Noam Chomsky has been the foremost critic of America’s imperial adventures for more than three decades. That is probably the only point of agreement shared by his legions of loyal supporters and his equally committed although far less numerous detractors. His domination of the field is so extraordinary and unprecedented that one would be hard-put to find a runner-up. It is a considerable achievement for someone who has been described, at times, as a "reluctant icon."[1]

Despite his low-key demeanor and monotone delivery, Chomsky has been anything but reluctant. On closer examination, however, it appears that he has gained his elevated position less from scholarship than from the sheer body of his work that includes books by the dozens—30 in the last 30 years--and speeches and interviews in the hundreds.

In the field of US-Israel-Palestine relations he has been a virtual human tsunami, washing like a huge wave over genuine scholarly works in the field that contradict his critical positions on the Middle East, namely that Israel serves a strategic asset for the US and that the Israeli lobby, primarily AIPAC, is little more than a pressure group like any other trying to affect US policy in the Middle East. For both of these positions, as I will show, he offers only the sketchiest of evidence and what undercuts his theory he eliminates altogether.

Nevertheless, he has ignited the thinking and gained himself the passionate, almost cult-like attachment of thousands of followers across the globe. At the same time it has made him the favorite hate object of those who support and justify the US global agenda and the domination of its junior partner, Israel, over the Palestinians. Who else has whole internet blogs dedicated to nothing else but attacking him?

What is less generally known is that he admits to having been a Zionist from childhood, by one of the earlier definitions of the term—in favor of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and a bi-national, not a Jewish state—and, as he wrote 30 years ago, "perhaps this personal history distorts my perspective.ﾓ[2]Measuring the degree to which it has done so is critical to understanding puzzling positions he has taken in response to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Given the viciousness and the consistency with which Chomsky has been attacked by his critics on the "right," one ventures cautiously when challenging him from the "left." To expose serious errors in Chomsky’s analysis and recording of history is to court almost certain opprobrium from those who might even agree with the nature of the criticism but who have become so protective of his reputation over the years, often through personal friendships, that have they not only failed to publicly challenge substantial errors of both fact and interpretation on his part, they have dismissed attempts by others to do so as "personal" vendettas.

Chomsky himself is no more inclined to accept criticism than his supporters. As one critic put it, "His attitude to who those who disagree with him, is, by and large, one of contempt. The only reason they can't see the simple truth of what he's saying is that they are, in one way or another, morally deficient."[3]

Although I had previously criticized Chomsky for downplaying the influence of the pro-Israel lobby on Washington’s Middle East policies,[4] I had hesitated to write a critique of his overall approach for the reasons noted. Nevertheless, I was convinced that while, ironically, having provided perhaps the most extensive documentation of Israeli crimes, he had, at the same time immobilized, if not sabotaged, the development of any serious effort to halt those crimes and to build an effective movement in behalf of the Palestinian cause.

An exaggeration? Hardly. A number of statements made by Chomsky have demonstrated his determination to keep Israel and Israelis from being punished or inconvenienced for the very monumental transgressions of decent human behavior that he himself has passionately documented over the years. This is one of the glaring contradictions in Chomsky’s work. He would have us believe that Israel’s occupation and harsh actions against the Palestinians, its invasions and undeclared 40 years war on Lebanon, and its arming of murderous regimes in Central America and Africa during the Cold War, has been done as a client state in the service of US interests. In Chomsky’s world view, that absolves Israel of responsibility and has become standard Chomsky doctrine.

Following through with a critique of his work seemed essential after reading an interview he had given last May to Christopher J. Lee of Safundi: the Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies and circulated on Znet.[5]

Quite naturally, the discussion turned to apartheid and whether Chomsky considered the term applied to Palestinians under Israeli rule. He responded:

Anyone familiar with Chomsky’s work will recognize that he is no stranger to inflammatory terms and that comparing one historical situation with another has long been part of his modus operandi. His response in this instance was troubling. Many Israeli academics and journalists, such as Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart and Amira Hass, have described the situation of the Palestinians as one of apartheid. Bishop Tutu has done the same and last year Ha’aretz reported that South African law professor John Dugard, the special rapporteur for the United Nations on the situation of human rights in Occupied Palestine and a former member of his country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, had written in a report to the UN General Assembly that there is "an apartheid regime" in the territories "worse than the one that existed in South Africa."[6]

Chomsky explained his disagreement:

His reluctance to label Israel’s control of the Palestinians as "apartheid" out of concern that it be seen as a "red flag," like describing it as "inflammatory," was a red flag itself and raised questions that should have been asked by the interviewer, such as who would be inflamed by the reference to 'apartheid’ as a "red flag" in Israel’s case and what objections would Chomsky have to that?

