Impressions of Gaza

 

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky.info, November 4, 2012

Source: Noam Chomsky

http://chomsky.info/articles/20121104.htm

Even a single night in jail is enough to give a taste of what it means to be under the total control of some external force. And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to begin to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where a million and a half people, in the most densely populated area of the world, are constantly subject to random and often savage terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade, and with the further goal of ensuring that Palestinian hopes for a decent future will be crushed and that the overwhelming global support for a diplomatic settlement that will grant these rights will be nullified.

The intensity of this commitment on the part of the Israeli political leadership has been dramatically illustrated just in the past few days, as they warn that they will “go crazy” if Palestinian rights are given limited recognition at the UN. That is not a new departure. The threat to “go crazy” (“nishtagea”) is deeply rooted, back to the Labor governments of the 1950s, along with the related “Samson Complex”: we will bring down the Temple walls if crossed. It was an idle threat then; not today.

The purposeful humiliation is also not new, though it constantly takes new forms. Thirty years ago political leaders, including some of the most noted hawks, submitted to Prime Minister Begin a shocking and detailed account of how settlers regularly abuse Palestinians in the most depraved manner and with total impunity. The prominent military-political analyst Yoram Peri wrote with disgust that the army’s task is not to defend the state, but “to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim (“niggers,” “kikes”) living in territories that God promised to us.”

Gazans have been selected for particularly cruel punishment. It is almost miraculous that people can sustain such an existence. How they do so was described thirty years ago in an eloquent memoir by Raja Shehadeh (The Third Way), based on his work as a lawyer engaged in the hopeless task of trying to protect elementary rights within a legal system designed to ensure failure, and his personal experience as a Samid, “a steadfast one,” who watches his home turned into a prison by brutal occupiers and can do nothing but somehow “endure.”

Since Shehadeh wrote, the situation has become much worse. The Oslo agreements, celebrated with much pomp in 1993, determined that Gaza and the West Bank are a single territorial entity. By then the US and Israel had already initiated their program of separating them fully from one another, so as to block a diplomatic settlement and punish the Araboushim in both territories.

Punishment of Gazans became still more severe in January 2006, when they committed a major crime: they voted the “wrong way” in the first free election in the Arab world, electing Hamas. Demonstrating their passionate “yearning for democracy,” the US and Israel, backed by the timid European Union, at once imposed a brutal siege, along with intensive military attacks. The US also turned at once to standard operating procedure when some disobedient population elects the wrong government: prepare a military coup to restore order.

Gazans committed a still greater crime a year later by blocking the coup attempt, leading to a sharp escalation of the siege and military attacks. These culminated in winter 2008-9, with Operation Cast Lead, one of the most cowardly and vicious exercises of military force in recent memory, as a defenseless civilian population, trapped with no way to escape, was subjected to relentless attack by one of the world’s most advanced military systems relying on US arms and protected by US diplomacy. An unforgettable eyewitness account of the slaughter — “infanticide” in their words — is given by the two courageous Norwegian doctors who worked at Gaza’s main hospital during the merciless assault, Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse, in their remarkable book Eyes in Gaza.

President-elect Obama was unable to say a word, apart from reiterating his heartfelt sympathy for children under attack — in the Israeli town Sderot. The carefully planned assault was brought to an end right before his inauguration, so that he could then say that now is the time to look forward, not backward, the standard refuge of criminals.

Of course, there were pretexts — there always are. The usual one, trotted out when needed, is “security”: in this case, home-made rockets from Gaza. As is commonly the case, the pretext lacked any credibility. In 2008 a truce was established between Israel and Hamas. The Israeli government formally recognizes that Hamas observed it fully. Not a single Hamas rocket was fired until Israel broke the truce under cover of the US election on November 4 2008, invading Gaza on ludicrous grounds and killing half a dozen Hamas members. The Israeli government was advised by its highest intelligence officials that the truce could be renewed by easing the criminal blockade and ending military attacks. But the government of Ehud Olmert, reputedly a dove, chose to reject these options, preferring to resort to its huge comparative advantage in violence: Operation Cast Lead. The basic facts are reviewed once again by foreign policy analyst Jerome Slater in the current issue of the Harvard-MIT journal International Security.

The pattern of bombing under Cast Lead was carefully analyzed by the highly informed and internationally respected Gazan human rights advocate Raji Sourani. He points out that the bombing was concentrated in the north, targeting defenseless civilians in the most densely populated areas, with no possible military pretext. The goal, he suggests, may have been to drive the intimidated population to the south, near the Egyptian border. But the Samidin stayed put, despite the avalanche of US-Israeli terror.

