One Arab World

Take the Unites States, now take that the American democracy doesn’t functions very well, but it certainly has the formal structure of a democracy. Its probably one of the most religious fanatic countries in the world. I mean how many people in Egypt think that humans were created 6000 years ago in their present form.

(E): We have (mummified) proof that they weren’t actually.

(C): What percentage of the people in Egypt, or in any country would believe that? It is about 50% in the United States. I mean the level of religious fundamentalism in the United States is beyond any country I know. And it has been for a long time, it goes back to the colonists; after all, this place we are sitting in has been conquered by religious extremists from England. The King waiving the holy book, claiming to be the children of Israel, exterminating the Malachite’s, and then as they spread across the continent a lot of it was Scotch-Irish and other religious fundamentalist. There have been repeated events in the United States called great awakenings and big religious revivals, which have enormous influence actually the most recent was in the 1950’s, that far back, and that’s when the “Under God” was put into the Pledge of Allegiance and “In god we trust” and we are having one right now. In Egypt for example, is there a problem about teaching evolution in schools?

(E): I don’t believe it is actually taught in government schools.

(C): I am surprised to hear that. There are democratic tendencies that come from all over the place. I mean say in Latin America, just recently in the past several decades. The strongest forces for democracy were coming in from Catholic Church. That’s why the United States launched a major war against the Catholic Church in Latin America, it’s just too democratic. That’s liberation theology. Trying to organize the peasants to read the gospels, which was considered sacrilegious because the gospels are a revolutionary tract, that’s why when Constantine took over Christianity and made it state religion in Rome he turned it from revolutionary doctrine, which is what the gospels are, to The Church in the Roman Empire. But to get the people to actually read the gospels and think what they say is pretty radical and when the priests and nuns tried to do that and organize peasants to follow the teachings of the gospels, they were slaughtered. Right there (pointing to a painting on the wall of his office) the murdered archbishop and the six leading Jesuit intellectuals who were slaughtered by the US backed forces. That was just typical. It’s kind of interesting, it’s a horrible story but it sort of frames the decade in the 1980’s. The people in power in Washington right now pretty; much the same government. Decade started with the murder of an archbishop, who was voice of the voiceless and ended with the murder of 6 leading Latin American intellectuals happened to be Jesuit priests, their house keeper, and daughter by an elite battalion armed and trained by the United States who had already slaughters tens of thousands of people. I mean if anything like that happened to Czechoslovakia everybody would know about it. Since it was done by US backed forces, no body knows about it. At least no body north of the Rio Grand, you go to Latin America, a lot of people know about it, but in North America or Europe almost no body, because we don’t pay attention to our atrocities…but that was religious. What will happen in Egypt depends on the Egyptian phenomenon, and tendency. I don’t see any inherent reason why the Muslim Brotherhood couldn’t be part of the majority part of the democratic culture. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But that for Egypt to work out.

(E): Let me move on to our next question by Ibrahim Saada, former editor-in-chief of Egypt’s Akhbar al-Yom: After losing significant popularity and having to deal with intense infighting at every maneuver, Sharon left the Likud party which he helped form in order to form Kadima. Pares, after losing leadership of the Labor party, also quit his party of forty years to join Sharon. Many believe Sharon to be the only one in Israel capable of delivering peace. Do you think there is any real hope that this Old Guard will deliver and implement a viable peace offer?