A more disturbing exchange occurred later in the interview when Chomsky was asked if sanctions should be applied against Israel as they were against South Africa. He responded:

Obviously not. But is it acceptable to make such a decision on the basis of what the majority of Israelis want? Israel, after all, is not a dictatorship in which the people are held in check by fear and, therefore, cannot be held responsible for their government’s actions. Israel has a largely unregulated, lively press and a "people’s army" in which all Israeli Jews, other than the ultra-orthodox, are expected to serve and that is viewed by the Israeli public with almost religious reverence. Over the years, in their own democratic fashion, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have consistently supported and participated in actions of their government against the Palestinians and Lebanese that are not only racist, but in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Chomsky made his position clear:

The interviewer, Lee, understandably puzzled by that answer, then asked him, "Palestinians aren't calling for sanctions?

That response also disturbed Palestinian political analyst, Omar Barghouti, who, while tactfully acknowledging Chomsky as "a distinguished supporter of the Palestinian cause," addressed the issue squarely:

For Chomsky, apparently not. But there were more absurdities to come:

First, what does Chomsky mean by saying "there is no need of it?" He was certainly aware, at the time of the interview that Israel, with its construction of a 25-foot high wall and fence, appropriately described by its critics as the "Apartheid Wall" was accelerating the confiscation of yet more Palestinian land and continuing the ethnic cleansing that began well before 1947 and there was nothing other than the weight of public opinion that might stop it.

Second, while there would be considerable support of sanctions against the US, if such were possible, would this not violate Chomsky’s own standard for applying them? Had he not moments before, said that the majority of the people must support them? He apparently has a different standard for Israelis than he does for Americans. And what the Palestinians may wish doesn’t count.

Then, having just told the interviewer that he did not like making comparisons, what can one make of his placing the relationship that existed between Poland and the former Soviet Union (Russia, in his lexicon) in the same category as that existing between Israel and the United States? He was referring to the implementation of sanctions by the Reagan administration against Poland in 1981 after the East Bloc nation had instituted martial law in response to the rise of the Solidarnosc movement. What role the Soviet Union had in that has been debated, but it should be obvious that there is no serious basis for such a comparison.

In retrospect, however, it was no surprise. In the Eighties, Chomsky placed Israel’s relationship to the US in the same category as that of El Salvador when the Reagan administration was backing its puppet government against the FMLN. Not embarrassed at having spouted such nonsense, he still repeats it. [8] Even then, he exhibited a gritty determination to deflect responsibility for Israel’s actions on to the United States. To point this out is not to defend the US or its egregious history of global criminality—which is not defensible—but to expose the deep fault lines that inhabit Chomsky’s world view.

In case I had missed something, however, I wrote him, asking if he wished to clarify what the Polish-Soviet relationship had in common with that of Israel and the US?

He declined to answer that question but with reference to my asking him about his avoidance of placing blame on Israel, he responded:

"Cheap, cowardly and convenient" to blame Israel? If his primary desire is to protect Israel and Israelis from any form of inconvenience is not obvious from that private response, his public effort to sabotage the budding campus divestment program should leave no doubt where and with whom his sympathies lie:

In an exchange with Washington Post readers, Chomsky was asked by a caller:

Chomsky replied:

I will assume that Chomsky understood very well what the caller meant: investing in Israeli companies and in State of Israel Bonds of which US labor union pension funds, and many states and universities have purchased hundreds of millions of dollars worth. These purchases clearly obligate those institutions to lobby Congress to insure that the Israeli economy stays afloat. This isn’t something that Chomsky talks or writes about.

The caller was referring to a speech that Chomsky had made to the Harvard Anthropology Dept. shortly after the MIT and Harvard faculties issued a joint statement on divestment. It was gleefully reported in the Harvard Crimson by pro-Israel activist, David Weinfeld, under the headline "Chomsky’s Gift":

Here you see one of the tactics that Chomsky uses to silence his few left critics; he accuses them of aiding "the most extreme supporters of US-Israeli violence."

