by Noam Chomsky
It will be recalled that it was Kriegel’s impressive study that convinced the director-general of the Department of Information of the World Zionist Organization that the media had been duped by the powerful forces of Wafa and the International Communist Conspiracy (see chapter 5, section 7.2). As far as the book itself is concerned, it is of interest only to those who are amused by the latest antics of Paris intellectuals. More interesting, perhaps, is that it could be taken seriously in Israel, though they were realistic enough not to use this fascinating material for hasbara beamed to an American audience.
6. Who is Responsible? 6.1 The Background for the Inquiry
W
hen the reports of the massacre reached the outside world, Israel denied any knowledge of what had happened. This pretense was quickly dropped in favor of outraged denial of any responsibility. The official reaction of the government was
announced on September 19, and appeared in a full page advertisement in several American newspapers.107 The heading was “BLOOD LIBEL,” a reference to traditional anti-Semitic incitement. It is a reflex reaction to accuse critics of Israel of anti-Semitism, a device of proven effectiveness to deflect any rational discussion of the issues; see chapter 2, section 2.1.
The official government statement then went on to assert that “there was no position of the Israeli army” in the area where “a Lebanese unit entered a refugee camp in order to apprehend terrorists hiding there.” It claimed further that “As soon as the IDF learned of the tragic events, Israeli soldiers put an end to the slaughter and forced the Lebanese unit to evacuate the camp.” These shameful lies were silently abandoned later on. The second is not only contradicted by the eyewitness reports of numerous journalists, but also by General Sharon’s direct testimony in the Knesset a few days later, as already noted.108 The IDF entered Sabra long after the killings ended and did not enter Shatila at all. The only alleged “intervention” cited by Sharon was a Friday order to the Phalangist liaison officer to stop the killings; even if one can believe Sharon’s statement, it merely deepens the responsibility of the IDF, since at a later meeting that day the Chief of Staff congratulated the Phalange on their “good work” and sent them back into the camp to complete it. As for the claim that there was no position of the Israeli army in the area completely surrounded by IDF soldiers who could not only observe what was happening but were so close by that they “must have heard the screams of the massacred all night,”109 no comment is necessary. Subsequently, there was a temporary pretense that the camps had been only partially encircled by the IDF and that the militiamen must have entered, unknown to the IDF, through the unguarded eastern sector, but this too was dropped as the press, including the Israeli press, reported the opposite, even citing earlier official IDF statements that the camps were completely encircled.110 Shortly after, the full range of pretenses was dropped, as unsustainable in the face of massive counter-evidence. Apart from a few journalistic hold-outs and Paris ex-Stalinists performing their “national duty,” the basic facts were soon uncontested.
The refusal of the Begin government to permit a full independent inquiry raised a new furor. Sharon, in his Knesset testimony, accused the Labor opposition of simply playing politics when it called for an investigation. A look at the Labor critique tends to confirm his judgment. In his speech to the Knesset the same day, Labor Alignment leader Shimon Peres qualified his call for an investigation in the following terms:
And in the name of the unity of the nation I call upon all members of this house to exclude the Israel Defense Forces from this discussion. Let us leave aside our sons who are serving their nation faithfully. Let us not include the great and important organization that carries out orders, and which is blameless altogether; let us leave them out of this painful political controversy. We are sure that the Israel Defense Forces did not lend its hand to this spilling of blood.111
In short, the “full independent inquiry” that the Labor opposition was calling for according to the American press was to exclude the IDF, which is blameless a priori, and to keep to “political controversy,” i.e., to the role of the Likud government. An inquiry that excluded the role of the IDF in organizing the militias and sending them into the camps it had encircled, standing by in the manner of the Czar’s police while they did their work, would be no inquiry at all, but rather, merely an attempt to score political points against the Likud. Within a few days, the opposition to a serious inquiry on the part of both Likud and Labor was swept aside in the political currents within Israel, and the Commission of Inquiry headed by Chief Justice Yitzhak Kahan was established. We return to its report and the reception it received, an interesting story in itself.112
Note that the issue was not whether IDF forces were involved in the massacre. No credence was ever given to the occasional reports from Lebanon intimating that Israeli soldiers participated, though one wellknown apologist—Martin Peretz—claimed otherwise, stating: “I resent the alacrity with which some people have rushed to arrange the facts so that it seems the Israelis did the murdering, not the Christians.”113 It is always a useful device, when in difficult straits, to concoct an opponent who can be refuted easily, as when critics of orthodox ideological distortions are “refuted” on the pretense that they are pro-Communist,* or
* Walter Laqueur, for example, fulminates that “The inability to accept the permissible limits of rewriting history was the undoing of Cold War revisionists.” adding that “It is one thing to admire Stalin, it is another to depict him as a great humanist whose sole aspiration was to cooperate with the West in a spirit
when opponents of a strategic weapons build-up are dismissed with arguments against unilateral disarmament. But the conditions that Labor attempted to impose on the inquiry went far beyond the non-issue that Peretz raises, a fact that was overlooked in the outrage focussed upon Begin and Sharon.
