Global Warming and The Common Good

Sometimes the attacks on education and the common good are very closely linked. There’s a current illustration which is pretty striking. Several--one of them is what’s called the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act, which is now being proposed to state legislatures by ALEC. That’s the American Legislative Exchange Council. It’s a corporate-funded lobby with tremendous wealth, that designs legislation to serve the needs of the corporate sector and the extreme wealth. It has been quite influential. Well, this particular act, which is just now being proposed, the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act, mandates what they call “balanced teaching,” of climate science in K-12 classrooms. “Balanced teaching,” as you probably know, is a code word that refers to teaching climate change denial. That’s to “balance” authentic climate science--that stuff you read in science journals and other serious publications. And legislation based on these ALEC models have [sic] already been introduced in several states will probably be instituted {inaudible} soon.

This ALEC legislation is based on a project of the Heartland Institute. That's a corporate-funded institute which is dedicated to rejection of the scientific consensus on what’s happening to the climate. The Institute has a project which calls for, in their words, “a global warming curriculum for K-12 classrooms.” And its aim (I’m quoting from it)  is “to teach that there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather.” Of course all of this is dressed up in rhetoric about teaching critical thinking and all sorts of nice things. It’s very similar and parallel, in fact, to the current assault on teaching children about evolution and about science quite generally. All of that has to be balanced with raging controversies.

And there is indeed a controversy. On one side is the overwhelming majority of scientists, all of the worlds’ greatest national academies of sciences, the professional societies of science, the professional science journals, the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the general groupings of scientists that deals with this. They all agree that global warming is taking place, that there's a substantial human component, that the situation is serious and quite possibly dire, and that very soon, maybe within decades, the world might reach a kind of a tipping point when the process will escalate sharply and will be irreversible. The end of life as we know it, very severe affects on the possibility of decent human survival. Actually it’s very rare to find such overwhelming scientific consensus on complex scientific issues like this.

Now it’s true that it’s not unanimous. There is a controversy. And the media commonly reports, presents, a controversy between the overwhelming scientific consensus, the national institutes of science, the science journals and so on the one side, and on the other side, the skeptics. Actually, among the skeptics, there are a few quite respected scientists who caution that there’s a lot that is unknown--which is correct. The fact that there’s a lot that’s unknown means that things might not be as bad as the consensus claims or they might be a lot worse. That’s what it means to say that much is not known, but only the first alternative is ever brought up. And there’s something omitted from this contrived debate. There’s actually a much larger group of skeptics among scientists, highly regarded climate scientists who regard the regular reports of the IPCC as much too conservative. That includes, for example, the climate change study group at my own university, at MIT. They’ve repeatedly been proven correct over the years. The consensus apparently is too conservative. Things are much worse. But they’re scarcely part of the public debate at all, although they’re very prominent in the scientific literatures you can find if you read the science journals.

Well, the Heartland Institute and ALEC are part of a huge campaign by corporate lobbies. To sew doubt about the near unanimous consensus of scientists that human activities are having a major impact on global warming, with perhaps ominous consequences and not that far off. The campaign is not a secret. It’s openly announced, publicly announced, including the lobbying organizations of the fossil fuel industry, American Chamber of Commerce, the major business lobby and others. It’s had a certain effect on public opinion. So, public opinion in the United States is not quite as concerned about the dangers of what we are doing to the climate as in other comparable countries. But actually a careful study showed that public opinion remains much closer to the scientific consensus than policy is, which is an interesting fact. And that’s undoubtedly why major sectors of the corporate world are launching their attack on the educational system to try to counter the tendency of the public to pay attention to the conclusions of serious scientific research.

You probably heard that at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting, a few weeks ago, Governor Bobby Jindal warned the Republican leadership, as he put it, that, "We must stop being the stupid party... We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters." Actually, ALEC and its corporate backers have a different view. They want the country to be the stupid nation. And maybe, if it is, they’ll even join the stupid party that Jindal warned about.

The major scientific journals give a very clear sense of how surreal all of this is, how, what would it look like to observers, say, watching what’s going on on earth, in fact what it does look like in other countries. So, take Science magazine, the major science weekly, a journal of the American Association for the Advancement Science. A couple of weeks ago, it had three news items side by side. One of them reported that the year 2012 was the hottest year on record in the United States with all kind of harmful consequences all over the country—the drought, the hurricanes, all sorts of things. And, as it pointed out, this is continuing a long trend. The second news item reported a new study by the United States Global Climate Change Research Program, which provided some new evidence for rapid climate change as a result of human activities and also discussed likely severe impacts. The third news item reported the new appointments to chair the committees on science policy chosen by the House of Representatives where a minority of voters elected a large majority of Republicans, thanks to the shredding of the democratic system in recent years. In Pennsylvania, as you probably know, a considerable majority voted for Democrats for the House, but they won barely over a third of the House seats.

So, now we have the three science committees. All of the three chairs deny that humans contribute to climate change. Two of the three chairs deny that climate change is even taking place. And one of them, who denies everything, is also a long time advocate lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry. The same issue of the journal has a detailed technical article which provides new evidence that the irreversible tipping point may be ominously close. That’s a picture of what’s going on, in the context in which the ALEC effort is being introduced to ensure that we become a stupid nation.