When contacted by the Cornell Daily Sun which was preparing an article on the MIT-Harvard divestment movement, Chomsky repeated his objections, and "despite acknowledging the existence of this petition," the reporter wrote, Chomsky said, 'I’m aware of no divestment movement. I had almost nothing to do with the 'movement’ except to insist that it not be a divestment movement.’" [12] (Emphasis added)

A least, he cannot be accused of inconsistency. After speaking at the First Annual Maryse Mikhail Lecture at the University of Toledo, on March 4, 2001, Chomsky was asked:

Chomsky replied:

I regard the United States as the primary guilty party here, for the past 30 years. And for us to push for divestment from the United States doesn't really mean anything. What we ought to do is push for changes in US policy. Now it makes good sense to press for not sending attack helicopters to Israel, for example. In fact it makes very good sense to try to get some newspaper in the United States to report the fact that it's happening. That would be a start. And then to stop sending military weapons that are being used for repression. And you can take steps like that. But I don't think divestment from Israel would make much sense, even if such a policy were imaginable (and it's not).

Our primary concern, I think, should be change in fundamental US policy, which has been driving this thing for decades. And that should be within our range. That's what we're supposed to be able to do: change US policy. (Emphasis added)

Let us examine the response he gave at this event. Having stated forthrightly his opposition to pressuring Israel through divestment, he made no suggestion that his audience contact their Congressional representatives or senators regarding their support for aid to Israel. Mass appeals to Congress to stop funding, whether it was in opposition to the war in Vietnam or the Contras in Nicaragua, have been a basic element in every other nation-wide struggle against US global policy. Why not in this case? If Chomsky has ever called for any actions involving Congress, I could find no record of it.

Middle East activists, consequently, following Chomsky’s lead, have continued to allow members of Congress and liberal Democrats, in particular, avoid paying any political price for supporting legislation that has provided Israel with the billions of dollars and the weaponry it has used to suppress the Palestinians, confiscate their land and expand its illegal settlements. This is what has devastated the Palestinians, not the meaningless three score plus Security Council resolutions reprimanding Israel that the US has vetoed but which, for Chomsky, validate his position that the US is the main culprit.

What he suggested to this audience—getting a newspaper to report the helicopter "sales" to Israel should have had those not entranced by his presence shaking their heads. As for changing US policy being "within our range," if Israel is a US "strategic asset," as he maintains, how does Chomsky suggest this be done? Beyond contacting your local newspaper editor, he doesn’t.

Last year, Noah Cohen had the temerity to challenge Chomsky’s opposition to both a "single state" solution and implementing the Palestinian "right of return." Chomsky defended his "realism" and accused Cohen of being engaged in "an academic seminar among disengaged intellectuals on Mars... [and] those who take these stands" [are] "serving the cause of the extreme hawks in Israel and the US, and bringing even more harm to the suffering Palestinians." [13]

Note, again, how Chomsky accuses those who disagree with him of harming the Palestinians. This evidently includes the Palestinians themselves who refuse to surrender their "right of return." Their crime, in Chomsky’s opinion, is to oppose what he praises as the "international consensus," the support of which, for him, is "true advocacy." [14]

"The main task," he says, "is to bring the opinions and attitudes of the large majority of the US population into the arena of policy. As compared with other tasks facing activists, this is, and has long been a relatively simple one." [15] Simple? Who, we must ask, is on Mars? Of course, as noted previously, he offers no suggestions as how to accomplish this.

Although he doesn’t advertise it publicly, Chomsky did sign a petition calling for the suspension of US military aid to Israel, but it has received little publicity and Sustain, the organization initiating the campaign has done little to promote it. It is not a demand that Chomsky raises in his books or interviews. When I pointed this out, he responded:

Given the probable nature and outcome of previous "serious negotiations" and the relative strength in the power relationship, this would present no problem for Israel as was demonstrated at Oslo and since. Chomsky’s claim to have supported Human Rights Watch's call for stopping aid to Israel, however, was a figment of his imagination. This was confirmed by an HRW official who explained that HRW had only asked that the amount of money spent on the occupied territories be deducted from the last round of loan guarantees. [17] That is hardly the same thing. When I pointed this out to Chomsky, he replied:

To my objection that this did not exactly constitute what would be described as a "campaign," he testily responded:

I will leave it to the reader to decide whether describing US aid to Israel as illegal in a single document is the same as conducting a campaign to stop it.

Two and a half years earlier, Chomsky had made his position quite clear:

While no doubt a statement of this sort is comforting to the eyes and ears of Israel’s supporters in "the left," it should be obvious that his waiving of the Jewish State’s responsibility to adhere to the Nuremberg principles, as well as the Geneva Conventions, clearly serves Israel’s interests. (While a strong case can certainly be made against Peres, as well, he is not in Sharon’s class in the "war criminal" competition.)

