Let me ask you about Israel right now.
Israel’s passage of the new law that defines
Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people
and gives them the sole right to self-determination.
The law also declares Hebrew the country’s
only official language and encourages the
building of Jewish-only settlements in the
occupied territory as a national value.
This is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This is a defining moment in the annals of
Zionism and the history of the state of Israel.
We will keep ensuring civil rights in Israel’s
democracy.
These rights will not be harmed.
But the majority also has rights and the majority
decides.
An absolute majority wants to ensure our state’s
Jewish character for generations to come.
Can you talk about this new law, Noam Chomsky?
First of all, a slight correction: the all-Jewish
settlements that are authorized are within
Israel proper.
It’s not even a question on the Occupied
Territories.
They’re all like that.
But this is within Israel proper.
So, yes, the new law does change the existing
situation, but not by as much as is being
claimed.
What the new law describes has pretty much
been in place for a long time.
Basic law back in—land laws back in 1960
established what the Israeli High Court called,
concluded is—their statement was “Israel
is the sovereign state of the Jewish people”—all
Jewish people, but not its citizens, just
the Jews.
That was 60 years ago.
The land laws were set up in such a way that,
as was recognized at the time, in fact, that—internally
in Israel, not outside—that the state lands
would be effectively under the administration
of the Jewish National Fund.
An array of legal and administrative practices
were set up to ensure that.
If you’re interested in details, I wrote
about them in detail 30 years ago in a book
called Towards a New Cold War, sort of went
through the documents.
But, basically, a complex array was set up
to ensure that the Jewish National Fund would
be in control of state lands.
That amounts to over 90 percent of the country’s
lands.
What’s the mission of the Jewish National
Fund?
Well, it has a contract with the state of
Israel which determines that its mission is
to work for the benefit—I’m quoting now—of
people “of Jewish race, religion or origin.”
OK, what do you expect to follow from this?
What you expect to follow is that 92, 93 percent
of the land of the country is effectively
reserved for people of Jewish race, religion
and origin.
And that’s the way it played out.
This finally came to the court, the Israeli
courts, High Court, in the year 2000.
Civil liberties association in Israel brought
a case.
The plaintiffs were an Arab couple, professional
Arab couple, who wanted to buy a home in a
Jewish settlement, settlement of Katzir, which
was, like most of the country, restricted
to Jews.
The court finally ruled in their favor, in
a very narrow decision.
Almost immediately, efforts began to try to
figure out a way around it, by various devices.
And the new law simply authorizes it, straight.
It authorizes all-Jewish settlements in Israel
proper, which means about 90 percent of the
country.
If you look at the development of settlements
over the years—it’s discussed in an important
article by Israeli writer Yitzhak Laor in
a recent issue of Haaretz.
I wrote about it in a post here in Truthout.
He points out that I think about 700 all-Jewish
settlements were set up, no Arab settlements.
Arab Palestinians are restricted to about
two percent of the land, a lot of them being
kicked out of that.
So, all of this, it formalizes what has been
practiced, in complex ways.
It does demote Arabic from being an official
language to not having that status.
It enhances the past practices by introducing
them into what’s called the Basic Law, which
is effectively the constitution.
So, yes, these are changes, but less dramatic
than the way it’s portrayed, not because
these are proper moves, but because it’s
always been like that in one way or another.
Incidentally, this should not be too strange
to Americans.
You look at the housing—this has recently
been discussed by [Richard] Rothstein, an
interesting book.
If you look at the New Deal housing programs,
they were legally and explicitly directed
to ensuring white-only projects, white-only
towns.
That’s why the towns that sprang up in the
1950s, like Levittown, were 100 percent white.
Various legal requirements were introduced
to ensure that.
This is the New Deal.
We’re not talking about the Deep South,
although, of course, they influenced it.
This didn’t change until the late '60s.
And by then, it was too late to benefit African
Americans.
The reason was because of general economic
changes in the ’50s—'50s and the '60s
were a great growth period in the United States,
offered the first time in hundreds of years
of history, 400 years of history, for African
Americans to have some sort of a chance of
entering the mainstream society.
But they were blocked from housing, by legal
means.
By the time the legal means were dismantled,
we were moving into the onset of the neoliberal
period of stagnation and decline, so it didn't
do them any good.
That’s another chapter in the ugly history
of American racism.
So, we shouldn’t be all too startled to
see what’s going on in Israel, which is
quite ugly and is part of the shift of the
country far to the right, which was predicted
in 1967, predicted right off, that a consequence
of the occupation would be to turn the country
to the right.
When you have your jackboot on someone’s
neck, it’s not good for your psyche.
And I think we’ve been watching this happen.
Israel is quite aware of it, incidentally.
Israeli political analysts have been pointing
out for a couple of years that Israel should
be preparing itself for a period in which
it loses the support of sectors of the world
that have some concern for human rights and
international law, and should be returning
towards alliances with the countries that
just don’t care about this.
Say, India, under the recent ultranationalist
Modi government, shares with Israel the move
towards ultranationalism, repression, a hatred
of Islam; China doesn’t pay attention to
these things; Singapore; Saudi Arabia; United
Arab Emirates.
And we can see it happening in the United
States, as well.
So, not too long ago, Israel was the absolute
darling of progressive, liberal America.
That has changed.
By now, among self-identified Democrats, they
have considerably more support for Palestinians
than for Israel.
Support for Israel in the United States has
shifted to the ultranationalist right and
evangelicals, who, for the wrong reasons,
support Israeli actions, with some passion,
in fact, while at the same time many of them
hold to doctrines which claim that the second
coming of Christ, which is imminent, will
lead to a series of events which will end
up with the Jews being sent to eternal perdition.
That combines with the support for Israeli
actions.
And that’s why the base of Israeli support
in the United States has shifted to the right
wing of the Republican Party.
So, these things are happening all over the
world.
Noam Chomsky, now linguistics professor at
the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Coming up, he’ll talk about the crisis in
Gaza.