For those who Adam Smith called “the masters of mankind,” it’s very important that we become a stupid nation in the interest of their short term profits. Damn the consequences. That’s the conception of the Common Good that they want to institute. These are essential properties of the reigning contemporary doctrines, sometimes called the market fundamentalist doctrines, inherent in these doctrines that you have to have these things going on.

ALEC and its corporate sponsors understand the importance of ensuring that public education train children to belong to the stupid nation and not to be misled by science and rationality. Well, what I mentioned is not the only case by far of pretty sharp diversions between public opinion and public policy. That’s important. It tells us a lot about the state of current American democracy and what it means for us and in fact for the world.

The corporate assault on education and independent thought, of which this incidentally is only one striking illustration, tells us a good deal more.

Let’s turn to policy. In climate policy, the US, which is the richest country in the world with enormous advantages, lags behind other countries. I’ll quote a current scientific review. “109 countries have enacted some form of policy regarding renewable power and 118 countries have set targets for renewable energy. In contrast, the United States has not adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy.”  It’s a current article. Or for that matter, has the US adopted other means that are pursued by countries that have national policies--that means virtually everyone.

Some things are being done, but sporadically and with no organized national commitment--which make some fairly ineffective. Now that’s not a slight problem for us, for your children, grandchildren, maybe not too far off, and for the world, in the light of the great predominance of American power. Indeed, it is declining. It has been for a long time as power is becoming more diversified internationally. But it’s still completely without challenge. It’s also worth mentioning that there are sectors of the world population that are really in the lead in trying to do something about these very dire consequences. It's throughout the world. It's the remnants of the indigenous populations. That’s true just about everywhere, whether they're tribal societies, first nations, aboriginals, whatever they are called.

They’re the leaders worldwide in trying to force some attention to these extremely grave matters. Actually, it’s the first time in human history that humans have been on the verge of destroying themselves, and not too far off. In the countries that have substantial indigenous populations, either majority or near majority, the countries themselves have taken very strong measures. Bolivia, which has an indigenous majority, and Ecuador, near majority, have legislation to preserve the rights of nature, as it's called. In Ecuador, which has substantial oil deposits, there are efforts by the government, under pressure from the indigenous population, to leave the oil in the ground. In fact, now their government is attempting to get some support from European Union, I don’t think they’re approaching the United States to subsidize them in leaving the oil underground so that it won’t destroy all of us. We’re doing the opposite, in fact, right here in Pennsylvania--get it to be used as quickly as possible so it can be as harmful as possible to future generations and to the world. The same is true with indigenous populations elsewhere. India is practically at war over it. Columbia, Australia, wherever you go, Canada--the indigenous populations is trying hard to save the human species while the educated, civilized sectors of the world are trying to destroy the human species.(…)

Question on Fracking

 Chomsky: …a very interesting topic, I think I mentioned that in Ecuador, where there’s a large indigenous population, they’ve … [the issue is] not to not be fracking ...  they have plenty of oil reserves. There are efforts by government not to use the oil and keep it underground because the understanding of the indigenous population is we’re better off if we don’t use it because every bit of it that we use, it harms us. It harms our children. It harms the world--and maybe severe harm. So one possibility is to take the stand of, say, the indigenous tribes in Ecuador and the same much around the world. The other is to take the stand on which, say, Obama and Romney completely agree: "Let's  get all of the oil, the hydrocarbons that are underground, huge quantities. Let's use them all as efficiently as possible. It'll give us a hundred years of energy independence. What’s the world going to look like in a hundred years? That's somebody else’s problem. What’s important is how much money I can make tomorrow." Incidentally, the oil independence issue is almost totally meaningless. I mean, if all of our oil came from, say, Saudi Arabia, we'd have no more dependence than we have today. You can easily see that. The US policies towards the Middle East, say, were exactly the same in the 1950s under Eisenhower, when we didn’t get any oil from the Middle East. In fact, we were the biggest oil exporter. And the US at that time, in the 1950s initiated a program to exhaust domestic oil in the interest of profits for Texas oil producers, so, to use domestic oil, Texas oil, instead of cheaper Saudi oil. Because Texas oil producers would make more profit and then we’d have big holes in the ground which we could fill in, later calling them “the strategic energy reserve.”

But the policies towards controlling the Middle East and controlling Middle East oil were the same. So, forget the energy independent issue. The real issue is “Do we want the consequences of extracting, as hydrocarbons, natural gas and oil to the maximum extent as possible. Well, you can figure out what the consequences are. So, take, say, fracking. I mean it has a lot of local affects. You know, I’m sure you all know about this. It harms water supplies--you know, toxic effects. It's very energy intensive. Natural gas is more efficient than oil, you know, less CO2, but it also releases methane, which is worse than CO2, and it's energy intensive to extract it. But there are other effects like the ... You know, the economic arguments are that fracking and shift to natural gas will give us a transition period in which we’ll have cheap energy which will enable us to transition to renewable energies. OK, so, therefore it's ....

