by Noam Chomsky
There were, of course, certain problems: “the main difficulty encountered when planning the settlement of Judea and Samaria,” Elisha Efrat explains, is that it is inhabited by Arabs “who are not prepared to leave any place of their own free will” and who “are not at the mercy of absentee ‘effendi’ landowners who are willing to sell their land,” as was (conveniently) the case during the settlement of Israel itself.50 Efrat is a planner with the Israel Ministry of the Interior and a professor at Tel Aviv university, where, he informs us, he prepared a longer study of these problems “in the framework of the Tel-Aviv University Research Project on Peace,” a name that Orwell would have appreciated.
In September 1973, the Labor Party approved the “Galili Protocols,” which called for extensive additional rural and urban settlement and commercial and industrial development in the territories, including the Golan, the West Bank, Gaza, and northeastern Sinai, where the city of Yamit was to be established (the native population had been brutally expelled, driven into the desert, their settlements levelled). Not even the Labor “moderates” (Allon, Eban) criticized the decision, though Arieh Eliav, the most noted dove, abstained from the vote and criticized the document, as did Shulamith Aloni. Minister of Justice M. Y. Sh. Shapira declared that “this document expresses the hope that with the passage of time we will be able to find a permanent solution for keeping the territories annexed, included, or united to the State of Israel.” A month later, Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal in a surprise attack, initiating the 1973 war. Sadat had stated that “Yamit means war, at least for Egypt.”51
The treatment of the inhabitants of northeastern Sinai merits attention, not only because of its character but also in the light of the reaction in the United States, to which we return, when the new Jewish settlers were compelled to leave this Egyptian territory, with handsome compensation, as part of the Camp David “peace process.” After initial expropriations in 1969, military forces commanded by General Ariel Sharon, in January 1972, “drove off some ten thousand farmers and bedouin, bulldozed or dynamited their houses, pulled down their tents, destroyed their crops and filled in their wells,” to prepare the ground for the establishment of six kibbutzim, nine villages, and the city of Yamit.* Subsequently Israeli bulldozers uprooted orchards (what is called in technical terms “making the desert bloom”), CARE aid from the U.S. was withheld to force landowners to sell their lands, mosques and schools were destroyed, and the one school to escape demolition was
*Public criticism led to a military commission of inquiry that issued a reprimand to Sharon; Yoram Peri, Between Ballots and Bullets, p. 97. turned over to a new kibbutz.52 The Minister of Housing, Labor Alignment dove Avraham Ofer, visited the area in the summer of 1975 and was disturbed to find that a few hundred Bedouin still remained along the coastline. He demanded that the Israeli army evacuate the area since it was to become a national park to “serve the masses of vacationers and bathers who, it is expected, will flow to the golden coast of Yamit.” These Israeli vacationers would naturally be disturbed if there were Bedouin encampments nearby, disfiguring the terrain. In the journal of Mapam (the dovish, kibbutz-based left-wing of the Labor Alignment), Ezra Rivlis reported that Yamit is to be “a Zionist, chalutzic, desert city,” much like Tel Aviv, built on the sands in the earliest days of the Jewish settlement—an apt analogy, since in that case too Arabs alleged that their lands had been taken by force. Rivlis describes how “along the barbed wire, on the other side, the Bedouin stare at us wideeyed, dispossessed, with no arrangements or solutions as yet to their problems.” He adds that “in the background of their stubborn refusal to compromise, it is said, lies the hidden incitement of representatives of Sadat and Fatah.”53 What other reason could there be for this stubborn refusal? Dark references to a sinister “hidden hand” when Arabs irrationally refuse some such “compromise are common in the Israeli press, including the left-wing press, as in this case.
As has so often been the case, the Arabs refused the kind of “compromise offered to them by their benign adversaries, who even were so kind as to permit them to serve as an underpaid and exploited labor force in the lands from which they had been expelled. It was therefore necessary to resort to force, in the manner just indicated, after the failure of peaceful means, a regrettable necessity, particularly for a state that has always been committed to such sublime moral standards and humanistic principles, from which it is forced to depart by Arab intransigence, as American supporters are quick to inform us. In the American Jewish press, Samson Krupnick described the “most unique and exciting experience” of observing the birth of Yamit and the arrival of the first “Americans, Canadians, Russian olim [immigrants] and some Israelis.”54 In the U.S., there was general silence on these matters, which scandalized many Israelis, apart from such expressions of admiration for this unique and exciting experience. In particular, these events elicited no comment from democratic socialists who were singing hymns of praise to Israel while denouncing anyone who dared raise questions about these policies as anti-Semites, bloody-minded radicals who support terrorism and hate democracy, etc. See chapter 2, note 60, and examples below.