Chomsky’s rationalization of Israel’s criminal misdeeds in The Fateful Triangle should have rung alarm bells when it appeared in 1983. Written a year after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, in what would become a sacred text for Middle East activists, he actually began the book not by taking Israel to task so much as its critics:

First, the PLO was seen as a threat by Israel, not by the United States in 1982, particularly since it had strictly abided by a US-brokered cease-fire with Israel for 11 months, giving it a dangerous degree of credibility in Israeli eyes. Second, whom did Chomsky mean by "we?" Perhaps, President Reagan and some members of Congress who gently expressed their concern when the number of Palestinians and Lebanese killed in the invasion and the wholesale destruction of the country could not be suppressed in the media. But he doesn’t say. It certainly wasn’t those who took to the streets across the country to protest Israel’s invasion. Both political parties had competed in their applause when Israel launched its attack, as did the AFL-CIO which took out a full page ad in the NY Times, declaring "We Are Not Neutral. We Support Israel!" paid for by an Israeli lobbyist with a Park Avenue address. The media, in the beginning, was also supportive, but it is rare to find an editorial supporting US aid to Israel. It is rarely ever mentioned and that’s the way the lobby likes it. So is Chomsky creating a straw figure? It appears so.

If we follow Chomsky’s "logic," it would be an injustice to bring charges of war crimes against Indonesian, El Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Haitian, or Filipino officers, soldiers, or public officials for the atrocities committed against their own countrymen and women since they were funded, armed and politically supported by the US. Perhaps, General Pinochet will claim the Chomsky Defense if he goes to trial.

He pressed the point of US responsibility for Israel’s sins again in his introduction to The New Intifada, noting that as one of the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions, "It is therefore Washington’s responsibility to prevent settlement and expropriation, along with collective punishment and all other measures of violence... .It follows that the United States is in express and extreme violation of its obligations as a High Contracting Party." [22]

I would agree with Chomsky, but is the US refusal to act a more "extreme violation" than the actual crimes being committed by another signatory to the Conventions, namely Israel? Chomsky would have us believe that it is.

It is a point he made clear at a talk in Oxford in May, 2004, when he brought up the killing a week earlier of the Hamas spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin by the Israeli military as he left a Mosque in Gaza. "That was reported as an Israeli assassination, but inaccurately" said Chomsky. "Sheikh Yassin was killed by a US helicopter, flown by an Israeli pilot. Israel does not produce helicopters. The US sends them with the understanding that they will be used for such purposes, not defense, as they have been, regularly."

Chomsky is correct to a point. What is missing from his analysis is any reference to the demands from Congress, orchestrated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s officially registered lobby, to make sure that the US provides those helicopters to Israel to use as its generals see fit. (In fact, there is not a single mention of AIPAC in any one of Chomsky’s many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict). What Chomsky’s British audience was left with was the conclusion that the assassination of Sheik Yassin was done with Washington's approval.

While its repeated use of helicopters against the Palestinian resistance and civilian population has been one of the more criminal aspects of Israel’s response to the Intifada, absolving the Israelis of blame for their use has become something of a fetish for Chomsky as his introduction to The New Intifada [23] and again, in more detail in Middle East Illusions, illustrates:

What to do Chomsky again doesn’t say, but he does try to tell us why:

"On that matter, the fundamental reasons are not really controversial... It has long been understood that the gulf region has the major energy sources in the world... " [25]

Chomsky then goes on for two pages explaining the importance of Middle East oil and the efforts by the US to control it. It is the basic explanation that he has repeated and republished, almost verbatim, over the years. What it has to do with the Palestinians who have no oil or how a truncated Palestinian state would present a threat to US regional interests is not provided, but after two pages the reader has forgotten that the question was even posed. In his explanation there is no mention of the lobby or domestic influences.

Chomsky does acknowledge that "major sectors of American corporate capitalism, including powerful elements with interests in the Middle East [the major oil companies!]" have endorsed a "two-state solution" on the basis that

Such an outcome would have little direct influence on regional Arab politics, except to demoralize supporters of the Palestinian struggle in the neighboring countries and around the world, a development that would clearly serve US interests. It would, however, curb Israel’s expansion, which is critical to Israel’s agenda, not Washington’s. Chomsky also fails to recognize a fundamental contradiction in his argument. If the support of Israel has been based on its role as protector of US strategic resources, namely oil, why does not that position enjoy the support of the major oil companies with interests in the region?

It is useful to go look at Chomsky’s earlier writings to see how his position has developed. This paragraph from Peace in the Middle East, published in 1974 and repackaged with additional material in 2003, is not dissimilar from the liberal mush he often criticizes:

Readers should note amidst the vagueness of this paragraph, how Chomsky’s suggestion that "the active pursuit of peace" should be left to "people of the former Palestine" mirrors a phrase that we have heard frequently from Clinton and since from George the Second and Colin Powell, namely, "leaving the negotiations to the concerned parties".

