by Noam Chomsky
but others do, for example, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who describes the Zionist Organization of America as (in recent years) “the American wing of the Liberal Party in Israel which, together with Begin’s Revisionists, make up the Likud.95 Thus the two extremes that have been “highlighted” in recent debate among American Jews are not exactly equally represented: one consists of George Habash, and the other, the Zionist Organization of America, and in fact, most others in the organized Jewish community.
Helprin then proceeds to give the version of history as perceived in the “middle ground.” Apart from the U.S., we find “the facile rejection of Israel and compassionate overembrace of its enemies by nearly all the world,” including Europe, which “hardly reacted” to PLO atrocities in the past, saving its condemnations for Israel—a ridiculous falsification, of course, but one that appears to be widely believed in the U.S. and is sometimes supported with serious misrepresentation; for one example, by Saul Bellow, see TNCW, pp. 303-4. As for Israel, while it is not perfect, its “campaign in Lebanon was both late in coming and restrained in character when compared with what any other state, civilized or uncivilized, would do in reaction to the continual shelling of its cities, the murder of its children and the massing of arms against it for years without abatement.” Omitted are a few possibly pertinent facts: e.g., that Israel occupies Arab territory from which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled in 1967 (not to speak of questions that might be raised about earlier years) and that the PLO had scrupulously adhered to the July 1981 cease-fire in the face of constant Israeli provocations, a matter to which we return.
As for the PLO, it “is to the slaughter of men, women and children what France is to wine.” Assuming this to be a valid characterization, we may ask what analogy is appropriate for Israel with its far greater slaughters since the early 1950s, long before the PLO was founded, or for the pre-state Zionist terror organizations, which, Simha Flapan writes, “established the pattern of terrorism adopted 30 years later by AI-Fatah.”96
According to official Israeli army statistics, 106 people died in the course of all terrorist actions in the north since 1967, considerably fewer than the number of victims of a single Israeli bombing raid.97 Or to take another comparison, the total number of Israeli victims is approximately the same as the number killed when Israel shot down a civilian Libyan airplane over the occupied Sinai in February 1973; the plane had become lost in bad weather and was one minute flight time from the Suez Canal, towards which it was heading, when shot down by the Israeli air force.98 The total number of Israelis killed in all acts of terror from 1967 is 282,99 less than the number killed by Israel’s air terrorists in Beirut on July 17-8 1981, in “retaliation” after a PLO response to Israeli bombing that broke the cease-fire.100 What of recent years?*
According to figures provided by Minister of the Interior Yosef Burg, in 1980 10 Jews were killed by terrorists and in 1981—8. In contrast, we have killed about a thousand terrorists in 1982, and caused the loss of life of thousands of inhabitants of an enemy country. If so, it results that for every 6-8 Jews sacrificed, we kill in return thousands of Gentiles. This is, undoubtedly, a spectacular situation, an uncommon success of Zionism. I might even dare to say— exaggerated.101
* Note that we are taking these Israeli figures at face value, not asking how the victims were killed, though a closer look at the terrorist incidents shows that the question is worth asking.
Israeli terrorist acts over the years, beginning long before the PLO was formed, have undoubtedly claimed far more victims than those of the PLO, and while they are typically described as “retaliation” here, the facts make clear that this is a term of propaganda, not description.102
So much for Europe, Israel and the PLO. Next, Helprin turns to the Arab states apart from post-1977 Egypt: “Were the confrontation states and the rejection states to allow that the Jews, too, have a right to political existence, they would get serene open borders and peace treaties…Israel will not listen to the Arabs until they decide to put an end to their 30-year war against it.” He adds that “when Arab officials speak of liberating or regaining the occupied territories, they mean all of Israel,” although “the Western press has been remiss at sniffing out this verbal trick.” The entire history just described—only a small part of the story, which will be extended directly—is completely expunged from the record.