(C): If I can pat my self on the back for saying something obvious. About a month before Sharon pulled out of Likud, I had an interview with the Haaretz in which they asked me what I thought was happening in Israeli politics and I said what seemed obvious, there would be a realignment. Peres and Sharon would form a party of the right wing which they would call moderate. The remnants of Likud would be right wing extremist, Jews from Brooklyn and so on. And the labor part would somehow reconstitute and become socio-democratic or something like that. That’s pretty much what happened. I mean Sharon and Peres make a good team. Sharon hasn’t changed a bit; ever. He is exactly what he always was. The policies he is now pursuing are his traditional policies. To talk about making peace is extremely misleading, peace is better than war, but peace is no value in its self, I mean Germany imposed peace on Europe. If there hadn’t been a war, then (Nazi) Germany would still be running Europe, it would be peaceful. Would that be wonderful? I mean Eastern Europe was perfectly peaceful with a couple of outbreaks, (but) very peaceful under Russian rule. Is that wonderful? Did we all love it? Peace can come in all kind of varieties, the question is whether there would be any kind of a just peace and that’s the last thing on Sharon’s mind. Its been obvious for thirty five years what a just peace is, in fact its pretty much what Sadat offered Israel in 1971. It was a full peace treaty in return for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. I don’t think Sadat cared much about the West Bank. He meant withdrawal from Sinai. Were Israel was then expanded though North Eastern Sinai. Well that’s when Israel rejected the offer, and the US decided to back Israel. And since then there has been no possibility of a just peace. By the mid 70’s the Palestinian issue had reached the international agenda, prior to that it wasn’t so Sadat said nothing about the Palestinians in his peace offer just as UN 242 says nothing. By the mid 70’s the Palestinian nationalism began to be recognized, in January 1976 Syria with the support of Egypt and Jordan and the other states, put forth a resolution in the UN security council, calling for a peace, in accord with the UN 242, the main diplomatic document, but different in that there would be a Palestinian state in the areas that Israel occupied. Go back to UN 242 borders but with the Palestine State, maybe minor, mutual adjustments to the borders, which was the original intent of 242. Well the US Vetoed it. When the US veto’s something, it’s a double veto. First of all it doesn’t pass, and second of all is out of history, just like the master of the Jesuits, since the US did it, it was out of history. If Russians had done it, big event in history, this one is out history, it would have to go to obscurer scholarly texts just to find out if it happened. US vetoed another one in 1980. In 1979 Israel and United States did accept Saddat’s offer, they were forced to by the 1973 war. 1973 war was a very close thing for Israel, it made them recognize that they can’t just dismiss Egypt that’s a viscid case. So Kissinger realized that they have to make some kind of deal and they basically accepted Saddat’s original offer. But this time, in harsher terms from their point of view, because by that time it involved the Palestinian state. But at Camp David in 1979, effectively, the US and Israel accepted Saddat’s 1971 offer. Well since the United States owns history, the way that it comes down in history is a very diplomatic achievement. Actually it was a diplomatic disaster. It was Washington’s refusal to accept the offer in 1971, that led to the 1973 war which was a very bad war, might have led to a nuclear declare war and all kind of suffering and so on, but they finally accepted but of course had to deal with the triumph, meanwhile, year after year in 1980, the US vetoed another security council resolution calling for a two state settlement and so it continues year after year. I mean I won’t go thru all the details, but its still happening. I mean Israel and the United States have never been willing to accept the international consensus which is over whelming, on a two state settlement; actually the only break from this rejectionism…

(C): Taba. The Taba negotiations in the end of January 2001 came fairly close to, there was still a lot to do, but it was pretty close to the international consensus. There were still things to work out but it was close, and if the Taba negotiations had continued, it might well have led to a peaceful settlement. Israel pulled out, Sharon came in, and he had no use for a political settlement, and he doesn’t want it now either. And he and Bush are busily at work making sure that there will never be a peaceful settlement or anything like the international consensus, that’s what the separation wall is about, that’s what the infrastructure development is about and so on, to make sure that there can’t be a peace that involves a viable Palestinian entity. Nothing has changed; certainly Sharon’s policies now are pretty much the same as the ones he announced in 1992.

(E): Well what do you think drives the United States policy towards where it is?

