Chomsky Labels Oslo Accords “Triumph of U.S. Indoctrination System”

By John Dirlik

Dissident political analyst Noam Chomsky describes the much-lauded Declaration of Principles signed two years ago by Israel and the PLO as offering the Palestinians something "similar to the apartheid" of early South Africa. Chomsky cites the euphoria surrounding the accords as evidence of the "triumph of the American indoctrination system."

Speaking on the "New World Order" to packed auditoriums on consecutive nights at Concordia and McGill Universities in Montreal, Chomsky reminded his audiences that the U.S. and Israel had stood alone for decades against the entire world, which supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Now, welcoming the Oslo accords, the international community has reversed itself by a deal that rejects Palestinian statehood. "The U.S. has imposed its wishes so fully that it [Oslo] is universally described as a great achievement for diplomacy," said Chomsky. He described this as both a "very successful power play of U.S. policy" and an "achievement of propaganda that has to be admired."

Chomsky noted that even the usually independent European media succumbed to American indoctrination, citing among several newspaper headlines one in the Manchester Guardian that read: "Israel agrees to quit West Bank." That's "not even remotely true," said Chomsky. "They agreed to quit about a quarter of the West Bank."

Chomsky took to task not only Western media and journals of opinion but also the scholarly publications for completely ignoring Middle East history and portraying the Oslo accords as agreements born of compromises and concessions.

"The rational way to evaluate whether a compromise was made is to look at the positions of the two sides that allegedly have made the compromises," Chomsky said. "The PLO side has had various ambiguities and internal contradictions, but there's one feature that's been pretty clear for about 20 years, and that's been a broad consensus on some kind of two-state settlement."

The Israeli position since 1968 has been very consistent, according to Chomsky, and is that Israel "should keep parts of the occupied territories, namely, the parts it wants, and it should relinquish the Palestinian population centers because Israel plainly doesn't want the burden of administering them." This vision, clearly spelled out in various Israeli proposals, was later "supplemented with fertile ideas of cantonization—small locally run [Palestinian] sectors separated from one another and surrounded and controlled by Israeli power."

Chomsky pointed out that since the Oslo accords were signed, "settlements have gone up about 10 percent, the land integrated under Israeli control has risen from 65 percent to 75 percent, and the structures of the settlements and the cantons have been instituted." He compared the post-Oslo situation to the apartheid system in South Africa during the 1950s, saying that for the Palestinians "it's not like the end of apartheid, it's like the beginning of it." According to Chomsky, the Oslo accords not only actualized long-standing Israeli goals, but in some ways went further, since they are "more or less the Sharon plan, the extremist position which went well beyond the early [Israeli] proposals."

Although he regarded the Israel-PLO deal as simply the implementation of Israeli policy, Chomsky stressed this was made possible only because of American compliance. "Nothing would have happened without U.S. support," he said, "so it's basically U.S. policy."

Chomsky convincingly argued that firmly entrenched American military and ideological dominance following the Gulf war prompted the Europeans to abandon their support for a two-state solution. It also enabled the U.S. "to extend the Monroe Doctrine over the Middle East just as it extended it over the Western hemisphere." "That's what it means to be the biggest thug on the block," he said. "The new world order is very much like the old world order in that it's based on the rule of force. Any reference to principles like justice, freedom and all that, that's for the commissar class."

Chomsky—who has written extensively on the indoctrination systems of democratic societies—took a shot at the intellectual community for its role in promoting official state doctrine. One of the ways opinion molders manage to mislead the population, Chomsky said, is by manipulating language for ideological purposes. He gave as an example the term "rejectionism," which is used "solely in a racist sense, for those who reject the right of Israeli Jews to self-determination but not for those who reject the right of the Palestinians to self-determination." Chomsky insisted this was a "necessary terminology decision" because using that term in a non-racist sense would expose the U.S. as having led the rejectionist camp.

"This is the sort of newspeak Orwell referred to when he was speaking about the Soviet Union," he said, "but here we have it in a very free society with nobody noticing it." Given a "sufficiently servile intellectual class," observed Chomsky, "free societies can function in a highly totalitarian way."

Although Chomsky's appearances on both campuses were greeted with thunderous applause, some in the audience were visibly discomfited by his unconventional views. During the question period, the self-declared libertarian was asked if he supported anti-hate laws such as the ones enacted in Germany which make denying or even questioning the Holocaust a punishable offense. Chomsky corrected the student, saying "there are laws against questioning the slaughter of Jews but there are no laws against questioning the slaughter of the gypsies, who were treated in exactly the same way and killed on the same scale relative to their population."

Chomsky voiced his adamant opposition to what he termed "Stalinist and fascist" legislation that would grant the state the power to determine and enforce historical truth. He conceded that Germany's case was "special," but questioned whether people should be jailed for denying that gypsies were slaughtered by the Nazis, or that Armenians were massacred by the Turks, or that Canada was complicit to the "worst genocide since the Holocaust" in East Timor by supplying Indonesia with arms.

Chomsky added that if punishment for the denial of atrocities was made a general principle, the U.S. would have to put most of its population in jail, because when asked how many Vietnamese were killed in the Vietnam War, the median answer is two percent of the actual figure. "That would be like people in Germany being asked how many Jews died in the Holocaust and giving a median answer of 300,000," he said.

Chomsky suggested that advocates of anti-hate laws are in fact against them. They support such legislation only to silence those whose views they consider offensive. "But try to find someone who favors the principle that the state should ban all falsehoods, all denials of atrocities and massacres. I have never heard of anyone in favor of that."

John Dirlik, a free-lance writer from Quebec, writes on Canadian and Middle East affairs.