A further goal might have been to drive them beyond. Back to the earliest days of the Zionist colonization it was argued across much of the spectrum that Arabs have no real reason to be in Palestine; they can be just as happy somewhere else, and should leave — politely “transferred,” the doves suggested. This is surely no small concern in Egypt, and perhaps a reason why Egypt does not open the border freely to civilians or even to desperately needed materials

Sourani and other knowledgeable sources observe that the discipline of the Samidin conceals a powder keg, which might explode any time, unexpectedly, as the first Intifada did in Gaza in 1989 after years of miserable repression that elicited no notice or concern,

Merely to mention one of innumerable cases, shortly before the outbreak of the Intifada a Palestinian girl, Intissar al-Atar, was shot and killed in a schoolyard by a resident of a nearby Jewish settlement. He was one of the several thousand Israelis settlers brought to Gaza in violation of international law and protected by a huge army presence, taking over much of the land and scarce water of the Strip and living “lavishly in twenty-two settlements in the midst of 1.4 million destitute Palestinians,” as the crime is described by Israeli scholar Avi Raz. The murderer of the schoolgirl, Shimon Yifrah, was arrested, but quickly released on bail when the Court determined that “the offense is not severe enough” to warrant detention. The judge commented that Yifrah only intended to shock the girl by firing his gun at her in a schoolyard, not to kill her, so “this is not a case of a criminal person who has to be punished, deterred, and taught a lesson by imprisoning him.” Yifrah was given a 7-month suspended sentence, while settlers in the courtroom broke out in song and dance. And the usual silence reigned. After all, it is routine.

And so it is. As Yifrah was freed, the Israeli press reported that an army patrol fired into the yard of a school for boys aged 6 to 12 in a West Bank refugee camp, wounding five children, allegedly intending only “to shock them.” There were no charges, and the event again attracted no attention. It was just another episode in the program of “illiteracy as punishment,” the Israeli press reported, including the closing of schools, use of gas bombs, beating of students with rifle butts, barring of medical aid for victims; and beyond the schools a reign of more severe brutality, becoming even more savage during the Intifada, under the orders of Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, another admired dove.

My initial impression, after a visit of several days, was amazement, not only at the ability to go on with life, but also at the vibrancy and vitality among young people, particularly at the university, where I spent much of my time at an international conference. But there too one can detect signs that the pressure may become too hard to bear. Reports indicate that among young men there is simmering frustration, recognition that under the US-Israeli occupation the future holds nothing for them. There is only so much that caged animals can endure, and there may be an eruption, perhaps taking ugly forms — offering an opportunity for Israeli and western apologists to self-righteously condemn the people who are culturally backward, as Mitt Romney insightfully explained.

Gaza has the look of a typical third world society, with pockets of wealth surrounded by hideous poverty. It is not, however, “undeveloped.” Rather it is “de-developed,” and very systematically so, to borrow the terms of Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza. The Gaza Strip could have become a prosperous Mediterranean region, with rich agriculture and a flourishing fishing industry, marvelous beaches and, as discovered a decade ago, good prospects for extensive natural gas supplies within its territorial waters.

By coincidence or not, that is when Israel intensified its naval blockade, driving fishing boats toward shore, by now to 3 miles or less.

The favorable prospects were aborted in 1948, when the Strip had to absorb a flood of Palestinian refugees who fled in terror or were forcefully expelled from what became Israel, in some cases expelled months after the formal cease-fire.

In fact, they were being expelled even four years later, as reported in Ha’aretz (25.12.2008), in a thoughtful study by Beni Tziper on the history of Israeli Ashkelon back to the Canaanites. In 1953, he reports, there was a “cool calculation that it was necessary to cleanse the region of Arabs.” The original name, Majdal, had already been “Judaized” to today’s Ashkelon, regular practice.

That was in 1953, when there was no hint of military necessity. Tziper himself was born in 1953, and while walking in the remnants of the old Arab sector, he reflects that “it is really difficult for me, really difficult, to realize that while my parents were celebrating my birth, other people were being loaded on trucks and expelled from their homes.”

Israel’s 1967 conquests and their aftermath administered further blows. Then came the terrible crimes already mentioned, continuing to the present day.

The signs are easy to see, even on a brief visit. Sitting in a hotel near the shore, one can hear the machine gun fire of Israeli gunboats driving fishermen out of Gaza’s territorial waters and towards shore, so they are compelled to fish in waters that are heavily polluted because of US-Israeli refusal to allow reconstruction of the sewage and power systems that they destroyed.

The Oslo Accords laid plans for two desalination plants, a necessity in this arid region. One, an advanced facility, was built: in Israel. The second one is in Khan Yunis, in the south of Gaza. The engineer in charge of trying to obtain potable water for the population explained that this plant was designed so that it cannot use sea water, but must rely on underground water, a cheaper process, which further degrades the meager aquifer, guaranteeing severe problems in the future. Even with that, water is severely limited. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which cares for refugees (but not other Gazans), recently released a report warning that damage to the aquifer may soon become “irreversible,” and that without remedial action quickly, by 2020 Gaza may not be a “liveable place.”

Israel permits concrete to enter for UNRWA projects, but not for Gazans engaged in the huge reconstruction needs. The limited heavy equipment mostly lies idle, since Israel does not permit materials for repair. All of this is part of the general program described by Israeli official Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, after Palestinians failed to follow orders in the 2006 elections: “The idea,” he said, “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” That would not look good.

