On Palestine (10 page)

IP:
Absolutely.

 

 

This conversation between Noam
Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, and Frank Barat was recorded on January 14, 2014, and has been condensed and edited.

Chapter Three

The Present

 

FB: What is the role of activists standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people? Should they be pragmatic in terms of their advocacy or should they lead the way and adopt more ethical and radical positions? Should we focus on occupation or on the nature of the state of Israel?

NC:
If their goals are to help the Palestinians, while they should of course take positions that are ethical, they also must be pragmatic. They have to ask themselves what is going to help and what is going to hurt the Palestinians. Take the antiwar movement about Vietnam for example. There were young people who were properly outraged by the war and thought that the ethical attitude to have was to carry out acts of destruction against US property, corporations, destroy armaments, and so on. That's ethical, but it was harmful. The Vietnamese were strongly opposed to it. They did not care about the fact that people in the US felt good, they cared about what happened to them, on the ground. And the effects on them were harmful since it provoked a huge backlash and strengthened support for the war. Those are the kind of choices that you always have to make when you are considering acting in the interest of someone. You have to ask what is going to help them, not what is going to make me feel good. Call it pragmatic if you like, but I would call it ethical. You are concerned with the effects of your actions on the people you are standing in solidarity with.

Look at the South African solidarity movement. They actually lived up to this condition pretty effectively. By and large, looking at their actions, they selected actions which both harmed South African apartheid and enhanced support for the anti-apartheid struggle in their home countries. That's what we should be doing. And that can be done. Take Israel, a couple of days ago we read a report about settlements in the Jordan Valley, which have had their profits reduced by European boycott movements. That doubly makes sense. It harms the occupation and it is quite intelligible to the audience at home. It's an educational process. You are trying to get people to understand that these are criminal activities and that you are using creative ways to undermine those activities. Those are the kind of actions that make sense. There are other actions that are harmful. First because they have almost no effect on the policies, but they also predictably create a backlash of opposition which simply strengthens the crimes. For example, ten years ago, at the time when Sharon invaded the West Bank and there were these massive atrocities in Jenin, there were protests here. There was a faculty petition condemning it. I signed it mainly out of sympathy for the people who were doing it, but I thought it was badly designed. It had provisions in it which were guaranteed to be unintelligible to the general population and to create a backlash. They insisted on including something about the fact that the university should divest from Israel. No background was laid for that. Nobody understood why. Why not divest from Harvard? The result was exactly as I thought. There was this huge reaction dwarfing the petition. For the next couple of months the issue at Harvard was not Jenin; this was forgotten. The issue became is there anti-Semitism at Harvard. So then you spend a couple of months arguing about that. The net effect for the Palestinians was predictably harmful. These are the type of things you have to think about. You have to ask what the consequences are going to be for the victims. That should be the highest priority all the time. Tactical decisions are important. They are not trivial. Human lives depend on them.

You have to think carefully about what the effects are and the multiple dimensions involved. One, what does it have to do with the policy of the state; how does it affect that? The other is, what about the audience here—at home—that you are trying to mobilize to become more active themselves, through civil disobedience and everything else? There are people who I very much respect, mostly religious Christians, who are very dedicated. They think it's very important to break into military installations and smash all these kind of missiles. I can understand why they are doing it. But the net effect turns out to be predictably harmful. For one thing, the workers in the plants have no idea what the protesters are doing except taking their jobs away. No background has been laid explaining why they are breaking the missiles. There are no educational efforts in the community to make people understand that this is something sensible to do. The net effect is that you spend enormous amounts of time and money wasted in court cases, testifying and so on, and then a couple of people go to jail, and nothing has been achieved. Those are the kinds of questions you have to ask all the time.

IP:
I think there are three elements here which are very important to consider: the fragmentation of the Palestinian existence; the accountability of the Zionist ideology for the reality we face today in Israel and Palestine; and finding the right balance between ethical positions and concrete actions.

The first point is to relate to the biggest success of the Zionist project, which was to fragment the Palestinian existence; in this respect they suffered more than the Vietnamese or the South Africans (although not in terms of human cost, at least in the case of the former). The Palestinians have gone through history ever since 1948 as a fragmented group and thus different Palestinian groups are exposed to a ton of different Israeli policies. As an activist, when you have a fragmented group with no clear leadership, no clear address to which you can refer to get clear guidance of what are the national priorities of the people you support—it is not always easy to come with the right or adequate response. In other words, it is very difficult to adopt a clear ethical position that respects the interests of all the Palestinian groups concerned. For instance it is obvious that when you live under occupation in the West Bank or when you are a refugee in Lebanon you may have different priorities as far as the Israeli policies against you are concerned, and therefore you would ask the solidarity movement to do two different, contradictory, things.

The second point is the role and accountability of Zionism. I think what activists were looking for is a kind of framework which tried to contain as many of the Palestinian communities of suffering as they could. Knowing that in some cases, some policies will be less adequate for one group, and more adequate for another. This is where I see activism doing the right thing in the last few years, where it takes Zionism not so much as an ideology or a scholarly riddle that has to be deconstructed, but refers to it mainly as the source of most of the evil that torments Israel and Palestine. The Palestinians are subjected to different sufferings because of Israeli policies, but there is an ideological source behind it.

Sticking to such a framework as activists is highly important to my mind. As I have pointed out earlier there is anomaly in the way Zionism has been until now protected from any serious challenge or rebuke. Activists in the West were allowed to demonstrate against apartheid in South Africa, and did not limit their actions against just one or other policy of the South African government. There is a greater willingness among activists to confront the ideology behind the policies.