A couple of problems with that. Namely it has the opposite effect. The main one: it has the opposite effect. If you have cheap hydrocarbons in a capitalist society, there’s going to be no incentive to develop renewables. So the more cheap hydrocarbons you have, the longer you put off the time until we begin to do what we got to do if we want to survive turn to renewables. And what is being done in other countries? I mentioned that out of 110 countries, the US is the only one that doesn’t have a national energy policy. If you look elsewhere, countries are doing various things, like in Ecuador. I told you what they were doing to try to keep the oil underground. In China, which is a huge polluter, but it's also by now in the lead internationally in solar energy. It’s producing most of the solar panels and advanced solar panels, the most high-tech, advanced, sophisticated solar panels. So so they’re ahead in the technology and they’re ahead in the scale. We’ve been falling behind. Germany and Denmark are pretty much switching to renewables. They're rich countries. So there are plenty of things that can be done. One of them is to try to maximize the damage, and to put off as long as possible the step towards trying to repair it, which may mean putting it off until it’s all over. That’s what the fracking is. And that’s the national consensus. From Obama to Romney, and everyone  in between. I think that’s pathological, frankly.

(Filmed at the East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, February 6, 2013) by Leigha Cohen Production

---

Noam Chomsky - on Darwinsm

There is the Social Darwinist view that Herbert Spencer is famous for developing that in the capitalist system, it will be nature and “red in blood and claw,” the strongest win. And Goldman Sachs is given as an illustration or maybe IBM and so on. But they’re not illustrations. They’re illustrations of how the nanny state, the powerful state that’s run by the principal architects of policy, designs policy in such a way as to enrich and privilege the designers. What do they have to do with capitalism? I mean there’s kind of a capitalist fringe to it. But what about Herbert Spencer?

Well, at the same time, a little after Herbert Spencer, there was a response much less known. Namely [Peter] Kropotkin: natural historian who wrote a book called Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution. And he argued the exact opposite. He argued that on Darwinian grounds, you’d expect cooperation in mutual aid. And to develop and leading towards community, workers control and so on. Well, he didn’t prove his point. That’s at least as well argued as Herbert Spencer is. In fact, Kropotkin essentially founded what is now called sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. But his contribution is sort of unmentionable because it came out with wrong conclusions. Well, nobody could give right conclusions, human natures probably has all of these factors in it. But some of them are favorable to the interests of the rich and powerful so those do survive. Here, there is, if you like, a Spencerian element. The ideological concoctions that are beneficial to the rich and powerful, they’ll tend to propagate. The ones that are harmful to the interests of the rich and powerful will tend to be marginalized and suppressed. But that has nothing to do with the reality of the world. That has to do with how power systems function.

exceptional post:Japan's nuclear catastrophe, march 2011

the crucial explanation from 18:00 and beyond and also in the Q and A section

the news conference given by Citizens' Nuclear Information Center on March 13, 2011 in Tokyo.

Gaza One Year Later (December, 2009)

[and today, Al Aqsa intifada, ten years later]

Watertown, Massachusetts, December 6, 2009

(transcript I contributed for Democracy Now!)

 

Noam Chomsky: Well, let me begin with two caveats, pitfalls that I think we should be careful to avoid. It’s very important to have this meeting about Gaza, one of the most disgraceful situations in the world. But we should remember that it’s only in US and Israeli policy that Gaza is separated from the West Bank. They are unity. One unit, what’s left of Palestine: 22 percent of the original Mandate. Now, it’s very important for the US and Israel to separate the two and isolate them. For one thing, that means if there ever is some kind of political settlement, the West Bank will be deprived of any access to the outside world; it will be imprisoned. It won’t have the seaport. It’ll essentially be contained by two enemies. So, there is a strategic reason for the longstanding and intense effort to distinguish Gaza and the West Bank to keep them apart, to ban transport and also kind of ideologically to make them seem as if there were two different places. They aren’t, outside of US and Israeli ideology. And we should be careful not to—[it's important] to resist that, I think.

Another division that I think is important to resist is between US and Israel. We constantly talk rightly about Israeli crimes but that’s highly misleading, because they are US-Israeli crimes. There’s nothing that Israel does that goes beyond what the United States authorizes and in fact, directly supports with economic, diplomatic, military and also ideological support that is by framing issues. So, that, there’s this First Amendment exception that Nancy [Murray] mentioned.

So, these are US-Israeli crimes. If we talk about Israel, we should remember we’re talking about ourselves. It’s not like talking about crimes of China. These are very important to keep in mind.

Now, turning to Gaza and the West Bank, the separation of Gaza and the West Bank is part of a much more general policy: policy of fragmentation of the residue of Palestine, so they cannot hope to emerge as a viable entity. Separating Gaza from the West Bank is one part of it. Gaza, as Nancy pointed out, has been converted into a prison. The screws are being steadily tightened so that it becomes a maximum security prison, something like Guantanamo. It’s kind of a little odd on the side that there has been so much horror in the United States about Guantanamo. It’s not very different from the maximum security prisons that the United States runs. And we’re unique in the world, in the western world in having incarceration system of this kind.