And the plan is being scrupulously followed. Sara Roy has provided extensive evidence in her scholarly studies. Recently, after several years of effort, the Israeli human rights organization Gisha succeeded to obtain a court order for the government to release its records detailing plans for the diet, and how they are executed. Israel-based journalist Jonathan Cook summarizes them: “Health officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day ... an average of only 67 trucks — much less than half of the minimum requirement — entered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks before the blockade began.” And even this estimate is overly generous, UN relief officials report.

The result of imposing the diet, Mideast scholar Juan Cole observes, is that “[a]bout ten percent of Palestinian children in Gaza under 5 have had their growth stunted by malnutrition ... in addition, anemia is widespread, affecting over two-thirds of infants, 58.6 percent of schoolchildren, and over a third of pregnant mothers.” The US and Israel want to ensure that nothing more than bare survival is possible.

“What has to be kept in mind,” observes Raji Sourani, “is that the occupation and the absolute closure is an ongoing attack on the human dignity of the people in Gaza in particular and all Palestinians generally. It is systematic degradation, humiliation, isolation and fragmentation of the Palestinian people.” The conclusion is confirmed by many other sources. In one of the world’s leading medical journals, The Lancet, a visiting Stanford physician, appalled by what he witnessed, describes Gaza as “something of a laboratory for observing an absence of dignity,” a condition that has “devastating” effects on physical, mental, and social wellbeing. “The constant surveillance from the sky, collective punishment through blockade and isolation, the intrusion into homes and communications, and restrictions on those trying to travel, or marry, or work make it difficult to live a dignified life in Gaza.” The Araboushim must be taught not to raise their heads.

There were hopes that the new Morsi government in Egypt, less in thrall to Israel than the western-backed Mubarak dictatorship, might open the Rafah crossing, the sole access to the outside for trapped Gazans that is not subject to direct Israeli control. There has been slight opening, but not much. Journalist Laila el-Haddad writes that the re-opening under Morsi, “is simply a return to status quo of years past: only Palestinians carrying an Israeli-approved Gaza ID card can use Rafah Crossing,” excluding a great many Palestinians, including el-Haddad’s family, where only one spouse has a card.

Furthermore, she continues, “the crossing does not lead to the West Bank, nor does it allow for the passage of goods, which are restricted to the Israeli-controlled crossings and subject to prohibitions on construction materials and export.” The restricted Rafah crossing does not change the fact that “Gaza remains under tight maritime and aerial siege, and continues to be closed off to the Palestinians’ cultural, economic, and academic capitals in the rest of the [occupied territories], in violation of US-Israeli obligations under the Oslo Accords.”

The effects are painfully evident. In the Khan Yunis hospital, the director, who is also chief of surgery, describes with anger and passion how even medicines are lacking for relief of suffering patients, as well as simple surgical equipment, leaving doctors helpless and patients in agony. Personal stories add vivid texture to the general disgust one feels at the obscenity of the harsh occupation. One example is the testimony of a young woman who despaired that her father, who would have been proud that she was the first woman in the refugee camp to gain an advanced degree, had “passed away after 6 months of fighting cancer aged 60 years. Israeli occupation denied him a permit to go to Israeli hospitals for treatment. I had to suspend my study, work and life and go to set next to his bed. We all sat including my brother the physician and my sister the pharmacist, all powerless and hopeless watching his suffering. He died during the inhumane blockade of Gaza in summer 2006 with very little access to health service. I think feeling powerless and hopeless is the most killing feeling that human can ever have. It kills the spirit and breaks the heart. You can fight occupation but you cannot fight your feeling of being powerless. You can't even dissolve that feeling.”

Disgust at the obscenity, compounded with guilt: it is within our power to bring the suffering to an end and allow the Samidin to enjoy the lives of peace and dignity that they deserve.

Noam Chomsky visited the Gaza Strip on October 25-30, 2012.

Noam Chomsky: speaking of truth and power

Israel is becoming extremely paranoid, overtaken by ultra-nationalist sentiments, and is acting pretty irrationally, from its own point of view. They are harming their own interests. My own denial of entry was a minor example of that. If they had just let me in to give a talk at Bir Zeit, that would have been the end of the story. In fact I wasn't even talking about the Middle East. I was talking about the United States, and they knew it of course."

Source: Al-Ahram - Weekly
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/1001/intrvw.htm

One of the world's major intellectual voices and a leading critic of Israel, Noam Chomsky has sided with the powerless throughout his career, while at the same time reminding the powerful of the inconvenient truths they would rather forget. He spoke to David Tresilian in Paris.

Known as much for his professional work in linguistics and philosophy as for his writings on politics and social issues, Professor Noam Chomsky was in Paris last weekend at the invitation of Le Monde diplomatique and the Collège de France. Divided between an academic seminar organised by Jacques Bouveresse, holder of the chair in the philosophy of language and knowledge at the Collège de France, and a series of interviews on political issues that culminated in a public meeting organised by Le Monde diplomatique , Chomsky's schedule testified both to the range of his work and to the respect with which he is held in France.

