Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  Obviously the actual facts do not constitute an acceptable version of history. Rather, it must be—whatever the facts—that it was the fault of the Arabs, particularly the PLO, that this noble American endeavor failed, though it is also permissible, within the doctrinal system, to assign a portion of the blame to the boorish Begin with his Oriental Jewish constituency. Crucially, no blame may be attached to the United States or to the western-oriented Labor Party, which is preserving the legacy of the “beautiful Israel.” These tasks were carried out with customary dispatch and elegance. In the subsequent months, the burden of discussion in the U.S. was shifted to the PLO and Hussein, on the assumption that the fate of the Reagan plan rested on PLO authorization of Hussein to take part in negotiations over the plan that Israel had rejected out of hand with American support. The required conclusion was established without noticeable difficulty while the actual facts of the matter were dispatched to their deserved location, Orwell’s memory hole.

  A few points of clarification may be in order. First, Israel would have been more than pleased to have Hussein join negotiations over the plan it had rejected, thus tacitly accepting the crucial Israeli principle that the Palestinians have no national rights, that they “are not a party to the conflict” as Israeli courts have ruled and “have no role to play” in any peace settlement, in the words of Labor Party dove Abba Eban (see chapter 3, section 2.2.2). Then Israel could have proceeded to take over the territories, with constant U.S. support, while the negotiations dragged on meaninglessly, or perhaps its extension of sovereignty might even be ratified in some form. No other outcome was possible, given American support for a Greater Israel, which persisted, in fact was reinforced in the months that followed. Second, it should be noted that if the PLO had adapted itself more successfully to the norms of western hypocrisy, pursuing a more intelligent diplomatic course, this would have marginally complicated the task faced by American propagandists: namely, to show that the failure of the plan was the fault of the Arabs and the PLO. The problems they would then have faced would have been comparable to the problems posed by Sadat’s 1971 peace offer or the two-state settlement proposed by the PLO and the Arab states in January 1976; that is, it might have taken a day or two to restore the Party Line to full effectiveness. It is difficult to imagine any other outcome, despite much nonsense that has been written about the matter. Let us now review the subsequent events, which followed their predictable course.

  Reagan’s proposals, while flatly inconsistent with the Likud program, did lend themselves to an interpretation that is at least partially in accord with Labor’s rejectionist stance, and were received with cautious approval by the Labor opposition. As we have seen, the leaders of the Labor Party also made it clear that the program was completely unacceptable to them, but this conclusion was expressed either in the Hebrew press or in circumlocutions which, it was rightly assumed, would be ignored by their well-disciplined American audience. The plan also evoked a partially favorable response by a number of Arab states and the PLO. The Palestine National Council, the governing body of the PLO, met a few months later, in February 1983, and reached a compromise position on the matter. One senior PLO official quoted in the New York Times described the Council’s stance as “saying yes and no at the same time” to the Reagan plan. PLO spokesman Ahmed Abdel Rahman said that the PLO would continue to support the Arab peace plan adopted in Fez in September 1982, which endorsed the international consensus, calling for a two-state settlement and peaceful coexistence among Israel, the Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and the other states of the region. The Council also declared that it “envisages the future relationship with Jordan to be a confederation between two independent states,” one Palestinian and one Jordanian.19

  In fact, the PLO reaction was rather similar to that of the opposition Labor Party in Israel: neither acceptance nor outright rejection, with room for maneuver to adjust the terms of Reagan’s proposal to their own wishes—the international consensus in the case of the PLO, the rejectionist Allon Plan in the case of the Labor Party. Furthermore, the PLO position appears to be closer to the literal sense of the Reagan plan than the rejectionist stance of the Labor party, though the plan is so vague that one cannot state this with any security.

