They Don't Even Know That They Don't Know 6 страница
DB: There's also a huge increase in fundamentalist media, print, obviously in newspapers and magazines, but particularly in the electronic media. You can't drive across the country.
That was true years ago. I remember driving across the country in the 1950s, being bored out of my head and turning on the radio. Every station I could find was some ranting preacher. Now it's much worse, and of course now there's television.
DB: You talk about the standard techniques and devices that are used to control the population: construction of enemies, both internal and external, the creation of hatreds, religious enthusiasm, and then you say, "the techniques are constant for the same structural reasons." What are those structural reasons?
The structural reason is that power is concentrated. The general policy is exactly the way that Adam Smith described it: it's designed for the benefit of its principal architects, the powerful. It serves the vile maxim of the masters: all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else. Those are the basic rules of the world. The way it works out depends on what the structures are. In our case it happens to be basically corporate structure. Much of the population is going to be harmed by that. Those policies are designed to turn state power into an instrument that works for the wealthy. Maybe there are some crumbs for the rest of the population, maybe not. But that's given.
Somehow you have to get the general public to accept this. Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have. How do you do that? There are not a lot of ways. One way is to frighten people and make them cower in terror that only the great leader can save them. Saddam Hussein is coming. You'd better hide in the sand, and by a miracle I'll save you. Then you save them by a miracle. So the combination of fear and awe is a standard technique, used all the time. Diverting people to other things. Elvis stamps. That's a technique. Professional sports are another. Get people to go insane about somebody or other. It also has the effect of creating attitudes of subservience. Somebody else is doing it, and you're supposed to applaud them. They're doing something you could never dream of doing in your life. So there are many devices, but not a lot. You generally find one or another of them being employed.
DB: You're predicting that the next big target is going to be the schools.
The schools are already a target. I think more generally what's going to happen is one or another move still further towards a two-tiered system designed for the two-tiered society. It's always been that, but more so than before. Better schools and more investment for relatively privileged sectors, what's called "choice." If you're in the slums, by some miracle you might be able to get in. Degradation or even elimination of the public education sector for large numbers of other people.
Increasingly, the assumption that it is not our responsibility as citizens to care for all of the citizens. What you have to do is work for yourself. That means try to create a system in which those with privilege, education and clout can get the education they want for their kids and the rest are out of luck.
DB: The conditions that form the U.S.-Israeli alliance have changed, but have there been any structural changes?
No significant structural changes. It's just that the need for the strategic alliance has intensified. Its viability has increased. The capacity of Israel to serve U.S. interests, at least in the short term, has probably increased. The Clinton administration has made it very clear that it's intending to go even beyond the extreme pro-Israeli bias of the Bush-Baker administration. Their appointment for the Middle East desk of the National Security Council is Martin Indyk, whose background is AIPAC, who has headed a fraudulent research institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, which is basically there so that journalists who want to publish Israeli propaganda, but want to do it objectively, can quote somebody. The one hope that the United States has always had from the so-called peace negotiations is that the traditional tacit alliance between Israel and the family dictatorships that rule the Gulf states will somehow become a little more overt or solidified. And it's conceivable. There is a big problem, however.
The problem is that Israel's plans, which have never changed, to take over and integrate the occupied territories, are running into some objective problems. They have always hoped that in the long run they would be able to reduce the Palestinian population. Many moves were made to try to accelerate that. One of the reasons they instituted an educational system on the West Bank was in the conscious hope that more educated people would want to get out because there wouldn't be any job opportunities. For a long time it worked. They were able to get a lot of people to leave. They now may well be stuck with the population. This is going to cause some real problems, because they're intending to take the water and the land. That may not be so pretty and not so easy.
DB: What's Israel's record of compliance with the more than twenty Security Council resolutions condemning its policies?
It's in a class by itself.
DB: No sanctions, no enforcement?
None. Just to pick one at random: Security Council resolution 425, March 1978, called on Israel to withdraw immediately and unconditionally from Lebanon. They're still there. The request was renewed by the government of Lebanon in February of 1991, when everyone was going at Iraq. You can't do anything. The United States will block it. Many of the Security Council resolutions that the U.S. has vetoed have to do with Israeli aggression or atrocities. For example, take the invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
At first the United States went along with the Security Council condemnations, but within a few days the U.S. had vetoed the major Security Council resolution, which called on everyone to withdraw and stop fighting.