This was published a year after the October 1973 war when the US was massively increasing both military and economic aid to Israel, a fact Chomsky emphasizes in his other writings. Raising it in this context, however, was not on his agenda at that time.

It is reasonable to conclude by now that Chomsky’s dancing around the question of US aid, his opposition to divestment and sanctions, and to holding Israel to account, can be traced more to his Zionist perspective, irrespective of how he defines it, than to his general approach to historical events . It doesn’t stop there, however. An examination of a sampling of his prodigious output on the Israel-Palestine conflict reveals critical historical omissions and blind spots, badly misinterpreted events, and a tendency to repeat his errors to the point where they have become accepted as "non-controversial facts" by successive generations of activists who repeat them like trained seals. In sum, what they have been given by Chomsky is a deeply flawed scenario that he has successfully sold and resold to them as reality.

The consequences are self-evident.

Those who have relied on Chomsky’s interpretation of the US-Israel relationship for their work in behalf of the Palestinian cause, have been functionally impotent. There is simply no evidence that any activity they have undertaken has applied any brake on the Palestinians’ ever-deteriorating situation. I include here, specifically, the anti-war and solidarity movements and their leading spokespersons who have adopted Chomsky’s formulations en toto. How much responsibility for their failure can be laid at Chomsky’s feet may be debatable, but that he has been a major factor can not be. On the other hand, for those in the movement whose primary interest has been to protect Israel from blame and sanctions, and their numbers are not small, Chomsky has been extremely helpful.

Up to this point, I have dealt largely with Chomsky’s opinions. His scholarship, unfortunately, exhibits the same failings. They were succinctly described by Bruce Sharp on an internet site that examines his early writings on the Cambodian genocide. Chomsky, wrote Sharp

His failures, wrote Sharp, are:

These criticisms, to be sure, are not exclusive to Chomsky, but given his elevated status and credibility as a scholar, they are particularly relevant. What has been described by Sharp is closer to the function of a courtroom prosecutor than a historian.

Granted, the issues concerning the effort to secure a just resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict are complex and controversial, but they need to be honestly examined and debated. Everyone, however, is not an equal participant in that debate. The question of the Palestinian "right of return" is for Palestinians themselves to determine, not Israelis, Washington or Chomsky’s "international consensus." Another issue, closely connected, "one-state vs. two states," is more complicated and upon which Palestinians are themselves divided. Although I support a single state, I do not intend to argue for it here, only to present and lay out for the reader Chomsky’s perspective. Given the dominance of the Zionist narrative, however, neither issue has the potential of energizing significant numbers of Americans in their behalf beyond those with a personal or vested interest in their outcome.

Two issues that do have that possibility and which are intimately linked are

1. Stopping the flow of tax dollars to Israel. In view of the sharp cuts being made across the nation in spending on health, education and pensions, there is a ready audience for stopping that aid which has now surpassed the $100 billion mark. It would include ending public and private investment in Israel, in Israeli companies, and in American companies doing business in Israel, which has already begun in a limited way; in other words, imposing the sanctions that Chomsky deplores, and

2. Exposing and challenging the pro-Israel lobby’s stranglehold on Congress and its control over US Middle East policies which is accepted as a fact of life by political observers in Washington and elsewhere, but not by Chomsky.

Chomsky does mention from time to time that the majority of the American people is less than enthusiastic about military aid to Israel but fails to take the issue further than that. His fixation on Israeli pilots flying US helicopters, notwithstanding, relegating the potential power of the aid issue and the lobby to the margins of political discourse has been essential for Chomsky since they undermine the basis of his analysis that

1. Israel is essentially a US client state that is supported by Washington based on its "services" as a "strategic asset" [30] and "cop on the beat" [31] for US interests in the Middle East and elsewhere and
2. The "rejectionist" position of the United States, espoused by successive administrations that oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state is the primary obstacle blocking the implementation of a "two-state solution." Moreover, he would have us believe that US policy, despite occasional appearances to the contrary, has supported "the gradual integration of the occupied territories within Israel." [32]
3. The influence of the pro-Israel lobby has been exaggerated by its critics and ﾒ is more of a swing factor than an independently decisive one... [and] that opens the way for the ideological influence to exert itself - lined up with real power." [33]

On these three points there is an extraordinary amount of contradictory evidence provided by reputable scholars in the field of which Chomsky is clearly aware (since he quotes them when useful) but chooses to ignore. Within the limits of this article, I will only be able to touch on a few.

