Michael Jansen, a regional analyst for the Irish Times and Middle East International, is the author of The United States and the Palestinian People (Beirut, 1970), The Battle of Beirut (London, Boston, 1982) and Dissonance in Zion (London, 1987).
Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (New Edition)
by noam chomsky
London, Pluto Press, 1999. 544 pages. £14.99
When this book first appeared in 1983 it was the most comprehensive indictment to date of Israel and the United States for their unjust treatment of the Palestinian people. Sixteen years on, Fateful Triangle (the definite article unaccountably dropped from the title of this edition) is as important a work as it was then. It is an essential tool for anyone seeking to understand the terrible triangular relationship between the sole superpower, the regional hegemon and nearly powerless Palestinian people.
The new edition opens with a pithy forward by Edward Said and an analytical preface by Chomsky and includes three new chapters to bring the story of the triangular relationship up to date.
Chomsky wrote the book in response to Israel’s invasion, occupation and savaging of Lebanon. Clearly he had, for some time, been gathering an archive of material in order to make his case against Israel and its US acolyte, but the terrible events of the summer of 1982 demanded something dramatic and damning as well as rigorous. This he delivered. Fateful Triangle was, and is, a systematic exposure of Israeli–US collusion in the atrocity the then Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon dubbed, with no Orwellian irony intended, “Peace for Galilee”.
Rereading the book seventeen years after Sharon sent his troops into Lebanon—where I had lived for fourteen years—was a painful experience. While Israeli forces were pounding Lebanon from the air, sea and land with state-of-the-art US ordnance, my husband and I wrote to keep sane. He braved the bombing of Beirut to report for the Economist of London; I chanced the Israeli military censors to gather material in Jerusalem for a book. I fully understand Chomsky’s need to marshal his ammunition and write. What he produced was not only a book about Israel’s onslaught against an undefended country already divided against itself by a savage civil conflict, but also a study of the Zionist enterprise as a whole. The monumental work is a mine of very useful information. Information readers can trust. A tour de force.
Taking this into consideration, Fateful Triangle should be read carefully, over time, its contents digested gradually, so the implications of the asymmetric relationships between the three protagonists can be grasped.
In the hundred-year war for possession of Palestine—as in all wars—truth was the “first casualty”. Indeed, the Zionist enterprise was founded on a lie: that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land”. Chomsky quotes Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, who said: “There is no conflict between Jewish and Palestinian nationalism because the Jewish Nation is not in Palestine [it is in Israel] and the Palestinians are not a nation.” Later on Prime Minister Golda Meir stated flatly that the Palestinians “did not exist” when the Zionists arrived in Palestine. In truth, Palestine was a land which had been inhabited for millennia by Palestinians. Some could even trace their roots to the peoples who dwelt in Palestine before the Jewish tribes settled there. To ignore the Palestinians was Zionism’s “original sin”. Everything it has done and said since it began its colonisation campaign at the end of the last century has been a consequence of that blatant lie.
The lie was essential because Zionism launched itself into Palestine at a time when the tide of history was turning against Western imperialism and colonialism. The state of Israel, both an imperialist and a colonising enterprise, was proclaimed at the moment colonies were securing their freedom.
The Zionist movement operated on several levels. On the first level, it ruthlessly built the infrastructure of its state-to-be; on the second, it co-operated with the Western powers who had dominion over the strategic Middle Eastern region; on the third, it cultivated constituencies in the West, particularly in the United States, which could be used to defend and promote its cause.
Meanwhile the Zionists carefully concealed their geopolitical intentions and their typically colonialist, racist attitudes so they would not lose the support of public opinion, particularly after the brave New World Order emerged after the defeat of Germany and Japan in the 1939‑45 war.
It is this strategy of concealment Chomsky has exposed in this work. He uses the theme of “rejectionism” to do so. “Rejectionism” is the word employed by Israel and its supporters to describe the Arabs’ attitude towards Zionism and the Jewish state. Supporters of Israel argue that if the Arabs had not rejected the Zionist project to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a peaceful accommodation between Zionism and the Palestinians/Arabs could have been reached early on, sparing the region a great deal of grief and destruction. Indeed, Zionists claim “Arab rejectionism” justifies everything they have done to defend their cause. This argument is stretched to fantastic lengths and twisted into incredible shapes by pro-Israeli apologists. Chomsky cites many examples and names the allegedly respectable men and women, intellectuals and publicists, who indulge in these dangerous fabrications. He contrasts the twisting of the truth by Israel’s foreign friends with the honest reporting of certain Israeli journalists, analysts and scholars. Several Israeli writers have even accused US Zionist propagandists of posing a serious danger to Israel and preventing progress in peacemaking with the Arabs.
Chomsky counters the contention that the Arabs are the rejectionist party by examining the record of Arab rejectionism. He gives concrete examples of Arab rejectionism: Palestinian rejection of Russian and Polish Jewish settlers when they came ashore, Palestinian and Arab rejection of the British project to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Arab rejection of the United Nations partition plan, Arab refusal to deal with the Jewish state in the aftermath of the 1948 and 1967 wars. He sees Arab rejectionism at these historical junctures as natural.
He argues it was understandable that the natives of Palestine should reject the colonisation of their country by aliens who flowed in after it became a British mandate. At that time the natives counted for 90 per cent of the population. And even after thirty years of Jewish immigration under British bayonets the Palestinians, who remained two-thirds of the population, could hardly be expected to accept that 55 per cent of their country should be given to foreign settlers. After 1948 and 1967, the Arabs rejected because of the psychological trauma of defeat, but this soon turned into a desire on the part of the regimes to reach some sort of accommodation with the militarily superior, Western-supported Jewish state.