DB: The U.S. has gone along with the last few UN resolutions or deportations.
The U.S. gone along, but refused to allow them to have any teeth. The crucial question is, do you do anything about it? For example, the United States went along with the Security Council resolution condemning the annexation of the Golan Heights. But when the time came to do something about it, that stopped.
DB: Lebanon is a dumping ground for deportees. Israel has taken and dropped by helicopter and bussed scores of deportees 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 of them by helicopter into the outskirts of Sidon, Lebanon couldn't refuse. This time Israel, I think, made a tactical error. The deportation of 415 people is going to be very hard for them to deal with. It's an interesting background. I just read in Ha'aretz, the main Israeli journal, that the Shabak, the secret police, stated, which they rarely do, that they had only asked for seven people to be deported. The other four hundred or so were taken by the Labor government and added. Shabak announced that it wasn't on their initiative. They never said anything about deporting them.
But taking this big class of people, mostly intellectuals, clerics, etc., and putting them in the mountains of southern Lebanon, where it's freezing and they may start dying, that's not going to look pretty in front of the TV cameras, which is the only thing that matters. So they may have some problems, because they're not going to let them back in.
DB: International law transcends state law, but Israel says these resolutions are not applicable. How are they not applicable?
Just like they're not applicable to the United States. The United States was condemned by the World Court. States do what they feel like. Of course, small states have to obey. Israel's not a small state. It's an appendage to the world superpower, so it does what the United States says it has to do. The United States tells it: You don't have to obey any of these resolutions, therefore they're null and void. As they are when the U.S. gets condemned. The U.S. never gets condemned by a Security Council resolution, because it vetoes them. But there are repeated Security Council resolutions condemning the United States which would have passed if it was any other country, and the General Assembly all the time. Take, say, the invasion of Panama. There were two resolutions in the Security Council condemning the United States for the invasion of Panama. We vetoed them both.
DB: I remember talking to Mona Rishmawi of Al Haq in Ramalla. She told me that when she would go to court, she wouldn't know whether the Israeli prosecutor would prosecute her clients under British mandate emergency law, Jordanian law, Israeli law, or Ottoman law.
Or their own laws. There are administrative regulations, some of which are never published. The whole idea is a joke, as any Palestinian lawyer will tell you. There is no law in the occupied territories. There's just pure authority. Even within Israel itself, the legal system is a joke when it comes to Arabs. It has to be covered up here. Arab defendants who come to the Supreme Court come after having been convicted. The convictions are in the high ninetieth percentile based on confessions. When people confess, everybody knows what that means. Finally, after about sixteen years, when one of the people who confessed and was tried turned out to be a Druse army veteran who was proven to have been innocent, it became a scandal. There was an investigation, and the Supreme Court stated that for sixteen years the secret services had been lying to them, had been torturing people and telling them that they hadn't. There was a big fuss in Israel about the fact that they had been lying to the Supreme Court. How could you have a democracy when they lie to the Supreme Court? Not the torture. Everyone knew it all along.
I recall once after an Amnesty International investigation of torture in Israel, one of the Supreme Court justices was in London and was interviewed by Amnesty International. They asked him, could he explain the extremely high percentage of confessions of Arabs. He said, "It's part of their nature" to confess. That's the Israeli legal system.
DB: About the deportations again: I heard Steven Solarz on the BBC a couple of weeks ago. He said the world has a double standard. Seven hundred thousand Yemenis were expelled from Saudi Arabia and no one said a word. Which is true. Four hundred and fifteen 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 is screaming. What about this other atrocity? There is always somebody who has committed a worse atrocity. For a Stalinist like Solarz -- which is exactly what is he, the typical Stalinist hack -- why not use the same line? In fact, as Solarz knows, Israel is treated with a very gentle hand, and the expulsion of Yemenis was part of the propaganda build-up for the war in the Gulf, hence acceptable.
DB: Israel's record and its attitude toward Hamas have evolved over the years. It once held it in favor, did it not?