Born in 1928 and now into his eighties, this schedule would have exhausted a man half his age. Chomsky nevertheless appeared to take it in his stride as he answered questions from the audience late into the evening at both events, speaking continuously for several hours in wide-ranging lectures on American foreign policy, contemporary world politics, and the situation in regions of the world of which he has made a special study, such as Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Both the seminar at the Collège de France, focusing on issues of truth and public rationality in a tradition associated with the English philosopher Bertrand Russell and writer George Orwell and simultaneously broadcast on the Web, and the later public meeting were heavily over-subscribed, and Chomsky's appearance at both was greeted with enthusiasm and affection by those who had in some cases traveled from across Europe to be present.

Drawing on more than half a century of political activism and dozens of books and articles, among them his powerful works on the Vietnam War, American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and For Reasons of State (1973), his works on the place of intellectuals in American life and the role played by the media, Manufacturing Consent (with Edward Herman, 1988), and his specialised works on Israel and Palestine, Fateful Triangle: the United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1983 & 1999), on the Middle East, Perilous Power: the Middle East and US Foreign Policy (with Gilbert Achcar, 2007), and on American foreign policy, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (2003), Chomsky spoke authoritatively on contemporary issues, indicating that his extraordinary intelligence and commitment to social change are as undimmed as ever.

A new book appeared in the same week as Chomsky's Paris visit, this volume, entitled Hopes and Prospects , bringing together recent articles on Latin America, the United States and the Middle East and Israel.

Despite his heavy programme, Noam Chomsky found time to speak to Al-Ahram Weekly about his views on the present situation in the Middle East and on American policy towards Israel, Palestine and the region as a whole. The Weekly is honoured to be able to present this interview in the lightly edited version below.

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Could I ask you for a statement on Israel's attack on the Freedom Flotilla this week while it was in international waters on its way to Gaza?

Hijacking boats in international waters and killing passengers is, of course, a serious crime. The editors of the London Guardian are quite right to say that "If an armed group of Somali pirates had yesterday boarded six vessels on the high seas, killing at least 10 passengers and injuring many more, a NATO taskforce would today be heading for the Somali coast."

It is worth bearing in mind that the crime is nothing new. For decades, Israel has been hijacking boats in international waters between Cyprus and Lebanon, killing or kidnapping passengers, sometimes bringing them to prisons in Israel including secret prison/torture chambers, sometimes holding them as hostages for many years. Israel assumes that it can carry out such crimes with impunity because the US tolerates them and Europe generally follows the US lead.

Much the same is true of Israel's pretext for its latest crime: that the Freedom Flotilla was bringing materials that could be used for bunkers for rockets. Putting aside the absurdity, if Israel were interested in stopping Hamas rockets it knows exactly how to proceed: accept Hamas offers for a cease-fire. In June 2008, Israel and Hamas reached a cease- fire agreement. The Israeli government formally acknowledges that until Israel broke the agreement on November 4, invading Gaza and killing half a dozen Hamas activists, Hamas did not fire a single rocket.

Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire. The Israeli cabinet considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to launch its murderous and destructive Operation Cast Lead on December 27. Evidently, there is no justification for the use of force "in self-defense" unless peaceful means have been exhausted. In this case they were not even tried, although -- or perhaps because -- there was every reason to suppose that they would succeed. Operation Cast Lead is therefore sheer criminal aggression, with no credible pretext, and the same is true of Israel's current resort to force.

The siege of Gaza itself does not have the slightest credible pretext. It was imposed by the US and Israel in January 2006 to punish Palestinians because they voted "the wrong way" in a free election, and it was sharply intensified in July 2007 when Hamas blocked a US-Israeli attempt to overthrow the elected government in a military coup, installing Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan. The siege is savage and cruel, designed to keep the caged animals barely alive so as to fend off international protest, but hardly more than that. It is the latest stage of long-standing Israeli plans, backed by the US, to separate Gaza from the West Bank.

These are only the bare outlines of very ugly policies.

You were also refused entry to Israel recently. How do you see the situation in the Occupied Territories and Gaza?

Well, just to make a small correction, I was denied entry to the Occupied Territories and not to Israel. In fact, if I had been going to Israel, they would have admitted me, and then I would have been able to go to the Occupied Territories. The reason they gave is that I was only going to Bir Zeit and not to an Israeli university.

Israel is becoming extremely paranoid, overtaken by ultra- nationalist sentiments, and is acting pretty irrationally, from its own point of view. They are harming their own interests. My own denial of entry was a minor example of that. If they had just let me in to give a talk at Bir Zeit, that would have been the end of the story. In fact I wasn't even talking about the Middle East. I was talking about the United States, and they knew it of course.

In the case of Gaza, it's just savage torture. They are keeping the population barely alive because they don't want to be accused of genocide, but that's it. It's limited to survival. It's not the worst atrocity in the world, but it is one of the most savage. Egypt is cooperating fully by building a wall and refusing to allow concrete to go in and things like that, so it's an Israeli-Egyptian operation that is literally torturing the people of Gaza in a way that I can't think of a precedent, and it's getting worse.

