Israel

Israel is not merely a setting in Noam Chomsky’s analysis of the aftermath of September 11: it is a focal point for his argument about selective attention to occupation, the unequal application of political and moral standards, and the way a major shock can be used to deepen existing violence. He describes the attacks as a severe blow to the Palestinians, followed within days by Israeli military incursions into Palestinian cities and a harsher tightening of control. He then places those actions in a wider pattern: governments and allies could invoke counterterrorism to intensify repression, while U.S. policy continued to protect Israel and preserve American strategic freedom of action.

Israel and the Palestinian aftermath

Chomsky says the September 11 attacks dealt the Palestinians a terrible blow, a consequence they recognized immediately. In his account, Israel openly welcomed the new opportunity to suppress them with impunity. Within days of the attacks, Israeli tanks entered Jenin, Ramallah, and Jericho; he notes that it was the first time tanks had entered those cities. Several dozen Palestinians were killed, and Israeli control tightened further over the population. The timing matters to his argument: the attacks did not create the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they changed the political circumstances in which Israel could act and in which those actions would be understood abroad.

He characterizes this sequence as part of a familiar escalation of violence, comparing the dynamic to Northern Ireland and the Balkans as well as Israel and Palestine. The comparison turns attention away from a single episode or a simple cycle of retaliation and toward a recurring political pattern: violence and its consequences provide grounds for further coercion, while the resulting escalation makes a durable settlement harder to reach. Israel’s response after September 11 is thus presented not as an isolated exception but as one instance of a wider mechanism.

Occupation, force, and public understanding

Chomsky argues that Americans and Europeans often fail to grasp how central the contrast between Iraq’s occupation of a country and Israel’s occupation is to political understanding in the Middle East. He treats this disparity as a particularly clear example of a broader gap between Western accounts and regional perceptions. In his telling, the facts most consequential to people in the region are often rarely mentioned in the United States and therefore remain little known even among intellectual elites.

That imbalance shapes how criticism is received. Chomsky describes criticism of Israeli actions in territories under what he calls nearly thirty-five years of brutal military occupation as marginal in the United States. He also argues that the familiar American characterization of the 2000 Camp David proposals as generous and magnanimous is not shared in the Middle East. The disagreement is not presented as a minor difference in wording: it concerns the conditions of occupation and the terms of a proposed settlement, and therefore the framework through which later events are judged.

U.S. support and the politics of counterterrorism

Chomsky links Israel’s conduct to U.S. policy and material support. In his discussion of targeted killings, he describes Israeli political assassinations of Palestinians accused of supporting terrorism, emphasizing that Israel offered no evidence for the accusations and that such evidence was not treated as necessary. He adds that doubts about some accusations appeared unfounded, while civilian deaths were routinely dismissed as collateral damage. For ten months, he says, U.S.-supplied attack helicopters had carried out a number of these killings. The details support his broader criticism: the official language of counterterrorism, as he interprets it, could authorize violence against alleged supporters without the evidentiary safeguards expected of a legal process.

He sets these practices within a longer record of U.S. support for Israeli force. His account includes Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which he says killed about eighteen thousand Lebanese and Palestinian civilians and was not an act of self-defense, as was admitted immediately. He also points to the subsequent use of the iron fist against villagers described by Israel as terrorists, and to Israeli invasions in 1993 and 1996, both with firm U.S. support. International reaction after the 1996 Qana massacre, he says, forced Bill Clinton to retreat. He estimates that the civilian death toll in Lebanon after 1982 was probably twenty thousand. These examples make his argument about September 11 part of a longer history rather than a claim that the attacks began a new pattern of violence.

Alliances, strategic purpose, and the limits of change

Chomsky rejects the idea that the Bush administration’s effort to assemble an international coalition necessarily meant a new commitment to multilateralism. He recalls that Bill Clinton had told the United Nations in 1993 that the United States would act multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary. Madeleine Albright and Defense Secretary William Cohen reiterated that position; Cohen described reliance on unilateral military power to defend vital interests, including access to essential markets, energy sources, and strategic resources. In Chomsky’s view, the coalition might soften the rhetoric, but was unlikely to alter the underlying policy: allies were expected to provide quiet, obedient support rather than participate in decisions, and Washington continued to reserve the right to act as it chose.

He sees little prospect that the Palestinians would gain from this new coalition politics. The attacks had already dealt them a severe blow, and he says Israel recognized that as well. He further argues that even the new U.S. posture discussed by George W. Bush and Colin Powell did not go as far as Bill Clinton’s Camp David proposals, which had been praised in the mainstream press despite being unacceptable to Palestinians for reasons debated in Israel and elsewhere. In his account, the prominence of a proposal in American coverage did not establish its acceptability to those expected to live with it.

Finally, Chomsky places Israel within a global pattern of states exploiting September 11 to intensify repression. Russia and China joined the counterterrorism coalition in hopes of gaining latitude for coercive campaigns, while Turkey offered troops for the new phase of the U.S. War on Terror in recognition, its prime minister said, of American support for Turkey’s own severe repression of its Kurdish population. Israel, in turn, recognized that it could suppress the Palestinians more brutally with stronger U.S. backing. Chomsky’s account therefore connects the local consequences for Palestinians to the international uses of the attacks: the counterterrorism framework could strengthen allied governments and expand their room for force without addressing the conditions that sustained conflict.

Strategic geography and the meaning of power

Israel’s place in the argument is also set against the strategic geography of the wider region. Chomsky describes the Persian Gulf as containing the world’s principal energy reserves, especially in Saudi Arabia and across the Gulf, with significant reserves in Central Asia as well. Afghanistan, he says, was a relatively minor piece on this wider chessboard; proposed pipelines there had long been associated with U.S. efforts to control Central Asian resources. He connects the expansion of U.S. military bases in Central Asia to the protection of those interests and to the surrounding network aimed at the Gulf, which stretched from the Pacific to the Azores and had previously relied most securely on Diego Garcia.

He interprets the new phase of the War on Terror as an opportunity for the Bush administration to consolidate its overwhelming military superiority and reinforce global dominance. During a visit by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the prince urged U.S. officials to pay greater attention to Arab reactions to Washington’s strong support for Israeli repression. Chomsky recounts that the response was dismissive: a senior official contrasted the force used in Afghanistan with the 1991 Gulf War and said the difference should demonstrate American capacity; a former military official predicted that firmness would earn respect and put an end to challenges. For Chomsky, this exchange exposes a power-centered view of deterrence, in which the display of overwhelming force matters more than addressing the political grievances voiced by regional actors.

He explicitly distinguishes documentary certainty from interpretation when he suggests that warning the world about American power may have been a principal objective of the bombing of Afghanistan. He compares this proposed purpose with the NATO bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had explained as necessary to establish NATO’s credibility. Chomsky’s comparison is not offered as a legal finding; it is his analysis of strategic purpose, and it places the treatment of Israel and Palestine within a broader account of how military force and coalition politics can serve claims to global authority. The consequences he emphasizes are not a resolution of the conflict, but intensified pressure on Palestinians, continued U.S. protection of Israel, and a wider reinforcement of coercive policy under the banner of counterterrorism.