GAZA, ISRAEL, CHOMSKY, II

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration:  Our VP, ready if Trump is impeached.

Trump has become too stupid, or his followers have, to bear comment, however: A little old lady neighbor knocked on my door and asked my help. She had not eaten for over a week. She would go shopping, but did not have a picture ID. She asked me to go with as I did have one. She had to give me the money and I passed it on to the clerk. (Trump's law). Yes, he actually said you need a picture ID to buy groceries.

Now, we continue Chomsky, this time just on Gaza and Israel:

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Israel has passed a widely-condemned law that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and gives Jews the sole right to self-determination. It also declares Hebrew the country's only official language and encourages the building of Jewish-only settlements on occupied territory as a "national value." The law has drawn international condemnation and accusations that Israel has legalized apartheid. For more we speak with world-renowned political dissident, author, and linguist Noam Chomsky. He is a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years.

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about Israel right now. Israel's passage of the new law that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and gives them the sole right to self-determination. The law also declares Hebrew the country's only official language and encourages the building of Jewish-only settlements in the occupied territory as a national value. This is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: This is a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel. We will keep ensuring civil rights in Israel's democracy. These rights will not be harmed. But the majority also has rights and the majority decides. An absolute majority wants to ensure our state's Jewish character for generations to come.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about this new law, Noam Chomsky?

NOAM CHOMSKY: First of all, a slight correction: the all-Jewish settlements that are authorized are within Israel proper. It's not even a question on the Occupied Territories. They're all like that. But this is within Israel proper.

So, yes, the new law does change the existing situation, but not by as much as is being claimed. What the new law describes has pretty much been in place for a long time. Basic law back in—land laws back in 1960 established what the Israeli High Court called, concluded is—their statement was "Israel is the sovereign state of the Jewish people"—all Jewish people, but not its citizens, just the Jews. That was 60 years ago.

The land laws were set up in such a way that, as was recognized at the time, in fact, that—internally in Israel, not outside—that the state lands would be effectively under the administration of the Jewish National Fund. An array of legal and administrative practices were set up to ensure that. If you're interested in details, I wrote about them in detail 30 years ago in a book called Towards a New Cold War, sort of went through the documents. But, basically, a complex array was set up to ensure that the Jewish National Fund would be in control of state lands. That amounts to over 90 percent of the country's lands.

What's the mission of the Jewish National Fund? Well, it has a contract with the state of Israel which determines that its mission is to work for the benefit—I'm quoting now—of people "of Jewish race, religion or origin." OK, what do you expect to follow from this? What you expect to follow is that 92, 93 percent of the land of the country is effectively reserved for people of Jewish race, religion and origin. And that's the way it played out.

This finally came to the court, the Israeli courts, High Court, in the year 2000. Civil liberties association in Israel brought a case. The plaintiffs were an Arab couple, professional Arab couple, who wanted to buy a home in a Jewish settlement, settlement of Katzir, which was, like most of the country, restricted to Jews. The court finally ruled in their favor, in a very narrow decision.

Almost immediately, efforts began to try to figure out a way around it, by various devices. And the new law simply authorizes it, straight. It authorizes all-Jewish settlements in Israel proper, which means about 90 percent of the country. If you look at the development of settlements over the years—it's discussed in an important article by Israeli writer Yitzhak Laor in a recent issue of Haaretz. I wrote about it in a post here in Truthout. He points out that I think about 700 all-Jewish settlements were set up, no Arab settlements. Arab Palestinians are restricted to about two percent of the land, a lot of them being kicked out of that.

So, all of this, it formalizes what has been practiced, in complex ways. It does demote Arabic from being an official language to not having that status. It enhances the past practices by introducing them into what's called the Basic Law, which is effectively the constitution. So, yes, these are changes, but less dramatic than the way it's portrayed, not because these are proper moves, but because it's always been like that in one way or another.

Incidentally, this should not be too strange to Americans. You look at the housing—this has recently been discussed by [Richard] Rothstein, an interesting book. If you look at the New Deal housing programs, they were legally and explicitly directed to ensuring white-only projects, white-only towns. That's why the towns that sprang up in the 1950s, like Levittown, were 100 percent white. Various legal requirements were introduced to ensure that. This is the New Deal. We're not talking about the Deep South, although, of course, they influenced it.

This didn't change until the late '60s. And by then, it was too late to benefit African Americans. The reason was because of general economic changes in the '50s—'50s and the '60s were a great growth period in the United States, offered the first time in hundreds of years of history, 400 years of history, for African Americans to have some sort of a chance of entering the mainstream society. But they were blocked from housing, by legal means. By the time the legal means were dismantled, we were moving into the onset of the neoliberal period of stagnation and decline, so it didn't do them any good. That's another chapter in the ugly history of American racism.

So, we shouldn't be all too startled to see what's going on in Israel, which is quite ugly and is part of the shift of the country far to the right, which was predicted in 1967, predicted right off, that a consequence of the occupation would be to turn the country to the right. When you have your jackboot on someone's neck, it's not good for your psyche. And I think we've been watching this happen.

