USA "support for Israel"
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Fateful Triangle by
Noam Chomsky:
The rise in Israel’s stock among liberal intellectuals with this demonstration of its military prowess is a fact of some interest. It is reasonable to attribute it in large part to domestic American concerns, in particular, to the inability of the U.S. to crush indigenous resistance in Indochina. That Israel’s lightning victory should have been an inspiration to open advocates of the use of violence to attain national goals is not surprising, but there are many illusions about the stance of the liberal intelligentsia on this matter. It is now sometimes forgotten that in 1967 they overwhelmingly supported U.S. intervention (more accurately, aggression) in Indochina and continued to do so, though many came to oppose this venture for the reasons that impelled business circles to the same judgment: the costs became too high, out of proportion to the benefits that might be gained—a “pragmatic” rather than principled opposition, quite different from the stance adopted towards depredations of official enemies, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, for example. (In contrast, the central elements of the peace movement opposed aggression in both cases on principled grounds; these facts have been much obscured in the subsequent rewriting of history). Thus the appeal of Israel’s efficient and successful use of force was, in fact, quite broad. It was only half-jokingly that people spoke of sending Moshe Dayan to Vietnam to show how to do the job right.
At the same time, the challenge to authority at home was regarded with much distress. A dread image was conjured up of Vietcong, Maoist fanatics, bearded Cuban revolutionaries, rampaging students, Black Panthers, Arab terrorists and other forces—perhaps on the Russian leash—conspiring to shake the foundations of our world of privilege and domination. Israel showed how to treat Third World upstarts properly, winning the allegiance of many frightened advocates of the virtues of knowing one’s place. For some, the military might that Israel displayed induced open admiration and respect, while others disguised these feelings, appealing to the alleged vulnerability of Israel before the forces it had so decisively crushed, and still others were deluded by the effective “‘David and Goliath’ legend” (see note 58).
Individuals have their own reasons, but tendencies of this nature are readily detectable and go a long way towards explaining the outpouring of “support for Israel” as it demonstrated its capacity to wield the mailed fist. It is since 1967 that questioning of Israel policies has largely been silenced, with effective use of the moral weapons of anti-Semitism and “Jewish self-hatred.” Topics that were widely discussed and debated in Europe or in Israel itself were effectively removed from the agenda here, and a picture was established of Israel, its enemies and victims, and the U.S. role in the region, that bore only a limited resemblance to reality. The situation slowly began to change in the late 1970s, markedly so, after the increasingly visible repression under the Milson-Sharon regime in the occupied territories (only partially reported here) and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which offered a serious challenge to the talents of propagandists.
The immense popularity that Israel won by demonstrating its military efficiency also offered a weapon that could be usefully employed against domestic dissidents. Considerable effort was devoted to showing that the New Left supported Arab terrorism and the destruction of Israel, a task largely accomplished in defiance of the facts (the New Left, as the documentary record clearly shows, quite generally tended to support the position of Israeli doves).60
It is interesting that one of the devices currently used to meet the new challenge is to extend to the press in general the deceptive critique applied to the New Left in earlier years. Now, the insistent complaint is that the media are antagonistic to Israel and subject to the baleful influence of the PLO, motivated by their reflex sympathy for Third World revolutionary struggles against Western power. While this may appear ludicrous given the evident facts, neither the effort (see p. 1*, and further examples below) nor its not insignificant success in containing deviations towards a minimal degree of even-handedness will come as any surprise to students of twentieth century propaganda systems, just as there was no surprise in the earlier successes of those who were fabricating a picture of New Left support for PLO terrorism and contempt for Israel precisely because it is a democracy advancing towards socialism, one of Irving Howe’s insights.61 We are, after all, living in the age of Orwell.
Within the Jewish community, the unity in “support for Israel” that has been demanded, and generally achieved, is remarkable—as noted, to the chagrin of Israeli doves who plausibly argue that this kind of “support” has seriously weakened their efforts to modify harsh and ultimately self-destructive government policies. There is even a lively debate within the American Jewish community as to whether it is legitimate to criticize Israel’s policies at all, and perhaps even more amazing, the existence of such a debate is not recognized to be the amazing phenomenon it surely is. [Stalinist]
Had it not been for Israel’s perceived geopolitical role—primarily in the Middle East, but elsewhere as well—it is doubtful that the various pro-Israeli lobbies in the U.S. would have had much influence in policy formation, or that the climate of opinion deplored by Peled and other Israeli doves could have been constructed and maintained.
The policies that Benvenisti describes were established by the Labor government shortly after the 1967 conquest, then accelerated by Begin. The consequences were predicted from the start by Israeli doves, who were generally ignored or denounced here in the post-1967 raptures about Israel’s unique magnificence—when, for example, Irving Howe was explaining that Israel offers “about as good a model as we have for the democratic socialist hope of combining radical social change with political freedom” (precisely at the time when such hopes, such as they were, were rapidly receding), and issuing vitriolic denunciations of those who attempted to report some of the facts as obsessed by “a complex of values and moods verging on the pathology of authoritarianism,”* among other similar thoughts...
Israel’s policies in the West Bank, Benvenisti concludes, are “an outgrowth of an imperial concept—‘I want this’—combined with the ability to go about taking it.” It must be stressed again that this “ability” is conferred by lavish U.S. funding, ideological support of the kind described, and diplomatic support; for example, the U.S. veto of an April 2, 1982 Security Council resolution calling on Israel to reinstate the ousted elected mayors Bassam Shak’a of Nablus, Karim Khalef of Ramallah, and Ibrahim Tawil of El Bireh, recent targets of terrorist attack (see pp. 56f.).* The U.S., which stood alone in voting against the resolution (Zaire abstained), regarded it as “one-sided.”
In fairness, it should be noted that Israel is not the only state to be accorded such diplomatic protection by the U.S. A few months earlier, the U.S. vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning “South Africa’s utilization of the illegally occupied territory of Namibia as a springboard for armed invasions and destabilization of the People’s Republic of Angola.” Other countries too have been afforded such diplomatic protection, for example, Indonesia at the time of its invasion of East Timor
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