6.2 The Charges The government of Israel blamed the Phalange for the massacre. Sharon, in his Knesset testimony, argued that Israel cannot “choose our neighbors in the Middle East”; if they are savages, it is not Israel’s fault. As Begin put it in a widely-quoted statement, “Goyim kill goyim, and they immediately come to hang the Jews,”114 another sign of the ineradicable anti-Semitism of world opinion. The U.S. government blamed the Christian militias, assigning Israel indirect responsibility for failing to do enough to prevent the massacre. The Labor opposition blamed Begin and Sharon. American supporters of Israel also rushed to blame Begin and Sharon, who had defiled the “beautiful Israel” of earlier
of goodwill, peace and mutual benefit” (“Visions and Revisions,” Times Literary Supplement, March 5, 1982). He cites no examples of rewriting of history, admiration of Stalin, or the rest; as noted several times, it is a convention of scholarship and intellectual life in general that no evidence is necessary in denunciation of those who dare to question Higher Truths—for Laqueur, that “Unlike the Soviet Union, the U.S. does not want to convert anyone to a specific political, social, or economic system” (Laqueur and Charles Krauthammer, New Republic, March 31, 1982), etc. For some further examples of his interesting doctrines, see Chomsky and Herman, Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. I. pp. 87f.; TNCW, pp. 48, 190.
years. The Arab states and the PLO blamed the U.S., which they regarded as directly responsible for Israel’s actions, virtually a partner in them. The efforts of the Israeli government to dissociate itself from the work of its hired guns have already been discussed. The other charges merit further examination.
Before examining them, it is worth noting that each of these charges had a clear purpose. The Labor Alignment hoped to discredit the Likud government; the huge post-massacre demonstration was the first one supported by the Labor Party, which maintained its silence, with the exceptions already noted, throughout the earlier carnage. Supporters of Israel who had watched similar or worse atrocities in silence in the past, blaming the Palestinians when they are oppressed or massacred, had to find a way to justify their longstanding practice
that helped lay the basis for this unusually visible atrocity—which, again, did not compare in scale to the slaughter of civilians by Israel’s bombardment of defenseless civilian targets, in the Sabra and Shatila camps and elsewhere, a few weeks earlier. The American government hoped that if Labor were returned to power and the Arab states could be brought into line, Reagan might succeed in imposing the American plan for the region, including the “peace plan” already discussed, thus bringing about the long-sought regional strategic consensus under American power. As for the Arab charges, in this case they strike uncomfortably close to home.
6.3 “We” and “They”: Defiling the Beautiful Israel The attempt to focus blame on Begin and Sharon took various forms. The New York Times was positively ecstatic about the fact that “the people of Israel have broken the resistance of their Government to force a full and fair inquiry,” ignoring the attempt by the Labor Alignment to forestall such an inquiry. By doing so, the Times editors continued, Israelis have “affirm[ed] their humanity,…shame[d] the killers of their own children,…expose[d] the hypocrisy of many of their critics.”115We have already seen how the genuine revulsion of many Israelis over their government’s role in the massacre was converted by supporters here into a device to intensify settlement in the occupied territories and militarization of Israeli society (see chapter 3, section 4.2.2). Commentary of the sort just quoted made its effective contribution to this process.