  Commentary on the Reagan plan in the United States was highly favorable, including such predictable responses as that of the New York Times, explaining that the U.S. government is now working to persuade the Arab states and “Palestinians who will listen that the P.L.O’s rejection of Israel and reliance on terror are at a bloody dead end” and that “such extremists” as the PLO “must no longer be held out by the Arab League as the ‘sole’ negotiators for Palestinian rights.” A brief look at their own files would have sufficed to reveal the intellectual and moral quality of these remarks, and the fuller history should not have been entirely beyond their reach. As for Israel, its “true spirit” will “be revealed,” the Times assured its readers, if the Arab leaders “offer Israel firm security guarantees in exchange for an unthreatening Palestinian domain in the West Bank and Gaza.” The certainty of the Times editors was undiminished by the fact, which once again they suppress, that any such notion has consistently been rejected in the clearest and most unequivocal terms by both major political groupings in Israel and also by the U.S., as in the case of the U.S. veto of the January 1976 Security Council resolution to this effect, a resolution backed by the “confrontation states” and the PLO, actually prepared by the PLO if we can believe the current President of Israel, its 1976 UN Ambassador. “The Israelis who marched into Lebanon have never heard the word peace except from Egypt,” the Times added, with comparable veracity. See chapter 3.

  The Times’s harshest critic of Israel’s expansionist policies, Anthony Lewis, wrote that in its “wisdom” and “shrewdness,” Reagan’s initiative “has set the agenda for peace” and that it should appeal to “the sensitive democracy of Israel” as shown by the fact that it was “quickly welcomed” by the leader of the Labor Alignment, Shimon Peres. However, though Lewis and others who commented similarly did not discuss the point, Peres was adamantly and unequivocally opposed to the program as Lewis outlines it: namely, transition to Palestinian selfrule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip without “Israeli control over that land.” In fact, Peres regards any proposal that entails loss of such control as “threaten[ing] Israel’s very existence” (see p. 148*), among many other statements to the same effect, a position from which he has never deviated. Thus Peres “welcomed” the plan in a rather special sense: with an interpretation that is quite inconsistent with its meaning, at least as Lewis understands it.

  Comment elsewhere was similar. Reagan’s peace proposals, whatever they meant exactly (“Never mind the details,” as the Times editors put it), were taken as the basis for further discussion among rightthinking people. The general response served to eliminate the international consensus with its intolerable assumption that Palestinians have the same human rights as Jews, while removing from sight the actual diplomatic history with its record of the extreme rejectionist stance of both Labor and Likud, and crucially, the United States. But that, by now, is familiar fare.

  The PLO National Council met in February and gave its official response to the Reagan plan, and in April Jordan announced that it had not received PLO authorization to represent the Palestinians and therefore would not enter the negotiations. These events gave the media a further opportunity to display their assumptions and insights. After the February PLO National Council meetings, the New York Times delivered an editorial reprimand under the heading “The P.L.O. Versus the Palestinians,” declaring that what the PLO “really rejects is reality, diplomacy and, as always, Israel.” It has once again “betrayed” the cause of the Palestinians. A Palestinian state in the occupied territories, “if ever attainable, is certainly not attainable now... By demanding the impossible, the P.L.O. continues to obstruct the plausible: self-government for a million Palestinians”—what the term may
mean, the Times does not say (“never mind the details,” especially when it is someone else’s life that is at stake). The international consensus is thus dismissed as “impossible”—as indeed it is, in the face of U.S. rejectionism. The Times adds that “even if a small, new Palestinian nation were desirable, it could only evolve over time”—there is no Palestinian nation, the Times pronounces, echoing the Likud and Labor Party, mimicking Arab extremists who reject Jewish claims to national rights (a “small, new Jewish nation may not be desirable,” some anti-Semite might declare). The PLO is “irrelevant,” since it does not conform to U.S. wishes.20

  What the Times fails to say is as revealing as its own words. Thus, Israel is not “irrelevant” even though its rejection of the Reagan plan is far more extreme than that of the PLO. The Labor opposition is not “irrelevant” indeed, it is the hope of the future—even though its reaction to the Reagan plan is approximately on a par with that of the PLO, and its position is in clear and explicit contradiction to the “self-government for a million Palestinians” which the Times professes to advocate. The United States is not “irrelevant,” though it gave the coup de grace to the Reagan plan by continuing—in fact, increasing—its support for settlement in the occupied territories. Other commentary in the press was not very different at the time, and remained so in coming months.

