User:Urthogie/noam

I will show here the near constant errors in the 91 page chapter "Israel and Palestine: Historical Backgrounds" in Noam Chomsky's Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians. Chomsky himself makes clear that the Arab-Israeli conflict must be understood from a historical context. In this article, I will make clear that he is ill-equipped for this task.

Only a couple of paragraphs into the chapter, Chomsky makes several grave errors over the course of a single paragraph:

"The opposition of the indigenous population to the Zionist project was never a secret. president Wilson's King-Crane Commission reported in 1919 that 'the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine' and estimated that the latter-- 'nearly nine-tenths of the whole-- are emphatically against the entire Zionist programme.' The Commission warned that to subject them to this program 'would be a gross violation of the principle [of self-determination], and of the people's rights, thought it kept within the forms of law,' a conclusion disregarded by the great powers, including the U.S.  The Commission,  while expressing 'a deep sense of sympathy for the Jewish cause,' recommended limitation of Jewish immigration and abandonment of the goal of a Jewish state."

First off, the King-Crane Commission never reported anything. Its report was suppressed, and kept secret, until 1922, when it was released after having failed to gain consensus (along with the Treaty of Versailles). It's surprising that Chomsky doesn't know this. He says that it was "reported in 1919" when it was neither reported whatsoever, nor released until 1922.

Chomsky's shoddy research on the King-Crane Commission might explain why he takes it completely out of context, using it to show early opposition to Israel. Chomsky refuses to tell his readers what the commission actually suggested: a Greater Syria, encompassing modern Syria, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and the Gaza Strip. The commission's report, far from exposing Zionism as opposed to the right of self-determination for those in the region, shows that European leaders sought to take away the right of self-determination not only from the Jews but from the Palestinians the Jordanians. Of course, Chomsky doesn't tell his readers this-- it doesn't add much to rhetoric. Instead, he says that the report "gave due consideration only to the views of inhabitants of the land."