So, it’s not just becoming a prison. It’s becoming something like a maximum security prison, which is basically a torture chamber. It’s under constant siege, very harsh and brutal siege. And siege is an act of war. Of all countries in the world, Israel surely is unusual in recognizing that. It twice launched the war in 1956 and 1967 on the grounds that its access to the outside world was very partially restricted. That was considered a crime. And total siege is, of course, a much greater crime.

So, it’s a major war crime that we’re carrying out. Supplies that you just heard are restricted so that you have bare survival. And there’s constant and systematic attacks on all the borders including the coast line to drive the population inland. On the borders, that takes away limited arable land. On the sea, what it is done is drive fishing fleet to a couple of kilometers from the shore, where fishing is impossible because of the conditions that Nancy described. After the destruction of the sewage systems, the power systems and other infrastructure, fish can’t survive and people can’t survive near the sea so that that destroys the fishing industry and it contains Gaza even more narrowly. Again, part of the policy of imprisonment. It sounds like sadism and it is. But it’s kind of rational sadism. It’s achieving well-understood and carefully planned end of US and Israeli policy.

There are also regular atrocities, special atrocities just to keep showing who’s boss. So, at the end of September, Israeli troops entered northern Gaza and kidnapped five children and brought them over to Israel and they disappeared into the Israeli prison system. Nobody knows too much about it. It includes secret prisons which occasionally surface. It’s estimated that roughly a thousand people are there, often for years, without any charge at all, just hidden away somewhere. So these kids probably joined that.

All of this happen with total impunity, happens regularly with complete impunity. That’s part of our ideological contribution to ensuring the crushing of Palestinians. That’s been going on for decades, in fact, in Lebanon and in the high seas. Israel has been hijacking boats on the way from Cyprus to Lebanon. Capturing or sometimes killing, passengers are taken to Israel, some keeping them in prisons, sometimes for decades, sometimes as hostages for eventual release, no charges. Often, we only barely know where they are by occasional surfacing of stories about secret prisons which aren’t published in the United States as they are in Europe and Israel.

And this is, again, in complete impunity because we permit it. We say we’re not going to talk about it so therefore, impunity. This is worth remembering when you read about what’s considered now one of the primary barriers to negotiations: the fate of an Israeli soldier Gilat Shalit, who was captured at the border on June 25^th, 2006. Well, capture of a soldier of an attacking army is some sort of a crime, I suppose. It doesn’t rank very high among crimes. And against the background of constant, hijacking boats, kidnapping of civilians, killing of civilians on the high seas in Lebanon, it doesn’t rank very high. And the situation was made even more dramatic by the fact that one day before corporate Shalit was captured on the border, Israeli troops entered Gaza City, kidnapped two civilians, a doctor and his brother, spirited them across the border, and the two disappeared into the US-backed Israeli secret prison system. And nobody is talking about negotiations to get them out. They are Arabs, so they have no human existence. So, we don’t talk about them. And in fact, it was barely reported here because it’s insignificant. Shalit ought to be returned in prisoner exchange but that’s a toothpick on the mountain—but the one that we talk about.

And other crimes just go on regularly. Like a few days ago, you may have read that Israel banned the shipment of cooking gas into Gaza. Just an act of gratuitous cruelty. It means that—it is used for almost everything. So, that’s gone. The water system is under very severe attack. The International Committee of the Red Cross and the UN Environmental Protection Agency which work there estimate that, by now, only maybe 5 to 10 percent of the water, very limited water in the Strip, is usable.

Israel has constantly attacked the water system. The last invasion, US-backed Israeli invasion a year ago, destroyed around 30 kilometers of pipes and other equipment. Nothing is allowed back in to repair them. So, by now, as Nancy said, children are dying of diseases from poisoned water. And that is going to continue. The Red Cross estimates that if this continues, it would—at the best of circumstances, unless something is done about it—it may take centuries before this region becomes viable, before it’s possible for life to exist there.

Well, this is more rational savagery. A couple of months ago, I was out in California, giving a fund-raising talk for Middle East Children’s Alliance—it’s a marvelous organization. It’s been working in Gaza and other places for years, Barbara Lubin, its director, who had just come back from Gaza, a very heroic woman. And she described, she talked, as Nancy did, about what they found. One of the things they did, the delegation, was to go around the schools and just asked children, if you had one request, what could it be? And they thought they might direct their funding to that. And overwhelmingly, what children said in the schools was that what they would like is a drink of water in the morning. Well. That’s Gaza. And they did manage to find mechanics in the Strip who were able to construct small water purification devices and they’re trying now to fund enough water purification made with local materials, so that maybe children can have a drink of water in the morning. Their fondest wish. Well, that’s what we are doing. We’re doing. And we should remember that.

There’s a purpose. The purpose was explained right at the beginning of the occupation by Moshe Dayan, who was the Minister of Defense in charge of the occupied territories. In late 1967, he informed his colleagues that we should tell the Palestinians in the territories that we have nothing to offer them:“They will live like dogs. And those who will leave, will leave. We’ll see where this ends up.” And that’s the policy. It’s quite rational. “Live like dogs. And we’ll see what happens.” So, yes, sadism, but rational sadism.

