Il dissenso di Chomsky sulla questione Israele - Palestina

Chomsky’s dissent about Israel-Palestine question

1. Noam Chomsky’s life

Noam Chomsky is a pivotal figure in contemporary linguistics, politics,

cognitive psychology, and philosophy.

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in Philadelphia to

Jewish parents, Dr. William (Zev) Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, who were
engaged in teaching and studying the Hebrew language. It seems that both parents
were equally important in Noam’s development as thinker, teacher and activist in
a different way. From his father he has inherited the interest for language, from
his mother the political sensitivity which has motivated him to look far beyond his
immediate social context and into the realm of political action and involvement.
His first published article on the fall of Barcelona, Austria and
Czechoslovakia and the rise of fascism, appeared in the school magazine he edited
at the age of 10 (Sperlinch 2006: 7).
Chomsky's political consciousness evolved apace and as a young man he
was involved in anarchist movements and in the radical left. In the 1960s he
joined actively in the protests against the Vietnam War.
In 1947 – 2 years later had entered the University of Pennsylvania – he met
2 persons who had a relevant impact on his life choices: Zelig Harris, a prominent
linguist and the founder of the first linguistics department in the United States at
the University of Pennsylvania and his future wife, Carol Doris Schatz. These two
meetings brought Chomsky to leave the idea of abandoning his studies – which
had disappointed him – and settling in Palestine, to realize the dream of a
binational socialist state. Harris was active in the Jewish issue of the time. He

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promulged that Arabs and Jewish in Palestine should live together as one , that is
to say that there should not be a separatist Jewish state (Sperlinch 2006: 76).
In 1949 Chomsky began his graduate studies in linguistics and concluded
them with a BA honor's thesis Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew which
contains several ideas that foreshadow Chomsky's later work in generative
grammar. In the same year, he married the linguist Carol Schatz. During the years
1951 to 1955 Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of
Fellows. At the same time, he completed his PhD dissertation entitled
“Transformational Analysis” which has built the basis of the later monograph
“Syntactic structure” (1957) that – along with the “Logical Structure of Linguistic
Theory” (1975) – has revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. His major
innovation was his argument concerning an innate capability in human beings to
acquire language. According to Chomsky, the infant, at birth, even before being
exposed to whatever language, already has knowledge about the manner in which
human language operates. In this sense, do exist basic syntactical structures
shared by every language on earth. He called this common denominator "universal
grammar" (Chomsky 1965: 6). Within this perspective, acquisition of language is
an interaction between an innate knowledge of languages’ depth structure and a
contextual knowledge stimulated by children’s surroundings1.
In 1961, he became full professor at M.I.T, in the department of Modern
Languages and Linguistics where in 1976 was appointed Institute Professor, a
position he held until 2002.
Since 1960s, Chomsky has taken up political fights causing stormy debates
about political questions. His political criticism has traditionally been aimed
primarily at the United States and its foreign policy. In his opinion, the United
States, has carried out and provided patronage and support for appalling war
crimes throughout the world, in Korea, Angola, Cuba, East Timor, Guatemala,

1
This represented a real revolution in linguistic but had at the same time important effects on
psychology. Put specifically, Chomsky’s approach constituted an attack against the behaviourist
doctrine according to which human being acquire their behaviours – among which the use of
language – as a result of conditioning (Chomsky, Otero 2004: 27).

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Nicaragua and elsewhere. According to Chomsky, United States policies are

