Elite Policy and the "Axis of Evil"

Noam Chomsky, ZNet, 1 May, 2008
In January, the Hamas-led prison break allowed Gazans for the first time in years to go shopping in nearby Egyptian towns, plainly a serious criminal act because it slightly undermined U.S.-Israeli strangulation of these unpeople. But the powerful quickly recognized that these events too could turn into "good news." Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai "said openly what some senior Israeli officials would only say anonymously," Stephen Erlanger reported in the New York Times: the prison-break might allow Israel to rid itself of any responsibility for Gaza after having reduced it to devastation and misery in 40 years of brutal occupation, keeping it only for target practice and, of course, under full military occupation, its borders sealed by Israeli forces on land, sea, and air, apart from an opening to Egypt (in the unlikely event that Egypt would agree).

That appealing prospect would complement Israel's ongoing criminal actions in the West Bank, carefully designed along the lines already outlined to ensure that there will be no viable future for Palestinians there. At the same time, Israel can turn to solving its
internal "demographic problem," the presence of non-Jews in a Jewish
state. The ultra-nationalist Knesset member Avigdor Lieberman was
harshly condemned as a racist in Israel when he advanced the idea of
forcing Arab citizens of Israel into a derisory "Palestinian state,"
presenting this to the world as a "land swap." His proposal is slowly
being incorporated into the mainstream. Israel National News reported
in April that Knesset member Otniel Schneller of the governing party
Kadima, "considered to be one of the people closest and most loyal to
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert," proposed a plan that "appears very
similar to one touted by Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman,"
though Schneller says his plan would be "more gradual" and the Arabs
affected "will remain citizens of Israel even though their territory
will belong to the [Palestinian Authority and], they will not be
allowed to resettle in other areas of Israel." Of course the unpeople
are not consulted.

In December Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the last hope of many
Israeli doves, adopted the same position. An eventual Palestinian
state, she suggested, would "be the national answer to the
Palestinians" in the territories and those "who live in different
refugee camps or in Israel." With Israeli Arabs dispatched to their
"natural" place, Israel would then achieve the long-sought goal of
freeing itself from the Arab taint, a stand that is familiar enough in
U.S. history, for example in Thomas Jefferson's hope, never achieved,
that the rising empire of liberty would be free of "blot or mixture,"
red or black.

For Israel, this is no small matter. Despite heroic efforts by its
apologists, it is not easy to conceal the fact that a "democratic
Jewish state" is no more acceptable to liberal opinion than a
"democratic Christian state" or a "democratic white state," as long as
the blot or mixture is not removed. Such notions could be tolerated if
the religious/ethnic identification were mostly symbolic, like
selecting an official day of rest. But in the case of Israel, it goes
far beyond that. The most extreme departure from minimal democratic
principles is the complex array of laws and bureaucratic arrangements
designed to vest control of over 90 percent of the land in the hands
of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization committed to using
charitable funds in ways that are "directly or indirectly beneficial
to persons of Jewish religion, race or origin," so its documents
explain: "a public institution recognized by the Government of Israel
and the World Zionist Organization as the exclusive instrument for the
development of Israel's lands," restricted to Jewish use, in
perpetuity (with marginal exceptions), and barred to non-Jewish labor
(though the principle is often ignored for imported cheap labor). This
extreme violation of elementary civil rights, funded by all American
citizens thanks to the tax-free status of the JNF, finally reached
Israel's High Court in 2000, in a case brought by an Arab couple who
had been barred from the town of Katzir. The Court ruled in their
favor, in a narrow decision, which seems to have been barely
implemented. Seven years later, a young Arab couple was barred from
the town of Rakefet, on state land, on grounds of "social
incompatibility" (Scott Peterson, Washington Post, December 20, 2007),
a very rare report. Again, none of this is unfamiliar in the U.S.
After all, it took a century before the 14th Amendment was even
formally recog- nized by the courts and it still is far from
implemented.

