by Noam Chomsky
The debate has not been for or against the indivisibility of Eretz Israel. No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of Eretz Israel. The debate was over which of two routes would lead quicker to the common goal.
The “two routes” were rejection of partition, or acceptance on the assumption that circumstances would later permit a further expansion of the borders of the Jewish state to all of the territories that fell within “the boundaries of Zionist aspirations,” as Ben-Gurion understood them.* Chaim Weizmann, asked about the exclusion of the Negev from the proposed Jewish state, responded: “It will not run away.”197 In a similar vein, Labor dove Chain Arlosoroff wrote to Weizmann in 1932 that “the desire to establish national sovereignty in a part of Palestine…contains a core of sound thinking,” since “state power” in this region “could become a strategic base for potential future progress.”198
In a letter to his son, discussing partition, Ben-Gurion wrote that A partial Jewish state is not the end, but only the beginning... I am certain that we will not be prevented from settling in the other parts of the country, either by mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or by some other means... [If the Arabs refuse] we shall have to speak to them in a different language. But we shall only have another language if we have a state.
In May 1948, feeling quite confident of Israel’s military superiority (contrary to the “David and Goliath legend” discussed earlier), BenGurion presented the following strategic aims to his General Staff:
* After the 1967 war, long after he had left office, Ben-Gurion changed his views and came to oppose the expansionist policies he had always advocated and pursued while in a position of authority, thus isolating himself completely from his former Labor Party associates. By some remarkable logic, this fact is regularly adduced by Labor supporters here to show how conciliatory Labor Zionism really was. See chapter 6, section 6.3, below, for one of many examples.
...we should prepare to go over to the offensive with the aim of smashing Lebanon, Transjordan and Syria... The weak point in the Arab coalition is Lebanon [for] the Moslem regime is artificial and easy to undermine. A Christian state should be established, with its southern border on the Litani river [within Lebanon]. We will make an alliance with it. When we smash the [Arab] Legion’s strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo.
An interesting portent.
After the Armistice Agreement was signed in February 1949, Ben-
Gurion decided to establish another fait accompli. He ordered two
brigades to Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba, which they took with no
resistance on March 10. Violation of cease-fires has been a standard
practice; recall the attack on the Golan Heights in 1967 (see p. 21).
Shortly after, Ben-Gurion was touring the border with a young general,
whom he asked, “How would you take those hills?,” pointing to the
Mountains of Edom beyond the Jordanian border. The general made
some suggestions and then said, “Why do you ask? Do you want to
conquer those hills?” Ben-Gurion responded: “I? No. But you will
conquer them.” He also maintained what his official biographer calls
“his dream of annexing the Sinai Peninsula.” After the 1956 conquest of
the Sinai,* Ben-Gurion announced the founding of “the Third Kingdom of
* Menachem Begin “swore” before the Israeli Knesset that David Ben-Gurion had proposed the conquest of the West Bank in 1956 in a discussion with his coconspirator in the attack on Egypt, French Socialist Prime Minister Guy Mollet,
Israel,” and informed the Knesset that “Our army did not infringe on Egyptian territory... Our operations were restricted to the Sinai Peninsula alone.”199
9.2 Moderates and Extremists Pre-state Zionism exhibits a number of striking similarities to divisions within the PLO between the Rejectionists, who refuse to accept any compromise, and the mainstream around Yasser Arafat, who have joined the international consensus on a two-state settlement (see chapter 3), though they too do not abandon their “dream” of a unitary democratic secular state, a goal to be achieved, they now say, through a process of peaceful interaction with Israel. The fact that the accommodationist elements that dominate the PLO refuse to abandon their “dream” has been exploited regularly as an argument that it is impossible to have any dealings with them. For example, David Krivine describes “the agony which Jewish Israelis are going through at present in seeking a solution to the problem of the Palestinians,” discussing a seminar on that subject in Jerusalem. The “agony” is caused by the fact that there is no one to speak to: not even Meir Pail’s plan for a two-state settlement “had any chance of acceptance by the Arabs”—which is of course false: a similar plan was “prepared” by the PLO, proposed at the UN, rejected by Israel and vetoed by the U.S. as far back as January 1976, as we have seen.
who was allegedly receptive. Mordechai Basok, “Begin’s ‘scoop’,” Al Hamishmar, Sept. 9. 1982. If this is true, then the operation was presumably aborted as a consequence of Eisenhower’s unexpectedly harsh response to the invasion of Egypt. One might also wonder whether there was a more general plan involving the Arabs of the Israeli Galilee as well; see section 2.