Within days after the report of the massacre, the U.S. press was flooded with letters and statements by people who had accepted what came before with silence or acclaim, in some cases, with occasional qualms during the Begin-Sharon intensification of the oppressive practices of the Labor government in the occupied territories and the Peace for Galilee Operation. Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset and Michael Walzer wrote that “All of us must now say to the BeginSharon Government: ‘You are doing grave damage to the name of Israel, long associated with democracy, conciliation and peace’.”116 On the same day, Howe added in a separate statement that “This has not changed my attitude toward Israel but it has certainly confirmed and strengthened my opposition to the Begin and Sharon Government.” The following day, in his third statement on the massacres in two days in the New York Times, Howe explained the difference between “We” (opponents of Begin-Sharon) and “They” (the evil pair):
“We” believe in negotiating with any Palestinians who openly acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel, in the hope of reaching a settlement that secures Israeli borders and grants Palestinian rights. “They” regard the Palestinians simply as the enemy to be smashed and “mopped up.” Such differences point to a fundamental divergence within Jewish ranks. We are experiencing a conflict between the values of democratic conciliation and the goal of imperial domination, between the visions personified by Chaim Weizmann’s liberal Zionism and Vladimir Jabotinsky’s ultra-nationalist Zionism. We are in the midst of a struggle over the character of Jewish life, both in Israel and the Diaspora…it is the bad policies and misconduct of Begin-Sharon that provide the most substantial help to the enemies of Israel… So this is where some of us stand: warm friends of Israel, open critics of Begin-Sharon.117
Just before the massacres, Nat Hentoff, who had been sharply critical of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the silence of American Jews concerning it,* had written:
* A committed civil libertarian who has written widely on civil and human rights issues in the U.S. and abroad, taking a strong and uncompromising stand, Hentoff writes here of his fear that Israel will not “remain a Jewish state” if it continues to rule over 1.3 million Palestinians. It is apparently his view, then, that there is no problem in its being “a Jewish state” with a smaller minority of non-Jewish citizens, say 15%. One wonders whether he would have the same attitude towards a proposal to convert the United States into a “White state” or
From the start of the Jewish state, there has indeed been a tradition, tohar haneshek (“purity of arms” or “morality of arms”), in the Israeli armed forces. Until now, Israeli soldiers had to be very, very careful about injuring civilians, let alone killing them.118
A Boston Globe editorial explains: There is little understanding of the way in which Begin’s right-wing revisionist Zionism differs from the Zionism of a David Ben-Gurion or even a military man like Moshe Dayan. Traditional Zionism sought peace between Arab and Jew and empathized with the Palestinian quest for a homeland.119
Addressing the Knesset after the massacre, Shimon Peres stated:
But the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister were struck dumb. Their silence thundered as it pained. The fate of “a Christian state,” with a legal and administrative structure of the sort that defines Israel as “a Jewish state.” To my knowledge, he has never addressed this issue in his many writings on Israel and Zionism, a standard oversight among civil libertarian supporters of Israel (not to speak of those who simply deny the facts; see TNCW, chapter 9, for some examples). It is also noteworthy that Hentoff has expressed great admiration for committed opponents of civil rights—Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, for example—as long as this opposition is restricted to the Israeli context. See chapter 4, section 5.5 and notes 145, 107.
Israel, David Ben-Gurion said, is dependent on its strength and its righteousness. Righteousness, not just strength, has to guide our deeds.120
This statement appeared in the New York Times, evoking not shock and amazement but respect—and general dismay over the passing of the righteousness of Ben-Gurion’s Israel. Examples can be freely multiplied.
The fact that such statements as the ones just quoted could be made, and regarded seriously, once again provides evidence of the remarkable successes of our system of indoctrination, of what Walter Lippmann called “the manufacture of consent,” among the intelligentsia who are its agents and, not infrequently, its most credulous victims. Enough has already been said to dismiss the claim that the name of Israel has been associated with “conciliation and peace” or that the Zionism of the Labor Party “empathized with the Palestinian quest for a homeland.” One can only hope that some day, honesty will lead to the recognition of the contribution made by such outlandish claims as these to allowing both Labor and Likud to undertake their policies of consistent rejectionism and oppression, exactly as Israeli doves have been lamenting for many years.
