Online Bookstore: South End Press Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (South End Press Classics Series) Book

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Chomsky's first strike: His "client state" thesis ignores the fact that, but for Harry Truman's insistence, the U.S. would have opposed the 1948 United Nations partition plan -- and Israel's founding. Through the Six Day War, the U.S. remained neutral and often hostile to Israel, providing no help whatever.

His second: The "Israel as aggressor" thesis ignores the existence and history of Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who in 1948 promised a "war of annihilation" against Israel, that for all intents and purposes has continued ever since. In that war alone, Israel catastrophically lost nearly 1% of her population, including 600 Israeli civilians captured and mutilated beyond recognition. In total, Israel has lost some 24,000 Jewish and Arab citizens to Arab wars and terrorism, proportionately comparable (today) to over 1 million U.S. citizens. To this war, as Werner Cohn notes in Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (available free online), Chomsky devotes only parts of two pages, taking events entirely out-of-context.

Chomsky similarly avoids full treatment of the pivotal 1929 Arab riots. To this, as Cohn reports, "Chomsky devotes two paragraphs." His main text admits that in August 1929, 133 Jews were massacred, including a "most ghastly incident" in Hebron, where 60 Jews were killed. Chomksy quotes Christopher Sykes' Cross Roads to Israel.

For the record, Sykes leaves no doubt that in 1929 Haj Amin el-Husseini was likewise a major instigator. A Jewish boy was murdered after innocently kicking a ball into a neighboring Arab garden. The Mufti's henchmen walked about Jerusalem carrying clubs. Unconcerned with "sacred frontiers of the fatherland," the Mufti was "interested in religion.... The enemy was the Jewish people." Chomsky neglects to mention "the goading policy of the Supreme Moslem Council" or its purposeful "driving Jews to exasperation," (Sykes, 1967 Nel Mentor ed.). No, Chomsky relies largely on a single eyewitness (contradicted by many others, whom he ignores), thus falsely blaming the 1929 riots, as Cohn notes, entirely on the Jews.

All that--and the 1973 Yom Kippur War--negate Chomsky's theses, so the vast bulk of his action begins in 1982, with the false notion that Israel consistently rejected "any political settlement" with Arabs. This not coincidentally also avoids such mitigating factors as Israel's return to Egypt of Sinai (including Israeli-developed oil wells and resorts), within 12 years of Nasser's (renewed) 1967 vow to erase Israel from the map. Instead, Chomsky speciously cites a "flood" of letters to the U.S. media in "strikingly similar format," falsely inferring U.S. media and government support for "establishment of a Greater Israel." Good grief.

As to 1982, Chomsky avoids noting that Israel was only then responding to decades of cross-border terrorist raids and bombardments suffered by Israeli towns that took innumerable Israeli lives--all of them from staging areas in southern Lebanon. Rather, he focuses on ostensibly pro-Israel media, including profiles of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, whose "state worshipping" he terms worthy of the "annals of Stalinism."

This book, in fact, hardly touches on of the considerable Arab hostilities to Israel over more than 54 years. Thus, Chomsky avoids the critical fourth, fifth and sixth corners of the complex Middle East "triangle"--that render it hexagonal--Arab incarceration of Arab refugees, Arab expulsion of 900,000 Jews from Arab lands and Arab oppression of other non-Muslim peoples, including Sudanese Christians and animists, Iraqi and Turkish Kurds, Egyptian Copts and Moroccan Berbers.

Readers should, instead, somehow believe that a "persistent and sinister" ideological American Jewish plot creates "illusion about Israeli society and the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict," and presents "the major obstacle to an American-Palestinian and Israeli-Palestinian dialogue." In short, Chomsky's false allegations closely resemble age-old libels that blame the Jews--for everything.

This book was first issued in 1983 by Noontide Press, as Cohn reports, the publishing arm of California's neo-Nazi Institute for Historical Review, whose catalogue prominently features Holocaust denial, Nazi-era propaganda films banned for sale in Germany, hate literature by Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, the late Father Coughlin--and the crème of its choice selections, the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The French publisher of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, Pierre Guillaume, recounts in glowing terms his 1979 introduction to Chomsky and the latter's independent promotion of a petition supporting Faurisson's "findings" and "extensive historical research into the Holocaust question," according to Cohn.

In "Quelques commentaires élémentaires sur le droit à la liberté d'expression," (Some elementary comments concerning the right of free expression), Cohn shows, Chomsky himself declares that even fascists and anti-Semites may speak freely--but that Faurisson is neither. Chomsky writes that Faurisson is best described as "a sort of apolitical liberal." As freely as Chomsky gives patronage to such "revisionists," he gladly accepts theirs. The prominence of his books in their catalogues does not concern him, says Cohn.

Triangle strikes out at last--by likening Jewish, Israeli and Zionist actions to Hitler's in all 12 of its references to history's worst tyrant (Cohn).

Better Chomsky should call this volume "Hex-again," to make his purpose clear.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

You will find excellent resources for further study and consideration, including updated discussion covering recent developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sources are plentiful. Regardless of where you ultimately land on this debate, the book is well-documented and useful.