Loading ...NOAM CHOMSKY on Obama, Palestine and student activism
While you’re in London you’re giving three talks on three topics to university audiences; America’s domination in global politics; the state of human rights in the 21st century; and the Middle East region in the Obama era. Are these the most pressing issues of our time and are they linked – if so, how?
Well they’re very closely linked. For one thing the United States plays an absolutely central role in all of them, which is natural – it’s about as close to a global sovereign as there’s ever been. So anything it does is naturally very significant. Fifty years ago, forty years ago I guess, when South Africa was becoming a major issue in the United Nations, in the early 60s, and the African nations were pressing hard for international pressure to end apartheid, the USA was standing in the way, dragging its feet, – along with Britain – and one of the South African leaders, one of the white leaders, pointed out to a high US official that they didn’t really care what the votes were at the United Nations, there was only one vote that counted. Well, that’s pretty much the way it works. So yes, they are linked very definitely.
Are these the three most important issues? Well, there are two issues in the world which literally have to do with survival – the environmental crisis and nuclear weapons. I’ll be talking about that some more tonight [at the Institute of Education, for the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS, on October 27th], but again, the US role is quite significant.
Obama seems to have taken some steps towards nuclear disarmament. How significant is this?
Well I suppose if you have a very powerful microscope you could detect them. But as far as I know the steps are only rhetorical. I mean, some of them are not too bad, for example, he’s called for the United States to ratify congress’s test-ban treaty. That actually was signed by Clinton ten years ago but Senate didn’t ratify it, and yes, they should certainly do that. He’s called for extending the slow but significant process of reducing the nuclear weapons in the two major super-powers, and that’s fine. He’s also reversing some – not all, but some – of the Bush positions.
You have to bear in mind that Bush, especially in his first term, drove the country way off the spectrum, I mean it’s a pretty narrow policy spectrum, but the first Bush administration was literally off the spectrum, and one of the things they did was completely undermine the 2005 nuclear review conference – in fact stated that the US was not bound by the non-proliferation treaty – they didn’t put it in those words but that’s in effect was this was. Actually Bush’s second term moved sort of towards moderate centre, and Obama’s continuing that. So yes there’s a shift from Bush, but it’s hard to find much of a difference from the main centre of US policy – it varies a little from side to side, but it’s pretty stable over the long term.
You’ve spoken about the responsibility of intellectuals, but how important is student activism? You’r meeting students from several SOAS Palestine Society and other University of London Palestine groups. What do you think of UK universities twinning with Palestinian ones and students occupying their universities to win humanitarian scholarships?
It’s always been very important. I mean, students happen to be at a time in their lives when they’re maximally free, I mean they’re at least partially out of parental control, but not yet burdened by trying to provide for keeping a family alive – so they have options. And, if you look over the years, student activism has had an enormous effect. The whole world has changed substantially since the 1960s in many respects and student activism was a major factor in that – rights of minorities, rights of women, environmental concerns, opposition to aggression.
You know, I didn’t happen to like any of the candidates at the last US election, but it was inconceivable forty years ago, or 20 years ago, that the Democratic Party would field a woman and an African-American. That’s substantially as a result of student activism. And so are many other things.
On this particular issue, the same is true. There’s some respects – I don’t want to exaggerate because there are a lot of differences – but it’s kind of interesting if you go back and read what was happening in the international debate around South Africa, say forty years ago, it’s not unlike what’s happening with regard to Israel and the Palestinians today. The South African regime was taking steps, rather like those that Israel and the United States are taking – remember Israel and the United States are tandem, there’s a doctrine that the United States is an honest broker standing between two irrational adversaries, but it’s completely untrue, Israel can’t go beyond what the US permits it to do, and [the US] supports what it does, that’s true of Obama as well. So the US and Israel are in a position a little bit like what the US and South Africa were like forty years ago: dragging their feet, putting up barriers to a political settlement that most of the world agrees on. And they’re taking similar actions.
Just today, for example, Amnesty International released a report about water usage among Palestinians. And the facts aren’t novel, but it hasn’t been presented as publicly before. Briefly, Israel – which means the US and Israel – have sharply restricted water use by Palestinians in all kinds of really ugly ways – well, actually it’s worse than what happened in South Africa as far as I know. It was reported in The Independent, I’ll be interested to see if it’s reported in the United States – it wasn’t reported in today’s New York Times.
On the other hand, also today [27/10/09] in the news, Congress is considering, and may already have passed, a demand that the Obama administration dismiss the Goldstone Report. That’s like calling for dismissal of condemnation of South African apartheid. Actually the Goldstone report in my view is extremely flawed, as are all the reports – the human rights reports – on Israel and Palestine. Nevertheless it’s a step, it’s a significant step – it’s extremely flawed for fundamental reasons, both legal as moral, it presupposes, just as human rights reports do, that Israel was acting in self-defence and had a right to do so – but nobody believes that.