And things are not dramatically different in the West Bank. Somewhat, but not much. First of all, everything turning the West Bank, just about everything that’s going on there is in a violation of international law. Gross violation. There’s a lot of talk here about expansion of the settlements. That’s completely diversionary. That has almost nothing to do with the issues. I mean, even if there was no further expansion of the settlements, they already destroyed the possibilities of viable Palestinian existence. Every one of them is illegal and known to be. There isn’t any controversy about it.

In late 1967, Israel was informed by its highest legal authorities—the main one, Theodor Meron, is a very respected international lawyer, a judge in the International Tribunals—he informed the government of what, in fact, is transparent that: “transferring population to occupied territories is in gross violation of the Geneva Conventions.” It’s the foundations of international humanitarian law. The Attorney General affirmed his conclusion. A couple of years ago, as you know, it was reaffirmed by the International Court of Justice. Moshe Dayan, who was in charge, recognized that. In late 1967, he said yes, it’s true, everything we’re doing is in violation of international law, but that’s often done, and so we’ll dismiss it. And he’s right. As long as the Godfather says it’s fine, you can dismiss it. So, yes, we’ll go on carrying out criminal acts. And we’ll debate some minor crime. You know, like debate of expanding settlements to allow natural growth. That’ll divert attention from the real issue, and we’ll be able to believe that our government is somehow acting humanly in an effort to achieve peace.

That, expansion of settlements, which is the big issue that we’re supposed to be excited about, even a ten-month alleged suspension which Hillary Clinton praised as “unprecedented generosity,”—all of that, even that little toothpick is a fraud. When Obama announced that he wanted termination of expansion of settlements, he was just quoting George W. Bush, who had said exactly the same thing. In fact it’s in the so-called Road Map, officially agreed framework for policy. When that’s ever mentioned, it’s rarely pointed out that Israel did accept the Road Map formally, but immediately added 14 reservations which completely eviscerated it.

So, it rejected the Road Map with US acquiescence, so therefore, as Dayan said, yes, fine, we’ll dismiss it. But that’s in the Road Map and Obama repeated it just as Bush did. But he repeated it with a usual wink. When asked, his spokesperson said that: US opposition to the expansion was purely symbolic. He would not go even as far as Bush No.1, who imposed very mild sanctions for expansion of settlements. But Obama made it clear that we’re not going to do it; these are just symbolic statements, so this minor diversionary operation can continue with effective US support.

Well, so it’s all illegal. We permit it, so therefore, it’s fine. It’s authorized. And it expands the principle of fragmentation, which is the core of US-Israeli strategic policy. So, separate Gaza from the West Bank. In the West Bank itself, the program is, for Israel, to take wherever is valuable and break up the rest in two unviable cantons. What’s valuable is, first of all, water resources. It’s a pretty arid region but there is an aquifer. There’s water that runs on the West Bank and Palestinian side of the international border. So, Israel has to annex that. And that’s also some of the most arable land and it’s also the nice suburbs. It’s the pleasant suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, kind of like Lexington where I live, relatively to Boston, a nice place to live. So that all happens to be in the West Bank, so we have to annex that.

And there’s the wall, as you know, snaking through the West Bank. It should properly be called an “annexation wall,” because the plan is to annex everything that is inside it, incorporated within Israel and that’s with a polite smile from the Godfather, so therefore that’s OK.

It’s interesting, in a commemoration of November 9th, the fall of Berlin Wall, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor made an impassioned speech about how we have to bring down all the walls that divide us. But not the one cutting through the West Bank, which is about twice as high as the Berlin Wall and far longer and simply stealing land from defenseless people, thanks to the leader of the free world and us, because we’re allowing it.

So, take over everything that’s valuable, kind of near the border. Take over the Jordan Valley on the other side, it’s about a third of the West Bank. And Palestinians are being kept out of it by one means or another or driven out, that’s being settled. That imprisons what’s left. And what’s left is divided by carefully planned settlement salients which cut through to break it up into parts. So, there's one going east of what’s called Jerusalem, greatly expanded region, “Greater Jerusalem,” expands almost all the way to Jericho. And that essentially bisects the West Bank. There’s another to the north including the town of Ariel. Another one, north to that, goes to Kedumim. So it essentially breaks the region up. There’s technically contiguity where over—through the desert to the east, but that’s essentially unviable.

And what remains is broken up by hundreds of checkpoints which are there primarily for harassment. They move, so nobody knows where they exactly are going to be. But it means, for example, that if you want to visit your cousin two miles away, it may take you five hours to get there if you ever manage. And an ambulance may take two hours to get from one spot to a hospital a couple of miles away because it has to go through checkpoints and a patient has to be carried over, you know, a big barrier, put him on another one on the other side, and so on. These are essentially techniques for harassment. They have no security purpose, even a remote one. But they are perfectly rational to ensure that the population will “live like dogs and if they want to leave, that’s fine, they’ll leave.”

