Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (28 page)

But the point is, in
Newsweek
and the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
and so on, you simply cannot state these facts—it’s like belief in divinity or something, the lies have become immutable truth.

W
OMAN
: Then what happened with the Camp David Accords—why did the United States and Israel agree to deal with Egypt at that point?

Well, if you look back to around 1971 or so, you’ll find that all the American ambassadors in the Middle East were warning Kissinger that there was going to be a war if the United States kept blocking every diplomatic option for resolving the conflict.
  ⁵²
Even the big oil companies were in favor of a political settlement, they were telling the White House: “Look, if you block every diplomatic option, the Arabs are going to go to war, they’ve got no choice.”
  ⁵³
But in the White House they were just laughing, it was all a big joke—just like they were laughing in Israel. And on purely racist grounds.

See, intelligence systems are very flawed institutions: they’re highly ideological, they’re fanatic, they’re racist, and as a result the information that comes through them is usually grossly distorted. Well, in this case the intelligence information was, “Arabs don’t know how to fight.” The chief of Israeli military intelligence, Yehosifat Harkabi, his line was, “War is not the Arab’s game”—you know, these gooks don’t know which end of the gun to hold, you don’t have to worry about them. And the American military, the C.I.A., everyone obviously was producing the same information: if Sadat mobilizes an army in the Sinai, you kind of laugh, “What do these guys think they’re doing? We’ll leave seven hundred men on the Bar-Lev Line and that’ll stop them.”
  ⁵⁴
So the United States refused to pursue a diplomatic settlement, and that refusal then brought on the 1973 war—where suddenly it turned out that war
was
the Arab’s game: the Egyptians won a major victory in the Sinai, it was quite a military operation, in fact. And it just shocked U.S. and Israeli intelligence, it really frightened them—because like I say, state planners usually understand violence, even if they can’t understand anything else. So in the ’73 war, it suddenly became clear that the assumption that “war is not the Arab’s game” was false: Egypt
wasn’t
a military basket-case.

Okay, as long as Egypt was a basket-case, the United States had been content to let them be a Russian ally—if the Russians want to sink money into this morass, that’s fine, we don’t mind, we just laugh at them. But in the 1973 war, it suddenly became clear that Egypt wasn’t just a basket-case, they knew how to shoot and do all these other things that matter, so Kissinger decided to accept what had in fact been long-standing Egyptian offers to become an American client-state. Well, that’s what Egypt had wanted all along, so they immediately kicked out the Russians and got on the American gravy-train. And now they’re the second-biggest recipient of U.S. aid, though still way behind Israel—and at that point Sadat became a “moderate,” because he had switched to our side. And since Egypt was considered the major Arab deterrent to hawkish Israeli policies, the obvious back-up position was just to remove them from the conflict, so Israel would be free to solidify its control in the region—as it has done, in fact. See, before the 1973 war, U.S. planners thought that Israel didn’t have to worry about any Arab forces at all. Now they saw that that was wrong—so they moved to extract Egypt from the conflict. And that was the great achievement of the Camp David peace process: it enabled Israel to integrate the Occupied Territories and attack Lebanon without any Egyptian deterrent. Alright, try to say
that
in the U.S. media.

Incidentally, by now you are beginning to be able to say it in the strategic analysis literature. So if you read articles by strategic analysts, they’re starting to say, yeah, that’s the way it worked.
  ⁵⁵
Of course that’s the way it worked, that’s the way it was
designed
. That’s the way it was obviously going to work right at the time of Camp David—I mean, I was writing about this in 1977.
  ⁵⁶
If you eliminate the major Arab deterrent force and increase U.S. aid to Israel to the level of 50 percent of total U.S. aid worldwide, and Israel is committed to integrating the Occupied Territories and attacking and disrupting Lebanon, if you get that configuration of events, what do you
think
is going to happen? It’s transparent, a child could figure it out. But you can’t say it, because to say it would imply that the United States is not the leader of the world peace forces, and is not interested in justice and freedom and human rights around the world. Therefore you can’t say any of these things here, and by now you probably can’t even
see
them.

Water and the Occupied Territories

M
AN
: But doesn’t Israel need the Occupied Territories for defense purposes, with respect to the other Arab states on its borders—isn’t that the main reason for holding on to them?

Well, there I can only talk about the way that
they
look at it—the way the top Israeli decision-makers look at it. So there’s a very interesting book published in Hebrew, called
Mechiro shel Ihud
, which is a detailed documentary record of the period from 1967 to 1977, when the Labor Party was in power in Israel [the Occupied Territories were originally seized by Israel in 1967]. It’s by a guy named Yossi Beilin, who was the top advisor to Shimon Peres and is kind of a Labor Party dove, and he had access to all sorts of Labor Party documents. And the book is almost a daily record of cabinet meetings in Israel between 1967 and ’77—right in the period when they were trying to figure out just what to do with the Occupied Territories.
  ⁵⁷

Well, there’s virtually no mention of security, barely a mention of it. One thing that does get mentioned a lot is what they call the “demographic problem”—the problem of what do you do about too many Arabs in a Jewish state. Okay, that’s called the “demographic problem” in Israel, and in fact, people here refer to it that way too.
  ⁵⁸
The purpose of that term, which sounds like kind of a neutral sociological term, is to disguise the fact that it’s a deeply racist notion—we would see that right off if we applied it here. Like, suppose some group in New York City started talking about the “demographic problem”—there are too many Jews and blacks. There are too many Jews and blacks in New York City, and we’ve got to do something about it, because they’re taking over—so we’ve got to deal with the “demographic problem.” It wouldn’t be very hard to decode this. But in Israel and in this book of cabinet records, there’s a lot of talk about the “demographic problem,” and it’s easy to see what that means.

