1.
Goodman: We begin inIsrael, where aState
funeral was held today in front of the Knesset, the israeli parliament, for
formerPrimeMinister ArielSharon. He died saturday after eightyears in a coma.
He was eightyfiveyearsold. He’ll be buried in aStatefuneral today at his home
in southernIsrael. TheUS was among eightcountries, eighteencountries to send
delegations to attendSharon’sfuneral, along withMiddleEast international envoy,
TonyBlair and the russian and german ForeignMinisters. At aState memorial inJerusalem,
[]Biden rememberedSharon as a controversial, but bold military leader and
statesman.
2.
Biden: When he told tenthousand
israelis to leave their homes inGaza in order, from his perspective, to
strengthenIsrael, I can’t think of a much more controversial. As a
student of the jewishState, I can’t think of a muchmoredifficult and
controversial decision been made. But he believed it, and he did it. The
security of his people was always Arik’s unwavering mission, a nonbreakable
commitment to the future of jews, whether thirtyyears or threehundredsyears
from now.
3.
Goodman: That was []Biden speaking duringArielSharon’smemorial.
Thousands of israelis came to pay their respects as his coffin lay inState outside
the parliament building inJerusalem. Ministers held a minute’s silence at
sunday’s cabinetmeeting to remember their former leader. This is israeliPrimeMinisterBinyaminNetanyahu.
4.
Netanyahu: [translated] In all of his latest
roles as minister of defense, as minister of housing, minister of
infrastructures, minister of foreign affairs, Arik has contributed to theStateOfIsrael
and, as much as he could, to the security ofIsrael, and that’s what he did as
Israel’s prime minister. I believe he represents a generation of Jewish leaders
who rose from our people with the resumption of our independence. He was tied
to the land. He knew the need to protect the land, and he understood that,
above all that, our independence is our ability to protect ourselves by
ourselves. I believe he will be remembered as one of the prominent leaders and
one of the bravest commanders in the heart ofIsrael forever.
5.
Goodman: ArielSharon has been one of themostdominant
political figures in Israel’s history, involved in each of Israel’s major wars
dating back to its founding in1948. AsPrimeMinister, he oversaw Israel’s
disengagement from theGazaStrip. TheGazawithdrawal caused a serious rift in
Sharon’sLikudParty, which led to his departure. He formed a new party, Kadima,
which maintained theGazadisengagement while expanding israeli control over the
major settlementblocks in the occupiedWestBank. Among palestinians, Sharon was
one of themostreviled politicalfigures in theHistory of theIsraelPalestineconflict.
He’s seen as father of the settlementmovement, an architect of the israeliInvasionOfLebanon,
which killed a reported 20.000 palestinians and lebanese. An israeli commission
of inquiry found Sharon had indirect responsibility for the massacre of over a
thousand palestinian refugees at the Sabra- and Shatila-camps inLebanon in1982.
To talk about ArielSharon’s life and legacy, we’re joined now by threeguests.
InNYC, we’re joined byRashidKhalidi, theEdward Said Professor of Arab Studies
at Columbia University, author of a number of books, including BrokersOfDeceitHowTheUSHasUnderminedPeaceInTheMiddleEast
and, just reissued, UnderSiegePLODecisionmakingDuringThe1982War. Joining us
from his home inMass. by phone, NoamChomsky, world-renowned political
dissident, linguist and author, InstituteProfessorEmeritus atMIT, where he’s
taught for more than fiftyyears. His1983book, theFatefulTriangle, is known as
one of the definitive works on the Israel-Palestine conflict and
the1982InvasionOfLebanon. And we are also joined fromOxford byAviShlaim, anEmeritusProfessor
ofInternationalStudies atOxfordU, the author of IsraelAndPalestineReappraisalsRevisionsRefutations.
He served in the IsraeliArmy in the mid[19]60s and is widelyregarded as one of
the world’s leading scholars on the israeliarabconflict. We welcome you all
toDemocracyNow. Let’s go first to the israeli historian, AviShlaim. Your
response to the death ofArielSharon, what you feel he should be remembered for?
6.
Shlaim: ArielSharon is one of themost-iconic and
-controversial figures in Israel’sHistory. He had deep,
he was a deeplyflawed character, renowned for his brutality, mendacity and
corruption. Despite these characterflaws, he is a major figure in shaping
Israel’s modernHistory. He was one of the five mostinfluential
figures who left a deep mark on modernIsrael. The first was DavidBenGurion, the founder of theState, who in1949
concluded the armisticeagreements with the neighboring arabStates, the only
internationallyrecognised borders that Israel has ever had. Second was LeviEshkol, who, in the aftermath of theJune1967War,
presided over the transformation ofIsrael from a plucky littleDemocracy into a
brutal colonialpower. The third was theLikudleader, MenachemBegin,
who signed the first peace treaty with an arab country. He signed the
peacetreaty withEgypt in1979. The fourth was YitzhakRabin,
the only israeliPrimeMinister who went forward on the political front towards
the palestinians, and he did this by signing theOsloAccord in1939 and clinching
the historic compromise between the twonations with the iconic handshake withYasserArafat
on theWhiteHouselawn. And finally, there is ArielSharon,
who always rejected theOslopeaceprocess, who, asPrimeMinister, tried to sweep
away the remnants ofOslo and forge a new strategy ofUnilateralism, of giving up
on the palestinians and redrawingunilaterally the borders of greaterIsrael. So,
his legacy can be summed up in one word, Unilateralism,
acting in defiance ofUNResolutions, InternationalLaw and international publicopinion.
The real question is, How was ArielSharon, and how is Israel today under his
successors, able to defy the entire international community? And the answer
to that is that Israel could not have done it on its own, but it has a little
friend, and the friend is theUnitedStatesOfAmerica, but that is a different
story.
7.
Goodman: We’re going to break and then get
response from ProfessorRashidKhalidi and ProfessorNoamChomsky, as well as
continue our discussion with israeli historianAviShlaim. This is DemocracyNow.
We’re talking about the death of ArielSharon. Stay with us. [break] We’re
talking about the death of the former prime minister, ArielSharon, who died
saturday after eightyears in a coma. He was 85 years old. We are joined by
Professor NoamChomsky inMassachusetts, byAviShlaim, the israeli historian
atOxfordU inBritain, and we’re joined here inNYC byRashidKhalidi. Among his
books are BrokersOfDeceitHowTheUSHasUnderminedPeaceInTheMiddleEast. He’s theEdwardSaïdProfessorOfArabStudies
atColumbiaU. You’re also palestinian. Your response to the death ofArielSharon?
8.
Khalidi: Well, for me, themostimportant emotion
is a sense of, finally, the man who carried out a war in which 20.000people
were killed, theLebanonWarOf1982, who besiegedBeirut, who destroyed
buildingafterbuilding, killing scores of civilians in a search to destroy thePLOleadership,
has finallyleft the world. I was inBeirut that summer of1982. And I, to me, it’s horrific to watch the hagiographies that
are being produced by people likeVicePresidentBiden, by theNewYorkTimes, by
much of theMedia, about a man who really should have ended his days at theHague
before theInternationalCriminalCourt. He was a man who, from theverybeginning
of his career, started out killing people. As the commander ofUnit101, he was
the man who ordered theQibyaMassacre.
9.
Goodman: Explain. What is Unit101?
10.
Khalidi: Unit101 was a
military unit of the israeliArmy formed at the orders of the israeli leadership
of the time to carry out savage reprisal raids. But we’re talking about dozens
of victims. In retaliation for, in this case, two or three people being killed,
69 people had their homes blown up over their heads.
11.
Goodman: When was this?
12.
Khalidi: This was 1953 in a small village in
the, what is today theWestBank. This was thefirstcondemnation ofIsrael by
aSecurityCouncilResolution. This was something that theUnitedStates at the time
was willing to say was a horrible, horrible crime. And this is a man who, since
then, really, has only acted on the basis of a belief that force is the only
thing the Arabs understand. The idea that he is now considered by some to be a
peacemaker is grotesque, frankly.
13.
Goodman: NoamChomsky, you wrote theFatefulTriangle
in response to what happened inLebanon. It changed the discourse for many in
this country. First, explain your reaction to the death ofArielSharon and what
we should understand about him.
14.
Chomsky: Well, you know, there is a convention that you’re notsupposed to speak-ill-oftherecentlydead,
which unfortunatelyimposes a kind of vowofsilence, because there’s nothing else
to say. There’s nothing good to say. What both Rashid and AviShlaim have
said is exactlyaccurate. He was a brutalkiller. He had
one[idéefixée] in mind, which drove him all his life, a greaterIsrael as
powerful as possible, as few palestinians as possible, they should somehow disappear,
[Accurate.] and anIsrael which could be powerfulenough to dominate the region.
TheLebanonWar then, which was his worstcrime, also had a goal of imposing a
clientState inLebanon, a maronite clientState. And these were the driving
forces of his life. The idea that theGazaEvacuation
was a controversial step for peace is almostfarcical. By2005, Gaza had
been devastated, and he played a large role in that. The israeli [“]hawks[“]
could understandeasily that it made no sense to keep a few thousand israeli
settlers inGaza using a verylarge percentage of its land and scarce water with
a hugeIDF, israeliArmy, contingent to protect them. What made moresense was to
take them out and place them in theWestBank or theGolanHeights, illegal. It
could have been done very simply. They could have, the israeliArmy could have
announced that, on augustfirst, they’re leavingGaza, in which case the settlers
would have piled into the trucks that were provided to them, which would take
them from their subsidised homes inGaza to illegal subsidised homes in other
territories that Israel intended to keep, and that would have been the end of
it. But instead, a, what israeli sociologists call, BaruchKimmerling called an
absurd theater was constructed to try to demonstrate to the world that there
cannot be any further evacuations. The farce was a successful publicrelationseffort.
[]Biden’s comments illustrate that. It was particularlyfarcical when you recognise
that it was a virtual replay of what happened in1982 when Israel was compelled
to withdraw from the egyptianSinai and carried out an operation that the israeli
press ridiculed as OperationNationalTrauma1982, We have to show the world how
much we’re suffering by carrying out an action that will benefit our power and
our security. And that was the peacemakingeffort. But his career is one of
unremitting brutality, dedication to the fixedidea of his life. He doubtlessshowed courage and commitment to pursuing this
ideal, which is an ugly and horrific one.
15.
Goodman:
Avi Shlaim, go back to 1982 and what happened in Lebanon. First, where were
you?
16.
Shlaim:
In 1982, Ariel Sharon was defense minister in Menachem Begin’s government, and
he was the architect of the invasion of Lebanon. And it was a war of deception
because Sharon tricked his Cabinet colleagues into launching this operation by
pretending the aims were very limited, whereas in fact he had a big plan to
completely change the bare geopolitics of the region, to create a new order in Lebanon
but by helping Israel’s Maronite Christian allies to come to power in Lebanon
and then sign a peace treaty with Israel, then to expel the Syrian forces from
Lebanon and to replace Syrian with Israeli hegemony in the Levant. This war of
deception ended in tears. It didn’t achieve any of its grandiose geopolitical
objectives, and it ended also with the massacre in the refugee camps of Sabra
and Shatila. There was an Israeli—there was an Israeli commission of inquiry
which found Defense Minister Sharon as responsible for failing to prevent the
massacre of the Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Christian allies, and Sharon
was forced to step down—he was fired as minister of defense. And no one could
have guessed at that time how a man who was found unfit to serve as minister of
defense would bounce back as Israel’s prime minister. But this is all of a
piece in Sharon’s career as a soldier and as a politician, because, as
Professor Khalidi pointed out, Sharon committed his first war crime as a young
major in 1953 when he destroyed many houses in the Jordanian village of Qibya,
and he was responsible for the massacre of 69 civilians. So that was his first
war crime, but it was not to be his last. And the consistent thread in his
career as a soldier and as a politician was to use brute force, not just
against the regular armies of the Arab states, but also against Palestinian
civilians. And the other consistent thread is to shun diplomacy and to rely on
brute force to impose Israeli hegemony on the entire region. President George
W. Bush famously called Sharon a man of peace. Sharon was nothing of the sort.
He was a man of war through and through, and he called his autobiography Warrior,
not Diplomat.
His approach to diplomacy reversed Clausewitz’s dictum; for Sharon, diplomacy
was the pursuit of war by other means. For the last 40 years, the Arab-Israeli
conflict has been my main research interest, and I can honestly say that I have
never come across a single scintilla of evidence to support the notion of Sharon
as a man of peace.
17.
Goodman:
I wanted to go back to 1982, the commission report you referred to, Avi Shlaim,
and ask Noam Chomsky about the Kahan Commission and what it is they found, and
how it is that Ariel Sharon actually survived politically beyond that.
18.
Chomsky:
Well, the Kahan Commission did condemn Sharon for what they called “indirect
responsibility” for Sabra-Shatila massacre. The Kahan Commission, I think, was
really a whitewash. It tried to give as soft as possible an interpretation of
what was in fact a horrifying massacre, actually one that should resonate with
people who are familiar with Jewish history. It was almost a replica of the
Kishinev massacre in pre-First World War Russia, one of the worst atrocities in
Israeli memory, led to a famous nationalist poem by the main Israeli poet,
Chaim Nahman Bialik, “City of Killing.” The tsar’s army had surrounded this
town and allowed the people within it to rampage, killing Jews for three days.
They killed 45 people. That was—that’s pretty much what happened in
Sabra-Shatila: Israeli army surrounded it, sent in the Phalangist forces, who
were obviously bent on murder.
19. Goodman:
These were the Lebanese Christian forces.
20. Chomsky:
Lebanese Christian terrorist force, allied with Israel. The soldiers watched as
they illuminated it. They helped them enter. They watched for several days
while they murdered, not 45 people, but somewhere—Israel claims 800, other
analyses go up to several thousand. That’s the Sabra-Shatila massacre. The idea
that Sharon had indirect—the tsar, incidentally, was bitterly condemned
internationally for direct responsibility. That’s, in fact, one of the events
that set off the huge flow of refugees from Eastern Europe, including my
father, among others. But—so this was a kind of a replica, except far more
brutal and vicious. And Sharon escaped more than a mild censure. It’s true that
he was removed as defense minister, but it wasn’t long before he came back. And
that’s one of a number of extremely shocking incidents in his career.
21. Goodman:
I want to stay with that for a moment, Noam, because I want to turn to Ellen Siegel. She was a Jewish-American
nurse who worked at a hospital at the Sabra camp at the time of the Sabra and
Shatila massacre in September 1982. We interviewed her in 2001 and played it on
the 20th
anniversary of the killings. She described some of what she witnessed
during the massacre.
22.
Siegel:
The 18th, which was a Saturday morning, it was also the first day of Rosh
Hashanah. We were told to come down to the entranceway to the hospital, that
the Lebanese army was downstairs. Well, it wasn’t the Lebanese army; it was the
Phalange. And here were a group of soldiers who looked—who looked quite neat,
clean, and they told us that they were going to march us out of the camp. And
they took our passports from us, and they started to march us down the main
street of the hospital. As we were marching, we saw dead bodies. They started
to holler at us, this militia, telling us that we were not Christian, that we
came to help people who hated Christians, that we were terrorists. They were
talking on walkie-talkies. There was constant communication with someone. There
was a Palestinian who had been working in the hospital, who did not flee when
the rest of them did. And he was terrified, and he asked for someone to give
him a lab coat. And so we gave him a lab coat. But, of course, he was picked
out immediately because he looked very different than these white and blonde
and Scandinavian and American and British health workers. And I turned around,
I saw him on his knees pleading, and I was told to keep walking. And the next
thing I heard was a shot. I never looked back. As we continued walking, there
were new soldiers. There was a whole contingent of other soldiers lining the
streets. And these militia people looked quite crazed. They were—looked very
dirty, very messy, and looked like they had been on drugs or something. They
were just tense, wide-eyed, nervous—extremely nervous. There was a group of
Palestinians and Lebanese refugees who they forced to line up against a—they
were all just lined during this pathway. And one of the women had an infant in
her hands, and she tried to give this infant to one of the doctors. And the
Phalange said, “No, you can’t—can’t take this baby.” And they were watching us,
and they were giving us the V sign. It was hard to tell who was more uptight about
what was going to happen to who. As we continued down the street, we—there was
an area that had been part of the camp. And suddenly, there were—there was
bulldozers with an Israeli—with a Hebrew letter on it, and it was going back
and forth, back and forth. That, I’m sure, turned out to be the mass grave. We
were—we kept on walking. Walkie-talkies. We reached the end of the camp, and we
turned a corner. This was outside of the camp. They lined us up against a
bullet-ridden wall, and they had their rifles ready. And we really thought this
is—I mean, it was a firing squad. Suddenly, an Israeli soldier comes running
down the street and halts it. I suppose the idea of gunning down foreign health
workers was something that was not very appealing to the Israelis. But the fact
that they could see this and stop it shows that there was—there was some
communication.
23. Goodman:
That was Ellen Siegel, a Jewish American nurse who was working at Gaza Hospital
in the Sabra camp at the time of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982. I
asked her what should happen to Ariel Sharon.
24.
Siegel:
I think what should happen to him is what has happened in our history, in
Jewish history. Ever since I was a child, I have learned that what happened
during the Holocaust happened because people were silent, people did not speak
up. People allowed bad things to happen to other people and did not do anything
about it. We should be the last people on Earth that should allow that to
happen. Simon Wiesenthal continues and the Jewish agencies continue to look for
Nazi war criminals, and indeed they should, and bring them to justice. Ariel
Sharon is a war criminal. And the legal aspects of this, I understand, as a
non-legal person, put him in that category. He allowed innocent people to be
murdered. He did nothing to protect it. He knew that they were the sworn enemy
of the Palestinians. And so, he should be tried.
25. Goodman:
That was Ellen Siegel, the nurse who worked in the Sabra camp at the time of
the massacre in 1982. Professor Rashid Khalidi, also with us, your relative
headed that hospital called Gaza Hospital?
26. Khalidi:
Correct.
27. Goodman:
That Ellen Siegel worked in.
28. Khalidi:
My cousin Aziza was the director of Gaza Hospital at the time.
29. Goodman:
And you were in Lebanon. He was there.
30. Khalidi:
I was in Beirut at the time.
31. Goodman:
Describe the reaction afterwards, how—what he was doing at that time.
32. Khalidi:
What my cousin, Aziza, what she was doing at the time?
33. Goodman:
What she was doing.
34. Khalidi:
Well, she was trying to stay alive. First of all, they were treating patients,
as victims of the massacre came in. And then, as Ellen describes, they were—
35. Goodman:
Only critically injured patients there at the time, as they were trying to
clear out.
36. Khalidi:
Precisely, precisely. And most people realized that a massacre was going on,
and most of the Palestinians fled. My cousin was completely traumatized,
obviously, by it, as, for that matter, were my children and thousands and
thousands of others, Lebanese and Palestinian children, who were living in Beirut
during the 10-week siege of the city, bombardment and siege of the city. One of
the things that nobody has talked about is the new documents that have been
revealed in the Israel State Archives, which I think pin direct responsibility
for much more of what happened in Sabra and Shatila on not only Ariel Sharon
and the Israeli government, but reveal American responsibility for what
happened. The
New York Times, on the 30th anniversary of the massacre in
September of 2012, published an op-ed
with links to some of these documents—by a student of mine, actually—which
shows that in fact Sharon’s responsibility was far greater than indirect, shows
that the Israeli government knew perfectly well what was going on, that the
Israelis stonewalled to prevent the massacre being stopped. American diplomats
were sent to tell the Israelis on the 16th of September, in the middle of the
massacre, “You must withdraw your forces from Beirut,” and one can read in
these documents, which The New York Times has put a link to on their
website, exactly how Sharon basically fended that off so that the killing could
continue for another day.
37. Goodman:
What was Israel’s goal in Lebanon? The pretext was an assassination attempt on
Israel’s ambassador in London and the shelling of northern Israel from Lebanon.
38. Khalidi:
Right. Well, the shelling had been stopped for a year. Ambassador Philip Habib,
since 1981, had stopped the cross-border exchanges, so that pretext was
removed. And Sharon was dying for a pretext. We have now the text of his
meeting with Secretary of State Haig in May, and he lays out his objectives. He
says, “We’re going to turn Lebanon into a satellite state,” much as Avi and
Noam Chomsky said. “We are going to eliminate Syrian influence, and we’re going
to destroy the PLO.” Those were his objectives. And he,
exactly as Professor Shlaim said, sold this to the Israeli Cabinet by—and to
the Americans, by saying it would be a much more limited operation. In fact, he
intended to reach Beirut, and he intended to do all of these quite ambitious
things to change the entire map.
39. Goodman:
We’re going to break, then come back to this discussion. We’re talking about
the death of Ariel Sharon. We’re talking about his life and legacy, the former
general and former prime minister of Israel. Stay with us.
40. [break]
41. Goodman:
This is Democracy
Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. The
former Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has died. He died on Saturday
after eight years in a coma. He was 85 years old. Our guests are Professor Avi
Shlaim at Oxford University, where he is a professor emeritus there of
international relations; Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned linguist, political
dissident, author; and Rashid Khalidi, Arab studies professor at Columbia University,
the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies. You were just talking about The
New York Times and how they covered what happened at Sabra and
Shatila, and the direct responsibility that Ariel Sharon—linking to documents
of Sharon’s responsibility and U.S. responsibility. Elaborate further on that
and then how it’s—his life is being described today in the same pages.
42. Khalidi:
Well, I describe it as the apotheosis of Ariel Sharon. He’s being turned from a
war criminal and a mass murderer, which he was, into a god, in the American—in
much of the American media. The New York Times has played an enormous role
in this. Instead of, for example, running their own op-ed, which was published
a little over a year ago, which lays out in damning detail, from documents in
the Israel State Archives, Israeli and American responsibility, notably Sharon’s
responsibility, for this massacre, they republished on their—in their online
edition yesterday an op-ed by Sharon in which he justifies the war. It has been
a degrading spectacle to watch the American and the Israeli media turn this man
into, as Avi said, a man of peace, something that he could never possibly have
been described as.
43.
Goodman:
Why does—Professor Avi Shlaim, why does Ariel Sharon hold the special place he
does in the annals of Israeli history?
44.
Shlaim:
Noam Chomsky reminded us that one shouldn’t speak ill of the recently dead, so
I would like to say something positive about Ariel Sharon, which explains both
his popularity with one segment of the Israeli population and the reviling of
Sharon by another segment of the Israeli population. And the point is that
towards the end of his active life, Sharon finally understood the limits of
military power. He had always been a proponent of greater Israel, but he understood
that the facts of democracy worked against Israel, so he didn’t—he did not
jettison the dream of greater Israel, but he scaled it down to what he thought
was realistic for Israel to maintain in the long run. So he had a strategy of
redrawing the borders of greater Israel unilaterally. Stage one was building
the wall on the West Bank, and stage two was the unilateral withdrawal from
Gaza in August 2005. Now, the withdrawal from Gaza was not part of any
negotiations or overall peace deal with the Palestinian Authority. It was a
unilateral move undertaken in Israel’s interests. So, Sharon withdrew from
Gaza, but he wanted to consolidate Israel’s presence on the West Bank. And this
got him into trouble with the right wing of his own party, the Likud Party, and
with the settler community, so he quit the Likud, and he set up a new center
party, Kadima. But Kadima did not survive Sharon’s political demise. Today,
Kadima has two seats in the 120-member Knesset. So Sharon’s last-minute effort
to realign Israeli politics ended in total failure. His enduring legacy in
Israel’s history is that he empowered and emboldened some of the most
xenophobic, aggressive, racist, expansionist and intransigent elements in
Israel’s dysfunctional political system.
45.
Goodman:
Professor Khalidi?
46.
Khalidi:
Another thing that might be mentioned about Gaza is that there’s a huge debate
in Israel about whether the withdrawal was a good thing or a bad thing. The
withdrawal did not change the situation of Gaza as being completely under
Israeli control, which it is to this day. So Israel withdrew its settlers and
withdrew its troops from within the Gaza Strip, but it completely controls the
Strip from without. It is the largest open-air prison in the world. Sharon also
had a notorious period as commander of the Southern Command in which he
participated in the savage repression of resistance inside Gaza, killing
thousands of—hundreds—well, many hundreds of Palestinian militants, destroying
thousands of homes, as part of a huge repression of the resistance.
47.
Goodman:
Noam Chomsky, Dov Weissglas, a top aide to Ariel Sharon, described the
withdrawal from Gaza by saying, quote, “The significance of our disengagement
plan is the freezing of the peace process. It supplies the formaldehyde
necessary so there is no political process with Palestinians.” Explain what he
meant and how that translates today to the so-called peace process that’s going
on.
48.
Chomsky:
Well, Dov Weissglas understood the situation very well. The Oslo Accords in
1993 determined that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are a single territorial
entity which cannot be divided. Immediately, the United States and Israel set
about separating the two and making sure that they would not be united. And
this is extremely significant, not only for the people of Gaza, but for the
prospect of any viable Palestinian entity. The West Bank is essentially
imprisoned. Its one access to the outside world would be through Gaza—access
through the sea, through the air, if there was an airport, and so on. By
breaking Gaza from—separating Gaza from the West Bank, that undercuts whatever
limited possibility there might be for a meaningful Palestinian
self-determination. Dov Weissglas pointed out that—what he meant is—in fact, as
he said, Israel will keep the people in Gaza on a diet. We won’t let them
starve to death; that won’t look good in the international world. We’ll just
give them just enough to stay barely alive in this open-air prison, as Rashid
Khalidi correctly described it, and they’ll be separated from the West Bank.
Meanwhile, both the wall, the separation wall—actually an annexation wall—that
Sharon initiated and other development and settlement projects, including in
the Jordan Valley, will effectively cantonize whatever is left of—to
Palestinian administration and surround it so that it has—so that it is another
kind of prison, surrounded completely by Israel and its Jordanian ally. Actually,
Professor Shlaim said something very important in his last—his first comment at
the very end. All of this can happen because of what he called
Israel—ironically, Israel’s little friend, because the United States
authorizes—it supports it, provides the requisite diplomatic, economic,
military support, and also ideological support—namely, by a false—by the
process of reshaping and falsifying what is underway. This is quite
reminiscent; this is not novel, unfortunately. If you look at the history of
South Africa, it was pretty similar. By 1960, the South Africans knew that they
were becoming a pariah state. The South African foreign minister called in the
American ambassador and told him, “Look, we know everyone is going to vote
against us in the United Nations. We’re going to have all kinds of problems.
But as long as you support us, it doesn’t make any difference.” And that’s the
principle that they had here, too, right to the end of the Reagan years, 1988,
the U.S., along with Britain, was still vetoing and blocking resolutions which
would call for any kind of sanctions, and supporting South African atrocities
and crimes. This is a kind of a replay of it. As long as the United States, the
most powerful state in the world, continues to play its crucially supportive
role, unfortunately, these developments will continue. And this is of prime
significance for people like us, for American citizens. It’s our
responsibility. I mean, Sharon may have had indirect—as the Kahan Commission in
its whitewash claimed, indirect responsibility for Sabra-Shatila—actually
direct responsibility. And we have direct responsibility for the fact that our
own government is crucially facilitating all of this.
49. Goodman:
What could Kerry do right now?
50. Chomsky:
What should we do?
51. Goodman:
And what should—what do you feel John Kerry should do?
52. Chomsky:
What John Kerry should do is insist on implementing a very broad international
consensus, virtually universal, calling for a two-state settlement on the
internationally recognized border, which is, as was said before, the 1949
ceasefire line, possibly with minor and mutual adjustments, which was a U.S.
policy—
53. Goodman:
We have five seconds.
54. Chomsky:
Yeah. And this is supported by the entire world. It’s been blocked by the
United States for 35 years. We should shift that policy, join the world, and
carry out the measures which might conceivably bring a semi-decent peace.
55. Goodman:
We have to leave it there. I want to thank Professor Noam Chomsky in
Massachusetts; Avi Shlaim, Israeli historian at Oxford; and Rashid Khalidi, a
Palestinian professor, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia
University.
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