Israel is factually evil and promote terrorism

Posted on: July 10, 2025 at 20:10:36 CT

Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978. It was all in the context of the Camp David agreements. It was pretty obvious that those agreements would have the consequence they did—namely, freeing up Israel to attack Lebanon and integrate the occupied territories, now that Egypt was eliminated as a deterrent. Israel invaded southern Lebanon and held on to it through clients—at the time it was Major Sa’ad Haddad’s militia, basically an Israeli mercenary force. That’s when Security Council Resolution 425 was passed.

When Israel invaded in 1982, there’d been a lot of recent violence across the border, all from Israel north. There had been a U.S.-brokered ceasefire which the PLO had held to scrupulously, initiating no cross-border actions. But Israel carried out thousands of provocative actions, including bombing of civilian targets—all to try to get the PLO to do something, thus giving Israel an excuse to invade.

It’s interesting the way that period has been reconstructed in U.S. journalism. All that remains is tales of the PLO’s bombardment of Israeli settlements, a fraction of the true story (and in the year leading up to the 1982 Israeli invasion, not even that).

The truth was that Israel was bombing and invading north of the border, and the PLO wasn’t responding. In fact, they were trying to move toward a negotiated settlement. (The truth about earlier years also has only a limited resemblance to the standard picture, as I’ve documented several times—uselessly, of course.)

We know what happened after Israel invaded Lebanon. They were driven out by what they call “terrorism”—meaning resistance by people who weren’t going to be cowed. Israel succeeded in awakening a fundamentalist resistance, which it couldn’t control. They were forced out.

They held on to the southern sector, which they call a “security zone”—although there’s no reason to believe that it has the slightest thing to do with security. It’s Israel’s foothold in Lebanon. It’s now run by a mercenary army, the South Lebanon Army, which is backed up by Israeli troops. They’re very brutal. There are horrible torture chambers.

We don’t know the full details, because they refuse to allow inspections by the Red Cross or anyone else. But there have been investigations by human rights groups, journalists and others. Independent sources—people who got out, plus some Israeli sources—overwhelmingly attest to the brutality. There was even an Israeli soldier who committed suicide because he couldn’t stand what was going on. Some others have written about it in the Hebrew press.

Ansar is the main camp. They very nicely put it in the town of Khiyam. There was a massacre there by the Haddad militia under Israeli eyes in 1978, after years of Israeli bombing, that drove out most of the population. That’s mainly for Lebanese who refuse to cooperate with the South Lebanon Army.

Israel dumped scores of deportees in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s. Why has that changed now? Why has Lebanon refused?

It’s not so much that it has refused. If Israel dropped some deportees by helicopter into the outskirts of Sidon, Lebanon couldn’t refuse. But this time I think Israel made a tactical error. The deportation of 415 Palestinians [in December 1992] is going to be very hard for them to deal with.

According to the Israeli press, this mass deportation was fairly random, a brutal form of collective punishment. I read in Ha’aretz [the leading Israeli newspaper] that the Shabak [the Israeli secret police] leaked the information that they had only given six names of security risks, adding a seventh when the Rabin Labor government wanted a larger number. The other four hundred or so were added by Rabin’s government, without intelligence information.

So there’s no reason to believe that those who were deported were Hamas [Islamic fundamentalist] activists. In fact, Israel deported virtually the whole faculty of one Islamic university. They essentially deported the intellectuals, people involved in welfare programs and so on.

But to take this big class of people and put them in the mountains of southern Lebanon, where it’s freezing now and boiling hot in the summer—that’s not going to look pretty in front of the TV cameras. And that’s the only thing that matters. So there may be some problems, because Israel’s not going to let them back in without plenty of pressure.

I heard Stephen Solarz [former Democratic congressman from Brooklyn] on the BBC. He said the world has a double standard: 700,000 Yemenis were expelled from Saudi Arabia and no one said a word (which is true); 415 Palestinians get expelled from Gaza and the West Bank and everybody’s screaming.

Every Stalinist said the same thing: “We sent Sakharov into exile and everyone was screaming. What about this or that other atrocity—which is worse?” There is always somebody who has committed a worse atrocity. For a Stalinist mimic like Solarz, why not use the same line?

Incidentally, there is a difference—the Yemenis were deported to their country, the Palestinians from their country. Would Solarz claim that we all should be silent if he and his family were dumped into a desert in Mexico?

Israel’s record and its attitude toward Hamas have evolved over the years. Didn’t Israel once favor it?

They not only favored it, they tried to organize and stimulate it. Israel was sponsoring Islamic fundamentalists in the early days of the [first] intifada [an uprising of Palestinians within Israel against the Israeli government]. If there was a strike of students at some West Bank university, the Israeli army would sometimes bus in Islamic fundamentalists to break up the strike.

Sheikh Yassin, an anti-Semitic maniac in Gaza and the leader of the Islamic fundamentalists, was protected for a long time. They liked him. He was saying, “Let’s kill all the Jews.” It’s a standard thing, way back in history. Seventy years ago Chaim Weizmann was saying: Our danger is Arab moderates, not the Arab extremists.

