Part 8, NOAM CHOMSKY: The New World Order
November 23, 1991
NOAM CHOMSKY:
In February 1971, a problem arose. President Sadat of Egypt offered a peace
treaty in those terms -- virtually identical with the terms of official U.S. policy.
Israel rejected it. That was under the "doves", incidentally -- the Labor
Party, looking for broader territorial gains. And the United States had had to decide
whether to pursue its own policy or to change that policy. That was kind of an internal
bureaucratic conflict. Henry Kissinger then won out (he was then National Security
Advisor) and pursued his policy which was what he called "stalemate" --keeping
things the way they are; no peace treaty. Israel responded to Sadat's offer by recognizing
it as a genuine peace treaty. The U.S. backed the rejection. That's a big split in change
in U.S. policy, actually. Coincidentally, that happens to be the month in which George
Bush appeared on the national scene as U.N. ambassador, although he had nothing to do with
policy (probably no more than he does now). Ever since then, the U.S. policy has been
flatly rejectionist, and separated from the rest of the World in the manner that I
described.
From `71 to `73, that was a period of great triumphalism in Israel. The
assumption was that Israel had overwhelming military power. It could disregard the Arabs
altogether. As the former Chief of Military Intelligence in Israel, Yehoshefat Harkabi
(now a dove, incidentally) .... as he put it at the time, "War is not the Arabs'
game." They don't know which end of the gun to hold, so we can just keep the
stalemate. Kissinger accepted that, so there was no need to respond to Sadat's offers, or
anything. Now, in October, 1973, those illusions were shattered. It turns out that
they did know which end of the guns to hold. It was kind of a near thing. Policy had to
shift. Kissinger, who was, incidentally, no great genius, does understand things like
violence. He seemed to have a good understanding of that. And he could see that
Egypt had it, and therefore, he had to pay attention to them. And therefore, U.S.
policy shifted. It shifted in the perfectly natural way. Since Egypt could not be simply
dismissed as a basket case, the thing to do was to incorporate it into the U.S. system;
that is, to accept Sadat's actually longstanding offers to turn Egypt into a U.S. client
state, and to remove it from the conflict. That's the major Arab military force, and
if you remove it from the conflict you essentially eliminate the only Arab deterrent,
which means that Israel is then free to continue to pursue the major policies which the
U.S. supports and pays for; namely, integrating the Occupied Territories and attacking its
northern neighbor, Lebanon.
Well, that is the Camp David Agreement. Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy was
culminated in the Camp David Agreement which had exactly these properties. And that was
quite obvious, at the time, to anyone who was willing to look at the facts without
ideological blinkers. And it's actually conceded in retrospect. It's called
"ironic". "Ironic" is another one of those technical terms which
refers to the predictable consequences of intended U.S. actions which happen to conflict
too radically with the professed values. So that's what's called "ironic"
in the political science literature, and so on. And that's a term that applies very
broadly to almost everything. So that was "ironic", but as I say, it was obvious
to any ten-year-old at the time. And it's now conceded. Well, that's exactly what
Israel did, of course, with HUGE U.S. aid. The Carter Administration raised aid to the
stratosphere so that Israel could, in fact, continue to do this with the Arab deterrent
removed.
Well, then comes the invasion of Lebanon. Actually, there was one in `78;
another in 1982. It's purpose was to destroy the moderates in the P.L.O. That's widely
conceded .... not even conceded --proclaimed in the Israeli literature. General Harkabi
pointed out that this was a war for the West Bank. The problem was P.L.O. moderation. They
kept making these annoying demands for negotiations leading to mutual recognition, and so
on. And that's no good. We want them to go back to terrorism. We want them shooting
down planes, and that kind of stuff. Then, they're easy to deal with. The point was
actually put rather well by the editor of The New Republic, Martin Peretz in an interview
in Israel right before the 1982 invasion. He advised Israel (I'm quoting) "to
administer to the P.L.O. in Lebanon a lasting military defeat that will clarify to the
Palestinians in the West Bank that their struggle for an independent state has suffered a
setback of many years. Then, the Palestinians will be turned into just another crushed
nation like the Kurds and the Afghans. And their problems, which are beginning to be
boring, will be forgotten."
Well, it's possible, with regard to the Afghans, that if you go to some of the
more extreme Stalinist elements in the Communist Party bureaucracy, you could hear similar
comments on the Afghans back in those days. And I should say that Peretz's comments and
attitudes toward the Kurds do rather accurately capture U.S. policy toward them, as we've
just seen again. Well that's U.S. policy, and it stays like that until today.
Now, there's a spectrum, as always. There are the hawks and the doves. So let's
look. According to the hawks, the Palestinians deserve nothing like other crushed nations.
And then there are the doves. And here, a good example is Thomas Friedman again. On
the occasion of his receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Israel ... he had
several interviews in the Israeli Press where he advised Israel to run the Occupied
Territories in the manner in which they run South Lebanon. Now, that means under the
control of a terrorist, mercenary army with big prison camps where you hold hundreds of
torture chambers; actually, where you hold hundreds of hostages to ensure that the
villages submit to the rule of the terrorist mercenary force.
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