Israel–Palestinian relations

Israel–Palestinian relations are portrayed as a test of the gap between U.S. claims of a new, coalition-based response after September 11 and the continuity of its strategic commitments. Chomsky argues that U.S. support enabled harsher Israeli repression of Palestinians, while the attacks further weakened Palestinian prospects for political gain.

U.S. policy and strategic continuity

Chomsky places U.S. policy toward Israel within a broader account of how American governments pursue national interests through military power and selective cooperation. He notes that the language of acting multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary predated the Bush administration: Bill Clinton stated that approach to the United Nations in 1993, Madeleine Albright reiterated it, and Defense Secretary William Cohen invoked unilateral military power in 1999. The stated interests included access to essential markets, energy sources, and strategic resources. In Chomsky’s reading, the Bush administration went further, alarming allies without abandoning the established latitude to act as Washington chose.

The need to assemble a coalition might soften official rhetoric, he argues, but was unlikely to change policy. Coalition members were expected to support the United States quietly rather than share in decision-making, while Washington avoided placing international institutions at the center of its response. Against that background, he treats any suggestion that alliance-building would produce a constructive breakthrough for Palestinians with skepticism: a change in diplomatic presentation did not itself indicate a change in the distribution of power or in U.S. support for Israel.

September 11 and the Palestinian position

Chomsky describes September 11 as a severe setback for Palestinians. He says Palestinians recognized this immediately, as did Israel, because the attack strengthened the political environment in which Israel could expect greater U.S. backing. Elsewhere, he states directly that Israel understood it could repress Palestinians more harshly with increased American support. The consequence, in his account, was not a new opening for Palestinian claims but a worsened balance of political support.

He also contrasts this post-attack posture with the possibility of renewed diplomacy. When Colin Powell indicated that the United States might take a new approach to the Palestinian crisis, Chomsky compared the prospect with the proposals Bill Clinton had made at the 2000 Camp David Summit. He argues that the positions then being discussed by George W. Bush and Powell did not even reach those proposals, which he considers unacceptable. His criticism turns on the terms and substance of the proposals, not simply on whether American officials described their approach as renewed or more engaged.

Regional interests and the logic of power

The relationship is situated within a region whose importance Chomsky connects to energy and strategic access. He identifies Saudi Arabia and the wider Persian Gulf as holding the world’s principal energy reserves, with additional significant resources in Central Asia. Afghanistan, in this account, was a relatively minor piece on that strategic board, though proposed pipelines there could serve wider efforts to influence Central Asian resources. This framing helps explain why he treats U.S. policy in the region as bound up with strategic interests rather than as a response limited to the immediate crisis.

Chomsky links this regional analysis to a broader account of military positioning. He argues that the United States established substantial bases in Central Asia for the first time, strengthening its ability to influence resource-rich areas and adding to a network directed toward the Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, he says, Diego Garcia had been the most secure base in that network; the new position made intervention easier. In this interpretation, support for Israel and the handling of the Palestinian question belong to a wider structure of U.S. power, though the evidence does not reduce every policy decision to a single motive.

Repression, retaliation, and the cycle of violence

Chomsky presents stronger U.S. backing for Israel as part of a wider post-September 11 pattern in which governments used the attacks to intensify existing coercive policies. He cites Israel’s recognition that it could act more harshly against Palestinians with reinforced American support alongside examples involving Russia, China, and Turkey. The comparison emphasizes how counterterrorism language could give renewed force to established state policies, rather than necessarily changing their objectives.

His warning about escalation rests on a recurring causal argument: large-scale violence against civilians can deepen anger and despair, validate extremist claims, and encourage further recruitment. In discussing the attacks and a possible military response, he argues that even killing Osama bin Laden would not prevent a massacre of innocents from worsening the conditions that sustain violent movements. He also says that exceptionally violent retaliation can reproduce crimes of the kind that prompted demands for vengeance. Applied to Israel–Palestinian relations, this framework makes the intensification of repression more than a unilateral political outcome: it risks feeding the cycle of violence that the stated policy of counterterrorism is supposed to end.

Moral and political stakes

Chomsky’s analysis joins a strategic critique to a test of moral consistency. He argues that the same basic moral standards must apply to powerful states and their adversaries: an action considered just when undertaken by one side cannot be condemned when another undertakes it. He also points to U.S. support for corrupt and brutal governments that obstruct democracy and development, relating that support to the protection of American interests in Middle Eastern oil. A survey of wealthy, Westernized Muslims reported by The Wall Street Journal, he says, found that anger had also been intensified by U.S. policy in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and toward Iraq.

The resulting account is deliberately at odds with reassuring explanations that attribute popular anger to hostility toward freedom or democracy. For Chomsky, the central issue is the political conduct that shapes grievances and the unequal power that allows some acts to be treated differently from others. Israel–Palestinian relations therefore serve as a concrete instance of his larger argument: alliances and counterterrorism rhetoric can reinforce repression, while the resulting violence and resentment make a durable reduction in conflict less likely.