United States–Israel relations

United States–Israel relations occupy a central place in Noam Chomsky’s critique of post-September 11 policy: he argues that Washington’s longstanding support for Israel’s coercive treatment of Palestinians was likely to intensify, while the attacks weakened Palestinian prospects and gave the United States a new opportunity to display its military power. The relationship is presented not as an isolated alliance but as part of a wider pattern in which strategic interests, military dominance, and selective multilateralism take precedence over Palestinian demands and public opposition.

Strategic Support and Palestinian Consequences

Chomsky describes American support for Israel as a factor in the repression of Palestinians and in wider resentment toward United States policy. He cites a long-standing explanation for hostility in the Arab world: Washington assists corrupt and brutal governments that obstruct democracy and development in order to protect its interests in Middle Eastern oil. In the aftermath of September 11, he adds, American policy in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and toward Iraq had further intensified those feelings, including among wealthy, Westernized Muslims interviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The attacks also damaged Palestinian prospects directly. Chomsky says Palestinians recognized immediately that the event had dealt them a severe blow, as did Israel. Against that background, the suggestion that the United States might adopt a new approach to the Palestinian crisis carried little promise in his account. He argues that George W. Bush and Colin Powell were not even going as far as Bill Clinton’s Camp David proposals, which he regards as unacceptable. He points to the difficulty of finding a map of the proposals in the United States, while maps were available elsewhere, including in Israel, and directs readers to contemporaneous writing for a fuller account.

The Alliance and the Use of Power

Chomsky places the relationship within a broader history of American unilateralism. In 1993, Bill Clinton told the United Nations that the United States intended to act multilaterally when possible but unilaterally when necessary. Madeleine Albright reiterated the position, and in 1999 Defense Secretary William Cohen described reliance on unilateral military power to defend vital interests. Those interests included access to essential markets, energy sources, and strategic resources. Chomsky sees George W. Bush as taking this established practice further: the need to assemble a coalition might soften the rhetoric, but, he argues, was unlikely to change the policy. Coalition members were expected to support Washington quietly rather than participate in decisions, while the United States reserved the right to act as it chose and avoided invoking international institutions.

In this account, support for Israel is bound up with the assertion of American power rather than simply with coalition diplomacy. During a visit to the United States, Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urged the administration to attend to Arab reactions to its strong support for Israeli repression. Chomsky recounts that American officials responded that they did not care what he or other Arabs thought. He presents this exchange as evidence of a doctrine that treated military resolve and disregard for regional opinion as demonstrations of dominance. The Afghanistan campaign, in this reading, was made to display American capabilities; the implications extended to Washington’s support for Israel.

September 11 and Intensified Repression

Chomsky reports that Israel recognized it could crush the Palestinians with still greater brutality under strengthened American support. He places that expectation alongside the responses of other governments that used the attacks to intensify harsh policies, including Russia in Chechnya, China, and Turkey in its campaign against Kurds. The comparison situates Israel’s anticipated freedom of action within a broader post-September 11 pattern: governments could invoke the new counterterrorism climate to expand repression, while Washington’s backing helped shape which acts were condemned and which were accommodated.

He also warns that the political response could deepen the cycle of violence. Earlier, he predicts that some bellicose elements in the United States would use the crisis to strike enemies with extreme force, without regard for innocent people who would suffer there, at home, and in Europe. He describes the resulting feedback as familiar: a violent response could serve the wishes of Osama bin Laden and help reproduce the conditions for further violence. In that argument, the intensified support for Israel is not detached from the broader consequences of a policy that risks multiplying civilian suffering and grievance.

Military Reach and Strategic Context

Chomsky links the post-September 11 turn to a larger expansion of American military reach. For the first time, he writes, the United States established major military bases in Central Asia. He associates them with the contemporary “Great Game,” the effort to control the region’s substantial resources, and the wider encirclement of the world’s principal energy reserves in the Persian Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, he identifies Diego Garcia as the most secure base in the system directed toward the Gulf; he argues that the new deployments made intervention easier.

This geography clarifies the strategic setting in which he discusses American backing for Israel. The administration’s declared counterterrorism campaign, he argues, also offered an opportunity to consolidate an already overwhelming military advantage and promote global dominance. He cautions that the purposes of the Afghanistan bombing cannot be established from secret documents, but considers it reasonable to infer that demonstrating what the United States could do to countries that defied its rules was a principal objective. He compares this logic with NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had justified in terms of preserving the alliance’s credibility—specifically, American credibility and that of its leading arms client. For Chomsky, American support for Israel belongs to this larger system of power projection, though he distinguishes his interpretation of strategic purpose from proof of confidential planning.

Limits of the Post-September 11 Shift

Chomsky rejects the expectation that coalition-building would produce a substantial change in United States policy toward Palestinians. Governments might find it convenient to accept the appearance of multilateral cooperation, he argues, but Washington continued to reserve its freedom of action. He therefore considers Palestinians unlikely to gain from the new diplomatic circumstances; the attacks had instead set them back and appeared to strengthen the support available to Israel.

His broader conclusion is that September 11 accelerated existing tendencies more than it altered the underlying international order. In the relationship between Washington and Israel, the decisive change he anticipates is an increase in the room for repression, enabled by stronger American backing and a political environment organized around counterterrorism. The consequences, he warns, could be significant and damaging even as the basic structures of international power remained largely in place.