For Palestinians, there are now two options. One is that the U.S. and
Israel will abandon their unilateral rejectionism of the past 30 years
and accept the international consensus on a two-state settlement, in
accord with international law—and, incidentally, in accord with the
wishes of a large majority of Americans. That is not impossible,
though the two rejectionist states are working hard to render it so. A
settlement along these lines came close in negotiations in Taba Egypt
in January 2001 and might have been reached, participants reported,
had Israeli Prime Minister Barak not called off the negotiations
prematurely. The framework for these negotiations was Clinton's
"parameters" of December 2000, issued after he recognized that the
Camp David proposals earlier that year were unacceptable. It is
commonly claimed that Arafat rejected the parameters. However, as
Clinton made clear and explicit, both sides had accepted the
parameters, in both cases with reservations, which they sought to
reconcile in Taba a few weeks later—and apparently almost succeeded.
There have been unofficial negotiations since that have produced
similar proposals. Though possibilities diminish as U.S.-Israeli
settlement and infrastructure programs proceed, they have not been
eliminated. By now the international consensus is near universal,
supported by the Arab League, Iran, Hamas, in fact every relevant
actor apart from the U.S. and Israel.

A second possibility is the one that the U.S.-Israel are actually
implementing, along the lines just described. Palestinians will then
be consigned to their Gaza prison and to West Bank cantons, perhaps
joined by Israeli Arab citizens as well if the
Lieberman-Schneller-Livni plans are implemented. For the occupied
territories, that will realize the intentions expressed by Moshe Dayan
to his Labor Party cabinet colleagues in the early years of the
occupation: Israel should tell the Palestinian refugees in the
territories that "we have no solution, you shall continue to live like
dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process
leads." The general conception was articulated by Labor Party leader
Haim Herzog, later president, in 1972: "I do not deny the Palestinians
a place or stand or opinion on every matter.... But certainly I am not
prepared to consider them as partners in any respect in a land that
has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of
years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner."

A third possibility would be a binational state. That was a feasible
option in the early years of the occupation, perhaps a federal
arrangement leading to eventual closer integration as circumstances
permit. There was even some support for similar ideas within Israeli
military intelligence, but the grant of any political rights to
Palestinians was shot down by the governing Labor Party. Proposals to
that effect were made (by me in particular), but elicited only
hysteria. The opportunity was lost by the mid-1970s when Palestinian
national rights reached the international agenda and the two-state
consensus took shape. The first U.S. veto of a two-state resolution at
the Security Council, advanced by the major Arab states, was in 1976.
Washingon's rejectionist stance continues to the present, with the
exception of Clinton's last month in office. Some form of unitary
state remains a distant possibility through agreement among the
parties, as a later stage in a process that begins with a two-state
settlement. There is no other form of advocacy of such an outcome, if
we understand advocacy to include a process leading from here to
there; mere proposal, in contrast, is free for the asking.


It is of some interest, perhaps, that when advocacy of a unitary
binational state had some prospects, it was anathema, while today,
when it is completely unfeasible, it is greeted with respect and is
advocated in leading journals. The reason, perhaps, is that it serves
to undermine the prospect of a two-state settlement.

Advocates of a binational (one-state) settlement argue that on its
present course, Israel will become a pariah state like apartheid South
Africa, with a large Palestinian population deprived of rights, laying
the basis for a civil rights struggle leading to a unitary democratic
state. There is no reason to believe that the U.S., Israel, or any
other Western state would allow anything like that to happen. Rather,
they will proceed exactly as they are now doing in the territories
today, taking no responsibility for Palestinians who are left to rot
in the various prisons and cantons that may dot the landscape, far
from the eyes of Israelis travelling on their segregated superhighways
to their well-subsidized West Bank towns and suburbs, controlling the
crucial water resources of the region, and benefiting from their ties with U.S. and other international corporations that are evidently pleased to see a loyal military power at the periphery of the crucial Middle East region, with an advanced high tech economy and close links to Washington.