The invasion of Lebanon was the same thing. Israel wanted to destroy the PLO because it was secular and nationalist, and was calling for negotiations and a diplomatic settlement. That was the threat, not the terrorists. Israeli commentators have been quite frank about that from the start.

Israel keeps making the same mistake, with the same predictable results. In Lebanon, they went in to destroy the threat of moderation and ended up with Hezbollah [Iranian-backed fundamentalists] on their hands. In the West Bank, they also wanted to destroy the threat of moderation—people who wanted to make a political settlement. There Israel’s ending up with Hamas, which organizes effective guerrilla attacks on Israeli security forces.

It’s important to recognize how utterly incompetent secret services are when it comes to dealing with people and politics. Intelligence agencies make the most astonishing mistakes—just as academics do.

In a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier, the dominant power, has to justify what it’s doing. There is only one way to do it—become a racist. You have to blame the victim. Once you become a raving racist in self-defense, you’ve lost your capacity to understand what’s happening. The United States in Indochina was the same. They never could understand—there are some amazing examples in the internal record. The FBI is the same; they make the most astonishing mistakes, for similar reasons.

In a letter to The New York Times, the director of the [B’nai Brith’s] Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, wrote that the Rabin government has “unambiguously demonstrated its commitment to the peace process” since assuming leadership. “Israel is the last party that has to prove its desire to make peace.” What’s been the record of Rabin’s Labor government?

It’s perfectly true that Israel wants peace. So did Hitler. Everybody wants peace. The question is, On what terms? The Rabin government, exactly as was predicted, harshened the repression in the territories. Just this afternoon I was speaking to a woman who’s spent the last couple of years in Gaza doing human rights work. She reported what everyone reports, and what everybody with a brain knows—as soon as Rabin came, it got tougher. He’s the iron-fist man—that’s his record.

Likud [the major right-wing party in Israel] actually had a better record in the territories than Labor did. Torture and collective punishment stopped under Begin. There was one bad period when Sharon was in charge, but under Begin it was generally better. When the Labor party came back into the government in 1984, torture and collective punishment started again, and later the intifada came.

In February 1989, Rabin told a group of Peace Now leaders that the negotiations with the PLO didn’t mean anything—they were going to give him time to crush the Palestinians by force. And they will be crushed, he said, they will be broken.

It hasn’t happened.

It happened. The intifada was pretty much dead, and Rabin awakened it again with his own violence. He has also continued settlement in the occupied territories, exactly as everyone with their eyes open predicted. Although there was a very highly publicized settlement cutoff, it was clear right away that it was a fraud. Foxman knows that. He reads the Israeli press, I’m sure.

What Rabin stopped was some of the more extreme and crazy Sharon plans. Sharon was building houses all over the place, in places where nobody was ever going to go, and the country couldn’t finance it. So Rabin eased back to a more rational settlement program. I think the current number is 11,000 new homes going up.

Labor tends to have a more rational policy than Likud—that’s one of the reasons the United States has always preferred Labor. They do pretty much the same things as Likud, but more quietly, less brazenly. They tend to be more modern in their orientation, better attuned to the norms of Western hypocrisy. Also, they’re more realistic. Instead of trying to make seven big areas of settlement, they’re down to four.

But the goal is pretty much the same—to arrange the settlements so that they separate the Palestinian areas. Big highway networks will connect Jewish settlements and surround some little Arab village way up in the hills. That’s to make certain that any local autonomy will never turn into a form of meaningful self-government. All of this is continuing and the United States is, of course, funding it.

Critics of the Palestinian movement point to what they call the “intrafada,” the fact that Palestinians are killing other Palestinians—as if this justifies Israeli rule and delegitimizes Palestinian aspirations.

You might look back at the Zionist movement—there were plenty of Jews killed by other Jews. They killed collaborators, traitors and people they thought were traitors. And they weren’t under anything like the harsh conditions of the Palestinian occupation. As plenty of Israelis have pointed out, the British weren’t nice, but they were gentlemen compared with us.

The Labor-based defense force Haganah had torture chambers and assassins. I once looked up their first recorded assassination in the official Haganah history. It’s described there straight.

It was in 1921. A Dutch Jew named Jacob de Haan had to be killed, because he was trying to approach local Palestinians to see if things could be worked out between them and the new Jewish settlers. His murderer was assumed to be the woman who later became the wife of the first president of Israel. They said that another reason for assassinating him was that he was a homosexual.

Yitzhak Shamir became head of the Stern Gang by killing the guy who was designated to be the head. He didn’t like him for some reason. Shamir was supposed to take a walk with him on a beach. He never came back. Everyone knows Shamir killed him.

As the intifada began to self-destruct under tremendous repression, the killing got completely out of hand. It began to be a matter of settling old scores and gangsters killing anybody they saw. Originally the intifada was pretty disciplined, but it ended up with a lot of random killing, which Israel loves. Then they can point out how rotten the Arabs are.

It’s a dangerous neighborhood.

Yes, it is. They help make it dangerous.

-Interview of Noam Chomsky


Edited by TigerMatt at 20:11:11 on 07/10/25