Israel is quite aware of it, incidentally. Israeli political analysts have been pointing out for a couple of years that Israel should be preparing itself for a period in which it loses the support of sectors of the world that have some concern for human rights and international law, and should be returning towards alliances with the countries that just don't care about this. Say, India, under the recent ultranationalist Modi government, shares with Israel the move towards ultranationalism, repression, a hatred of Islam; China doesn't pay attention to these things; Singapore; Saudi Arabia; United Arab Emirates.

And we can see it happening in the United States, as well. So, not too long ago, Israel was the absolute darling of progressive, liberal America. That has changed. By now, among self-identified Democrats, they have considerably more support for Palestinians than for Israel. Support for Israel in the United States has shifted to the ultranationalist right and evangelicals, who, for the wrong reasons, support Israeli actions, with some passion, in fact, while at the same time many of them hold to doctrines which claim that the second coming of Christ, which is imminent, will lead to a series of events which will end up with the Jews being sent to eternal perdition. That combines with the support for Israeli actions. And that's why the base of Israeli support in the United States has shifted to the right wing of the Republican Party. So, these things are happening all over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, now linguistics professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Coming up, he'll talk about the crisis in Gaza.

In Gaza, thousands gathered Saturday for the funeral of 11-year-old Majdi al-Satari, who died after he was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper Friday at protests near the separation fence with Israel. 17-year-old Moumin al-Hams and 43-year-old Ghazi Abu Mustafa were also shot and killed by Israeli snipers at the protests. In total, Israeli soldiers have killed at least 150 Palestinians since the Palestinians' nonviolent Great March of Return protests began on March 30. For more we speak with world-renowned political dissident, author, and linguist Noam Chomsky. He is a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years.

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: "Noam Chomsky Is a Soft Revolution" by Foy Vance. This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman, as we return to our conversation with the world-renowned dissident, linguist and professor Noam Chomsky.

Let's turn to the situation in Gaza. Israel's Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan said Thursday Israel could launch another wide-scale military operation against the Gaza Strip. This comes after Israel's violent crackdown on peaceful protests in Gaza from March to May, when Israeli forces killed over 136 Palestinians, injured over 14,000 Palestinians. I want to turn to the Canadian doctor, the Palestinian-Canadian doctor Tarek Loubani, who was shot by Israeli forces in both legs while he was helping treat Palestinians injured by Israeli forces during the nonviolent Great March of Return. It was May 14th, a Monday. I asked Dr. Loubani—this is right after he was shot—if he felt he was targeted.

DR. TAREK LOUBANI: I don't know the answer to that. I don't know what orders they received or what was in their heads, so I can't tell you if we were deliberately targeted. What I can tell you is the things that I do know. In the six weeks of the March, there were no paramedic casualties. And in one day, 19 paramedics—18 wounded plus one killed—and myself were all injured, so—or were all shot with live ammunition. We were all—Musa was actually in a rescue at the time, but everybody else I've talked to was like me. We were away during a lull, without smoke, without any chaos at all, and we were targeted—and we were, rather, hit by live ammunition, most of us in the lower limbs. So, it's very, very hard to believe that the Israelis who shot me and the Israelis who shot my other colleagues—just from our medical crew, four of us were shot, including Musa Abuhassanin, who passed away—It's very hard to believe that they didn't know who we were, they didn't know what we were doing, and that they were aiming at anything else.

AMY GOODMAN: So, later that same day, May 14th, the man that Tarek was just talking about, Dr. Loubani was talking about, paramedic Musa Abuhassanin, was shot and killed by Israeli forces. He was shot in the chest. Dr. Loubani tweeted a photo captioned, "A haunting photo, Friday, May 11. Left: Mohammed Migdad, shot in the right ankle. Hassan Abusaada. Tarek Loubani, shot in left leg and right knee. Moumin Silmi. Youssef Almamlouk. Musa Abuhassanin, shot in the thorax and killed. Volunteer unknown. Photographer: shot and wounded." And he showed this photograph that he had, that he thought he was just going to have for a scrapbook, and then realized these were some of the last days of their lives. What's going on in Gaza right now, from your perspective, Noam?

NOAM CHOMSKY: We can add to that list the young Palestinian woman, a medic, who was murdered by a sniper, far from the so-called border, when she was tending to a wounded patient. Yes, it's hideously ugly.

But there's a background, as always. The crucial background is that Israeli—this Israeli stranglehold on Gaza, which has reduced the life to bare survival, has reached the point where the United Nations, other analysts predict that by the year 2020, Gaza will literally be uninhabitable. That's two million people, half of them children, being caged in a prison, carefully controlled, savage restrictions on food, on anything that comes to them, to the extent that the fishermen are kept close to shore so they can't fish, the sewage plants have been destroyed, the power plants have been attacked.