exclusively driven by an unrestrained desire for power, prevalently led by the
economic interests of narrow elites. This, in his own view, has driven the United
States to play the role of world policeman, based on the use of violent means of
coercion – economic and military alike. He continuously savages the declared
goals of United State foreign policy – such as the defense of democracy, the
concern for world peace and the war against terrorism – as ridiculous, ironical
and instrumental.
The disparate crimes the US government can perpetrate are allowed by a
well-oiled system that ensures that the public receives almost no information
about the truly important issues. Those who are considered responsible for
distorting the facts and maintaining the fraud and camouflage are the media and
the intellectuals, the greatest collaborators with the powerful and the economic
elites (Chomsky, 1999, p. 43). In other words, he shows a vision of human
society free of oppression from concentration of power.
There is a certain tension in Chomsky’s thinking which probably underlies
the will of finding any fruitful tie-up among the different strands of his work.
Chomsky is often asked about the connection between his political opinions and
his linguistic research (Chomsky 1992a). He always objects vehemently to the
attempt to make such connections, maintaining that any that may exist are very
minor. One of them may be the idea that one of the innate abilities we "inherit"
genetically is the ability to create and develop a moral system. Like language
capability, moral capability does not dictate a specific morality which is imprinted
in us. The idea is that there is a mental capacity that makes it possible to create a
human, moral system of some kind (Smith, 1999, p. 180).
In this work, we will concentrate on the criticism that Chomsky has showed
against American liberal community that since 1967 has mobilized, according to
the author, a fanatic support to the expansion of Israel so contributing to its
destruction. In the following paragraphs, we will briefly synthesize the history of
Israeli state and the opinion of the author on the matter.

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2. Historical backgrounds

2.1 Israel in Biblical Times

The difficult boundary, territorial, and

resource problems associated with the presence
of an Israeli state surrounded by Arab people,
can be understood only in the context of the long
history of the Jewish people. Only during a very
short period we have seen an united and
independent Israel. According to Biblical
writings around 1000 B.C., the King David first
united the Jewish tribes. His kingdom probably
extended from the Gulf of Aqaba to the
Euphrates, but did not included Philistia (the present-day Gaza Strip). After the
death of his son Solomon, nearly 70 years later, the kingdom split into two weaker
states: Israel (conquered by Assyria in 722 B.C.); and Judah (conquered by
Babylon in 586 B.C.).

Between 166 B.C. and 63 B.C, thanks to

Maccabees, Jews conquest again the autonomy.
The Roman conquest ended Jewish autonomy,
and, after several Jewish revolts, Rome expelled
many Jews from their homeland, which the
Romans called Palestine. Most of the world's
Jewish population remained outside Palestine for
the next 18 centuries.

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Il dissenso di Chomsky sulla questione Israele - Palestina

2.2 Palestine (British Mandate) 1920-48

Although Jews kept alive the hope of

returning to Palestine, the concept of a Jewish state
did not crystallize until the founding of the World
Zionist Organization in 1897. At the same time,
immigration by European Jews accelerated, and –
after the Balfour Declaration of 1917 – Jews
increasingly settled in Palestine, which the League
of Nations mandated to Britain in 1920.

2.3 Palestine (UN Partition Plan) 1947

During the mandate years, Jewish

settlement increased the Arab resentment and led to
frequent strife. An attempt to resolve this conflict
was made with The United Nations partition plan
(1947) which aimed at creating a Jewish state, an
Arab state, and a UN-administered Jerusalem.
Nevertheless, the surrounding Arab countries
opposed the plan and immediately after it invaded
Israel proclaiming its independence in May 1948.

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2.4 Israel 1949-1967

By the end of the 1948-49 war, the

Israelis held more land than the UN plan had
prescribed for them. About 750,000 Palestinians,
those who lived in what became Israeli territory,
fled or were pushed out by advancing Israeli
forces which surrounded Arab countries. Jordan
occupied the West Bank (which it later annexed)
and Egypt occupied and administered the Gaza
Strip. In this way, Jerusalem became a divided
city with Israelis at the western, Jewish in the
inhabited part and Jordanians in the eastern
portion, including the religiously significant Old City. Israel unilaterally
proclaimed West Jerusalem its capital in 1950, a move still unrecognized by most
of the international community.