(C): Well there’s debate about this, but my own feeling is it’s partially through strategic and geo-political interests like most policies. I mean you can sort of see the evolution of US policy has changed over the years, so in the 1950’s for example, the US didn’t have particularly close relations with Israel, in fact in 1956 it ordered Israel to leave Sinai. And Israel of course had to do it, because it had to do what the big boys say. It began to change a little in the 1960’s. But not much, the real change was in 1967 when Israel performed a major service to the United States, by destroying Nasser. First of all Nasser was one of the pillars of the non-aligned movement and the United States detested the non-aligned movement. Two years before Nasser’s defeat, Sukarno in Indonesia, was kicked out by a major massacre; one of the worst massacres in the twentieth century. CIA compared it to Stalin and Hitler. The west just loved it; I mean such euphoria they couldn’t control themselves, because the military coupe which killed maybe a million people, mostly landless peasants, destroyed any elements of Indonesian democracy, opened the country up to western exportation and knocked out a pillar of the non align movement, which they detested. In 1967 Israel did the same thing to Nasser and that was very important at the time, because as you recall there was virtually a war going on between Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and the west was very concerned that the Nasserite secular nationalism might spread and there were even concerns that Nasser represented a feeling in the Arab world, that the wealth of the region should go to its own people; not be sent abroad over to a small bunch of gangsters who run the oil states for the benefits of foreigners. I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if Saudi Arabia cooperated in that work. We don’t have documents from Saudi Arabia, but it would not be a great surprise to discover that there were meetings between Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel on how to get rid of Nasser. The logic fits, any way that happened, so the thread of secular nationalism was destroyed. It became clear that Israel was a real strategic asset that had already been more or less assumed, so in the 1958, which was a very important year in the Middle Eastern affairs. The Iraqi revolution, which kicked out the British and broke the Anglo American condominium royal, there was a lot of deep concerns about that. And in fact if you look at the national Security Council and CIA documents from those years which we have, they recognize that. One document says “a logical corollary of Arab opposition to Arab nationalism is support for Israel as the one reliable Western out-post in the region.” that’s 1958. In fact Israel cooperated with Britain allowing over-flights to Jordan and so on, and they say Israel is the only state in the region that’s cooperating with us, so that’s logical. Well they didn’t do much about it until 1967, after that the relationship just took off, and since then Israel has been considered a major part of the general US system for controlling Middle East oil. You can argue about whether it is rational or not, but it’s not irrational. The Nixon administration, described Israel as one of the local cops on the beat, and the problem is to control the oil producing regions and to protect the monarchies, because they run them the way we like, so they control the oil producing regions, protect the monarchies from their own population. To do that you need local cops on the beat, periphery states, non-Arab, there is a collection of them, Turkey was the main one, Israel is another, Iran as long as it was under the Shah, Pakistan was for a while,and that’s the periphery. Those are the local cops. The police head quarters is in Washington obviously, and there is a branch office in London, so if anything really goes wrong, they bring in the big muscle, but that’s supposed to keep the major powers in control. I think that’s pretty much what’s been working.

(K): Do you see benefit in the Bush administrations attempt to apply domino theory to today’s Middle East especially since what you call the "threat of a good example" in the region is unfortunately not noticeably coming?

(The domino theory was a 20th Century foreign policy theory that speculated if one land in a region came under the influence of Communists, then more would follow in a domino effect. The domino effect indicates that some change, small in itself, will cause a similar change nearby, which then will cause another similar change, and so on in linear sequence, by analogy to a falling row of dominoes standing on end. The "threat of a good example" is that a country could successfully develop outside the U.S. sphere of influence, thus presenting a model for other countries, including countries in which the United States has strong economic interests. Ie China.)

(Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Mass_media_analysis)

(C): Well there are two versions to the domino theory, there is the version that’s given for the public; the public version is that if one of two men wins in Vietnam, he’s going to get into a canoe, and land in California and rape your grandmother, that’s basically the public version. And that’s the way you frighten people who are supporting whatever you’re doing. And then after, if something goes wrong, people make fun of it and say you exaggerated the threat, and so on and so forth. But there is a rational version of the domino theory which is never abandoned, because it is correct. The rational version is that if successful dependent development takes place anywhere in the tinniest spot in the world, it might be helpful, to use the terminology of planners; it might be a virus that would infect others who might try to do the same thing, and then the infection may spread and then pretty soon you’re losing control of important places. Actually that’s why the US attacked South Vietnam, as they did in 1962; they were concerned that it was a potential virus. Vietnam had no special resources, but successful independent development in Vietnam might spread to Thailand, the others might reach Indonesia and then you’re really in trouble. That’s why after the Indonesian massacre, which inoculated Indonesia from the virus, top planners thought well maybe we (should) stop the war in Vietnam. George Bundy, the national security advisor, latter said that’s why we should have stopped it, because Vietnam was destroyed, it’s not going to be a virus and Indonesia was secured, massacre and dictatorship. And it’s the same every where in the world. So that version of the domino theory makes perfect sense it’s never abandoned and yes it’s the thread of a good example. Cuba is the same, why is the United States so dedicated to destroying Cuba. Take a look back at the documents from the Kennedy years, makes it very plain, its with Arthur Slazenger the historian who is Kennedy’s Latin American advisor, an internal documents says the fear is what he called the spread of the Castro idea of taking the matter s into your own hands which may impress others in the region who are suffering from the same kind of oppression that the Cuban people where under the dictator we supported. You got to stop that. Same with the Middle East, that’s why the United States has always been opposed to efforts of democracy in the Middle East. In fact you see it right today in Iraq. The US has been strongly opposed to democracy in Iraq. The talk about democracy came along… you just have to look at the time. When the US invaded Iraq, the US and Britain, the reason was what Bush and Blair, and Powell and the rest of them called a single question. It’s a single question; will Saddam give up his weapons of mass destruction? That’s how he got authorization for the use of force, that’s how they frightened the population into supporting it and so on; a single question. Well, a couple of weeks after the invasion the single question was answered, it had the wrong answer, all of a sudden it turned out that the real reason was not the single question. And I bet rather what they call Bush’s messy addition to bring democracy to the Middle East and so on. If this was happening in North Korea, we’d laugh. But since its happening here we have to pretend to be serious. How come that became the messy addition after we didn’t find the weapons of mass destruction. Well you take a look since then, you find out that there isn’t a particle of evidence that the US is supporting democracy anywhere, and the only evidence for it is that they say so. But every body says so, Stalin said the same thing. The evidence is all opposed. Take Egypt for an example. Did bush initiate the kifaya movement? No, it started with the intifada, and then picked up again the invasion of Iraq. And they say it’s an imperial movement, its not. The US doesn’t want it anymore than it wants the Muslim brotherhood. Take Iraq. The US and Britain tried in every possible way to prevent elections in Iraq. Prevent them. They tried all sorts of alternatives; the caucus system, and so on. They were finally forced to accept the elections, why? Because there was massive non-violent resistance. They don’t care about insurgents, them they can kill, but what they do care about is the mass popular movements, for which Sistani was a kind of a symbol, which simply demanded election. Finally the US and Britain had to back down, and permit election, and then of course they immediately turned and tried to subvert them, which is what they are doing now. I mean, they want to make sure that they can impose in Iraq a stable client state of the kind that the US has in El Salvador, or Russians had in Poland, or for that matter the Germans had in Visio-France, a state run by the local authorities. Take Poland under the Russians, Polish police, Polish duty forces, Polish civilians, but you stay within the