Another thing they talk about a lot is water—and that’s a very crucial thing, which is not discussed very much in the United States but it’s probably the main reason why Israel is never going to give up the West Bank. See, this is a very arid region, so water is more important than oil, and there are very limited water resources in Israel. In fact, a lot of the wars in the Middle East have been about water—for instance, the wars involving Israel and Syria have usually been about the headwaters of the Jordan, which come from Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. And as a matter of fact, one of the main reasons why Israel is holding on to the so-called “Security Zone” it seized in southern Lebanon [in the 1982 invasion] is that that area includes a mountain, Mount Hermon, which is a big part of the watershed that brings water to the region. Actually, the invasion of Lebanon was probably an attempt, among other things, to get ahold of the Litani River, a little farther to the north—but they were driven back by Shiite resistance and couldn’t hold on to it, so they had to pull back.

Well, economic facts are classified in Israel, so you can’t be sure of the exact numbers, but most of the studies on this, including some American studies, indicate that Israel is getting about a third of its water from the West Bank. And there really is no alternative to that, short of some sort of technological innovation—like, maybe someday someone will invent a technique of desalination, so they could use seawater. But at the moment, there is no other alternative: there are no underground water sources except the West Bank sources, Israel didn’t get the Litani River, they obviously aren’t going to get the Nile—so there just is no other water source for them, except the West Bank sources.

And in fact, one of the occupation policies that the Arabs in the West Bank have found most onerous is that Israel forbids them to dig deep wells. Well, that’s very hard on Arab agriculture—I mean, an Arab farmer on the West Bank has the same water allotment for farming that a Jewish city-dweller in Tel Aviv has just for drinking. Think about that: the drinking-water for a Jewish city resident is the same as the
total
water for an Arab farmer, who’s got to do irrigation, and take care of livestock, and do everything else you do on a farm. And the Arabs are not allowed to sink deep wells, they’re only allowed to sink shallow wells that you do without equipment—the deep wells are Jewish wells, only for Jewish settlers, and they get something like twelve times as much water, or some huge amount more water.
  ⁵⁹

Okay, so water’s a big issue that comes up in the documents, there’s the “demographic problem,” there are historical reasons, and some other things too—but the fact is, there is very little talk about security concerns.

Imperial Ambitions and the Arab Threat

M
AN
: Well, I don’t know about these cabinet records—but the fact is that when Israel was originally conceived in 1948, it was immediately lunged upon by virtually everybody on its borders: all of the Arab countries immediately tried to destroy it, and prevent its very existence. Wouldn’t you say the Israeli people are justified in remembering that history still, as they set national policies today?

Well, you’re right that that’s the standard line about what happened. But it’s not true. Keep in mind the background facts. In November 1947, the U.N. General Assembly made a recommendation for a three-way partition of Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a small internationally-administered zone that would have included Jerusalem [the area was under British imperial control].
  ⁶⁰
Now, I should stress that this was a General Assembly
recommendation
, and General Assembly recommendations have no force: they are only recommendations. Israel
insists
that they have no force, I should say—Israel is by far the greatest violator of General Assembly recommendations, beginning in December 1948, when Israel rejected the General Assembly call for allowing Palestinian refugees the right of return [they had fled violence that broke out in Palestine beginning in November 1947]. In fact, Israel was accepted into the United Nations on
condition
that it accept that requirement, and it claimed that it would accept it—but then it immediately refused to carry through on that promise.
  ⁶¹
And it goes on right until today: I don’t know how many, but probably hundreds of General Assembly recommendations have been rejected by Israel.

Anyway, such a recommendation was made by the General Assembly in November 1947, and at that point war broke out in Palestine among the Palestinians and the Zionists [Jewish nationalists]. The Zionists were by far the more powerful and better organized force, and by May 1948, when the state of Israel was formally established, about 300,000 Palestinians already had been expelled from their homes or had fled the fighting, and the Zionists controlled a region well beyond the area of the original Jewish state that had been proposed by the U.N.
  ⁶²
Now, it’s
then
that Israel was attacked by its neighbors—in May 1948; it’s
then
, after the Zionists had taken control of this much larger part of the region and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been forced out, not before.

And furthermore, there’s very good scholarship on this that’s come out in Israel now which shows, I think pretty conclusively, that the intervention of the Arab states was very reluctant, and that it was to a large extent directed not against Israel, but against King Abdullah of Trans Jordan (what’s now Jordan), who was basically a client ruler for the British. And the Arab states in fact did it because they felt that Abdullah was just a pawn of Britain, and they had good reason to believe that he was assisting the British in reconstructing their imperial system in the region in various ways [Britain had arranged to turn formal administration of Palestine over to the United Nations in May 1948]. It’ll be a hundred years before any of this material enters mainstream American scholarship, I should say—but it’s very good scholarship, and it’s important.
  ⁶³

So anyway, the area that’s now Jordan was being ruled by a British client, and the other Arab states in the region regarded the Jordanian military, quite correctly, as just a British army with kind of a guy with Arab headgear leading them. And they were very much concerned about the fact (which they knew at some level, even if they didn’t know all of the details) that Abdullah and the Zionists were cooperating in a plan to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state—which in fact did happen, Abdullah and the Zionists
did carry
out that plan of partitioning the area that was to be the Palestinian state between them.
  ⁶⁴
And furthermore, Abdullah also had much greater plans of his own: he wanted to take over Syria, and become the king of “Greater Syria.” And there was apparently a plan in which Israel was going to attack Syria, and then Abdullah was going to move into Syria to defend the Syrians and end up afterwards holding the whole pie, by pre-arrangement. Well, that plan never quite got worked out, as history shows—but the other Arab states had wind of it, so then they moved in against Israel to try to block Abdullah’s goals.
  ⁶⁵