Chomsky, Bloody Chomsky: A Profile in Complexity

In such torturous prose, it is not clear Chomsky is even sure whether or not he is being sarcastic - a device he would typically employ with clarity and aplomb. At the very least, we are asked to compare Israel’s invasion of Lebanon with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, both of which sought to prop up (a la Vietnam) corrupt and illegitimate local clients and smash threatening peasant insurgencies. But Chomsky does not extend the comparison as he did with Kosovo and Timor, because to do so would be to admit that Israel did withdraw to a limited southern occupation that same year, after which most of the carnage, including massacres of Palestinians far worse than Sabra and Shatila, was caused by Syrian and Iranian-backed clients. Actually, if Chomsky were to compare numbers, as he liked to do while protesting the Kosovo war, he could point out that Israel would have had to invade Lebanon 75 times over to cause the carnage Brezhnev brought Afghanistan, where 1.3 million were killed and more antipersonnel mines sown than in any war in modern history. Also, ever the media critic, he could have questioned the glut of coverage given to the Israeli siege of Beirut, which rendered more media attention in months than Afghanistan did in ten years, and not quite all of it, as he would have us believe, sympathetic to the Israelis.

As one who has been slighted with that loaded sobriquet self-hating Jew, (by an exasperated Hebrew school teacher) I would be remiss in applying the same to Chomsky, as have many of his Jewish detractors. He has even been somewhat noble in braving the inevitable mortar fire that comes before any Jew who tries to air Israel’s dirty laundry in public, especially America’s public, and I believe morally genuine in his compassion for the Palestinians, whose suffering is real and who have repeatedly been sold out by their own leaders and the Arab states, as well as swept aside by the U.S.-Israel axis. Still, something in Chomsky’s critique of Israel rankles, suggesting that there may be psychology at work here apart from a ubiquitous penchant toward the side of the downtrodden (a position the Jews forfeited when they won their first war). The original closing chapter of Fateful Triangle, The Road to Armaggedeon, now reads rather embarrassingly, though Chomsky has done nothing to modify or even reinterpret his rhetoric: Sooner or later Israel will face a military defeat - it came close in 1973 - or the need to resort to a nuclear threat, with consequences that one hesitates to imagine (442). Never mind that Israel came nowhere close to defeat in 1973 but why, of any country, did Chomsky make Israel the world’s primary nuclear fall guy?

His final conclusion: there is a Samson complex (467) afoot in Israeli society, whereby, the Biblical tale as precedent, Israel will make sure they destroy everyone else along with themselves, when it comes down to brass tacks. Now, what would Chomsky’s reaction be if I suggested that apocalyptic bin Ladenism is simply a reflex of the Muslim character, a Saladin complex? If he were to call me a racist, as he surely and correctly would, then how are we to interpret his assessment of the Jews? Since 1983, as far as I am aware, Israel has not led us into nuclear holocaust. It is a truism, as Chomsky likes to say, that Pakistan and India came far closer to giving the world its second nuclear war (more than once) than Israel ever has - yet we get no 500-page tome on that irascible conflict. In Fateful Triangle, Chomsky gives dire, and not entirely baseless, warnings of a religious chauvinist element taking over Israeli democracy, with implications of regional war and perhaps ethnic cleansing to follow. However, when Western conservatives portended the same about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in places like Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or North Africa, Chomsky brushed them off as irrational bigots fanning the flames of hatred.