Finally there is the need to strike the right balance between the ethical positions and concrete actions. At the end of the day it is the concrete actions of the activists that help the people on the ground. But this is not always easy to do. This is one of the predicaments facing the BDS movement. The campaign can be very helpful when it is focused on the evils perpetrated in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip. But this is also a movement that galvanized thinking people from all walks of life who do not want to support just one particular Palestinian group but would like to face the oppression, and violation of human and civil rights, wherever it occurs and point to its source.

It is of course important to maintain the general discussion the BDS campaign has generated about Israel's nature and policies and to use it when it can be helpful. I can give two different recent examples to show the different roles BDS can play. The operation attempted by Israel to cleanse the Bedouins in the Naqab, the Prawer Plan, was thwarted not by BDS pressure but by the very clear message the Bedouin community sent to the Israeli government of the possible dire consequences of the attempt to forcefully remove a community which had serving members in the army, the police, and on its margins connections to the arsenal of the criminal world—in short there were loads of weapons around.

In a new developing case regarding the attempt of the Israeli government to cleanse the Palestinians from the old city of Akka (Acre), the only effective means will be a strong international campaign spearheaded by a cultural boycott. Here the connection between the racist ideology of Zionism and the actual policies on the ground is part of the tasks of a concrete BDS campaign.

The ability to take this case by case, and the Israeli government is providing us with many of them recently, is crucial. We need to make sure we do not stay at the level of slogans. You know what you are talking about and are very concrete about the kind of atrocities that you are facing. In most cases, you can leave it to an academic debate later on to explain the general context. But as an activist there has to be a direct address to the community of suffering, even if you do not have national leadership and even if the reality is fragmented.

NC:
I think that's correct and in this respect I think the South African anti-apartheid movement was a pretty good model. They tended to be pretty concrete. Let's oppose allowing sports teams to participate in international events because of their racist conditions. Let's oppose racist hiring in universities. All of that makes sense. It's directed against particular policies and it's clear what the general background is. It's also intelligible to the audience at home. But there was another aspect of the South African solidarity movement which is very critical. By the 1990s the apartheid regime had virtually no international support. Only two countries—the USA and Britain. They supported apartheid strongly right to the end, particularly Reagan. That was sufficient for the regime, as long as they had US support they did not care, like Israel right now.

That meant that a crucial part of activism had to be directed against the USA, and secondly Great Britain. That's very critical. It's critical now too. Part of the intellectual weakness of the BDS movement is that it is directed against Israel but not against the USA. US policies are absolutely critical. Israel understands, like South Africa at the time, that they can be a pariah state, the whole world can be against them, but that it does not make a difference as long as the USA backs them. That was true in South Africa and it's true in Israel. The US solidarity movement has to focus on that. What are we going to do to change US policies? That is quite critical.

IP:
Although of course there are elements of US policy and Israeli policy that are not easily distinguishable.

NC:
That's part of the problem. The USA supports Israel not out of benevolence, but because it's useful for US policies. So yes, they do overlap a lot. Also cultural relations, Christian Zionism for example, is part of the demographic base of the Republican Party—extremely anti-Semitic, but pro-Israel. All these things have to be addressed.

IP:
I also meant the industrial complex. The academic complex. It's not very autonomous in Israel. It's part of the American milieu in many ways.

NC:
Not autonomous, you're right. Such that Israel's major military industry, Rafael, moved their management headquarters to Washington, because that's where the money is.

IP:
Sometimes you target Israelis elites and you condemn them for their complacency or their direct involvement in the atrocities. You are also in a way, targeting the octopus that is America, in this respect.

NC:
If you make it clear. Not if you do not talk about it.

IP:
I agree, you have to clarify. That's a good point.

FB: Can pressure from the bottom up, from civil society, through the boycott movement and other tactics, change US policies?

NC:
I think that US foreign policy as in every other case will have to change because of pressure from the bottom. Take South Africa. It was popular pressure which finally induced Congress and even businesses to begin to pull out of South Africa. It could not get to the executive. Reagan vetoed congressional sanctions, but there was enough popular pressure for Congress to override the vetoes. Reagan had then to violate the congressional legislation. Popular pressure did make a difference. That's the same on every other issue. Civil rights, women rights, whatever it may be. That's what has to be done here too. Now, does BDS contribute to that? It could. In fact, it has not much, it might have even been harmful, the way it has been conducted, but it could. If there is groundwork laid by educational programs among the public which makes these actions understandable, helps explain what's happening, and if you can work it out, is directed specifically toward the USA. So for example, the Jordan Valley. I do not think this has been done in the US, it should be. Boycotting products of the Jordan Valley. First of all it harms the Jordan Valley settlement project, but much more significantly, it brings out here that the USA and Israel have a policy of depopulating the Jordan Valley, which is a real ethnic cleansing. Kicking the Palestinians out, whose population is now down to sixty thousand, compared to a couple of hundred thousands in 1967. There is a systematic policy of displacing them, replacing them by Jewish settlements, which leads the way to a form of annexation which would completely imprison any Palestinian entity that might arise somehow—in 30 percent of the West Bank. The US is backing these actions and policies. Something simple like boycotting products is an entry point to bringing out all of these issues. Among the general public that's intelligible. In fact it's already been pretty successful. One of the major successes, to a large extent thanks to young Palestinian activists, has been in the colleges. The atmosphere in the universities around these issues has radically changed. Not many years ago, if I was talking even here, at MIT, on Israel/Palestine, I would have had to have police protection. Now it's totally different. If we were to give a talk tomorrow, we would get a huge audience, engaged, you could not get a hostile question. That's an enormous change, and that can be extended.