In the West Bank, first of all it's not Israel: it's the United States and Israel. The United States sets the bounds of what they can do and cooperates with them. It's a joint operation, just as the attack on Gaza was. But they're continuing to impose their stranglehold, and they're taking what they want. The land inside the separation wall, which is in fact an annexation wall, they'll take that. They'll take the Jordan Valley, and they'll take what's called Jerusalem, which is far larger than Jerusalem ever was, as it's a huge area expanding into the West Bank.

And then they have these corridors going to the east, so there's a corridor going from Jerusalem through Maal Adumim towards Jericho. If that's ever fully developed, it'll bisect the West Bank. Interestingly, the United States has so far blocked their efforts to fully develop this corridor.

About ten years ago, there was advice from Israeli industrialists to the government, saying that in the West Bank they should move, in their phrase, from 'colonialism' to 'neo- colonialism'. That is, they should construct neo-colonial structures on the West Bank. Now, we know what those are. Take any former colony. Typically, they have a sector of extreme wealth and privilege that collaborates with the former colonial power, and then a mass of misery and horror surrounding it. And that's what they suggest, and that's what's being done. So if you go to Ramallaha -- I wanted to see it for myself, but I didn't get there -- it's kind of like Paris, you live a nice life, there are elegant restaurants, and so on, but of course if you go into the countryside, it's quite different, and there are checkpoints and life's impossible. Well, that's neo-colonialism. There's only totally dependent development, and they will not allow independent development, and they're trying to impose a permanent arrangement of this kind.

Salam Fayyad, who I had hoped to meet in Ramallah -- we talk by telephone -- has described his programmes, which sound sensible to me. First of all, calling for a boycott of settlement production, which I think is very sensible, and I think that should be done all over the world, while trying to arrange for Palestinians to have forms of employment other than working in the settlements so they don't contribute to settlement growth: taking part in non-violent resistance to the expansion and doing whatever construction they can manage to do within the Israeli framework, maybe even in Area C, the Israeli- controlled area, and just taking small steps towards trying to lay the basis for a future independent Palestinian entity.

Then it becomes very delicate because Israel might very well accept it. In fact, the Israeli deputy prime minister I think he is, Silvan Shalom, had an interview about this in which he was asked how he would react to this, and he said it's fine, if they want to call the cantons we leave to them a state, then that's fine, but it'll be a state without borders... and that'll essentially implant the neo-colonial structure.

There's another element to it, which is the military force. There is an army run by an American general, Keith Dayton, which is trained by Jordan with Israeli cooperation, and has caused a lot of enthusiasm in the United States. John Kerry, who is head of the Senate foreign relations committee, gave an important speech on Israel-Palestine -- he's kind of Obama's point man for the Middle East -- he said that for the first time Israel has a legitimate negotiating partner. Why? Because during the Gaza attack, the Dayton army was able to prevent any protests, and Kerry thought that was very good, and the press thought that was very good, and now they are a legitimate partner. If you read Dayton himself, he says that they were so effective during the Gaza attack that Israel was able to shift forces from the West Bank to Gaza to extend the attack, and Kerry and Obama think that's a fine thing, so that's more of the traditional neo-colonial pattern, with para-military forces controlled by the colonial power that keep the population under control.

These are very ambivalent steps... Unless the United States changes its position and joins the world on a political settlement, then I think it looks very grim, and I don't think the Egyptian position is helpful at all.

Will change come about as a result of the role played by world public opinion, perhaps in the manner of what happened in South Africa?

South Africa is an interesting case, and it's worth looking closely at the history. In about 1960, South Africa was beginning to realise that it was becoming a pariah state, and the South African foreign minister called in the American ambassador -- we now have the records of their conversation -- and he told the American ambassador, 'we know we are becoming a pariah state, and everyone is voting against us at the United Nations, but you and I understand that there's only one vote at the United Nations -- yours,' meaning that as long as you back us up we don't care what the rest of the world says. And that turned out to be very accurate.

Over the next several decades, protest against South Africa increased, and by the end of the 1970s there were sanctions, and corporations were pulling out. The US Congress was passing sanctions resolutions, which Reagan had to evade, in order to keep supporting South Africa, as he did, continuing right to the end of the 1980s, at a time when major atrocities were taking place, such as the wars in Angola and Mozambique, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and it was done within the framework of the war on terror.

The ANC was condemned by Washington in 1988 as one of the more notorious terrorist groups in the world, and just last year Mandela was removed from the US terrorist list. South Africa looked impregnable: the world was against them, but they were winning everything and they were fine. Then the US shifted policy in about 1990. Mandela was allowed out of prison, and apartheid collapsed within a few years, so the South African minister was correct.