2.5 Israel and Occupied Territories Since June 1967

In the aftermath of the 1967 war, the

Israelis occupied the West Bank, the Gaza
Strip, the western portion of Syria's Al
Qunaytirah Province (the Golan Heights), and
Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and reaffirmed their
control of these territories during the 1973 war.
In late June 1967, Israel unilaterally
incorporated nearly 67 square kilometers of
West Bank land within the city bounds of
Jerusalem and in 1980 proclaimed a united
Jerusalem as its capital, a move that signed a
proper annexation. In 1981, it also unilaterally

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annexed the Golan Heights. The international community has not recognized
these annexations. Afterward, as a consequence of the Camp David accords, Israel
returned the Sinai to Egypt. In 1993, Israel and the PLO – after formal mutual
recognition – signed a Declaration of Principles eventually extending limited self-
rule to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In the following years, the sequence of rapidly unfolding events has

changed the dynamic of Israel-Palestine question. The authority of Israel and USA
and the ability of both to shape the situation in the middle east, have been
seriously weakened by the war in Lebanon and the dangerous deterioration of
security in Iraq. The Palestinians have suffered under international sanctions
aimed at deliberately punishing them for choosing Hamas in the January 2006
Palestinian elections. Arab opinion has hardened against both US power and
Israeli intransigence. In short, the prospect for peace between Israel and
Palestinian people have rarely looked so critical (Loewenstein, 2007, p. XIII).

3. The fateful triangle

Although Chomsky grew up in the Jewish Zionist cultural tradition, he is

highly critical of the policies of Israel towards Palestinians and its Arab
neighbors. He strongly rejects Israel’s consistent opposition to any political
settlement that accommodates the national rights of the indigenous population; its
repression and state terrorism over many years; its propaganda efforts, which have
been remarkably successful in the United States. But his real concern is the
policies that have been pursued by the U.S. Government and Americans
responsibility in shaping or tolerating these policies. To his view, US people who
describe themselves as “supporters of Israel” should probably be defined as
“supporters of the moral degeneration and ultimate destruction of Israel”
(Chomsky 1983: 3).

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Il dissenso di Chomsky sulla questione Israele - Palestina

The basis of American action is, to his eyes, pure, unadulterated racism. He
always specifies that his claims are not targeted to the American population, but to
the politically activist and articulate parts of it and to the Government. From a
political point of view, American policies are viewed as strongly racist since they
do not recognize the right of self-determination to both the two national groups
who claim for it. One group is what is left of the indigenous population, the other
is the immigrants, the Jewish settlers who came in. Self-determination can be
defined as the population’s freedom of acting without external compulsion and of
determining its own political status (Cassese 2006: 162-164).This implies that
people should be free to choose their own state and their territorial boundaries. In
theory, both these groups should have equal rights and the must for the
Government should be of pressing for a solution which accords them. The only
realistic solution, propose Chomsky, that would satisfy the right of self-
determination for both the national groups, is a two-state settlement with Israel
coming back to the pre-June 1967 borders and a Palestinian state in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip. This solution, although supported by most of the word, it is
opposed by the United Stated and Israel. This equates, in Chomsky’s view, to
reject any right of self-determination for the indigenous population in the former
Palestine.

Chomsky quotes a series of plausible opportunities for a political settlement

which have been rejected and disappeared from the history for their
inconvenience.

First, President Sadat of Egypt offered a peace treaty to Israel on the pre-
June 1967 borders in 1971 which Israel rejected and the United States backed
them in that rejection.

Second, in January 1976 Syria, Jordan and Egypt, the so-called

“confrontation states” made a proposal in the U.N. Security Council for a two-
state settlement with international guarantees and territorial rights secured, that
was backed and even prepared by the PLO, supported by the Soviet Union and

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most of the world. Again, it was vigorously opposed by Israel, which even
boycotted the session and bombed Lebanon in retaliation against the United
Nations, and the United States vetoed it.

There have been a series of such things ever since which impede a political
settlement and legitimate a state of permanent military confrontation. According
to Chomsky, this is leading to Israel destruction, to their economic collapse and
moral degeneration and probably, sooner or later, their physical destruction.
Moreover, this situation is leading the world very close to nuclear war (Chomsky
1983: 4).