Clearly, all of this is pure Agitprop. How can the New York Times and its writers expect to get away with it? The answer is simple enough; it is no trick at all, given overwhelming dominance of the means of articulate expression by one specific point of view. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that the New York Times Magazine would permit an article to appear reviewing the actual historical facts, at least, as long as the U.S. remains committed to its Greater Israel policies. This example, which is by no means unusual, illustrates very well what Walter Lippmann sixty years ago called “the manufacture of consent,” an art which “is capable of great refinements” and will lead to a “revolution” in “the practice of democracy.”103
3. The Continuing Threat of Peace
T
he well-known Israeli writer Amos Elon has written of the “panic and unease among our political leadership” caused by Arab peace proposals (see 2.4.1 above). “The most extreme instance,” he
adds, “though not the only one, was in early 1971, when Sadat threw Israel off balance with his announcement, for the first time, that he was willing to enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and to respect its independence and sovereignty in ‘secure and recognized borders’.”104 Elon describes the harshly negative reaction of the government, the silence of most of the press, and the convoluted efforts of most Orientalists to prove that Sadat’s offer did not mean what it said—rather like Helprin’s insight into the devious “verbal trick” of the Arabs when they speak of a settlement in which the occupied territories will be turned over to their inhabitants. The occasion for Elon’s article was the “emotional and angry” reaction of the government to the justannounced Saudi (Fahd) peace plan of August 1981,105 a response which he found “shocking, frightening, if not downright despair-producing.”*
Elon had good reason for his despair. The Labor Party journal Davar * Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir stated that “Even the suggestion of Saudi recognition of Israel is not new.” The Saudi plan called for a two-state settlement on the 1967 borders, with recognition of the right of all states in the region to exist in peace. It should be noted that many Labor leaders denounced the Saudi peace plan, e.g.. Chaim Herzog, who warned that it was prepared by the PLO (see section 2.4.1 and Party chairman Shimon Peres, who “remarked today that the Saudi peace proposal threatened Israel’s very existence” (Ha’aretz, Aug. 10, 1981; Israeli Mirror).
found Israel’s reaction—including military flights over Saudi Arabia—to be so “irrational” as to cause foreign intelligence services to be concerned over Israeli bombing of Saudi oil fields.106 Another wellknown journalist described “the frightened, almost hysterical response of the Israeli government to the Saudi plan” as “a grave mistake,” adding that if the PLO offered to negotiate with Israel, “the government would undoubtedly declare a national day of mourning.”107 In fact, the PLO had repeatedly expressed a willingness to accept a negotiated settlement and to participate in general peace negotiations, but no call for a day of mourning was necessary, since the denial of the facts was still effectively in force.
A few months later, in February 1982, Uri Avneri criticized a similar Israeli reaction to a Syrian proposal calling for “termination of the state of war between the Arabs and Israel…” along with confirmation of the right of the Palestinians to an independent state alongside of Israel in the occupied territories.108 B. Michael made a similar observation in Ha’aretz. Noting the immediate efforts to dismiss the statement of the Syrian Minister of Information that a peace agreement would be possible if Israel were to withdraw to its 1967 borders, he comm
ented sardonically that “We must therefore be careful not to underestimate the danger posed by the Syrian plot, and we must do our best to kill it while it is still small.”109
In the same month (February 1982), Saudi Arabia’s state radio twice “called for direct peace negotiations between the Arabs and Israel, on condition that Israel recognize the PLO as the negotiating partner.” These initiatives too were ignored,110 as was a subsequent Iraqi initiative (see p. 367*).