That’s aside from the actions in what’s called Jerusalem, a vastly expanded region around what used to be Jerusalem. There, the actions are doubly illegal. They are not only in violation of international law but they are also in violation of explicit Security Council resolutions barring any modification of the status of Jerusalem. Actually, the US signed and joined those resolutions back in the late 1960’s and for several years afterwards.

So, they are doubly illegal and they continue. I mean, that’s--there's what you read every day in the papers about new buildings, taking over Palestinian homes. And there’s now, just reported that last year Israel radically accelerated its withdrawal of resident status for inhabitants of Jerusalem for whom the courts decided that the center of their life was somewhere else. In that case, you can have your residents removed if you’re Palestinian. There’s no case on record that I know of of an Israeli who had citizenship reduced because the center of their life is in Los Angeles or in New York, for example. So, it’s just another racist law designed to rid the region of sort of “rubble and vermin” that are in the way.

We’re kind of familiar with that in American history. It resonates. That’s why we’re here, basically. Yes, that’s what we did in the conquest of national territory except that the US was much more violent and exterminated the indigenous population. But it’s a familiar pattern. And I suspect that it’s part of the reason for the residual sympathy for Israel’s activities, strikes kind of a cord in our own national history. Maybe one we don’t like to look at very much.

Expropriation continues steadily. By now, rough estimates, about a third of the West Bank has been expropriated, converted into state land. Yossi Sarid mentioned recently that this means Israel can continue settlement for a hundred years without expropriating anything any further. Well, that’s what continues.

Senator Kerry has an interesting stand on this. He’s very close to Obama. He’s become more or less as a foreign policy—a kind of emissary. He gave a most important speech[O1]  on the Obama administration’s policies; policies with a speech to the Brookings Institution a couple of months ago. Obama—that took a standard position. The party line is that the United States is an honest broker, trying desperately to bring peace to these two difficult antagonists. So he repeated that, that’s normal. But then he added that, for a long time, Israel has been seeking a legitimate partner for peace and it’s never had one. So it’s kind of devastated—who can we negotiate with? But Kerry said that, now, finally, Israel may have a legitimate partner for peace. [the audience pointed out a PA problem]....I was talking about Senator Kerry and his formulation of the Obama administration’s position. He gave a talk a few months ago, in which he said that the US has, of course, always been an honest broker seeking peace. That’s true by definition, you know. You don’t need any factual evidence relating to that. And now, Israel has always been desperately seeking a legitimate partner and finally may have had one. What was interesting is that he gave his evidence. His evidence was that during the US-Israeli attack on Gaza, which he didn’t, of course, described it that way, there were no protests on the West Bank. It was quiet. Of course, that’s the other half of Palestine but they didn’t do anything about it. And he explained why. He said the reason is that the US has established an army, mercenary army headed by US General Dayton, trained with the assistance of Jordan and Israel and the army is able to suppress any sign of resistance to what the US and Israel were doing in Gaza. So, this, things are really looking up. There’s a possibility that there might be a legitimate partner controlled by a paramilitary force that is under our command. I should mention that the Dayton Army is under State Department control, meaning at least some guns of weak restrictions on human rights and other conditionalities. But people in the West Bank say that is much more a savage force which is under CIA control, General intelligence, and that’s subject to nothing. That’s standard all over the world.

So, we have a military force so that we can keep the population quiet. There’s collaborationist elite. And living in Ramallah, it’s kind of like, Tel Aviv, Paris, New York—a lot of money flowing in from European Union, cultural life, people live pretty well. A few miles away in villages, life is entirely different. But this is the model. That perfect model of a neo-colonial society. That’s what the US is—and the US has a plenty of experience with this. This is the model that was crafted in the Philippines a century ago after the US conquered the Philippines to uplift them and Christianize them and so on. Although most of the noble motives were killing a couple of hundred thousand, there was a problem with what to do with them. So, a new model of control was developed, which was a real break from European imperial pattern and it’s pretty much what I described.

There’s a military force, the Philippine constabulary, but it has to have collaborationist elite. The nationalist movement was broken up by various devices, subversion, spreading rumors and all sorts of other things. And the population was put under a very tight surveillance and control, using the highest technology of the day. This is a century ago, so that meant telephone, radio and so on. And they had extremely tight surveillance of the population, knew where everybody was and so on. Those techniques were later developed and applied in other US domains in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua and so on. And they blew back to the United States very quickly. In fact, Woodrow Wilson applied them in the United States during the First World War. And we’re familiar with them today and even more so elsewhere like Britain.

In the West Bank, which is, as Nancy pointed out, an experimental region. The biometric controls are extremely sophisticated. So, there’s identification of every person by any kind of measure you can think of, all in their identity cards. Pretty soon, they’ll be in chips put into their brains or something. There’s a talk of extending these measures to Israel. There, there’s arousing protests, but in the West Bank, no protest. We just do that. So, this is a familiar technique and it works. The Philippines are still under that control. It’s 100 years. And that’s one of the reasons why the Philippines, the one American colony in Southeast Asia hasn’t joined the exciting economic development of the past 20 years. It’s not one of the East Asian tigers.