4.2 Settlement under Begin and Reagan
4.2.1 Policies The post-1973 Kissinger diplomacy was designed to exclude Egypt from the Arab-Israel conflict, thus making it possible for the Labor government to pursue its settlement program along the lines of the Allon Plan (see chapter 3). Settlement was accelerated when Begin took power in 1977. There was a further substantial expansion in the settlement program after President Reagan announced that he regarded the West Bank settlements as “legal.” This reversal of U.S. government policy (at least at the rhetorical level) set in motion a huge “land grab” operation on the West Bank under a deceitful guise of legality intended to satisfy liberal American opinion. It aroused much protest among Israeli doves, but little comment here at the time.55
One opponent of Israeli rejectionism, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, observed shortly after that the settlement program “now completely ruled out a future solution” because of its extent and design, and that the commitment of the Labor Alignment not to withdraw from an area constituting 40% of the West Bank (the original intent of the Allon Plan of July 1967, as noted earlier) also meant “that its alleged aspiration not to rule over Arabs was meaningless.”56 Benvenisti undertook extensive research on the postReagan land grab operation. He found that under various ruses, the government had taken over more than half of the West Bank (outside of annexed East Jerusalem), and was planning to settle 100,000 people there by 1986. The nature of the settlement plans had meanwhile changed. The newer concept is to focus on “development of large urban centres which will organically link vital areas of the West Bank to the major Israeli urban centres.” These are to be “dormitories for Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.” The intent is to create a “dual society”: “The Arab towns and villages are to become like ghettos…surrounded by large Jewish dormitory suburbs, settlements, military camps—all served, linked and carved up by fast access highways.” The Jewish areas will have “Jewish services and standards…like elections and free speech,” while the Arab ghettos will remain under “the military government—or, if you prefer, the civil administration” of Menachem Milson (who has since resigned). In these ghettos, there is “a low level of service, almost no governmental investment in infrastructure or development.” Their boundaries are “sharply defined and no building will be permitted outside them” (there is virtually no room within them). These plans, he notes, are supported by the Labor Party under its current version of the Allon Plan, a fact which “makes nonsense of the [Labor] Alignment plan to keep only those areas where there is low density Arab population.”57
4.2.2 Reactions The immediate occasion for Benvenisti’s revelations was the recentlyannounced Reagan Peace Plan, which called for a settlement freeze while stating that “America will not support the use of any additional land for the purpose of settlement.” The latter statement
was a bit ironic, as the U.S. press was kind enough not to observe, in the light of Reagan’s role in setting off the land grab that led to the current situation. The statement is also false, since the Reagan administration moved at once to increase aid to Israel, and as noted earlier, the U.S. government has always been scrupulous in avoiding any supervision or other arrangements that might serve to restrict the use of the lavish American funding in conformity with the stated policy of denying support for settlement in the occupied territories. In fact, in his meetings with Begin, Reagan was careful to avoid the question of settlements, a fact brought out in a “well-documented” analysis by Senator John Glenn, whose plausible conviction is “that what heads of government say to each other through emissaries or in public pronouncements is far less important than what they say to each other in private, face to face.” “The consent that the Israelis have obviously read into a consistent record of silence on the part of the President over at least a year and a half has carried the de facto annexation of the West Bank by Israel very close to, if not beyond, the point of no return.”58 The message sent by liberal Democrats was still clearer, as they spearheaded the effort to increase aid to Israel even beyond the increases advocated by the Reagan administration.
To put the matter in slightly clearer terms than those employed in the media and other commentary, the U.S. once again expressed its support for further settlement in the occupied territories, on two levels: first, openly, by offering—in fact, increasing—the aid that will enable these programs to be pursued; and second, more subtly, by avoiding any reference to these matters in private discussion, so that it will be even clearer that the public rhetoric is for show, to be ignored in practice, as in the past.
The message is surely understood, a fact recognized by both critics and supporters of Israel’s current policies. In the former category, Chaim Bermant writes that there are “two principal arguments for a withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza.” The “moral argument” holds that Israel will not remain a democratic state if it continues to “retain the land of another people and maintain dominion over them.” The “practical argument” is that the U.S. “will not tolerate the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and if the occupation should continue, all American aid will be reduced and perhaps even stopped altogether.” Bermant states that “moral arguments have some force in Israel, perhaps more so than anywhere else, but they are not in themselves enough to effect a withdrawal from occupied territory” or even to check the policy of “galloping annexation.” As for the “practical argument,” it would have force “if it were at all valid.” But it is not, since Begin (like his predecessors, we may add)
has shown that whatever protests this or that American administration might make against the expansion of Jewish settlement or the infringement of human rights, in the West Bank, he has been able to strengthen his grip on the area without any diminution of American aid. Indeed, he is even anticipating an increase... Indeed the American Government has been financing the very policies it denounces with such consistency that one doesn’t have to be an Arab to wonder if the denunciations are sincere.59
True; one only has to be committed to elementary rationality and honesty, an observation that has some interesting consequences when applied to commentary on this matter in the United States.