Of course everyone has a right to self-defence, but not self-defence by force, that’s a different issue. The issue is did they have the right of self-defence by force? And there’s a condition that determines that: have they exhausted peaceful means? Now in this case, the United States and Israel didn’t even try peaceful means, they refused, when they knew there were peaceful means which would probably work, like reinstating the cease-fire which Hamas asked them to do. If you don’t try peaceful means which are available you have absolutely no right to self-defence by force, so, therefore if they fire one bullet it’s a crime.
The Goldstone Report said yes they have a right of self-defence and the only question is proportionality – that’s morally flawed and misleading legally, because the legal issue is quite clear that you don’t have the right of self-defence by force unless you actually exhaust peaceful means, but if you don’t even try peaceful means…
You said student activism is useful because we’re at a time in our lives when we’re not supporting families financially. What effect will the marketisation of education have on student activism and by extension on society?
As I mentioned the 1960s were a period when student activism had a very substantial role in civilising different societies and in democratising them. It always elicits a counter-force, and it did this time too. By the early seventies there were major steps being taken to try to restrict student activism, all kinds of steps, like for example raising tuition fees so that students come out of college with a debt burden – that’s enough to tell you, it limits what you can do. If some young person decides they want to go into public interest law, but if you come out of college with huge debts you’re just going to have to work for a corporation, and you may tell yourself ‘well I’ll just do it and pay off my debt’, but it doesn’t work that way – once you get involved you start internalising the values. And that’s a yoke that was imposed.
Actually, it’s pretty striking. It happens the last two trips I took before this one were to Mexico and California. Mexico is a poor country obviously, but there’s free education, in fact the national university is huge and pretty high quality. And there’s a city university in Mexico City which is pretty remarkable, it’s totally free.
Everyone who wants to go is granted admission – a lot of the kids aren’t ready for it so they have one year courses and so on, but it’s very successful. That’s Mexico – a poor country. If you go to California, which had a really great Higher Education system, a state system – they’re now talking about privatising it, because the state won’t fund it. Tuition fees are already high. And what they probably will do, down the road is take the major state universities, Brooklyn and UCLA, and privatise them. And the others will be reduced to the level of state colleges. That’s in the richest country, and these are socio-political decisions; they’re certainly not required by the nature of the economy, in fact just the opposite. And that’s only one of the many devices.
You’ve said that educating the American public about the situation in the Middle East is one of the most vital steps towards a just peace – why is America so vital, and why can’t a political solution be found by politicians, why does it require mass political participation?
What the United States does is vitally important on every topic, just because of the distribution of world power, and the United States is not a dictatorship, I mean even in a dictatorship there is some concern for public opinion, and in a more free society much more so. Now if the American public were to act effectively to try to get the US government to join the world, which is essentially what’s at stake here, it would have an effect.
In fact it’s about the only possibility I can see for any alternative to what the current likely situation is. In fact, the current tendency is not going towards a two state settlement, and it is also not going towards an apartheid state either, contrary to what a lot of the critics would claim. What it’s going towards is exactly what the US and Israel are doing, and indeed they’ve announced what they’re doing – it’s essentially taking over what Israel wants in the West Bank, land inside the so-called separation wall, or the annexation wall, which includes the main border resources, part of the arable land, taking over the Jordan Valley – which is about a third of the West Bank – and imprisoning what’s left, and building major salients [military out-posts] and then leaving Palestinians, sort of, to rot, in the corners that are left, without Israel taking any responsibility.
In fact it may even be worse than that. There was an ultra-right position which has now moved toward the centre, (and in fact is supported by certain New York Times commentators and so on). There are areas within Israel with heavy Palestinian concentration in Galilee, by the Green Line, so there was a right-wing proposal, by Avigdor Lieberman, the extreme right-wing figure, who’s now Foreign Minister, to cut those areas out, and force the people to be part of Palestine. Nobody asks the people, of course, whether they want to go from a rich first-world country to a third-world country, it’s not what they consider important, they just do it. When that first was proposed, it was regarded as kind of neo-Nazi, it’s now a centrist position, and as I say, we’ll see the outcome.
It’s not going to end up being like South Africa. In South Africa the white minority needed the black population, they were the ones who did the dirty work in society, so they needed them, and therefore the Bantustans were criminal, but they at least took care of them, I mean just like slave owners took care of the slaves, they needed them. But Israel doesn’t need them [Palestinians].