  The Times editors might argue that to criticize them along these lines is unfair, since a crucial premise has been omitted which serves to eliminate the absurdities, distortion of the historical record, egregious double standard and blatant inconsistencies: namely, that the task of the “newspaper of record” is to be a servant of external power, an outlet for state propaganda. On this assumption, the stance of the editors makes perfect sense: the U.S. government has determined that Israel is to be supported as a “strategic asset” and that the inhabitants of the conquered territories have no valid claim to the human rights accorded to Jews. Given the overriding principle just enunciated, then, the Times reaction is quite logical. The Times cannot fairly be accused of a double standard, as in the previous comments, since it is consistently following its single standard of service to the state.

  On April 10, 1983, Jordan announced that it had not received the authorization it has requested from the PLO, and that “we leave it to the P.L.O. and to the Palestinian people to choose the ways and means for the salvation of themselves and their land, and for the realization of their declared aims in the manner they see fit.” The New York Times pronounced the Reagan plan “a worthy but tragic failure.” “King Hussein rejected coexistence not with Israel but with the P.L.O.”; he “proved Yasir Arafat incapable of compromise.” Israel, which had “predicted failure for Mr. Reagan’s plan from the start,” now “feels vindicated for its resistance to a West Bank deal.” In the news columns, where editorializing is more effective since it is slightly concealed under a mask of objectivity, David Shipler explained that “no tangible alternative exists to the [Israeli] Government’s determination to hold the West Bank forever.” Various Labor Party spokesmen are quoted as saying that “There’s no one to yield the West Bank to,” “Jordan still hasn’t succeeded in disconnecting herself from the extremist Arab world,” etc. The “moderate noises” in the Arab world have been shown to be meaningless, Shipler concludes, and in Israeli Government circles “there was a strange irony of bitter satisfaction in having known all along, more clearly than the Americans could ever understand, that the Arabs were too hateful to negotiate with and recognize Israel.” Begin is vindicated: “there is nothing now to challenge him. lie stands surrounded by a vacuum.”

  Obviously, in New York Times news reports, it cannot be observed that there is in fact someone “to yield the West Bank to” (and also the Gaza strip, long tacitly conceded to Israel by the Times), namely, the population, which has clearly indicated that its political representative is the PLO. Similarly, it cannot be reported that the Reagan plan, which according to Shipler was “torpedoed” by “Arab intransigence,” was in fact torpedoed by the U.S. when it at once confirmed its intention to support Israel’s rejection of its own rejectionist plan.

  The Times also added a lesson in political theory and history. “Israel’s assault in Lebanon,” the editors explained, had “dramatized the impotence of the PLO,” a version of the new Arthur Goldberg theory of political legitimacy (see chapter 5, section 6.4). Nevertheless, “the P.L.O. remains frozen in fantasy, of victory over Israel culminating in a Palestinian state.” Like all other Arabs, Sadat was at first loyal to the “pan-Arab cause,” and in the service of this “ideological commitment,” he went to war in 1973, establishing himself as “the faithful heir of Nasser’s pan-Arabism.” “Only then could he escape the ideological stranglehold of the P.L.O. and break ranks with the Arab League.” But the other Arabs, and crucially the PLO, refuse any settlement short of “victory over Israel” so that “Americans, for all their zeal” for political accommodation, can do nothing. Since these are the “facts” as determined by the Party Line, it is irrelevant that Sadat offered Israel a peace treaty in 1971 (with no mention of Palestinian national rights, during the period when he still could not “escape the ideological stranglehold of the P.L.O.”), an offer rejected by Israel with U.S. backing; that Sadat went to war in 1973 after warning repeatedly that the U.S. and Israel gave him no choice with their refusal of a political solution and with the Labor Party settlement program in northeastern Sinai; that the Arab states and the PLO subsequently made repeated offers of political settlement, e.g., the January 1976 two-state proposal prepared by the PLO, furiously denounced by Israel, and vetoed by the U.S.; etc., as described in chapter 3. All of this is beside the point; it is as “irrelevant” as the PLO, or the Palestinians in the conquered territories, for the loyal priesthood of the state religion.