As for Howe’s “we” and “they,” he fails to mention that “they” include the Labor Party governments of which he was an ardent supporter, and the current Labor opposition as well, which he continues to support. Labor has never departed from its refusal to deal with any Palestinians on any political issue or to negotiate with the PLO even if it were to renounce terrorism and recognize the state of Israel. While in power, Labor rejected every peace proposal that offered the hope of reaching a settlement that secures Israeli borders, even ones (e.g., Sadat’s in 1971) that made no mention of Palestinian rights, and has maintained the same position since, even criticizing Begin for agreeing to abandon the northeast Sinai settlements that Labor established; it has called for transfer of Arabs to East of the Jordan; it supports continued settlement (which Labor initiated) as long as it falls within the framework of its planning and says little about severe repression (also its legacy) in the occupied territories; etc. Hence “we” are a small group indeed; it is, in fact, difficult to see how the Irving Howe of the years 1967-82, whose contributions were discussed above, can form part of this “we.”
Howe’s implied message is that if only “they” can be removed and the Labor Party returned to power, then “we” can proceed to realize the vision of “Weizmann’s liberal Zionism” (as he construes it), an illusion that flies in the face of the entire history of the political grouping that he contrasts to Begin-Sharon. Furthermore, Weizmann’s “liberal Zionism” had breathed its last by 1946, when Weizmann returned to London from the Twenty-Second Congress of the World Zionist movement “beaten and embittered. It was the end of an epoch. Militant Zionism had come out
on top after a decade-long struggle between giants”121 a struggle between Weizmann’s “liberal Zionism” and the “militant Zionism” of Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Labor Zionist faction that Howe sees as “we.” What is more, a look beyond the obvious would reveal the true nature of Weizmann’s “liberal Zionism,” “Weizmann’s legacy” as Zionist historian Simha Flapan termed it, with its “lasting impact,” namely, the rejection of any Palestinian rights within the Land of Israel, except as part of some temporary tactical maneuver.*
In the same connection, the journal that Howe edits, Dissent, subsequently cited a 1975 interview with Ben-Gurion, published after his * On “Weizmann’s legacy” and the actual positions taken by the “liberal Zionism” of Weizmann and the “militant Zionism” of Ben-Gurion, see chapter 3, section 2.2.2 and further discussion in chapters 3, 4, and references cited.
death, in which he called for return to the pre-1967 borders so as to ensure “an unassailable Jewish majority” in Israel (“the Arabs drastically outbreed us”) and because the country “belongs to two races—the Arabs of Palestine and the Jews of the world—each of whom, first the Jews and then the Arabs, have controlled it for some 1,300 years apiece.” This is published under the heading “Ben-Gurion on peace,” presumably justifying the association of Howe’s “we” with the Labor Zionism of BenGurion. Whatever one thinks of Ben-Gurion’s 1975 statement, it hardly serves the purpose. Ben-Gurion’s political career ended in the early 1960s. In the 1961 election he was “an electoral liability” and by then he was “to all intents and purposes…a defeated man,” Lucas observes. He resigned from office in 1963 and was expelled from Mapai (the Labor Party) in 1965. “In the course of the Six Day War [1967],” his biographer Bar-Zohar writes, “Ben-Gurion grasped that his active involvement in Israeli politics was at an end,” and by 1970 he “withdrew from public life” completely. His estrangement from his former Labor Party associates was further revealed by the statement quoted in Dissent, which placed him in complete opposition to their outspoken rejectionism.122 While the citation given was quite beside the point, it would have been in place to cite Ben-Gurion’s views while he was the leading figure in the Labor Party, for example, his position that the indigenous Arab population had no particular tie to their homes and hence no real place in Palestine so that transfer would be quite in order on moral grounds, his commitment to a Greater Israel that could be created by one or another method (not excluding conquest) after the tactical and temporary acceptance of partition had laid the basis for state power, his plans to dismember Lebanon, etc. Nothing of this has appeared in Dissent, though it would surely be relevant to a proper understanding of “we” and “they.”
