A limited chronicle of Zionism

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WE HAVE ARRESTED MEMBERS OF A UNDERGROUND The Fateful Triangle, by Chomsky, South End Press, 1983.

In one sense, it is easy to write a short review of any book by Professor Chomsky. It would be sufficient to remind the reader that he has long been known as an outspoken opponent of American imperialism and a devoted advocate of civil liberties. Now, again, he has brought his immense scholarship to bear on his special interest in Zionism.

Although he insists that the work is not meant to be a full history of the interrelationship between this country, Israel, and the Palestinians, the general reader would be hard put to find any more detailed discussion of that interrelation under one cover.

Chomsky, above all, is concerned with America's responsibility for the crime done to the Palestinians. Additionally, the book is the last word in the "war of words" that broke out here in the wake of the invasion of Lebanon. And there can be no doubt who wins the BOOK REVIEW verbal contest, as Chomsky destroys the partisans of Israel he chooses to take on. Nevertheless, he has his severe ideological limitations, shared by others within the antiwar movement in this country.

Chomsky is at his best when he documents the viciousness of the Israeli state. He correctly maintains that 'it is quite impossible to believe that there was no 'concurrence or assent' in the events that followed the entry of the Phalangists into the camps, " and he condemns the Kahan Commission report as nothing short of "disgraceful from an intellectual and moral standpoint.

He is equally incisive when he denounces the myth of the 'beautiful Israel" before Begin, and perhaps the most important function of the 'Triangle" will be seen to be its ample documentation of the racist and murderous nature of the Israeli Labor Party, whom the naive hope will win the forthcoming elections in July and, somehow, set things right again.

Yet it was the Labor Party's Golda Meir who declared that the Palestinian problem was nothing more than an 'invention of some Jews with distorted minds, " and it was Yitzhak Rabin who proclaimed that Labor would never negotiate with any Palestinians, and cerTHEIR AIM WAS TO TERRORIZE PALESTINIANS ON THE WEST BANK..

SHAMIR tainly not with the Palestine Liberation Organization, even if it were to abandon terrorism and recognize Israel.

Chomsky documents the implacable hostility of the United States toward any accommodation with the PLO, noting that after an intramural capitalist debate, Washington overruled its Arabists and opted for a rejectionist Israel as Lenni Brenner is the author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, Croom Helm and Lawrence Hill & Co., 1983. He has also published a number of articles in recent issues of Arab Perspectives and Freedomways magazines. its strategic bastion against nationalism and the Soviet Union.

"Reactionary windbags"

He exposes several American pro-Israeli propagandists as reactionary windbags, devoid of either morality or logic. As befitting the former henchman of Lyndon Johnson, Arthur Goldberg "has produced a most impressive contribution to contemporary thought: if some political entity can be destroyed by force, that determines its illegitimacy and the right of the conquerer to determine the fate of those whom it had pretended to represent. "

He serves up all the incredible statements from Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. Said the failed antiwar activist Fonda: 'I operate according to my conscience, and am attempting to convince President Reagan that the U.S. interest is bound up with friendship with democratic Israel, and not with feudal Saudi Arabia. "

Chomsky is furious with Irving Howe, the renegade Trotskyist, now the doyen of red-baiters over at the Democratic Socialists of America: "Howe, typically without argument, simply attributes Israel's...isolation to 'skillful manipulation of oil' and that sour apothegm: 'In the warmest heart there's a cold spot for the Jews. '"

Chomsky's weaknesses

However, Chomsky is at his weakest when it comes to concrete proposals as to how to bell the Zionist cat. In the past he has proclaimed himself to be a radical, finding praise for sundry antiBolshevik "council Communist" and "libertarian socialist" sectarians of the '20s and '30s but, in reality, he is a civil libertarian and moralist and nothing more.

Anyone who can say, in another place, "I, for one, would certainly not deny the right of free expression to Hitler, " or that Marxism-Leninism is a "dangerous right-wing deviation from the international socialist movement, " and then join Howe and a battalion of other envenomed opponents of the Palestinian cause in the ranks of DSA, is no revolutionary.

These weaknesses repeatedly present themselves in the "Triangle. "

Thus, after recording the monstrous crimes of the Labor Zionists, Chomsky can tell us that "It is difficult to conjure a picture of Labor as constituting a meaningful opposition though one might reasonably argue that support for Labor is nevertheless justified when one considers what Begin and his cohorts are likely to do in the future. "

This is just liberal garbage, of a piece FORCE THEM TO FLEE AND REPLACE THEM WITH JEWISH SETTLERS with what we shall soon hear from those who will rush to tell us to be sure to vote for any Democrat because he will be "the lesser of the two evils. "

But, since Chomsky is a genuine moralist, he doesn't develop this theme, since he knows full well that only the most politically backward and careerist elements among Israel's 17 percent Palestinian minority vote for their committed enemies.