Israeli propaganda beamed to an American audience, however, regularly speaks of the willingness of “socialist Zionism” to make peace if only some Arab leader would show some sign that Israel may exist in the region,111 ignoring—in fact, denying—the actual extreme rejectionism of mainstream socialist Zionism and the halting and sometimes ambiguous steps of the PLO and the Arab states over the past years towards a political settlement, which, whatever one thinks of them, clearly go far beyond anything that the Israeli Labor Party has been willing to consider and in fact go beyond what the Israeli “Peace Now” group has proposed. American commentators are still more extreme in their rejection of the historical record, as in the sample of cases cited. In the earlier years, the PLO was no less rejectionist than Israel, and its call for a “democratic secular state” was not what it appeared to be on the surface (see TNCW, p. 430). But it simply cannot be denied that from the mid-1970s, the PLO has moved increasingly towards an accommodationist position. While concealing this record, propagandists search desperately for statements by PLO spokesmen that reveal their unremitting hostility to Israel and unwillingness to accept it. Israeli doves have regarded such efforts with contempt, pointing out that the same logic would lead to the conclusion that no one should have any dealings with the Zionist movement or the State of Israel, since its leaders have consistently rejected any Palestinian rights and have repeatedly indicated that they regard any political settlement as a temporary stage leading to further expansion. What is more, they have acted on these principles. We return to the record, which is not without interest and is generally concealed here. That outright propagandists should resort to these deceptive practices is not very surprising; that, after all, is their vocation. It is more interesting that the practice is common across a broad spectrum of Western opinion, particularly in the U.S., as one aspect of the ideological support for Israel.
There have been other examples of missed chances, before and since. Mattityahu Peled alleges that “a historic opportunity was missed to start a dialogue between Israel and the PLO” in 1976, when plans were devised for mutual conciliatory gestures, leading to further peaceful contacts. He states that the plan collapsed because of Israeli military actions in Lebanon. Just at the time when Arafat was scheduled to make a conciliatory statement, as part of the plan, the Israeli Navy began capturing boats belonging to Lebanese Moslems, turning them over to Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies, who then killed them.112
In the light of American beliefs about the history of terrorism, it should perhaps be observed that along with acts of piracy such as these, Israel has also resorted to hijacking of airplanes, and may indeed have initiated this practice. In December 1954, a Syrian civilian airliner was captured by Israeli military aircraft to obtain hostages for exchange with Israeli soldiers who had been captured within Syria. The Prime Minister of Israel, Moshe Sharett, states in his diary that he was informed by the State Department that “our action was without precedent in the history of international practice.” Note that this Israeli action is a direct precedent for much later PLO actions to capture hostages for exchange with captured guerrillas, as in the major terrorist incidents that were widely and properly denounced in the West; at Ma’alot in 1974, for example.113
Returning to PLO initiatives, by the late 1970s, Seth Tillman concludes, “the evidence seemed persuasive…that Arafat and al-Fatah [the PLO mainstream] were prepared to make peace on the basis of the West Bank-Gaza state and to accept Israel within its approximate borders of 1967,” though not to “concede the moral legitimacy of Israel.” In November 1978, requesting a dialogue with the United States in a discussion with Representative Paul Findley, “Arafat issued the following statement: ‘The PLO will accept an independent Palestinian state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza, with connecting corridor, and in that circumstance will renounce any and all violent means to enlarge the territory of that state. I would reserve the right, of course, to use nonviolent means, that is to say, diplomatic and democratic means, to bring about the eventual unification of all of Palestine’.” Tillman reports further that he promised: “We will give de facto recognition to the State of Israel.” Neither these statements, nor others of a similar nature that were conveyed directly to the State Department, “elicited a response from the Carter administration.”114
In its April 1981 session, the PLO National Council unanimously passed a resolution endorsing a February proposal of Soviet President Brezhnev for peace in the Middle East in which Brezhnev—in accordance with what has been consistent Soviet policy—enunciated the following principles:
The inalienable rights of the Arab people of Palestine must be secured up to, and including, the establishment of their own state. It is essential to ensure the security and sovereignty of all states of the region including those of Israel. These are the basic principles.115
Citing the unanimous PLO endorsement of the Brezhnev proposal at a Paris press conference on July 14, 1982, Issam Sartawi of the PLO National Council* stated that
* On April 10, 1983, Sartawi was assassinated at a meeting of the Socialist International in Portugal. Responsibility for the assassination was announced by the Abu Nidal group, which has been at war with the PLO for a decade. In October 1973 Abu Nidal was condemned to death by a Fatah military tribunal. He is assumed to have been responsible for the assassination of several PLO figures in Europe, among them the leading PLO moderate Said Hammami in London in 1978, Naim Khader in Brussels in 1981, and others, and also for murderous attacks on synagogues and Jewish establishments in Vienna and
From this it follows that the PLO has formally conceded to Israel, in the most unequivocal manner, the right to exist on a reciprocal basis. This eliminates automatically the obstacle placed by Secretary of State Kissinger in the way of U.S. recognition of the PLO and the establishment of U.S.PLO dialogue.