Chomsky’s argument that US support for Israel has been based on its value as a "strategic asset," was most clearly articulated The Fateful Triangle in 1983 and was repeated in interviews and speeches until the Soviet Union was no longer a threat and new justifications were required:

The paucity of evidence he supplies to back it up should long ago have raised eyebrows. One item he inevitably brings up is a National Security Council Memorandum from January, 1958, that, according to Chomsky "concluded that a 'logical corollary of opposition to growing Arab nationalism "would be to support Israel as the only strong pro-Western power left in the Middle East" 35 On such an important point, one would expect he could produce something more recent. In that same year, in response to the successful anti-colonial uprising against the British in Iraq and nationalist moves in Lebanon, Eisenhower sent the marines to that country to protect perceived threats to US interests. Use of Israeli troops was apparently not considered.

The only regional "services" provided by Israel referred to by Chomsky were the defeat of Egypt in 1967 (when France was Israel’s major arms supplier) that was clearly done for Israel’s own interests and it’s role in dissuading the Syrian government from coming to the aid of the Palestinians when they were under attack by Jordan’s King Hussein in September, 1970. That’s it. And in the latter instance, Israel did not need the US to activate its forces to prevent what has been incorrectly recorded (not by Chomsky) as an attempted PLO takeover of Jordan. [36]

What Chomsky and those who parrot his analysis ignore (since he fails to mention them) are other factors that played a role in the routing of the PLO, such as internal Palestinian dissent, the refusal of the Syrian air force under Hafez Al-Assad—no friend of the PLO-- to provide air cover, and the strategic advantages of Jordan’s largely Bedouin forces. It was Henry Kissinger who exaggerated Israel’s role in the outcome of that situation and its potential as a Cold War asset [37], and, ironically, it is Kissinger’s position that Chomsky has enshrined as "fact."

There is another factor in the "strategic asset" argument that is usually overlooked. As Camille Mansour points out:

This opinion was confirmed earlier by Stephen Hillman, former staff member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, who wrote:

Chomsky was quite of aware of Tillman’s work, using it frequently as a reference in The Fateful Triangle. The above citation was not included. More to his liking was a comment by the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat from Washington, that Chomsky included in The Fateful Triangle and has been repeating in virtually every book, interview and speech he makes about the Israel-Palestine conflict. According to Jackson

He was referring to "the tacit alliance between Israel, Iran (under the Shah) and Saudi Arabia" yet there is no evidence that any of the three countries ever performed that role. When the first Bush administration considered the region’s oil sources threatened by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991, it acted on it own, and went out of its way to keep Israel from participating. This has not dissuaded Chomsky from continuing to tell us the same tale.

Why Chomsky believes we should give credibility to Jackson’s opinion is that he was "the Senate’s leading expert on the topic [of oil]" in Fateful Triangle ( p. 535); "the Senate’s expert on the Middle East and Oil" in Toward a New Cold War. (p. 315)

"the Senate’s leading specialist on the Middle East and Oil" in The New Intifada, (p .9) and Middle East Illusions (p. 179);"the ranking oil expert," on P. 55 in Deterring Democracy, "the Senate’s leading specialist on the Middle East and oil," in Pirates and Emperors, (p. 165), and "an influential figure concerned with the Middle East," Hegemony or Survival ( p.165).

I dwell on Chomsky’s descriptions of Jackson because they are characteristically misleading. The closest thing that Jackson came to being an oil expert was having once chaired an investigation on domestic oil practices while head of the Senate Interior Committee.

Aside from being known as "the senator from Boeing," in recognition of the many lucrative contracts he funneled Boeing’s way while chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jackson’s main legacy is as co-author of the Jackson-Vanik amendment which made the success of US-USSR Cold War negotiations dependent on the Soviet Union opening its doors to Jewish emigration. Understandably, that made him the darling of the pro-Israel lobby and American Jews, in general, who provided $523,778 or 24.9% of his campaign contributions over a five-year period. [41] An opponent of détente and a Cold War hawk, he was "virtually the last Democrat in the Senate to support... [the Vietnam] war." [42] Most recently, he has been remembered as the Congressional patron saint of the neo-cons, having given Richard Perle his start on the path to evil.

Thanks to his support of both Israel and the US military-industrial complex, Jackson’s labors did not go unnoticed by the influential Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a major promoter of the integration of the US and Israeli arms industries since 1976. It is another key component of the pro-Israel lobby that Chomsky has never mentioned. In 1982, it established the Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson Distinguished Service Award and Jackson became its first honoree. The most recent was his protégé, Perle.