However, he does repeatedly insist that the Palestinians should bite the bullet and recognize Israel, that is to say, surrender their right to 81 percent of their patrimony in the hope of thereby, somehow, convincing the Israelis and the United States to grant them sovereignty over the remainder. To him, this is «reasonable in essence, " even if not "optimal, " and he calls for this in the name of the 'international consensus, " which is absurd coming from one who never stops inveighing against "state-worship. "

But the best argument against this classic reformist utopia is "The Fateful Triangle" itself, which demonstrates that there is no Zionist tendency of any weight, not even the Peace Now grouping, that calls for a two-state solution. "Recognition of Israel can never be the And not without reason, as every Zionist knows that were the Palestinians to attain sovereignty in Hebron, they would only be inspired to struggle on until they liberated their entire homeland.

To be sure, Yasir Arafat frequently implies that he would "recognize" Israel, in return for a statelet. But now that he has discredited himself in paying court to the traitor Mubarak, what does this say about all who fantasize a compromise with the Zionist usurpers? That Chomsky ratifies such a bootless proposal testifies to his lack of revolutionary vision.

Chomsky makes one valid critique of the PLO: It must give up mindless terrorism against civilian targets. But beyond that and telling them to surrender 81 percent of their country, he has nothing to offer the Palestinians except his fear that they may "go the American Indians."

Here, he expresses the characteristic liberal conviction that things can only get worse, especially if the oppressed don't compromise. In fact he is out of touch. There was already a growing Israeli antiwar sentiment when he wrote the book in mid-1983, and since then the country has been plunged into a deep economic crisis, opening up new avenues for revolutionary development.

But this opportunity will only be seized upon by those with revolutionary audacity; and recognition of Israel can never be the banner that will rally the SOCIALIST ACTION Palestinians, nor can it long hold the progressive Jewish minority that seeks a way out of the racist and theocratic straitjacket of Zionism. Assuming an Alignment victory in the elections, they will learn, soon enough, that it has no answers to Israel's multilayered crisis.

When the British dominated the country, they consciously saw the Zionist settlement as their "loyal Jewish Ulster, " and it is indeed to Ireland that we must look for insight as to how the revolutionary movement will develop.

There, many Protestants, as individuals, have frequently come over to the nationalist cause, but they never were able to bring the majority of their community with them. Similarly, in our South, individual whites played an important part in the civil rights struggle, but again as a minority among the dominant stratum.

So too, in Israel, the progressive Jews must prudently assume that the majority of Jews will not break with the system that gives them privileges. The progressive youth will come to understand that they have only two choices: They can line up with the Zionists against the Palestinians, or with the Palestinians against the Zionists.

And one thing is absolutely certain: If they line up, no matter how critically, with the Zionists, they will never get rid of the Ashkenazi capitalist and bureaucratic elite that everyone knows, on one level or another, dominates their society. Until they are ready to build a democratic secular movement, side by side with the Palestinians and the Arab masses of the region, they can be nothing more than an ax without a handle.

Liberalism and the peace movement Closer to home, Chomsky avoids grappling with the very real impact that the pro-Israel prejudices of the majority of our fellow Jews has on liberalism and the peace movement. Although he properly denounces the brazen refusal of the organizers of the June 12, 1982, antinuclear demonstration to speak out against the invasion of Lebanon, which had just commenced, he offers no explanation for their silence.

But one of the reasons is fairly obvious. The demonstration's organizers did not want to alienate the many Jews who help support the peace organizations— and the liberal Democratic candidates, whom most of the peace movement supports—with their financial (and other) contributions.

This is also why the liberals, who can at least be counted on to speak against despotism elsewhere, not only are usually silent about Israel's crimes, but have frequently hailed these outrages. Chomsky himself points this out in the case of Hayden and Fonda, who showed up with the Israeli army in Beirut, although he fails to draw the implications from their sordid example.

Chomsky, and those who share his hesitations, actually do no service to the substantial element among the Jewish youth who share the internationalist values of their academic milieu; reject the middle- and upper-class values of their family environment; and already reject, to one degree or another, Zionism, as an intellectually isolated nationalist broom-closet.

People who want a peaceful, democratic, secular world and then turn around and oppose a democratic, secular Palestine are only deceiving themselves. Sooner or later, but inexorably, they will come to compromise with the enemies of democracy and secularism here. Chomsky has retreated to a reformist liberalism, but it still remains a liberalism with a human face, and his scholarly contribution, as in all of his books, is signal. 'The Fateful Triangle" will be most profitably read by both the general public and the specialist.

AUGUST 1984

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