Thread by @alexsmith1062

LONG THREAD

Excerpts from Noam Chomsky’s magnum opus on the Israel-Palestine conflict: ‘The Fateful Triangle’ (updated edition, Pluto Press, 1999 [original: 1983]).

Ben-Gurion: “let us not ignore the truth among ourselves. ... [W]e are the aggressors and they defend themselves ... The country is theirs ... Behind the terrorism is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self-sacrifice.”

Nahum Goldmann, a former WZO President: “To use the Holocaust as an excuse for the bombing of Lebanon...is a kind of [sacrilege], a banalization of the sacred tragedy of the Shoah, which must not be misused to justify politically doubtful and morally indefensible policies.”

Ben-Gurion: “Blowing up a house is not enough. What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. ... [S]trike mercilessly, women and children included. ... [T]here is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent.”

After Israel’s 1978 invasion of Lebanon, Mordechai Gur, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Labour Party, was asked whether the population of Southern Lebanon “should be punished”. He replied: “And how! I am using Sabra language [colloquial Hebrew]: And how!”

At the IDF’s Sidon headquarters in 1983, Haddad forces - allied to Israel - “repeatedly raped” a young female prisoner and “attempted to force her to copulate with a dog”, according to three Israeli reservists. There was no investigation.

IDF commander: “It is better that 1000 Arabs should die and not one of our soldiers”.

In 1982 the government of Israel stated that the threat posed by the PLO was “political no less than military”. The PLO could not be permitted to exist as a “political body”, it added.

US official: Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was designed to destroy “hope among the people of the West Bank and Gaza that the process of shaping the Palestinian people into a nation could succeed...[and to make] life so difficult for...[them] that they would...leave for Jordan.”

IDF officer on Arabs living in the occupied territories: “There are two alternatives, to live with them or destroy them. Personally I hate them. They stink. They do not share our culture. They sleep with goats. It is necessary to vaporise them, to turn them to a gas.”

The IDF’s Chief of Staff congratulated the Phalange on their “good work” during the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

In 1955 Israel’s PM admitted that his Defence Minister advocated “acts of madness and taught the army leadership the diabolic lesson of how to set the Middle East on fire, how to cause friction...[and] bloody confrontations” - with British installations in Egypt targeted.

Moshe Dayan, in September 1967, urged that Arabs be told: “we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads.”

When serving as Israel’s PM, Yitzhak Shamir warned that Palestinians who resist the occupation will be crushed “like grasshoppers,” with their heads “smashed against the boulders and walls”.

Yitzhak Shamir, 1943: “Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat...terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play...in our war against the occupier.”

The 1982 war against Lebanon was launched by Israel to counter the *political* threat posed by the PLO’s “peace offensive”.

Yitzhak Shamir openly admitted that the war was launched because the PLO posed “a terrible danger...Not so much a military one as a political one.”

An Israeli car bomb killed three children in Lebanon in 1991. “[I]t’s too bad that children were killed,” an Israeli military official said, but “the terrorists must realise” that vehicles can explode “on both sides of the security border.”

In 1973 a US planner noted that Saudi Arabia and Israel’s role is to “inhibit and contain those irresponsible and radical elements in certain Arab States...who, were they free to do so, would pose a grave threat indeed to our principal sources of petroleum in the Persian Gulf”.

Referring to the prospect of an independent Palestinian state, “visionary dove” Shimon Peres said in 1995: “the solution about which everyone is thinking and which is what you want will never happen.”

In ‘88 Rabin ordered plastic bullets to be used on Palestinian civilians as “more casualties...is precisely our aim...get rid of the illusion of some people in remote villages that they have liberated themselves...make it clear to them where they live and within which framework”.

Rabin expanded settlements “quietly and with wisdom” Yossi Beilin noted, but Netanyahu (more honestly) states his intentions openly, turning “the topic of Jerusalem as the unified capital of Israel - a matter which all Israelis agree upon - into a subject of worldwide debate.”