Noam Chomsky Quotes
A 1998 study was done in Hebrew by an Israeli scholar, Yosef Grodzinsky, and the English translation of the title is Good Human Material. That's what they wanted sent to Palestine for colonization and for the eventual conflict that took place some years later. These policies were somewhat complementary to the U.S. policy of pressuring England to allow Jews to go to Palestine, but not allowing them here. The British politician Ernest Bevin was quite bitter about it, asking, "if you want to save the Jews, why send them to Palestine when you don't admit them?"
Chomsky, Noam. Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance. Metropolitan Books, 2003.
Because of the classic historical anti-Semitism and discrimination, Jews were barred from land ownership and as a result few were farmers or had agricultural experience in their families. They were tradesmen, artisans, professionals in Europe. So amongst Jews and non Jews alike the notion of Jews settling the land of Palestine and farming it or trapping, the way the Boers had in South Africa or the French in Canada, was not a very credible image. The Zionists, realizing this potential weakness, placed strong emphasis on agriculture, developed the agricultural kibbutz concept and encouraged Jews to become farmers. The effort was so successful that almost all the leading early Zionist immigrants to Palestine became farmers. When independence came to Israel, the Jewish agriculture was more productive than most of that in Europe and almost on a par with small farms in the United States. The Israelis were known for “making the desert bloom.
At that time Jews in Palestine were in the minority. The issue of how to obtain the land was hotly debated amongst Jewish groups. Jabotinsky was at one extreme—colonize and take the land just as the Arabs had done to the Jews when there was a Jewish majority. His view did not however prevail. The policy was to buy the land from individual Arabs and Jewish land up to 1948 was obtained that way. In that year the UN partitioned Palestine and 11 Arab armies attacked the new state of Israel and asked the Arab civilians to leave the area so that the Army could cleanse it of Jews. Many did not, and they or their descendants are still on their land or have sold it. The Arabs who left, were suspected of being possible collaborators or terrorists, and they have never been paid for their land or allowed to return. Compensation is still in dispute. At the same time Jews driven out of Arab countries by law and the military have never been compensated or given any right of return either.
This quotation has great historical significance for its logic and perception as much as for its content, The Jewish population that the British admitted plus those already in Israel was a small fraction of the Arab population then and a tiny proportion of the Jews and Arabs now inhabiting Israel with a very high standard of living. This included over 1 million Russian Jewish immigrants, The perception of the capacity of land to support a population has always been underestimated, The Arabs simply extrapolated assuming no modernization, no technology, and every family having a small farm. Given Arab traditional perceptions of societal development, modern Israel could not possibly function, much less thrive as it does. This is one of the reasons that the Arab nations have been so reluctant to absorb more Palestinian Arab refugees. A backward view of society and assumption that the Arab status quo was then the optimum society prohibited the Arabs from modern developmental possibilities.
This statement hardened the Israeli population away from anything that would bring Hamas more power. The PLO leader had, for ALL the Palestinian people, recognized the right of Israel to exist {633062}. The Israelis observe that this is a de facto declaration of war, and hence treat Gaza and Hamas as an enemy force to be reckoned with. See {635341} for another alarming reneging of the recognition of Israel.
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