They not only held it in favor, they tried to organize and stimulate it. In the early days of the intifada, Israel was sponsoring Islamic fundamentalists. If there was a strike of students at some West Bank university, the Israel army would sometimes bus in Islamic fundamentalists to break up the strike. Sheikh Yaseen, an anti-Semitic maniac down in Gaza, who is 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. Chaim Weizman, seventy years ago, was saying, Our danger is Arab moderates, not the Arab extremists. The invasion of Lebanon was the same thing. They invaded Lebanon openly in order to destroy the PLO, which was a threat because it was secular and nationalist and calling for negotiations and a diplomatic settlement. That was the threat. Not the terrorists. The facts are familiar in Israel, unmentionable here, as part of the general cover-up of crimes of an unusually favored ally. They've done the same thing again, and always make the same mistake.
In Lebanon they went in to destroy the threat of moderation and ended up with Hezbollah on their hands. In the West Bank, they wanted to destroy the threat of moderation, people who wanted to make a political settlement, and they're ending up with Hamas on their hands. The mistake was predictable. The result was predictable. But it's important to recognize how utterly incompetent secret services are. Intelligence agencies make the most astonishing mistakes. For the same reason that academics do. They've got the same kind of background, the same assumptions. Especially when they're in a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier, the dominant power, has to justify what they're doing. There is only one way to do it, that's to become a racist: you have to blame the victim. Once you become a racist in self-defense, you've lost your capacity to understand what's happening. This is a very standard procedure. The U.S. in Indochina was the same. They never could understand. The FBI right here is the same. They make the most astonishing mistakes, for similar reasons.
DB: Get us through these Orwellisms of "security zone" and "buffer zone."
In southern Lebanon? That's what Israel calls it, and that's how it's referred to in the media. Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978. It was obvious at the time that the Camp David negotiations would have the consequence that they did, namely freeing Israel up to attack Lebanon and integrate the occupied territories by eliminating Egypt as a deterrent. Any kindergarten child could have seen that, and by now it's even conceded. So Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and held on to it. That's when the resolution was passed. They usually held on to it through clients, at the time it was the Haddad militia.
When Israel invaded in 1982, the border had not been quiet. There had been a lot of violence across the border, all from Israel north. There was an American-brokered ceasefire which the PLO had held to scrupulously. But Israel carried out literally thousands of provocative actions, including heavy bombing of civilian targets in an effort to try to get the PLO to do something so that they'd have an excuse for the invasion that finally took place. It's interesting the way that period is portrayed in American journalism. Universally it is portrayed as the period when the PLO was bombarding Israeli settlements. What was happening in fact was that Israel was bombing and invading north of the border and the PLO wasn't responding. They were trying at that time to move towards a negotiated settlement. Israel invaded Lebanon. We know what happened then. 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 they couldn't control. They were forced out. They held on to the southern zone, which they call a "security zone," but there's no reason to believe that it has the slightest thing to do with security. It's their foothold in Lebanon. It's run by a mercenary army, the South Lebanon Army, backed up by Israeli troops. They're very brutal. It's got horrible torture chambers. We don't know the full details, because they refuse to allow any inspections, by the Red Cross or anyone else. But there have been investigations by human rights groups, journalists and others who attest to overwhelming evidence from independent sources, people who got out, what goes on there, even Israeli sources. There was actually an Israeli soldier who committed suicide there because he couldn't stand what was going on. Some others have written about it in the Hebrew press. Ansar is the main one, which they very nicely put in the town of Khiyam which is a place where they carried out a massacre back in 1948. There was another massacre by the Haddad militia under Israeli eyes in 1982. That's mainly for Lebanese who refuse to cooperate with the South Lebanon Army. That's the security zone.
DB: Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman, in a January 11, 1993 letter to the New York Times, says that since assuming leadership the Rabin government has "unambiguously demonstrated its commitment to the peace process." "Israel is the last party that has to prove its desire to make peace." What's been the Rabin record?
It's perfectly true that Israel wants peace. So did Hitler. Everybody wants peace. When you say somebody wants peace, that's a tautology. 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 has spent the last couple of years in Gaza doing human rights work. She reported what everyone reports, and what everybody with a brain knew: As soon as Rabin came it got tougher. He's the iron fist man. That's his record. Actually, Likud had a better record in the territories than Labor did. Torture and collective punishment stopped under Likud. There was one period when Sharon was there that it was bad, but under Begin it was generally better. When the Labor party came back into the government in 1984, torture started again, collective repression started again, the intifada came. Rabin stated publicly, it was published in February 1989 to a bunch of Peace Now leaders, that the negotiations with the PLO didn't mean anything. It was going to give him time to crush them by force, and they will be crushed, he said, they will be broken.
