Palestine

Palestine appears in Noam Chomsky’s account as both an immediate casualty of the September 11 attacks and a test of the claims made in their aftermath. Within days, Israeli forces entered Palestinian cities and Israeli repression intensified; later, Chomsky argues, the attacks helped consolidate policies that left Palestinians with little reason to expect a more just outcome. The location’s significance lies in this contrast: a crisis presented as a new opportunity for international cooperation instead reinforced an older asymmetry in the treatment of occupation and political violence.

Immediate consequences of the attacks

The attacks dealt Palestinians under military occupation a severe blow, a consequence they recognized immediately, according to Chomsky. Israel, he says, openly welcomed the new prospects for acting against Palestinians without accountability. Within days, Israeli tanks entered Jenin, Ramallah, and Jericho; the entry into those cities was described as a first. Several dozen Palestinians were killed, and Israeli control over the population tightened. Chomsky presents the sequence not as an isolated response but as a familiar escalation of violence, comparable to dynamics in Northern Ireland and the Balkans as well as Israel and Palestine.

The attacks also sharpened an existing disparity in how occupation was understood. Chomsky argues that people in the Middle East saw a striking difference between U.S. policy toward Iraq’s occupation and toward Israel’s occupation. He further maintains that accounts of U.S. policy in the region often left out facts that mattered to those living there, including the consequences of American support for Israel. The resulting gap between dominant Western narratives and regional perceptions, in his analysis, helps explain why reassuring descriptions of diplomacy could carry little credibility among Palestinians and others in the region.

Diplomacy and the limits of coalition politics

After September 11, Washington sought international partners and suggested that its approach to the Palestinian crisis might change. Chomsky doubts that the effort to build a coalition represented a substantial shift in policy. He describes the United States’ declared preference, established before the Bush administration, as acting multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary. The coalition, in his account, might soften official rhetoric, but its members were expected to support U.S. action quietly rather than help determine it; Washington continued to reserve the right to act on its own terms.

That distinction shapes his assessment of the prospects for Palestine. Chomsky says the attacks had already dealt Palestinians a serious setback, a consequence acknowledged both by Palestinians and by Israel. He also argues that the Bush and Colin Powell proposals did not go as far as the proposals made at Camp David under Bill Clinton, which had been praised in the dominant U.S. press but were unacceptable to Palestinians for reasons debated in Israel and elsewhere. He points to the difficulty of finding a map of the proposals in U.S. coverage, while such maps were available elsewhere, as an example of how the terms of the dispute could remain obscured from American readers.

Occupation, power, and the regional context

Chomsky places Palestine within a broader account of U.S. policy in the Middle East. He argues that U.S. policy toward Iraq over the preceding decade had devastated Iraqi society while strengthening Saddam Hussein, who had received extensive U.S. support when committing grave atrocities, including the 1988 gassing of Kurds. In his account, people across the region could understand the contradiction in American policy even when they distrusted Osama bin Laden. The comparison with Palestine is not that the cases are identical, but that selective attention to occupation and state violence shaped how U.S. actions were perceived.

He also links anger in the region to American support for corrupt and brutal governments that obstructed democracy and development, a policy he associates with protecting U.S. interests in Middle Eastern oil. A survey of wealthy, Westernized Muslims conducted by The Wall Street Journal after the attacks, he notes, found that their feelings were intensified by U.S. policy in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and toward Iraq. Chomsky contrasts these explanations with familiar accounts that attribute Arab anger to hostility toward Western freedom or an inability to participate in globalization. For him, those accounts evade the political decisions that helped produce the anger.

A wider pattern of repression

In the longer term, Chomsky argues, September 11 accelerated tendencies already in motion: governments used the attacks to justify or intensify repressive policies, and the resulting coalition did not distribute restraint or accountability evenly. He specifically notes that Israel saw an opportunity to intensify its treatment of Palestinians with stronger U.S. support. He places this alongside Russia’s pursuit of latitude in Chechnya, China’s use of the counterterrorism climate for its own purposes, and Turkey’s offer of troops in the new U.S. campaign after receiving American arms and support during its repression of Kurds.

For Palestine, the consequence is not simply the failure of a diplomatic opening. Chomsky’s account portrays the post-attack moment as one in which the language of counterterrorism made coercive policies easier to pursue while Palestinian prospects for relief diminished. The same pattern reaches beyond the region: the Bush administration used fear and calls for patriotism to advance domestic measures and narrow public debate, while U.S. military power and coalition-building served broader strategic aims. Palestine therefore functions in the argument as a concrete instance of a recurring cycle: violence intensifies, the powerful gain room to act, and those already living under occupation bear further consequences.