It is this alleged refusal of the PLO to accept “even that” that is “the real holdup, which has shattered the complacency of all Israeli disputants, left-wing and right-wing.” The problem is “that the PLO—in all its factions—has only one aim, to retrieve the whole of Palestine; that is, to eliminate Jewish statehood.”200 See also chapter 3, note 111.
By the same logic, British anti-Semites might have argued in 1947— and perhaps did—that it was impossible to deal with the “moderate” Zionists who accepted partition, given the nature of their “dream,” a point that is regularly and conveniently ignored.
Elsewhere, incidentally, Krivine has put the matter a bit more honestly, explaining that: the one group we won’t talk with, it is true, is the PLO—but not because they are nasty people. The obstacle is the subject on the agenda. It can only be the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, and that we can’t agree to.201
Quite generally, the PLO has the same sort of legitimacy that the Zionist movement had in the pre-state period, a fact that is undoubtedly recognized at some level within Israel and, I think, accounts for the bitter hatred of the PLO, which, rational people must concede, has been recognized by Palestinians as “their sole representative” whenever they have had the chance to express themselves. Israeli doves have not failed to take note of this fact, and have also observed that “Those who shall sober up from the collective intoxication will have to admit that the Palestinians are the Jews of our era, a small, hunted people, defenseless, standing alone against the best weapons, helpless…the whole world is against them.”202
9.3 The Use of Terror The similarities extend to the use of terror. Commenting on the PLO’s resort to terror, Noah Lucas observes that though this “earned it little sympathy in the world, it nevertheless succeeded in establishing the image of its cause as the quest of a victimized people for national selfdetermination, rather than a neglected refugee problem as it had hitherto been widely regarded.” He adds that “There is no escaping the analogy with Zionism in the late forties.”203 Recall that the current Prime Minister of Israel and its Foreign Minister are former terrorist commanders, with a bloody record of atrocities to their credit including the killing of Jews* as well as Britons and many Arabs,204 while the Secretary-General of the Jewish Agency until 1981 (Shmuel Lahis) was
* Barnea and Rubinstein state that “the Hagana archives contain the names of 40 Jews who were killed by Irgun and LEHI (Stern Group) men in the course of their underground work or in the context of settling internal accounts,” reviewing the record. This does not include Jews killed by terrorist attacks aimed at others, as in the King David Hote
l bombing. The official history of Begin’s Irgun describes how they drowned a member who they thought might give information to the police, if captured; see Shahak, Begin And Co. The Haganah Special Actions Squads undertook “punitive actions against informers within the Jewish community” as one of its tasks (Bar-Zohar, Ben-Gurion, p. 99). A Haganah prison in Haifa contained a torture chamber for interrogation of Jews suspected of collaboration with the British, the Haifa weekly Hashavua Bair revealed in its 35th anniversary issue (April 1983), in an interview with a high military officer of the Haganah. In his review of Halabi (see note 152), Irving Howe attributes the alleged assassination of “a few of these [Village League] quislings” in the West Bank to the “fratricidal violence that seems so frequent in Arab politics” (my emphasis).