Had Chomsky mentioned Jackson’s hawkish pro-Israel background it would surely have raised questions about the senator’s credibility if not stripped it away altogether.

Apart from a handful of loyalists who seem echo his every word, Chomsky’s view of US-Israel relations does not fair as well with his fellow academics, including those who generally share his world view. While careful not to mention Chomsky by name, for example, Professor Ian Lustick was clearly referring to his theory when interviewed by Shibley Telhami in 2001:

Whether valid or not, if during the Cold War the US regarded Israel as a reliable ally against Soviet-backed regimes in some Arab states, this argument vanished as quickly as did the USSR. When Afif Safieh, Palestinian Delegate to the UK and the Holy See visited the United States just before the collapse of the Soviet Union he was surprised to see

The Soviet collapse forced not only the pro-Israel lobby, but Chomsky, as well, to scramble for a new reason justifying continued US support; the lobby to maintain, Chomsky to explain the US-Israel relationship.

He found it in a statement by former Israeli intelligence chief, Shlomo Gazit. The Cold War argument that Chomsky had earlier relied upon he now found to have been "highly misleading," preferring "the analysis... of Gazit" who wrote after the collapse of the USSR that:

"To which we may add," Chomsky wrote in the preface to the new edition of Fateful Triangle, "performing dirty work that the US is unable to undertake itself because of popular opposition or other costs." [46] Chomsky is still writing as if it were the Seventies or Eighties; there apparently is no limits to the "dirty work" the US will do for itself these days. Gazit would, of course, be expected to come up with an excuse for maintaining US support. But stability? If anything, Israel’s presence in the region has been the key destabilizing factor in the region and on two occasions, in 1967, and again in 1973, it almost led to nuclear war (and did lead then to a costly Arab oil embargo.) In the early days of the October War, when it appeared that Israeli troops might be overrun, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan reportedly panicked and threatened to use Israel’s atomic weapons on Egypt if the US did not rush Israel an airlift of conventional weapons. The Nixon administration promptly responded. [47]

As Mansour points out, "By so urgently asking Washington for arms, the Israeli government did not behave as a strategic asset, but as a protégé that feared—exaggeratedly perhaps—for its life." [48]

It should be noted that not until 1978, when Menachem Begin was elected prime minister, did Israel officially promote itself as a US asset. In an interview in the January 1991 Journal of Palestine Studies, the late retired Israel General Matti Peled said, "The argument that Israel is a strategic asset of the US serving as a static aircraft carrier, has never been more than a figment of the Israeli imagination. It was first proposed by Prime Minister Begin as a way of justifying the considerable grants given to Israel to purchase American weapon systems.... The Kuwaiti crisis has proved that the argument was false..." The arms deals were useful to the U.S, he said, because they triggered even bigger arms sales to America's Arab allies.

In 1986, and reprinted in four editions through 2002, Chomsky’s popular Pirates and Emperors contained a "strategic asset" theory that appeared to be pumped up on steroids. In one of five references to Israel performing that service, he wrote:

Chomsky couldn’t have been more mistaken. Thanks to the political support of the United States, Israel is anything but a "pariah state." It enjoys favored nation status with the European Union, its largest trading partner, and its arms industry, despite increasing integration with its US counterpart, is one of the world’s largest and competes with that of the US on the world market. Israel is also one of the major centers of the domestic high tech industry. It is hardly hostage to US demands although that characterization is what Chomsky is clearly trying to suggest. Furthermore, while the Israeli military and its arms manufacturers did serve US interests in Latin America and Africa, from the Sixties to the early Eighties, they did so for their own interests which happened to be mutually profitable.

Israel’s alleged usefulness to the US has been negated from other angles. Harold Brown was Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Defense. When his Israeli counterpart suggested that the two countries make plans for joint nuclear targeting of the Soviet Union in case of a war, Brown told Seymour Hersh that the Carter administration

Professor Cheryl Rubenberg challenged the Chomsky mindset from another perspective:

[T]he constraints imposed on American diplomacy in the Middle East by virtue of the US-Israeli relationship have impeded Washington’s ability to achieve stable and constructive working relationships with the Arab states, a necessary prerequisite for the realization of all American regional interests... .Even those regimes that pursued close associations with Washington in spite of the American-Israeli union were constrained from publicly normalizing the ties for fear of the domestic opposition an overt affiliation with the United States would bring... .