DB: It hasn't happened.
It happened. The intifada was pretty dead. He has awakened it again. His own violence has succeeded in reawakening the intifada. Several things, including the recent expulsion. But the increased repression after Rabin came in did reawaken the rather dormant protests and resistance -- possibly people just wanted to be left alone, they couldn't take any more. Rabin succeeded in reawakening it. He has increased settlement in the occupied territories, exactly as everyone predicted. There was a very highly publicized cutoff of settlement. It was obvious 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 economy couldn't handle it. So he eased back to a more rational settlement program. I think the current number is eleven thousand new housing units going up. Labor tends to have a more rational policy than Likud, one of the reasons the U.S. has always preferred Labor. They do it more quietly, less brazenly. Also, it's more realistic. Instead of trying to make seven big areas of settlement, they're down to four. But the theory is the same: try to break up the West Bank in a way which will make full Jewish settlement everywhere that's worthwhile, but surrounding pockets of Arab population concentration. So big highways, a network of highways connecting Jewish settlements, avoiding some little Arab village way up in the hills. All of this is continuing. The goal is to arrange the settlements so that they separate the Palestinian areas, so that there's no connection between them. That's to make certain that any form of local autonomy will never turn into any meaningful form of self government. That's continuing, and the U.S. is of course funding it, because it's in favor of it, as it always was. But true, Rabin is delighted to have a peace process if it can be on his terms.
DB: 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 any Palestinian national anspirations.
You might look back at the Zionist movement. There was plenty of killing of Jews by other Jews. They killed collaborators, traitors, people they thought were traitors. And they were under nothing like the harsh conditions of the Israeli occupation. As plenty of Israelis have pointed out, the British weren't nice, but they were gentlemen compared with us. The first Haganah assassination, the Labor-based defense force, the first that's recorded, at least, was in 1921. I looked it up in the official Haganah history. It's described there straight. A Dutch Jew named Jacob de Haan, because he was trying to approach local Palestinians to see if things could be worked out between the new settlers and the Palestinians, had to be killed. One of the murderers is assumed to be the woman who later became the wife of the first President of Israel. They said in the history that another reason for assassinating him was that he was a homosexual. Don't want those guys around. There were Haganah torture chambers, assassins. Yitzhak Shamir became head of the Stern gang by killing the guy who was designated to be the head. Shamir was supposed to take a walk with him on a beach. He never came back. Everyone knows Shamir killed him. The American revolution was no different.
As the intifada began to self-destruct under tremendous repression, this killing got completely out of hand. It began to be a matter of settling old scores, gangsters killing anybody they disliked. Originally it was pretty disciplined. But when the repression got harsh enough and the leadership was taken away, thrown into concentration camps, the thing deteriorated. It ended up with a lot of random killing, which Israel loves. Then they can point out how rotten the Arabs are.
DB: It's a dangerous neighborhood.
Yes, it is. They help make it dangerous.
DB: David Frum, a Canadian journalist, in the January 2, 1993 Financial Post, calls you, among other things, the "great American crackpot." I think that ranks up there with the New Republic's Martin Peretz's comment placing you "outside the pale of intellectual responsibility." But Frum actually has some substantive things to say: "There was a time when the New York Times op ed page was your stomping ground." Have I missed something here?
I guess I did too. I did once have an op ed, one. It was in 1971, I guess. I had testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This was the period when everybody in the New York Times was deciding we'd better get out of Vietnam because it was costing us too much. Senator Fulbright had in effect turned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee into a seminar. He was very turned off by the war at that time, by American foreign policy. He invited me to testify. That was respectable enough. So they ran a segment of ...
DB: Excerpts of your comments. There wasn't an original piece you had written for the Times.
Maybe it was slightly edited, but it was essentially a piece of my testimony at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So it's true, the Times did publish a piece of testimony at the Foreign Relations Committee.
DB: And that was your "stomping grounds." What about letters? How many letters of yours have they printed?