So, that’s a model which can be followed and which might work if we allow it. There are of course pretexts for all of this. Whatever a state does, there’s a pretext: security. Whatever you do, it’s in self-defense, kind of by definition. As usual, in this case, the pretext doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. So, take, say, the annexation wall. I mean the reason that was offered is defense. Security. I mean if they were concerned with security, we know exactly what would be done. The wall would be built on the international border. It could be made impregnable, patrolled on both sides, a mile-high, totally secure. And that would give security. But, of course, if the purpose is what it actually is, namely to steal land and resources, then it can’t be built on the international border, where it might, furthermore, inconvenience [inaudible], instead of just inconveniencing and in fact, stealing from Palestinians.

And the same is true with the attack on Gaza. It’s almost universally accepted here, and in the West generally, that Israel had a right of self defense, and therefore was justified in attacking Gaza even though the attack was maybe disproportionate. That’s accepted, for example, by the Goldstone report. The Goldstone report is very valuable account of the atrocities that were carried out in the course of the war, but they are regarded as disproportionate actions in a legitimate war of self-defense.

OK, think about it for a minute. There is indeed the right of self-defense. Sure. Everyone agrees to that. But there is no right to self-defense by force. That has to be argued. And there is extensive international law and just common sense on this. You do not have the right to use force in self-defense unless you have exhausted peaceful means. Well, in this case, there definitely were peaceful means and the US and Israel knew it. And they chose not to, even attempt them because they wanted a war. They wanted to attack.

Peaceful means are obvious, again, not controversial. There had been a ceasefire initiated and proceeding in June, 2008. Israel concedes officially that during the ceasefire, there was not a single Hamas rocket fire. Sderot was quiet. The ceasefire was broken on November 4th, when using the cover of the US election, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and killed half a dozen Hamas activists. And yeah, then rockets started firing. And in the following month, Hamas offered repeatedly to reinstate the ceasefire. Israel acknowledged it, the cabinet discussed it and decided not to accept it. OK. No right to use force in self-defense. It’s quite apart from conditions of international law, which I won’t go into, which is pretty explicit on this, are all violated.

So, the attack itself was a criminal act. The US and Israel are guilty of outright aggression. And if they fire one bullet, it was a crime. And if they carried out the atrocities as they did, it was a crime. And if you look, case by case, they’re just—there’s virtually no justification for the claim of security. And in fact that, I won’t go into the history here, but it goes back—at the very least until February, 1971. This has kind of been washed out from history because it doesn’t look nice for us.

But in February 1971, President Sadat of Egypt offered Israel a full peace treaty. Nothing for the Palestinians, just mentioned as refugees, on condition that Israel withdraw from the occupied territories. And all he cared about was withdrawal from the Egyptian territory. So, in effect, it was an offer of a full peace treaty with all the property guarantees and so on, in return for withdrawal from conquered Egyptian territory. One year later, Jordan made the same offer with regard to the West Bank, a full peace treaty if Israel withdraws from the West Bank.

Well, at that point, security problem was over, if Israel wanted it to be over. If Israel had accepted those peace treaties, the major Arab state, Egypt, would be out of the conflict. And Jordan, the minor Arab state on the southern border, would be out of the conflict. OK. End of security problems. There was no Palestinian security problems to speak of at the time. You know, if such [inaudible] could have easily been controlled. But Israel made a decision, a fateful decision to choose expansion over security. At that time, expansion was into northeastern Sinai, where they were planning to build a huge city Yamit and a lot of settlements.

The real question is: what’s the Godfather going to say? Well, there was a debate in Washington. It was internal controversy. Henry Kissinger won out. His position, as he says, was what he calls “stalemate”: we should have no negotiations. Just force. And so, Israel was able to reject the peace offer. I won’t go into the consequences but it meant an awful world, a lot of suffering and constant security problems.

And if you look, from then through now, it’s pretty much the same. I mean Israel could have security right now. The Arab League has long endorsed the international consensus on a two-state settlement. In fact, they initiated it. The major Arab states in January 1976, when they introduced a resolution at the Security Council, calling for a full peace treaty on the international border. It was vetoed by the United States. And US vetoes are double vetoe. It doesn’t happen and it’s out of history. So we don’t talk about that.

So, it continues. The Arab states have reiterated in a more developed form of peace agreement, a full peace agreement. The organization of Islamic states—they should include Iran—has accepted it. Hamas accepted it. In fact, anybody relevant accepted it with exception of the United States and Israel. So, yes, there are real security problems but not justifiable ones.

Among all the reports—there were a number of reports that came out of Gaza, the Goldstone report, an extensive one. Amnesty International published several, Human Rights Watch, they are very revealing. In my opinion, the most revealing of all of them is—at least the most important for us—is Amnesty International report, which really broke new ground for human rights reports. It went through the weaponry that had been used in the assault against Gaza. A lot of high-tech, destructive, murderous weaponry. It traced it to its source, which is mostly back to us. And it called for an arms embargo. Amnesty international called for an arms embargo on both sides, which means essentially on Israel. That’s talking to us. That’s saying we ought to join in an arms embargo and stop sending arms in violation of international law and indeed in violation of US law. We should stop violating US law and sending arms to a country that’s using them for aggression and violence and destruction.