The official program—official—was to keep Gaza on what was called a diet, barely enough to survive. Doesn't look good if they all starve to death. Notice that this is occupied territory, as recognized by—even by the United States, everyone but Israel. So, here's a population kept in a prison, in an occupied territory, fed a diet to keep them at bare survival, constantly used as a punching bag for what's called—what calls itself the most moral army in the world, now reaching a point where within a couple years it will be uninhabitable, yes, and in addition to that you have sadistic acts like highly trained snipers killing a young Palestinian woman medic when she's tending a patient, and what the doctor just described.

What do we do with it? We actually react to that. The United States has reacted. It has reacted by very sharply cutting its funding to the one organization, UNRWA, U.N. organization, that keeps the population barely alive. That's our response, along with, of course, overwhelming support for Israel, providing with the arms, diplomatic support and so on. One of the most extraordinary scandals, if that's the right word, in the modern world.

Can we do something about it? Sure, of course we can. Gaza should be a thriving Mediterranean paradise. It has a wonderful location, has agricultural resources, could be marvelous beaches, fishing, sea resources, even has natural gas offshore, which it's not being allowed to use. So there's plenty that can be done. But we've—the U.S. has preferred, under repeated administrations, but much worse now, to, as usual, support the murderers.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, Israel is threatening another strike on Gaza like what they called Operation Protective Edge in 2014 when they killed well over 2,000 people—about, oh, around a quarter of that number children.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yes, they are threatening. If you look over the record—there's no time to talk about it now—there's a marvelous book that just came out, incidentally. Norman Finkelstein's book Gaza, which is about Gaza's martyrdom, is a definitive study of this. But what's happened since 2005 is pretty straightforward. I mean, the previous history is ugly enough. But in 2005, Ariel Sharon, other Israeli hawks, recognized that it didn't make any sense to keep a couple of thousand Jewish settlers illegally settling in Gaza, using up most of its resources and devoting a large part of the Israeli army to protecting them. That was totally senseless. So they decided to move them from their illegal, subsidized settlements in Gaza to illegal, subsidized settlements in areas that Israel wanted to keep, in the West Bank, in the Golan Heights.

It was framed as a traumatic event, but that was a play for world opinion. It was basically a joke. They could have done it quite easily. And they pulled out, and that was called a withdrawal. But they remained under total Israeli occupation, just that the army wasn't inside Gaza; it was controlling it from the outside. There was an agreement reached in November 2005 between the Palestinians and Israel on a ceasefire, no violence, opening Gaza's seaport, rebuilding the airport that Israel had destroyed, opening the border so that there could be free flow between Israel and Egypt and so on. That agreement lasted a couple of weeks, in—that was November.

In January, the Palestinians committed a major crime: They ran a free election, recognized to be free and fair, only one in the Arab world. But it came out the wrong way. The wrong people won: Hamas. Israel, at once, escalated violence, tightened the siege, increased the repression against Gaza, imposed the diet. The U.S. reacted by standard operating procedure: started to organize a military coup. Hamas preempted the military coup, which was an even greater crime. Violence, the U.S.-Israeli violence, increased. The savagery of the siege increased, and so on.

Then it goes on like that. Repeatedly, there's an episode of what Israel calls mowing the lawn. Smash them up. They're defenseless, of course. Then there's an agreement reached, which Hamas accepts and lives up to. Israel violates it constantly. Finally, an Israeli escalation of the violation leads to some Hamas response, which Israel uses as a pretext for the next episode of mowing the lawn. I've reviewed this. Norman Finkelstein reviews it in his book. Others have. That's been the history since 2005.

So, yes, there might be another one. But now we're reaching a point where it's almost terminal. Repeat, it's expected that the Gaza Strip, having been devastated so savagely over the years, will literally become uninhabitable. Now, there are ways to deal with this. It's not a—doesn't take a brilliant scientist to figure it out. It's quite obvious.

AMY GOODMAN: And Noam, the solution that you say that is straightforward and simple?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Very straightforward. Live up to the terms of the November 2005 agreement. Allow Gaza to reconstruct. Open the entry points to Israel and Egypt. Rebuild the seaport that was smashed. Rebuild the airport that Israel destroyed. Allow them to reconstruct the power plants. Let them become a flourishing Mediterranean site. And, of course, permit—remember that the famous Oslo Agreements required, explicitly, that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank be a unified territory and that its territorial integrity must be maintained. Israel and the United States reacted at once by separating them. OK? That's not a law of nature, either. Palestinian national rights can be achieved, if the U.S., Israel are willing to accept that.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, author and linguist, now a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Chomsky taught for 50 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Visit Democracynow.org to watch our first full hour with Noam Chomsky, discussing immigration, U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and more. In the coming week, you'll hear Noam Chomsky on North Korea, Yemen, Iran and more. And that does it for our broadcast. I'm Amy Goodman. Our website, Democracynow.org. Thanks for joining us.

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