I think Israel is following the same path. It doesn't matter if the world is against us, as long as you support us. But they're treading on dangerous turf: the US can decide its interests lie elsewhere. Getting back to your question on the role of world public opinion, opinion in Europe and the Middle East influences things substantially. The US can't live alone in the world. There are political figures that think we should just put ourselves in a cage and not care what happens in the world... that we should just build a wall round the country, get out of the UN, and not care what they say. There's a strain of that in America's policy, but the leadership and the multinational corporations can't accept that, so they care about the rest of the world.

Europe is not helping. Take admitting Israel into the OECD: that's an affirmation of the legitimacy of the occupation. Europe is funding the survival of the Occupied Territories, but it is not making any moves to try to bring the US to accept international opinion, and it can. Right now, for example, there are proximity talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis with the US being the honest broker in the middle. Europe can expose this as a farce: what there ought to be are proximity talks between the US and the rest of the world, with maybe the UN as the neutral broker, as the US is standing alone in blocking an overwhelming international consensus, and until that changes nothing is going to happen, and Israel is relying on that.

In his June 2009 speech in Cairo, president Obama said that he would be putting American policy towards the Middle East and the Muslim world on a new footing. Do you see any evidence of that?

There are slight differences. But first of all there were differences between the two Bush terms. The first Bush term was extremely arrogant, abrasive and aggressive. The United States went to the United Nations and said very openly, 'you either do what we say or you are irrelevant.' And that caused a lot of antagonism, even among allies. People don't like to be insulted to their faces. It led to a lot of criticism, and the prestige of the United States in the world declined to its lowest point ever in international polls, and there was also plenty of protest from the inside, even from the establishment, because it was harming US interests.

The second Bush term was more accommodating, and it went back more toward the norm and had a kind of centrist support. Obama carried through there, so he's extending the second Bush term. The rhetoric is more moderate, and the stance is more friendly, but the policies have barely changed. Take Cairo. First of all his speech had very little content: he just said, 'let's love each other.' But on the way to Cairo he did have a press conference, and he was asked by one reporter, 'are you going to say anything about the authoritarian Mubarak regime?' And he said, his words were, 'I don't like to use labels for folks. He's a good man. He's doing good things. So, he's a friend.' I don't have to tell you what the human rights situation is like in Egypt, but for people in the Middle East, if they were awake, they should have understood that nothing was going to change.

And the same is true of the policies with regard to Israel. His policies are if anything harsher than those of the two Bushes, first and second. Right now there is, for example, a controversy over settlement expansion. It's very similar to the controversy that erupted 20 years ago when the first George Bush and when James Baker, the secretary of state, were in office. You may remember there was a time when whenever Baker would come to Jerusalem the prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, would take that occasion to announce a new settlement, and Baker was insulted -- he was a patrician, and he didn't like being insulted by Israel -- and Bush actually penalised Israel slightly. He imposed slight sanctions in the form of a cutback in loan guarantees that was supposed to match the expenses on settlements, and Israel quickly changed policy.

Well, that's pretty much what's happening now, with one difference. Obama has said that he will not impose any sanctions, and that his protests are purely symbolic -- it was his press spokesperson that said that in response to a question. That aside, the whole talk about settlement expansion is really a footnote: the question is the settlements, not the settlement expansion. Obama's position has just been reiterating what George W. Bush said and what's in the Road Map, the words of the Road Map, that in the first stage there is to be no more expansion, even for natural growth. So Obama reiterated it, but in a way that made clear that he wouldn't be doing anything about it, and the same is true for other issues.

When he announced the appointment of George Mitchell he did give a talk on the Middle East. He said, basically, 'there's a good hope for peace, there's a constructive plan on the table,' and then he addressed the Arab countries and said you should live up to what you say and you should move towards normalisation of relations with Israel. He knows perfectly well that that's not what the proposal was. The proposal was to establish a two-state settlement and in that context to move towards normalisation, so he very studiously ignored the content of the proposal and focused on the corollary, which is a way of saying that we're not going to change our position, and we're not going to join the rest of the world in supporting a two-state settlement, and that's the way it's been ever since.

At the time of the election people were hopeful about seeing a new American president, particularly after eight years of George Bush. In your new book you describe Obama as being a 'blank slate,' on which people can write whatever they like. How do you evaluate Obama?

I actually wrote about it before the election, before the primaries even, and I wouldn't change anything I said. If you looked at his programme, he came across as a familiar centrist Democrat with pleasant rhetoric and a good salesman. Actually, as you may know, he won an award from the advertising industry for the best marketing campaign of 2008, which is true. He's literate, he's intelligent, he knows how to put a sentence together, he's affable, and he acts as if he likes people. But what was the call for change? It was empty. It was actually a blank slate: you could write on it whatever you liked. He never said what the change was going to be, or what the hope was going to be. It was just, 'we're going to have change.