Occasionally, when something appeared there which was an outlandish slander and lie about me, I've written back to them. Usually they don't publish the letters. Sometimes I was angry enough that I contacted friends who were able to put enough pressure on so they would run a letter of response.
DB: I haven't seen one in years.
Sometimes they just refuse. In the Times Book Review there were a bunch of vicious lies about me and the Khmer Rouge. I wrote back a short letter responding, and they just refused to publish it. I got annoyed and wrote back and I actually got a response, saying, we published a different letter that we thought was better.
DB: David Frum just can't stop lavishing praise upon you. He says, "Your views are exactly like the stuff peddled by Lyndon LaRouche and the Christic Institute." You had an incident involving the Larouchies that you've mentioned in several talks.
It went as far as death threats. I had been following them pretty closely, partly because I knew some of the kids involved. They were children of personal friends. It grew out of the Columbia strike in 1968. Originally it was the National Caucus of Labor Committees. It was a Marxist group of serious young people who were going to live in working-class areas and organize people. You could like it or dislike it. It was perfectly rational. This guy Lyndon LaRouche, who had some other name then, was the guru. At first he looked like some sort of standard ex-Trotskyite. After a while you could see what was happening. These are hard things to do. You're giving up your life, your career, the only world you live in is your surroundings. He gradually began to introduce slightly crazy themes into the ideology. You could see him do it little by little. At each point everyone in the group, nineteen-year-old kids, had to make a decision: Am I going to go along with this or am I going to give up my life? A lot of people went along. After a while they were off in outer space. The positions were so insane you couldn't even talk about it.
They then got quite violent. They started something called Operation Mop-Up. They were going to take the hegemony of the left by going into some movement meeting with baseball bats and beating everyone over the head. At first nobody knew what to do about it. After a while they figured, OK, we'll come back with bigger baseball bats. The next thing they started was what amounted to an extortion racket against parents. A lot of the kids had middle-class parents. The idea was to go back to your parents and tell them that unless they sold the store and gave it to LaRouche, they were enemies of the human race, objective fascists, and you were never going to have anything to do with them again.
This went on for a while. I started getting approached at talks I was giving. Some old couple would come up. I remember once a couple came up, a guy who had a little grocery store somewhere. He told me this was what his kids were saying, what did I think he ought to do? Usually I didn't answer. This once I said, if you want me to tell you the truth, I'll tell you the truth. I told him what I thought. About a week later I got a message signed Labor Committee Intelligence Service: our Intelligence Service has learned that you're spreading rumors about the party. You have one week to clear yourself of these charges. I threw it into the waste basket. Shortly after their newspaper started coming out with crazed attacks. The funniest one was a pamphlet they put out for the Bicentennial, July 4, 1976. It was called "Terrorist Commanders." It had on the front a picture of me and Marc Raskin. It was quite amusing. It was about how the two of us run the KGB and the CIA and the PLO and the Queen of England and whoever else was in their conspiracy at the time. They said we were planning to put atom bombs in major U.S. cities at the time of the Bicentennial. I got it in August, a month after. Usually these end-of-the-world people, when it doesn't happen they have some reason. But they were still predicting it a month after it didn't happen. That was put on the windshield of my car with a death threat scribbled on it. I won't go into the details of what happened next. I didn't hear from them for a while. Since then it's similar things.
DB: Anyone who comes to visit your office at MIT will see a very large black and white photograph of Bertrand Russell in the hallway next to your door. What's the story behind that photograph?
He's one of the very few people that I actually admire. I did have a big photograph of him. The office was vandalized during the Vietnam War years. A sauerkraut bomber. One of the things that was destroyed was that picture. Somebody succeeded in putting up another one.
DB: So does Russell exemplify the responsibility of intellectuals?
Nobody is a hero, but he had a lot of very good characteristics and did a lot of things that I admire.
DB: You do endless rounds of interviews, and I certainly inflict a fair share of them on you, how do you keep awake, much less sustain interest? What constitutes a good interview? What engages you? The questions are interminable, and usually the same.
They're not always quite the same. And I have to rethink things anyway. These are very important and interesting topics, and as long as people are interested in them, I'm going to keep talking about them.
DB: You can stay awake?
Most of the time.
DB: Thank you.