framework of Russian control. If anything happens they send in the troops. Just like in El Salvador, Nicaragua and so on. Just like Germany in occupied Europe. Visio-France wasn’t run by Germans, it was run by French. India was run by Indians, some British around, but mostly Indians, that’s imperialism. Egypt was a virtual British colony, but it was ruin by Egyptians on the ground. That’s normal, they are trying to see what they can impose that on Iraq, which won’t be easy, but that’s what they are trying to do. And crucially they want to prevent Iraqis from achieving their own goals. We know pretty well what they are, they kind of suppressed the polls recently because they don’t like the way they are coming out. There are some, the British defense ministry did a poll in Iraq a couple of month ago, and it was a secret, but it leaked, through the British press. I don’t think they reported it here, but what it found was that about 80% of the Iraqis want the occupying forces to leave. 1% thinks that they help with security, and almost half think that it’s legitimate to attack them. Well Bush and Blair immediately said there will be no timetable for withdrawal, so now what you think that, we are making up what goes on in your democracy, same with opening up the economy. I mean Iraqi’s don’t want to sell of the economy to foreign investors, but the US is trying very hard to impose liberalization which in effect allows foreigners, meaning mostly the US and Britain, to take over the economy, and so on down the line. I mean there is a lot of labor organization in Iraq, very courageous. The US absolutely doesn’t want unions any more than Britain does. Because they are a core of a functioning democracy, so they have to be smashed. In fact the US is still imposing Saddam’s labor laws to prevent organizing and its right across the line. I mean, why should the US be willing to tolerate democracy and independence? It doesn’t make any sense. I mean just ask your self, suppose that Iraq was granted sovereignty and was more or less democratic; that would be a nightmare for the United States. It’s got a Shiite majority; they will obviously be influential. They would prefer friendly relations with Iran, over hustle relations. A lot of them have close Iranian connections all around… the majority of the clerks come from there including Sistani, they were already setting up relations. I mean it’s the last thing Washington wants. Further more there is a Shiite population right across the border in Saudi Arabia, which happens to be were most of the Saudi oil is, they are repressed, but independent Iraq would be a model for them. A threat of a good example again. I mean you can imagine a Shiite alliance controlling most of the world’s oil, independent of Washington, tied up with Iran, probably turning to the east, to China, I mean you cant imagine a worse nightmare to Washington. Furthermore, if Iraq ever became independent, chances are that it would try to regain its natural position in the Arab world, as a leading power in the Arab world. It goes back to the biblical times. So yes they would try to regain it, which means rearming to confront the regional enemy and everyone knows who that is. Probably developing nuclear weapons as a deterrent. The United States is going to sit by and watch that? Those are the natural consequences, it’s not inevitable, but those are the likely outcomes of allowing a sovereign democratic Iraq. So of course the US will do everything it can to prevent it and of course Bush and Condoleezza rice never end their talk about democracy. But any one with a brain functioning knows that you don’t pay any attention to the declarations of leaders. I mean every leader you can imagine is full of benign intent, Hitler, Stalin, just run through the list. Sadam Husain; they are all just overflowing with kindness and love, and want to bring freedom and democracy, and justice everywhere. That’s why nobody with their brain functioning pays any attention to the declarations of benign intent by people in power. The declarations are completely predictable, they carry no information whatsoever, and so you ignore them. I mean you look at the actions, you look at the actions and you will see exactly what it means. Take Palestine again, does the US want to press for anything like the Taba arrangement? No, it’s out of the question. The US is supporting the separation wall, which is pretty much going to be the boundary or something like it, and if you look were it goes, Bethlehem for an example, its almost completely surrounded by now. The wall goes way to the east of Malal Demim, Arial, it basically turns the West Bank into three separated cantons. Sharon has recently announced they are going to keep the Jordan gallery. All this is down with US support, they can’t do anything unless the US supports it, so what they are doing is turning it into three prisons separated from a tiny peace of east Jerusalem of course separated from Gaza, what kind of peace is that? That could be peace.

