Power and Terror: Conflict, Hegemony, and the Rule of Force by Chomsky Noam Junkerman John Masakazu Takei

Author:Chomsky, Noam,Junkerman, John,Masakazu, Takei
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-25364-8
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Excerpts from a question-and-answer session sponsored by the Students for Justice in Palestine, at the University of California-Berkeley on March 19, 2002.

Q: The next question is a popular one: How do you explain the recent shift in U.S. policy to support Palestine and the possible creation of a Palestinian state?

CHOMSKY: I explain it the same way I explain the U.S. shift in policy to dismantle the military system and hand it over to Andorra. Since it didn’t happen, there is nothing to explain. There is no shift in policy whatsoever. It is a total farce. What happened is that Dick Cheney is running around the Middle East trying to get support for the upcoming war against Iraq, which is very hard because nobody wants it. In fact, most people hate it.

One of the problems is the Israeli tanks in Ramallah. Remember, when you read Israeli tanks and Israeli helicopters, you should translate it in your mind as saying U.S. helicopters and U.S. tanks and U.S. planes, which are sent to Israel with the certain knowledge that they are going to be used for this purpose. They happen to be flown by Israeli pilots, but it is us again in the case of the tanks, subsidizing their manufacture substantially; in the case of the helicopters, manufacturing them.

These are in effect U.S. military forces. Israel is like an offshore U.S. military base at this point. And the actions that it takes are actions that the U.S. authorizes or encourages. If they go one millimeter beyond what the United States wants, a quiet voice from Washington says, “That’s it,” and they quit. We just saw it again, a couple of days ago, when that soft voice came from Washington and said, Pull out the tanks and armed forces from the Palestinian cities, because it is screwing up Dick Cheney’s mission. Instantly they withdrew. Instantly. Because that is the way it works in the mafia. If the don gives you orders, the guy down below doesn’t kid around.

It has happened over and over. So when people talk about Israeli atrocities or Turkish atrocities, they should be saying U.S. atrocities, because that is where it is coming from. The same in Colombia.

So the shift on Palestine has been that the United States asked Israel to terminate the worst atrocities during the period of Cheney’s visit because it was messing up his mission. There has been a lot of excitement about the fact that the United States sponsored a resolution on Israel in the UN Security Council, for the first time in twenty-five years. There has been less attention to what that resolution said.

What the resolution said was that the world has a vision of two states in the region, Israel and some Palestinian state, maybe off in Saudi Arabia in the desert somewhere, and it is a vision for the future. What that means is that that resolution does not even reach the level of South Africa during the worst days of apartheid.

During the darkest

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