On the other side of the Israeli political fence, Wolf Blitzer, under the heading “Lessons from aid victory,” reports the successful outcome of the battle between the Administration, who wanted to “punish” Israel by increasing aid to it, and Congress, which preferred a “softer line,” increasing the aid still further. The final outcome, he notes, was that the full aid package sought by the Administration was accepted ($2.485 billion in economic and military assistance), but with “improved terms,” with $500 million converted from loans to outright grants. “The entire aid affair clearly represented an important and badly-needed substantive and symbolic victory for Israel,” thanks to the crucial assistance of congressional liberals, as he notes.* These loyal supporters were helped by “the reaffirmed vision of Israel as a working democracy, especially following the West Beirut massacres.”60
Presumably there is also a lesson here as to how to obtain further victories in Congress. It would be interesting to know how the reported 400,000 people who demonstrated in Israel in protest over the massacres will react to the fact—and fact it is—that the practical outcome of their efforts, given the way things are in the United States, was to accelerate the militarization of Israeli society and its expansion
* Particularly noteworthy, Blitzer observes, was the defeat of Congressmen who “had been targeted by the Jewish community.” This lesson has no doubt been carefully noted by Senator John Glenn, a presidential aspirant, who has been similarly “targeted” because of such indiscretions as the one cited on p. 189. See Curtis Wilkie, “Glenn campaign gets a buffeting,” Boston Globe, Feb. 20, 1983, discussing what New York Magazine called Glenn’s “significant Jewish problem,” a nontrivial one considering traditional Jewish financial support for Democratic candidates, Wilkie notes.
into the occupied territories. In passing, we might note some curious aspects of Bermant’s “moral argument.” The argument rests on consequences for the Jews, not for the conquered population, whose rights and wishes are null—not an untypical stance among liberal Zionists, or among Western intellectuals generally, as we have seen repeatedly. We might also ask what the basis is for the belief that moral arguments have more force in Israel than elsewhere, also a standard doctrine even among critics of Israeli policies. It would be difficult to justify this conclusion on the basis of the historical record. A more accurate picture is presented by Labor Party Knesset member (Gen.) Chaim Herzog, a military historian and former Israeli diplomat and the successful Labor Party candidate for President in March 1983. He writes that “We must be guided in our [foreign policy] relationships by the one criterion that has guided governments of Israel ever since the establishment of the state, namely: ‘Is it good for the Jews?’”61
The context for Herzog’s observations was his rejection of the (mild and limited) domestic criticism of Israel’s support for murderous dictators in Latin America—specifically, recent visits by Israeli high officials to such countries as Argentina, where, Haolam Haze reports, “the Israeli foreign minister last week extended a warm handshake to the Generals in Buenos Aires who had murdered about 1000 Jews in Argentina” (exactly as was done by other high Israeli political and military figures, including those of the Labor Party, while the Argentine massacre was at its height; Jacobo Timerman states that “I saw with my own eyes how Argentine jailers tortured Jews in prison while the Israeli government requested the Jewish community there to remain silent”).62 This Labor dove is also annoyed by the occasional displeasure voiced over the crucial aid offered by Israeli military advisers, arms salesmen and technical experts to the government of Guatemala for counterinsurgency and the hunt for “subversives,” helping to implement an anti-guerrilla campaign that “is showing more signs of success than El Salvador’s, mainly because it is more brutal,” with thousands “tortured, mutilated and killed” and tens of thousands driven to Mexico while “many peasants are herded into protected villages, leaving the countryside as a free-fire zone for the army,” a campaign that led to the killing of “at least 5,000 Indians” in the summer of 1982.63 In this case, unlike Argentina, there are no embarrassing questions as to whether it is “Good for the Jews.”
Blitzer’s “lessons from the aid victory” emphasize the importance of preventing critical discussion of Israeli policies in the U.S., as when the revered moralist Elie Wiesel explains that it is improper to criticize Israel outside its borders (but not improper to criticize others, e.g., the PLO), and in fact illegitimate to question its policies even within, since only those “in a position of power” possess the relevant information (see chapter 2, section 2.1). Apparently on the same assumptions, Israeli physicist Gerald Horwitz of the Hebrew University, in a letter
to the New York Times (Jan. 9, 1983), condemns Mattityahu Peled for an critical Op-Ed on December 30. He contends that Peled’s article “represents an anti-democratic and nationally objectionable act” because there is no justification “in a democratic society such as Israel—where disagreements with the Government can freely be brought to the press, to the polls, and even to the street—to turn to an external government, to an external voting population, to bring about by coercion a change which its proponent cannot succeed in persuading his own countrymen to accept.” The very fact that Peled voiced a criticism outside of Israel shows that he “does not understand democratic procedures,” which require that Israelis refrain from such “nationally objectionable acts” as criticizing policies of the government—particularly, in the U.S., where the “external voting population” is expected to pay the bills. Apparently, it is legitimate, according to this intriguing concept of democracy, to write in support of the government’s policies in the U.S., but not to criticize them. He does not explain how we are to deal with another problem, namely, that someone in the U.S. might quote something that Peled writes in Israel. Note that there is also apparently no violation of democratic principles when Americans visiting Israel condemn U.S. policies as “too harsh towards Israel,” a common practice.
