done. Choice of tactics is no trivial matter, a consideration that should be second nature to activists. The choice must be based on realistic assessment of existing circumstances – not what we might like them to be, but what they are.
Existing circumstances in Israel-Palestine are not obscure. For 50 years, Israel has been systematically creating a Greater Israel in the West Bank in which it takes for itself whatever it finds of value while bypassing Palestinian population centers so as to avoid the dread “demographic problem”: too many non-Jews in a “democratic Jewish state,” an oxymoron more difficult to sustain with each passing year. There is no need to run through the details, evident on the ground. Greater Israel is so closely integrated into Israel proper that Israelis are barely aware of the international border. The creation of Greater Israel has been undertaken in brazen defiance of Security Council resolutions and in perfectly conscious violation of international law. It has been advanced across the Israeli political spectrum, with only marginal opposition. Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, for example, were among its most forceful proponents.
Discussion of tactics and options is meaningless unless this reality is recognized. In particular, current 1-2 state debates are empty unless the Greater Israel option is recognized. As long as the option exists, we can be confident that Israel will never consider disappearing in favor of “one state” — that is, a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority. Nor is there any force in the world supporting this, or likely to be such a force in the foreseeable future.
Tactics therefore have to be directed at undermining the Greater Israel option. There are many possibilities: an arms-trade embargo conditioned on terminating this project, for example. Insofar as that can be accomplished, other options can be considered. I won’t proceed here but it takes little thought to recognize what the possibilities are. What is important is to keep all of this clearly in mind in devising ways to reach some tolerable settlement, one that can be a basis for moving on to something better.
The Bindlestiff: Are any of the various solidarity efforts to assist besieged Palestinians making progress, in your opinion? Since Israel’s May 2021 assault on Gaza, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement has called for global responses with a renewed sense of urgency. In the past, you have expressed fundamental criticisms of BDS. How do those criticisms fit into a positive agenda for the future?
Noam Chomsky: The basic criticisms are very simple. I think some of the tactical decisions are mistaken, and that important initiatives haven’t been taken because they don’t fall within an overly rigid doctrine as to how to proceed. I think that a general unwillingness to discuss these issues has been harmful, adopting a kind of “with us or against us” approach, very much unlike many other solidarity movements I’ve been involved with over the years.
The movement to boycott and divest from Israel (there are no sanctions) was, to my knowledge, initiated by Uri Avnery and Gush Shalom in the ‘90s. Their guiding principle was that BD actions should focus on the occupied territories, both on Israel’s criminal actions there and on outside actors who participate in them (US multinationals among them). I think there were good reasons for that. If we look at the record, I think we find that the successful actions typically have kept to that framework, and have had some effect – not anywhere near enough, plainly. But it’s the right way to proceed.