a man who murdered several dozen Arab civilians under guard in an undefended Lebanese village during the land-clearing operations of October 1948; he was immediately amnestied after receiving a sevenyear prison sentence, then granted a second amnesty which “denies the punishment and the charge as well” and later granted a lawyer’s licence by the Israeli Legal Council on the grounds that his act carried “no stigma.”205
As noted earlier, the self-defense forces based in the labor movement (the Haganah) also engaged in terrorist violence, though to a more limited extent than the outright terrorist groups—against Arabs, and also against dissident Jews, including a religious Jew organizing among the largely anti-Zionist native Jewish inhabitants of Palestine who was assassinated by two Haganah agents “as he left the small synagogue in the ‘Shaarey Tsedek’ hospital” in June 1924. The official history of the Haganah describes this “special activity” matter-of-factly, justifying the order “to remove the traitor from the land of the living” on the grounds of the “pathological character” of his anti-Zionist activities (furthermore, he was alleged to be a homosexual, the history reports). As one proof of the inveterate evil of the Palestinians, or perhaps all Arabs, David PryceJones, the New Republic specialist on this topic, cites the fact that King Abdullah of Jordan “was killed while leaving Friday prayers in the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem.” So different from the Zionists, with their fabled “purity of arms” and “sublime” moral sensibilities, much lauded in this journal.206
The record is long and bloody, as in the case of most nationalist movements; in the single month of July 1938, for example, the Irgun killed 76 Arabs with bombs in market places and the like.207 The official history of the Irgun makes little pretense that these actions were retaliatory, as is often alleged, referring proudly, for example, to the murder of 27 Arabs to prevent celebration over the British White Paper limiting Jewish immigration, the murder of 52 more Arabs when an Irgun member was arrested by the British, etc.208 The record is generally suppressed in the U.S., where cynics refer to terror and intimidation as an invention of the PLO. In the years after the state was established, there was also ample resort to terrorism, a few examples of which have already been cited.
It is noteworthy that former terrorists are honored in Israel, as the examples of Begin, Shamir, and Lahis indicate; there is no stigma” attached to their murderous deeds, again, a standard feature of nationalist movements. There are many other examples. The Israeli Cabinet recently decided to issue a new series of stamps in memory of Zionist heroes, including Shlomo Ben-Yosef, who was hanged by the British for shooting at an Arab bus; the murderers of Lord Moyne in 1944; and two men “executed for their part in the 1955 Cairo security mishap”209—this, a rather coy reference to the terrorist bombings (actually, 1954), which were a “mishap” in that the perpetrators were caught.
Since terrorism is considered to have been an honorable vocation, it is not surprising that its perpetrators have been protected by government authorities. For example, one of the suspected assassins of UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948 was a close friend of Ben-Gurion’s,* but he kept secret the fact that his friend had confessed the murder.210 Efforts have been made to suppress the record in other ways as well. After the 1954 “mishap,” the Israeli government angrily rejected the
* Barnea and Rubinstein (see note 204) write: “according to the accepted version, the present Foreign Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, was one of those who planned the murder.” They also note that Shamir has refused many requests to explain his role in the murder of Eliahu Giladi, a LEHI officer condemned to death by the LEHI command (headed by Shamir) in 1943.
Egyptian charges against the captured terrorists, denouncing the “show trial…against a group of Jews...victims of false accusations.” The journal of the governing Labor Party accused the Egyptian government of “a Nazi-inspired policy,” though the government was well aware of the facts.211 There are numerous other examples.