See chapter 3, section 1.2. The statement was welcomed by the British and French governments (with qualifications in the former case) as a recognition of the right of Israel to exist on a reciprocal basis. A joint communiqué issued by Sartawi and Mattityahu Peled on July 20 noted that “The PLO has made its willingness to accept and recognize the state of Israel on the basis of mutual recognition of each nation’s
probably in France. He was also responsible for the attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador Shlomo Argov in London in June 1982, the event that sparked the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to which we return. In an effort to piece together his murky and bloody history, Philippe Boggio describes him as “a dangerous fomentor of antagonisms, an expert agitator who can do a better job than any army of demolishing the PLO’s naturally ambiguous relations with a good part of the world,” and whose activities have consistently been directed to undermining PLO efforts from the early 1970s “to get all its factions to abandon the terrorist tactics discrediting the organisation.” The PLO has charged that he is an Israeli agent, noting that his operations “frequently serve Israeli interests indirectly,” a charge that is “one of the assumptions you bear in mind” according to a French secret service specialist. It is generally assumed that he is supported by Iraq, sometimes Syria, where his offices are located and where he appears to have access to considerable funding. Philippe Boggio, Le Monde, Oct. 13, 14, 1982; Manchester Guardian Weekly, Oct. 31, 1982.
legitimate right of self-determination crystal clear in various resolutions since 1977.”116 One might argue that this exaggerates the clarity of these declarations, but there is no doubt about the general drift of policy of the PLO and the Arab states,
the “panic” that this has regularly inspired in Israel, and the reaction of dismissal or simply denial of the facts in the United States.
To cite one last example, Ha’aretz published an interview with Shafiq el-Hout, official PLO spokesman in Beirut, who stated that “the PLO is prepared to offer peace to Israel on the condition that the Israelis will obey the UN resolutions and will recognize the national rights of the Palestinian people… We are prepared to participate in any official effort aimed at bringing a just and comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East.”117 Again, perhaps not what Israel is prepared to accept, but hardly consistent with the incessant charge that the PLO is adamant in its refusal to accept the existence of Israel on any terms, that “the backbone of its existence is the philosophy of destruction of Israel, and the road to this is the use of terror” (Yitzhak Rabin).118
The concern over evidence of Arab moderation, illustrated repeatedly above, can be traced to the early days of the Zionist movement. Simha Flapan discusses “Weizmann’s opposition to negotiations with the Palestinians themselves for a political solution” from the early 1920’s, and his concern that the Arabs might be “moderate enough to be likely to agree to [a constitutional settlement] and thereby preclude forever the possibility of a Jewish state.” This concern grew when “the moderate trend gained the upper hand among the Palestinians,” a “new and moderate trend in Palestinian nationalism” that Weizmann viewed “with grave suspicion.”119 One can understand the reasons. Arab moderation might have stood in the way of Zionist goals at the time, and therefore had to be resisted. Comparable remarks hold today.
In fact, it was not only the Saudi Arabian peace plan and other conciliatory gestures of the Arab states that were causing the familiar “panic by 1981-82. A still more serious problem was the increasing difficulty in portraying the PLO as merely a gang of terrorists, particularly, in the light of its observance of the U.S.-arranged cease-fire on the Lebanon-Israel border despite much Israeli provocation. There is good reason to believe that this threat was one prime factor impelling Israel to invade Lebanon, as we shall see.