American corporate and commercial interests in the Middle East have been constrained in other ways... .To cite but one example: as a result of pressure that pro-Israeli groups were able to exert on Congress, a set of antiboycott laws was passed that severely limit [US] business in the Arab world. As a result, American companies and the United States economy suffer an estimated $ 1 billion loss per year. [51]

That antiboycott legislation has been successfully used to prosecute American companies over the years and is now being employed by pro-Israel members of Congress to stifle efforts of US activists to instigate a boycott of Israeli products in the United States. There is no need to ask where Chomsky stands on that.

Furthermore, Rubenberg, emphasizing the point made by others, asks, "How can Israel, committed to policies that a priori assure the perpetuation of regional instability, be considered a strategic asset to American interests?" [52]

For the post-Soviet era, Chomsky might have sought support for his case from neocon stalwart Douglas Feith. With only slight modifications, these lines from an article by the Deputy Defense Secretary in the Harvard Law Review, Spring 2004, could have been written by Chomsky himself:

For a variety of reasons, Israel has remained strategically relevantsince the Soviet Union’s demise... Israel’s geography ensures itscontinued importance to the US Even without a Soviet presence, theMiddle East remains important to the US as the primary source ofAmerican oil imports... .

Israel has been a loyal ally to the US and, through its strength, a stabilizing Force in an otherwise volatile region. Although Israel’s very existence has fueled numerous conflicts in the Middle East, from the perspective of the US government, the destruction of Israel, the region’s sole liberal democracy, is strategically not an option. Operating on the principle that Israel is here to stay and should stay, US aid to Israel has yielded enormous strategic dividends for the US By creating a regional imbalance ofpower favoring Israel, aid has curbed Arab military aggression andprevented situations, namely full-blown war between Israel and itsneighbors, in which the US might need to deploy troops to the MiddleEast. (Emphasis added)

This last paragraph is quite interesting. Not only does Feith reinforce earlier citations from Hillman, Mansour and Rubenberg regarding Israel’s existence being the source of regional instability, he suggests that Israel has been justly rewarded for preventing another war that’s its presence would otherwise have caused. That’s chutzpah.

"In the real world," Chomsky writes, "the primary barrier to the 'emerging vision’ [the Arab League’s offer of full peace and recognition in exchange for Israeli withdrawal] has been and remains, unilateral US rejectionism." (Emphasis added) 53 Chomsky would have us believe that it is primarily the US and not Israel that stands in the way of a peaceful (if not a just) settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict. He fails, however, in all his prolific writings, to explain why this solution would interfere and not enhance US power in the Middle East since the Palestinian state suggested, as he frequently acknowledges, would be weak and dependent largely on Israel, the US and other Arab countries for its economic survival.

By repeating it over and over, often several times on the same page, Chomsky has made the "rejectionist" label stick to the US like tar paper. What he has really achieved, however, is establishing his own definition of the term, yet another "straw man" that he can then pummel the stuffing out of as if it were real. This has required some nimble shifting and inexcusable ignoring of the available record that every US president beginning with Richard Nixon has tried to get Israel to withdraw from the land it captured in 1967, albeit now, after successive failures, White House efforts have been reduced to a dribble.

These "peace plans" as they were called were not initiated for the benefit of the Palestinians but to pacify the area in the pursuit of America’s regional and global interests that have been negatively affected by Israel’s continuing occupation as described earlier. Under those plans, Palestinians in the West Bank would likely have once again come under Jordanian sovereignty and the Gazans under that of Egypt. Other than Camp David, in which Israel ended up the big winner, all the plans have been doomed:

"What happened to all those nice plans?" asked Israeli journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery. "Israel's governments have mobilized the collective power of US Jewry - which dominates Congress and the media to a large degree - against them. Faced by this vigorous opposition, all the presidents, great and small, football players and movie stars - folded one after another." [54]

The origin of the term "rejectionist" is important. Chomsky lifted it from what was referred to in the Seventies by Israel’s supporters, Chomsky among them, as the Palestinian "rejection front." It was the term they used to describe those Palestinian resistance organizations, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DPFLP), and some smaller groups, that rejected the existence of Israel as a Jewish state and called for the establishment of a democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, a position to which Chomsky was and remains unalterably opposed.

In 1975, Chomsky considered the possibility of

The Palestinian struggle did not, in fact, become acceptable in Chomsky’s eyes until it accepted the US-Israel demand that the PLO recognize Israel’s legitimacy within its 1967 borders. That he equates the desires of Palestinians to regain their lost homeland to the program of the most extremist Israeli colonizers is also telling. Another piece of the puzzle fits. Writing in 1974, he was more explicit: