page 3 of 4 of Chomsky on Middle East
Well that brings us up to the mid 80s. US support for the Iraqi invasion was taken extremely seriously. It was not just the support for Saddam Hussein throughout all the major atrocities, but much beyond that. So the United States began sending military vessels to patrol the Gulf to ensure that Iran would not be able to block Iraqi oil shipping. And that turned out to be a`verya very serious matter. The depth of US commitment to Saddam Hussein is illustrated by the fact that Iraq is the only country apart from Israel that has been granted the right to attack an American ship and kill in this case 37 sailors, with complete impunity. Not a lot of countries are allowed to get away with that. Israel did so in 1967 and Iraq in 1987, but there's no other case. That's an indication of the depth of commitment.
It went beyond that. The next year, in 1988, a US destroyer, the US Vincennes, shot down an Iranian commercial airliner, Iran Air 654, killing 290 people, in Iranian airspace. In fact the destroyer was in Iranian territorial waters; there's no serious dispute about the basic facts. Iran took that extremely seriously. They concluded the US was willing to go to extreme lengths to ensure that Saddam Hussein wins, and at that point they capitulated. It wasn't a minor event for them. It's a minor event here because that's just our atrocity, and by definition the powerful have no moral responsibilities and cannot commit crimes.
It's likely - let me emphasize that here I'm speculating-it's reasonable to assume that Pan Am 103 was blown up in retaliation. The immediate assumption of Western intelligence was that this is Iranian retaliation for the shooting down of Iran Air 654, and judging by what's happened since I think that remains a plausible speculation. The evidence that Libya was responsible remains very shaky. The strange judicial proceedings in the Hague, after the US and Britain finally agreed to allow the case to proceed (Libya had offered to permit it in a neutral venue years earlier), have only increased doubts among those who have followed the matter closely. But that's not going to be allowed to be discussed-we can be pretty sure that. It has, for example, apparently been deemed necessary to suppress entirely the "Report on the Lockerbie Trial in the Netherlands" by the international observer nominated by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1192 (1998). His report, released a month ago, was a sharp condemnation of the proceedings. One may speculate, again, that if he had confirmed the official US-UK position, the report might have received some mention, probably headlines.
If Iran was responsible, it's quite likely that they would have sought "plausible deniability" - the kind of service that the CIA provides for the White House - and used agents, as the CIA apparently did when it arranged the worst act of international terrorism in Beirut in 1985, a car bombing outside a Mosque, timed for when people would be leaving, which killed 80 people and wounded unknown numbers of others - a US atrocity and therefore not a crime, by the usual conventions. Possibly Iran might have even chosen a Libyan agent. But this is all speculation. Probably we will never know, since these are not the kinds of topics that are appropriate for inquiry.
Well despite all of this, Iraq remained a kind of an anomaly. In 1958 Iraq had extricated itself from the US-dominated system. That was anomalous, and it was anomalous in another respect too. Iraq was using - however horrendous the regime may be, the fact of the matter was that it was using its resources for internal development. So there was substantial social and economic development internal to Iraq, and that's not the way the system's supposed to work - the wealth is supposed to flow to the West. So there were complicated and anomalous relations all along. There's no time to go into them. But that is over. Now the effect of the war and particularly the sanctions has been essentially to reverse these departures from good form. By the time that Iraq is permitted, as it almost surely will be, to reenter the international system under US control, at that point there will no longer be any serious danger of it using its resources internally. It will be lucky to survive and partially recover. So that problem is, perhaps, more or less over. One might argue about whether that's part of the purpose of the sanctions, but it's likely to be the consequence.
Well, all of this raises a question - what about our fabled commitment to human rights? How are human rights assigned to various actors in the Middle East? The answer is simplicity itself: rights are assigned in accord with the contribution to maintaining the system. The United States has rights by definition. Britain has rights as long as it is a loyal attack dog. The Arab facade has rights as long as it manages to control its own populations and ensure that the wealth flows to the West. The local cops on the beat have rights as long as they do their job.
What about the Palestinians? Well they don't have any wealth. They don't have any power. It therefore follows, by the most elementary principles of statecraft, that they don't have any rights. That's like adding two and two and getting four. In fact, they have negative rights. The reason is that their dispossession and their suffering elicits protest and opposition in the rest of the region, so they do not exactly count as zero but rather as harmful.
Well, from these considerations, it's pretty straightforward to predict US policy for the last roughly 30 years. Its basic element has been and remains an extreme form of rejectionism. Now I have to explain here that I'm using the term in an unconventional way - namely in a non-racist way. The term, "rejectionist," is used conventionally in an purely racist sense in Western discourse: the term refers to those who reject the national rights of Jews. They're called "rejectionist" (as they are). But if we use it in a non-racist sense, then the term refers to those who reject the national rights of one or the other of the competing forces in the former Palestine. So those who reject the national rights of Palestinians are rejectionists. And the US has led the rejectionist camp in the non-racist sense for the last thirty years. In fact, it is the only significant member of the rejectionist camp that it has led, and still does.
The '67 war was dangerous; it came very close to nuclear confrontation. And it was agreed that there has got to be some diplomatic settlement. The diplomatic settlement that was proposed, by the United States primarily, and the other great powers, was called UN 242. Notice that it was explicitly rejectionist. It calls for recognition of Israel's right to live in peace and security within recognized borders, but says nothing about rights of the Palestinians, apart from a vague allusion to the problem of refugees. UN 242 calls for a settlement among existing states of the region. The agreement was, to put in simple terms, that there should be full peace in return for full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. That's UN 242. And it was official US policy at the time. Withdrawal could involve marginal and mutual adjustment of borders; perhaps straightening a crooked border here and there. But nothing more. And of course any settlement or development within the occupied territories is barred. There is no dispute over the fact that it would be in violation of the Geneva Conventions. On this, world opinion is unanimous, apart from Israel and the US. And in this case the US has been unwilling to articulate publicly its antagonism to international law and the Conventions that were established to bar crimes of the kind carried out by the Nazis, so it abstains from resolutions that pass unanimously apart from Israeli objection and US abstention.
The US held to this interpretation of UN 242 until 1971. In 1971, a very important event took place. President Sadat had taken power in Egypt, and he offered a settlement in terms of UN 242 - in terms of official US policy: full peace in return for full Israeli withdrawal. In fact his stand was even more forthcoming: he offered full peace in return for Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory, leaving open the status of the occupied territories and the Golan Heights. Of course, his proposal also was firmly rejectionist, saying nothing about the Palestinians.
Well, the US had a choice-was it going to accept that or was it going to reject UN 242? It was understood that Sadat's proposal was, as Israel put it, "a genuine peace offer"- a "milestone on the path to peace" as Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli Ambassador to the US, describes it in his memoirs.
The US had a decision to make. There was an internal confrontation. Henry Kissinger won out, and Washington adopted his policy of "stalemate": No negotiations, just force. So the US effectively rejected UN 242 in February 1971 and insisted that it means "withdrawal insofar as the US and Israel decide." That's the operative meaning of UN 242 under US global rule since 1971.
Officially, the US continued to support UN 242 until Clinton. He is the first president to declare that US resolutions are inoperative. But until then, at least verbally, the US accepted UN 242. That was only words, however. In practice the US following the Kissingerian interpretation. For every president, UN 242 in practice meant partial withdrawal as Israel and the United States determine. Carter, for example, forcefully reiterated US support for UN 242 and continues to do so, but also increased aid to Israel to about half of total US aid (as part of the Camp David settlement), thus ensuring that Israel could proceed to integrate the occupied territories within Israel and to prevent any meaningful fulfillment of UN 242 (and to attack its northern neighbor), exactly as was predicted, and as it did.
The rejectionist commitments of the international system changed by the mid 70s. By the mid 70s, an extremely broad international consensus, in fact essentially everyone, came to accept Palestinian national rights alongside of Israel. In January 1976, the Security Council debated a resolution, which included the wording of 242 but added Palestinian national rights in the territories from which Israel would withdraw. The US vetoed it, and therefore it's vetoed from history, so you can't even find it in history books with rare exceptions. The same is true of the events of February 1971. With diligent search one can discover the facts, but they have efficiently been removed from historical memory.
This continued. I won't run through the whole record. The US vetoed a similar Security Council Resolution in 1980, and voted against similar General Assembly resolutions year after year, usually alone (with Israel), occasionally picking up some other client state. Recall that a unilateral US rejection of a General Assembly resolution is, in effect, a double veto: the resolution is inoperative, and it is vetoed from history, rarely even reported. Washington also blocked other negotiating efforts: from the European and Arab states, the PLO, in fact any source. And so things continue up until the Gulf War.
This process of preventing a peaceful diplomatic settlement has a name, exactly the one that one would expect in the age of Orwell: it is called "the peace process."
The Gulf War changed things. At that point the rest of the world realized that the US is making a very clear statement: the US is going to run this area of the world by force, so get out the way. That was the understanding throughout the world. Europe backed off. The Arab world was in total disarray. Russia was gone. No one else counts. The US immediately moved to the Madrid negotiations, where it could unilaterally impose the US rejectionist framework that it had protected in international isolation for 20 years.
That leads in various paths to Oslo, and the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, where the Declaration of Principles (DOP) was accepted with much fanfare in what the press described as "a day of awe," and so on. The DOP merits a close look. It outlines clearly what is coming, with no ambiguity. For what it's worth, I don't say this in retrospect: I wrote an article about it at once, which appeared in October 1993. There have been few surprises since.
The DOP states that the "permanent status," the ultimate settlement down the road, is to be based on UN 242 and UN 242 alone. That's very crucial. Anyone with any familiarity with Middle East diplomacy knew on that day exactly what was coming. First, UN 242 means "partial withdrawal, as the US determines"; the Kissingerian revision. And "UN 242 alone" means UN 242 and not the other UN resolutions which call for Palestinian rights alongside Israel. Recall that 242 itself is strictly rejectionist. The primary issue of diplomacy since the mid-1970s had been whether a diplomatic settlement should be based on UN 242 alone, or UN 242 supplemented with the other resolutions that the US had vetoed at the Security Council, and (effectively) vetoed at the General Assembly. And the second issue was whether 242 would have the original interpretation, or the operative US interpretation after it rejected Sadat's 1971 peace offer. In the DOP, the US announced firmly and clearly that the permanent settlement would be based on UN 242 alone, keeping to Washington's unilateral rejectionism: anything else is off the table. And since this is a unilateral power play, 242 means "as the US decides." There was no ambiguity. One could choose to be deluded - many did so. But that was a choice, and an unwise one, particularly for the victims.
So matters continue. One can't really accuse Israel of violating the Oslo agreements, except in detail. It continued to settle the occupied territories and integrate them within Israel. That means you and I did it, because the US funds it knowingly, and the US provides crucial diplomatic and military support for these gross violations of international law. The successive agreements spell out the details. They are worth a close look. I reviewed the main one in print in 1996, if you happen to be interested. The details are striking, including the purposeful humiliation built into them. And they have been fairly closely implemented.
Looking very closely, through a powerful microscope, we can discern a difference between the two main political groupings in Israel (as in the US). There is, however, a noticeable difference in the US attitude towards them, but the reason is a difference of style more than substance. So take the man who was just appointed two or three days ago as the minister of defense, Ben Eliezer-he's described now as a "Labor hawk." He was the housing minister under Shimon Peres, hailed as the Labor dove. In February 1996, towards the end of Peres's term, the peak of "dovishness," he announced an expanded settlement program in the territories-I'll read it because it's essentially was happening now. This was February 1996. He said, "It is no secret that the government's stand, which will be our ultimate demand, is that as regards the Jerusalem areas - Ma'ale Adumim, Givat Ze'ev, Beitar, and Gush Etzion - they will be an integral part of Israel's future map. There is no doubt about this." He also announced the building of what Israel calls Har Homa, that's the last section around Jerusalem, mostly expropriated from Arabs. That was put on hold under the Netanyahu government because of strong international and domestic opposition. But the Peres project was picked up again by Barak, and proceeded with no protest.
A look at the map will explain what this means. The "Jerusalem area," so defined (as it had already been by Yitzhak Rabin, after Oslo), effectively partitions the West Bank: the city of Ma'ale Adumim was developed primarily for this purpose, and addition of other parts of the "Jerusalem areas" merely firms up the effective partition.