He has also accused Israel of guiding state terrorism for selling weapons to
apartheid South Africa and Latin American countries that he characterizes as U.S.
“puppet states”, such as Guatemala in the 1980s, as well as U.S.-backed
paramilitaries (or, according to Chomsky, terrorists) such as the Nicaraguan
Contras. He characterizes Israel as a “mercenary state” , “an Israeli Sparta” and a
militarized dependency within a U.S. system of hegemony. He has also fiercely
criticized sectors of the American Jewish community for their role in obtaining
U.S. support.

Turning to United States, although for most of this century, they were far
and away the world's dominant economic power in the last twenty years or so,
they have declined relative to Japan and German-led Europe. At the same time,
however, US military power has become absolutely preeminent. The strong card
of the United States is force, so they have established the principle that force roles
the word.

Diplomacy is a particularly unwelcome option, unless it's pursued under the gun
(Chomsky, 1992b: 25).

This isn't surprising, since it's trying to impose structures of

domination and exploitation. Military force is regarded as a major policy
instrument, preferring it to sanctions and diplomacy.

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Il dissenso di Chomsky sulla questione Israele - Palestina

When a state is committed to such policies, it must somehow find a way to

divert the population, to keep them far from seeing what's happening around them.
There are not many ways to do this. The standard ones are to inspire fear of
terrible enemies about to overwhelm us. So Arabs are viewed as the threats in the
same way as Qaddafi and his hordes of international terrorists, Grenada and its
ominous air base, Sandinistas marching on Texas and most recently Saddam
Hussein.
This is done through a doctrine which use in a distort way the terms of
political discourse. So, the expansion of Israel is named peace process and under
the traditional meaning of seeking peace, it would include the offer of a full peace
treaty to Israel by Egypt; the Security Council resolution of January 1976, which
called for a two-state settlement; PLO offers through the 1980s to negotiate with
Israel for mutual recognition; and annual votes at the UN General Assembly, most
recently in December 1990 (voted 144-2), calling for an international conference
on the Israel-Arab problem, etc.
But under the political meaning these efforts do not form part of the peace
process. The reason is that in the political meaning, the term peace process refers
to the US government attempt to block international efforts to seek peace. The
cases cited do not fall within the peace process, because the US backed Israel's
rejection of Sadat's offer, vetoed the Security Council resolution, opposed
negotiations and mutual recognition of the PLO and Israel, and regularly joins
with Israel in opposing any attempt to move towards a peaceful diplomatic
settlement at the UN or elsewhere. The peace process is restricted to US
initiatives, which call for a unilateral US-determined settlement with no
recognition of Palestinian national rights (Chomsky, 1992b: 95).
According to Chomsky, this system is not a law of nature. The processes, and
the institutions that engender them, could be changed. But that will require
cultural, social and institutional changes of no little moment, including democratic
structures that go far beyond periodic selection of representatives of the business
world to manage domestic and international affairs.

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References

CASSESE A., 2006, Diritto Internazionale, Bologna, Il Mulino.

CHOMSKY A.N., 1957, Syntactic structures, The Hague/Paris, Mouton.
CHOMSKY A.N., 1965, Aspects of the theory of syntax, Boston, MIT Press.
CHOMSKY A.N., 1975, The logical structure of linguistic theory, New York,
Plenum Publishing Corporation.
CHOMSKY A.N., 1983, Fateful triangle: the United States, Israel, and the
Palestinians, Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
CHOMSKY A.N., 1992a, Chronicles of dissent: interviews with David
Barsamian, Boston, South End Press.
CHOMSKY A.N., 1992b, What uncle Sam really wants, New York, Odonian
Press.
CHOMSKY A.N., 1999, Profit over people: neoliberalism and global order, New
York, Seven Stories Press.
CHOMSKY A.N., OTERO C. P., 2004. Language and politics, Edinburgh, AK
Press.
LOEWENSTEIN A. , 2007, My Israel question, South Australia, Griffin press.
SMITH N., 1999, Chomsky: ideas and ideals, Cambridge, University Press.
SPERLINCH W. B., 2006, Noam Chomsky, Bath, Bath press Ltd.

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