Actually, McCain had the same slogans, and it's obvious why. The elections in the United States are pretty much run by the advertising industry, and the party managers read polls, and they know that the polls showed that 80 per cent of the population thought the country was going in the wrong direction. So, your campaign platform is reflectively 'hope and change,' and that's Obama. And he put it rather nicely, and he did encourage a lot of people to get them energised and excited, but the fact of the matter is that the main reason he won is because of the support of the financial institutions. They preferred him to McCain, and they provided his funding, and that carried the elections. He did have popular support, but it was mainly the financial institutions, and they expected to be paid back -- that's the way politics works -- and they were.

There were huge bailouts, and the big banks are richer and more powerful than before, and finally when Obama began to react to the popular fury and started to talk about 'greedy bankers' and so on, they very quickly told him, 'you're out of line,' and they shifted funding to the Republicans. Now most financial institution funding is going to the Republicans, who are even more in favour of big business than Obama is. But that's the nature of American politics.

During the Bush presidency, we saw the US use torture in Iraq, extraordinary rendition, and force in international affairs, sidelining the UN despite international protests. Will we see efforts by the US to restore its image in world opinion, given that Obama's record so far has been underwhelming?

More than that, almost nothing has been done, and in fact in some respects it's worse than Bush. This is discussed in more detail in my book. But there was a Supreme Court case, in which the Supreme Court determined that the prisoners in Guantanamo had habeas corpus rights, and the Bush administration accepted that and argued that it didn't apply to Bagram. This went to the courts, and a lower court judge, who was a Bush appointee, a right-wing lower court judge, overruled them and said, yes it applies to Bagram too. Obama's justice department is trying to overturn that, to try to say, no, it doesn't apply to Bagram. In this respect, he's going beyond Bush.

If I were a lawyer for the Bush administration, I would point out that the charges against Bush on torture don't really hold very well under American law. Almost everything that Bush did and authorised was within the framework of American law. The United States didn't sign the Torture Convention, or it signed it but with reservations. It was rewritten very carefully to exclude the modes of torture that the CIA had developed and put in their torture manuals. That's called, 'torture that doesn't leave marks,' psychological torture, mental torture. The CIA was borrowing from KGB manuals, and it turned out that they had found that the most effective way to turn a person into a vegetable is psychological torture, like solitary confinement, humiliation, and other things like that. If you look at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, that's mostly what it was. It was mostly what they call 'psychological torture,' not electrodes to the genitals. So they could argue that they were operating from right within the framework of American law.

In fact, probably the only difference between the Bush and earlier administrations was that in the Bush case the torture was carried out by Americans. Usually, the United States farms it out to others: it's done by South Vietnamese, or Guatemalans, or Egyptians. That's what 'extraordinary rendition' is. You send it to other countries that will carry out the torture. But in this case it was done right in Guantanamo.

Actually, the only really interesting revelation in the torture memos, which wasn't very widely reported, is that the interrogators testified that they were under severe pressure from Cheney and Rumsfeld to get information tying Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda. And there was no such information, because it wasn't true. But when they couldn't come up with information, they got instructions to use harsher measures, so most of the torture was an effort by Cheney and Rumsfeld to get some kind of corroboration for their position that we had to invade Iraq because it was tied to Al-Qaeda, which was a ridiculous claim. But that's apparently what drove most of the torture.

Your latest book is called Hopes and Prospects . What are the hopes?

The first part of the book is about South America, and in South America there are many quite hopeful developments. For the first time in 500 years, since the Conquistadors, South America is beginning to move towards some degree of independence and integration and at least facing some of its severe internal problems. The colonial structure is extreme in South America, where there is a very narrow concentration of wealth in a mostly Europeanised, sometimes white elite, surrounded by an awful tragedy and some of the worst inequality in the world, in a region that has a lot of resources and a lot of potential. Some steps are being taken to deal with this.

In the US itself there also are changes. Whether they are fast enough to overcome the major problems I don't know, but just take Israel and Palestine. Not many years ago, if I wanted to give a talk on this I had to have police protection at a university, because the meetings would be broken up violently. I can remember when the police insisted on accompanying me and my wife back to our car after a talk at a university. That's not completely changed, but it's been changing over the years, and it changed radically after Gaza. Now there are enthusiastic audiences, very much engaged, very involved, very much wanting to do things.

It hasn't affected the media, and it hasn't affected the political class, or the intellectuals, but it's changing around the country, and sooner or later those things do have effects. In a way it was diverted by the Obama phenomenon, because that did bring about a lot of expectations and it diverted a lot of activism. But now disillusionment has set in. If the changes continue to develop, they can eventually bring about significant change, as they did in the case of South Africa.

Much of your work has been about the control of the media and the shortcomings of the intellectual class in the United States, where it is difficult to stand outside a narrow spectrum of opinion. How do you see your own position today?

First of all, I should say I don't think the US is very different from other societies in this respect. There may be different issues, but in England or France it's not very different. In every society there is a fringe of dissenters. That's been true throughout history. How do they do it? They are committed to certain values and ideals, and they decide not to conform. Usually they are not treated very well, and how they are treated depends on the nature of the society, but it is never very polite. In some societies you'll get your head blown off, in another you'll get the Gulag, in another you'll get vilified. Power systems do not like criticism, and they use whatever techniques they have to undermine and condemn it.