  The New York Times does permit itself to refer to Israel’s rejection of the Reagan plan, though the U.S. is above criticism. In contrast, the New Republic attributes the failure of this “bold American initiative” entirely to the PLO, which will be satisfied with nothing short of the surrender of Tel Aviv, and to Hussein’s cowardice. Naturally it cannot mention the Labor Party’s interpretation of the Reagan Plan—to understand that would require half a minute’s thought—but it is interesting that it cannot even bring itself to mention the government of Israel’s rejection of the plan. Nor is the United States subject to any criticism for offering still another rejectionist plan and then offering Israel full support for its immediate rejection of it; the failure was “no fault of the United States.” The editors further explain that only a “willful misreading of the facts” could lead to the “paradoxical” idea that the U.S. should invoke “economic sanctions to stop Israeli settlements on the West Bank” (to translate into real world terms, that the U.S. should stop paying Israel to establish these settlements). These settlements “are not an obstacle to peace in the Middle East,” but are rather “Hussein’s overriding inducement to enter negotiations.” It presumably follows that we should offer Israel even more support for its rapidly expanding settlement program, to strengthen the inducement.21

  These reactions approximately delimit the range of articulate reaction to the failure of the rejectionist Reagan plan that had been killed in early September by Israel’s rejection with U.S. support. The task of constructing a more acceptable history was therefore successfully concluded, with admirable efficiency.

  3.2 The Israeli Response Returning to September 1, 1982, it was to be expected that Israel would undertake some action to deflect any pressure to consider the Reagan proposals and to reduce the likelihood of conciliatory Arab moves that would induce the usual “panic.” There were, in fact, two immediate responses, one well-publicized, the other less so.

  3.2.1 The Incorporation of the Occupied Territories The well-publicized response of the Begin government was its immediate announcement that in defiance of Reagan’s request, many new settlements would immediately be established in “Judea and Samaria.”* Within a few
days, a headline in Ha’aretz read: “The Construction of

  * Similarly, on the same day that Jordan announced that it would not join in Reagan’s “peace initiative,” “Israeli officials revealed plans for massive Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank in defiance of Reagan’s call for a freeze on new outposts,” while expressing “oblique satisfaction” that the Reagan “peace process has suffered a severe blow.” The plan, formulated by the World Zionist Organization, called for 57 new settlements in the West Bank and Gaza within four years, and was announced two days after the U.S. “indicated it would pressure Israel to halt settlements to get Hussein into the Mideast peace process.” Congress responded in the customary fashion. A House Foreign Affairs subcommittee headed by Democrat Lee Hamilton voted to increase the military and economic aid requested by the Reagan administration for 1984 to even higher levels, without opposition. The Administration made no effort to block the increase. Yuval Elizur, Boston Globe, April 11 (Jerusalem); New York Times, April 14, 1983. For further details on the World Zionist Organization plan, see David Richardson, Jerusalem Post, April 10, 1983. The plan is intended to bring the Jewish population of the West Bank to 1.3 million in 30 years, by vast government subsidies and “severe restrictions on construction in Israel’s main urban centres... It is, of course, tacitly assumed that the American taxpayer will bear the cost; a reasonable assumption, given the history and the U.S. government reaction. See also chapter 3, section 2.4.1.