While the Zionists generally accommodated the powers-that-be before they proclaimed their state, in the run-up to that event they shifted to rejecting what was on offer as not being enough. Their objective was to seize as much territory as possible. They began by occupying land allocated to the “Arab state” by the UN partition plan, they violated cease-fires during the 1948 war, they conquered territory after armistice agreements had been signed in 1949. And once they had borders recognised by the international community they indulged in creeping annexation of demilitarised zones and the theft of water from Arab sources. In 1956 Israel occupied Egypt’s Sinai peninsula; in 1967 Israel took the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza from Egypt and captured the Syrian Golan; and in 1975/76 Israeli-sponsored forces occupied a border strip in south Lebanon. Chomsky makes it plain that Israeli rejectionism involved wars of expansion or aggression in defence of Greater Israel.
All the wars initiated by Israel testify to that fact—1948, 1956, 1967, 1968–69 (the War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt), 1978 (Israel’s first invasion of south Lebanon) and 1982 (Israel’s invasion of Lebanon). In all these wars but one, 1982, Israel claims untruthfully it was attacked. As far as the 1982 invasion of Lebanon is concerned, Israel admits it was an “initiated war”, implying it was pre-emptive and defensive. Another lie.
The one war the Israelis did not initiate, the October 1973 conflict, was launched by the Arabs with the intention of forcing Israel to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967 and reach an accommodation with the Arabs. The Arabs failed because of Israeli rejectionism.
Chomsky lists Israeli rejections of diplomatic initiatives to achieve accommodation which were either launched or accepted by the Arabs: Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the fifties and 1970; his successor Anwar Sadat in 1971 and 1978; Palestine President Yasser Arafat from 1974 to 1992/3; and Syrian President Hafez al-Assad after 1991. In its rejectionism, Israel has been generally supported or joined by the United States. Washington has, from time to time, dared a temporary show of independence only to revert to subservience. Chomsky is clearly incensed by Washington’s uncritical support for Israel. He argues, rightly, that without US diplomatic, political, financial and military assistance Israel would not be in a position to pursue its policy of rejectionism—a policy which has been particularly unprofitable over the last seventeen years.
That policy was wearing thin by May/June 1982. Israel had been unable to reject or resist Egypt’s offer to make peace and had pulled out of the Sinai. A cease-fire had been in effect for ten months in south Lebanon between Israel and the PLO, boosting the credibility of the organisation as a negotiating partner. Europe had recognised the right of the Palestinians to self-determination. The pressure for peace talks was becoming an increasing threat to Greater Israel, so Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon decided to make war on the PLO and finish it off, leaving Israel in permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. But Sharon’s assault against Lebanon and the Palestinian refugees living there was so brutal and bloody that it seriously damaged the myth of “beautiful Israel” so cherished by Israel and its supporters.
Chomsky describes how Israel mobilised its claque in the United States to maintain this image in the minds of ordinary, uninformed citizens, but he fails to point out that Israel’s advocates did not succeed. The truth could not be hidden or denied. Israel did not emerge from “Peace for Galilee” morally unscathed, but severely damaged. “Peace for Galilee” cannot be repeated. Israel is no longer free to make war at will. Israel does, from time to time, conduct limited operations against Lebanon, the last belligerent front with the Jewish state. But Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon is coming soon. Prime Minister Ehud Barak says by next July.
The tarnished “beautiful Israel” myth was exploded forever by nightly television coverage of Israelis beating Palestinian youths, shooting into crowds and bulldozing houses during the 1987–93 Intifada. The Intifada made the invisible Palestinian all too visible. The ugly occupation was costing Israel too much in terms of outside support and domestic self-confidence.
In 1993, Israel signed the Oslo deal to put a formal end to the Intifada and transform the occupation into US-sponsored, Israeli-controlled autonomy for the Palestinians. But before the ink had dried on the accord, Israel started to postpone and prevaricate over provisions it was obliged to honour, denying the Palestinians the land and the rights Oslo was meant to restore. Its rejectionist career is not, by any means, over. Israel and its allies are devising new strategies to hold onto the territories.
But it will not work. The tide of history, which was against Zionism from the outset, is running fast and strong against Greater Israel. The pariah regimes to which Israel and the United States allied themselves—South Africa, Rhodesia and the Latin American dictatorships—are gone. Israel has peace treaties on two fronts and could achieve peace on the other three if it withdrew from territories the Arabs and the rest of the world deem “occupied”—the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan and southern Lebanon. Ordinary Israelis are weary after one hundred years of warfare. Most prefer accommodation to rejectionism.
During the past decade Israel has been forced to shed some of its traditional “noes”: “no” recognition of the Palestinian people, “no” negotiations with the PLO, “no” uprooting of Jewish settlements and “no” to a Palestinian state. Having capitulated on these basic “noes”, Israel still clings to “no” withdrawal to the lines of 1967, “no” sharing of Jerusalem with the Palestinians and “no” return of Palestinians driven into exile by Israel. Israel will, ultimately, have to concede those “noes” as well. Chomsky, from his vantage point on the eastern seaboard of the United States, is not optimistic that Israel will capitulate, because of its solid US support. But even the United States cannot save Greater Israel from the force of history.