Very typically, over history, the intellectual classes have subordinated themselves to power, with very few exceptions. Yet, still there are people who don't go along and pursue an independent path. The US is not really very harsh in this regard, so a person of a limited amount of privilege, which is a great many people, and certainly me, are pretty much immune to harsh repression. I've faced a long prison sentence, and almost was sentenced, but that was because of open, overt resistance. I couldn't object to it as I was doing things that were openly and consciously illegal in resistance to the war, so if I had gone to jail I couldn't have called that repression. For speaking and writing and so on, the punishment is marginalisation and vilification, but I can live with that. There is plenty of support among the public.

Journalist Chris Hedges is doing research on the New York Times, and a few weeks ago he came across a memo from the managing editor of the New York Times to the writers and columnists, saying that they were not allowed to mention my name. National Public Radio has said in print that I'm the one person who will never be allowed on their primetime news and discussion programme. But it's not great punishment, and when I go home they'll be hundreds of email messages, and among them they'll be a couple of dozen invitations to give talks all over the country, and at almost all of them they'll be a substantial audience of interested and engaged people who are sympathetic and want to do something, and that's more than enough encouragement to keep going.

I do have access to the media abroad under certain circumstances, such that if I'm criticising the United States, I have access to the media. But if I am criticising those countries to which I'm invited, it stops, systematically. I've noticed it even in Canada. If I go to Canada, they like to hear criticisms of the United States, but if I start criticising Canada it closes, and it's the same elsewhere.

Finally, why have you criticised the formula 'to speak truth to power,' which was used by the late Edward Said to describe the role of intellectuals?

That's actually a Quaker slogan, and I like the Quakers and I do a lot of things with them, but I don't agree with the slogan. First of all, you don't have to speak truth to power, because they know it already. And secondly, you don't speak truth to anybody, that's too arrogant. What you do is join with people and try to find the truth, so you listen to them and tell them what you think and so on, and you try to encourage people to think for themselves.

The ones you are concerned with are the victims, not the powerful, so the slogan ought to be to engage with the powerless and help them and help yourself to find the truth. It's not an easy slogan to formulate in five words, but I think it's the right one.

Iran 'not to bow to US oppression'

Source: PressTV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=127805&sectionid=351020101

Prominent American scholar Noam Chomsky says Washington cannot apply its policy of oppression to Tehran, saying it is not in Iran's nature to follow orders.

Speaking in Beirut after Israel denied him entry into the occupied West Bank, Chomsky said the US is not concerned about what government is in power, adding that it solely wants administrations "to follow orders."

The world-renowned political analyst, however, went on to caution the US in the case of Tehran, saying that "Iran does not follow orders. It is trying to pursue its sovereignty. "

In his speech, which marked the withdrawal of Israeli forces from south Lebanon ten years ago, Chomsky drew parallels between Israel and South Africa's apartheid regime.

Pointing to the fact that during the apartheid era, the whites in South Africa cared for the black natives and supported them, Chomsky said that Israel does not even take responsibility for the Palestinians.

"Israel does not need the Palestinians. It doesn't want them. If they wither away like the leaves of autumn the way that the native Americans did, that is fine. They go somewhere else that is fine. But, they don't take any responsibility for them and they don't need them. So it's much worse than apartheid," he said.

Last Monday, the fierce Israeli critic was scheduled to deliver a lecture at a Palestinian University near Ramallah. He, however, was denied entry by the Israeli forces and spent several hours in detention before being allowed to return to Jordan.

Reacting to the move, some Israeli papers described the treatment of Chomsky as marking the start of a slide into fascism. The media's harsh criticism forced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to issue an apology to Chomsky, promising to grant him an entry visa for future visits.

Chomsky enters West Bank 'on air'

Source: PressTV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=126856§ionid=351020202


Denied entry by Israel, renowned US intellectual and linguist Noam Chomsky will hold his scheduled lecture at Birzeit University by video conference.

The American democracy activist had been invited by Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative Mustafa Barghouthi to lecture at the Palestinian Birzeit University on Monday.

But he was held up for hours by Israeli authorities at the Allenby crossing between Jordan and the West Bank on Sunday, and was ultimately denied entry into Palestinian land.

The octogenarian professor has apparently decided not to make another effort to travel through the border crossing, but will instead make his speech through a video conference, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Tuesday.

His lecture will also be broadcast live on al-Jazeera television, the English-language daily added on its website.

The outspoken Israel critic on Monday spoke to Palestinian caretaker Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, whom he was supposed to meet in Ramallah.

A statement released by Fayyad's office said he "strongly condemns the decision of the occupation forces to prevent Chomsky from entering Palestinian land."

Israeli officials did not admit the US philosopher because "the government did not like the kinds of things I say and they did not like that I was only talking at Birzeit and not at an Israeli university too," Chomsky told BBC.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's spokesman said that the idea that Israel prevents its critics from entering is "ludicrous," and "it's not happening."