(E): According to your wikipedia entry you define yourself as a Zionist; although, you note that your definition of Zionism is widely perceived as anti-Zionism, the result of what you say is a shift in the meaning of Zionism. Could you elaborate on that? Also how do you feel about your being Jewish yet one of Israelis fiercest opponents?

"I was deeply interested in...Zionist affairs and activities — or what was then called 'Zionist,' though the same ideas and concerns are now called 'anti-Zionist.' I was interested in socialist, binationalist options for Palestine, and in the kibbutzim and the whole cooperative labor system that had developed in the Jewish settlement there (the Yishuv)...The vague ideas I had at the time [1947] were to go to Palestine, perhaps to a kibbutz, to try to become involved in efforts at Arab-Jewish cooperation within a socialist framework, opposed to the deeply antidemocratic concept of a Jewish state (a position that was considered well within the mainstream of Zionism)."

(C): I am not one of Israel’s fiercest opponents; in fact I am very favorable, very friendly to the people of Israel. That’s an interesting concept, “Israel’s opponent” it actually has biblical origins, and people who pay attention to the bible should know where it comes from. It comes from King Ahab, who is the absolute epitome of evil of the bible, the most evil king. He called the profit Elijah to him, and he condemned Elijah, and he said to Elijah, why are you a hater of Israel. Why was the profit Elijah a hater of Israel? Because the king like every totalitarian, identifies himself with the country, the society, the culture, and the people and therefore if anyone criticizes the evil king, he is anti-Israel. A hater of Israel. And the term still means the same thing… it’s the same concept here. I’m not Anti-Israel, not at all. In fact read my interview on Harratz, because we go into this. As for being a Zionist, well back around 1940, early 1940’s I was a Zionist youth leader, and I was opposed to a Jewish state, very strongly opposed, but that was considered part of the Zionist movement at the time. We were in favor of Arab-Jewish cooperation’s. Socialist movements… working class cooperation, but no Jewish state. Who wants that any more than an Islamic state? ..and I have basically held to the same positions, I mean obviously times changed, different short term goals, since 1948 my feeling was I didn’t like the establishment of the state, but it was established. So my feeling was to have all the rights of any state in the international system; no more, no less. I don’t like other states either, but I think they should have those rights until we get to one reasonable system, and for the Middle East, and in fact for the most of the world, I think the most reasonable system doesn’t have states. In fact no body wants to go back to the Ottoman Empire obviously. But there were some things about the Ottoman Empire which were correct; the Ottoman Empire did not have state boundaries. You could go from Egypt to Istanbul, crossing any border posts, and people were more or less left alone. So in the Armenian sector of town, Armenians were at it, the Greeks sector, the Greeks were at it, and there was a lot of the informal fluid interaction. That’s a very natural way for societies to be, I think. In fact the nation state system was imposed in Europe by extreme violence, because it’s so unnatural. I mean the state boundaries had nothing to do with people; they were imposed by centuries of savage war. Europe was the most savage place in the world, for centuries because they were trying to impose a nation state system, which has nothing to do with what people are like, it broke it up into all kinds of other ways. And yes you have to do it with violence. Finally they did it, and the only reason the violence stopped was because in 1945 they realized that the next time they do it, they are going to wipe out the world. Ok, so now they stopped. But take the rest of the world, the nation state systems, the boundaries, are mostly the results of European colonialism. They were imposed. They make no sense for the people and that’s why you have violent wars going on all over the place. It’s a residue of the system of the imposing nation states, and I think that system ought to dissolve. It may take steps, a while till you get there; yes the states are the units of international affairs and in the case of Israel and Palestine, I think it should be a two state settlement for now. My feeling all along is that it should be federated. I mean anyone who’s traveled, and sees Jordan to the sea, knows that drawing a line any were doesn’t make any sense, for the people it’s completely senseless. So you can make a move toward some kind of federation and then closer integration as possibilities allow and ultimately a secular state were people can live with one another and have all sorts of relationships that there aren’t on national ethnic lines, there are plenty of other ways for people to interact, but that takes time and first a first step forward for it is the international consensus on two states, federation, moving on and maybe ultimately we can become as civilized as the ottoman empire. Who knows? But is that Zionism, it depends what you mean by Zionism. Back in the 1940’s it was called Zionism. Now it’s called anti-Zionism. I don’t care.

(K): Professor Chomsky thank you so much for the opportunity, do you have anything else to say to the readers of Egypt Today?