Perhaps the most remarkable illustration of the ability to efface atrocity concerns Deir Yassin, where 250 people were murdered by Begin’s Irgun and LEHI in April 1948 (see section 2 above). A year later, Ha’aretz reported the “settlement festival” for religious settlers who were founding Givat Shaul Beth (now part of Jerusalem) in “the former village of Deir Yassin.” Ha’aretz reports further: “President Chain Weizmann sent his greetings in writing...the chief Rabbis and Minister Moshe Shapira took part in the ceremony…the orchestra of a school for the blind played…”212 In 1980, the remaining ruins were bulldozed to prepare the ground for a settlement for Orthodox Jews. Streets were named after units of the Irgun which perpetrated the massacre, and of Palmach, the kibbutz-based strike force of Haganah, which took part in the operation but not the massacre. These units were to be “immortalized on the site,” in the words of the Israeli press.213 More recently, most of the Deir Yassin cemetery was bulldozed to prepare the ground for a highway to a new Jewish settlement.214
Nahum Barnea writes that “at first Deir Yassin was forgotten. Now it is celebrated.” He describes a (to him, horrifying) tour to Deir Yassin organized by the Society for the Protection of Nature, perhaps, he suggests bitterly, because “nature was the only thing not destroyed there on April 9, 1948.” The tour (an annual event) was led by a former Irgunist, who whitewashed the operation before a largely passive audience. The actual site of the village is now a mental hospital, as is the Acre prison, site of another Irgun operation.215
None of this is particularly surprising, or unique to the Jewish national movement. It can, furthermore, be explained in terms of the circumstances in which the Zionist movement developed and won its victories, which were hardly propitious. The actual record does, however, highlight the cynicism of the constant denunciation of the PLO as a movement unique in its inexplicable commitment to terror, guilty of such acts as intimidating “moderates,” along with major crimes against innocents that contrast so strikingly with the standards of its enemy. The actual record also helps to explain the feelings and attitudes of Palestinians who have fled or been driven from their homes, or who live under military occupation, or who remain as second-class citizens in a land that not long ago was their own. To explain is not to justify, but if circumstances can help to explain the resort to terror in pre-state Zionism and increasingly in subsequent years, then the same is true with regard to those who see themselves, not unreasonably, as the victims of Zionist success.
10. The Problem for Today
I
t is often argued that it is hypocritical for Americans or Europeans to condemn Israel for its treatment of the native population, considering the history of European colonization, which was surely vastly more
barbaric than anything that can be attributed to the Jewish settlers. If the argument has merit, then the same is true of earlier resort to similar efforts; for example, when Japanese imperialists in the pre-war years argued that what they were doing in Manchuria was based on a European model. Or suppose that Israel were to enslave the Arab population, arguing in justification that, after all, the American colonists indulged in literal human slavery for a century after their independence. Whatever merit the charge of hypocrisy may have, the fact is that brutal and inhum
an practices that were tolerated when the plague of European civilization spread over much of the world no longer are. Israelis often complain that they are held to higher standards than others. If they have in mind those who massacred American Indians and enslaved Blacks they are quite right, for the little that that observation is worth. In the real world of today, however, they have been largely immune from serious critical analysis, at least in the United States, where the true history is little known and they are depicted as guided by uniquely high moral principles though surrounded by barbarians whose sole aim is to murder innocents and to deny them their rightful home.
The conflict over Palestine has sometimes been depicted as one of “right against right,” an arguable—and in my view, defensible—proposition, though naturally not one that the Palestinians are likely to accept as morally valid. It is not clear that there is much to be gained by pursuing this question. Israel is a reality, a fact that few now contest despite increasingly desperate pretense to the contrary on the part of its numerous supporters and apologists. The same obviously cannot be said for the Palestinians, whose right to national self-determination is denied by the leaders of the rejectionist camp, Israel and the United States, whose power is dominant in the region. That is the primary topic that Americans must address.
Notes—Chapter 4 Israel and Palestine: Historical Background 1. There is a substantial literature on this topic, the overwhelming mass of it from the Zionist point of view. One useful study is Noah Lucas, The Modern History of Israel (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1974). Another, for the earlier years, is Sykes, Crossroads to Israel. On interactions between Jews and Palestinians, see, among many others, Porath, Emergence of the Palestinian National Movement. The Palestinian National Movement; Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians; Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest; David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1977); Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (Times Books, New York, 1979); Barry Rubin, The Arab States & Palestine (Syracuse, 1981). On the earlier years, there is much valuable material in the ESCO Foundation Study, Palestine: a Study of Jewish, Arab, and British Policies (Yale, New Haven, 1947), with the collaboration of a distinguished group of scholars, generally liberal Zionist in complexion. There are useful bibliographical notes in the books by Lucas and Said.