Well, you know, that’s a policy that Americans ought to follow. Let’s follow US law. Let’s try that for change. And stop sending arms to Israel. Well, I think adhering to the Amnesty international’s plea would make a lot of sense. There have been occasional reports from Human Rights Watch and others saying, you know, some arms shouldn’t be sent to a country that has used, that is carrying out regular tortures and so on. But this is the first call that I know of by a human rights group for a total arms embargo to an aggressive and violent state. 

And the call is directed to us. We are the one providing the overwhelming bulk of the arm and continuing to do it. And I think we should listen to the call. That also suggests something about tactics. If we want to act in ways which is going to change policy, not just to make us feel good but change policy, the tactic should be directed to Washington. Unless Washington changes its position, there isn’t going to be any peaceful settlement.

And there are good, historical analogies that we can use to sharpen up or thinking about this. It’s pretty common to make analogies between Israel and South Africa. Most of those analogies are pretty dubious. There are some similarities but enormous differences. One fundamental difference is that the white nationalists in South Africa needed the black population. That was the source of their labor and sustenance, so they didn’t want them to live like dogs and flee the country. They wanted them to stay there and be a subordinate population. That’s quite different from the case of Israel; they don’t want the Palestinians. They want them out away somewhere. Like the US attitude toward the indigenous population here: “Just either die or disappear.” That’s a serious disanalogy. But there are some—even though the analogies are weak, we can learn something from history. And histories are worth thinking about.

By the early 1960s, South Africa was becoming a pariah state. There was a talk of sanctions, and boycotts but they hadn’t been implemented yet. There were negative votes in the United Nations, there were sharp attacks. South Africans were aware of it. They did pretty much the kind of things that Israel is doing today.

South Africa was reacting at that time very much the way that Israel is doing now: the whole world hates us. You know, they’re just racist. They don’t understand how wonderful we are. We have to have better information and educational campaigns to explain to them how what we’re doing is exactly right and to the benefit of the black population and so on. They were doing all those things but they knew pretty well that they were not going to work. Just as Israel ought to understand that comparable effort is not going to work. They are going to continue being--turning into a pariah state. But South African foreign minister, about fifty years ago, spoke to the US ambassador and he said something quite perceptive and relevant. He told the US ambassador that yes, overwhelmingly they’re voting against us in the United Nations and so on. But in the United Nations, there is only one vote: yours. And as long as you’re backing us, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world says. That’s a pretty accurate perception. That’s what it means to have overwhelming global dominance of a kind that has never existed in history. And he was right. And if you look at the history what followed, it demonstrated it.

Through the 60s and 70s, South Africa became more and more a pariah nation. The United States and Britain kept supporting it. By 1980 or so, boycott, sanctions and so on were beginning; US corporations were beginning to refuse to invest; Congress began passing legislation. But the US continued to violate. The Reagan administration violated congressional legislation and overwhelming global opinion to continue supporting South African apartheid. And that’s one of the most violent and brutal periods.

In the 1980s with US support, South Africa was able to go kill an estimated a million and a half people and caused about $60 billion of damage just in neighboring countries, putting aside what it was doing inside South Africa with constant US support, went on through the 1980s.

In 1988, at that time, you couldn’t find anybody defending apartheid. You know, mayors, corporations, Congress, whatever. In 1988, the US formally identified the African National Congress, Mandela’s ANC, as one of “the more notorious terrorist groups in the world.” That was in 1988. You’ll be pleased to know, if you don’t already, that Mandela was taken off the terrorist list a couple of months ago. So we know how long we have to be terrified of him. Around 1989, for reasons which are not entirely known—we don’t have internal documents for that period—US policy shifted. And it moved towards ending apartheid and instituting a regime which sort of maintains the social and economical structure of the apartheid regime, but without total exclusion of the blacks. So, if you go to Cape Town or Johannesburg, you can see black faces in limousines. Even though for—and other signs of improvement, that was a major achievement getting rid of apartheid. But the fundamental structure was maintained. However, apartheid wad ended. Mandela was let out of prison, he was given a couple years of instruction and democracy and freedom and so on. And then he was allowed to appear. And the US, their Godfather changed its position and it ended. If you go back to 1988, it looked like one of the worst periods in South African history. People were desperate, giving up.

And that has happened elsewhere. So, South African minister was correct. And it happens in other cases too. I have no time to go through them but there are other cases where just a slight shift in US policy terminated violent, murderous aggression, in fact, near genocidal aggression. And it could happen in this case too. But something is going to have to press it and that’s going to have to come from inside. It’s not going to come from the rest of the world. And I think that is lessons we ought to keep in mind when we think about, first of all, our own responsibilities and also the kinds of tactical moves that would be appropriate. Thanks.

---

 [O1]http://www.brookings.edu/events/2009/~/media/Files/events/2009/0304_leadership/0304_leadership.pdf