Fateful Triangle

Peace for Galilee474“the men of Princeton” in an advance warning against the war.Let us turn to the “devastating indictment of the P.L.O sympathizers”which so impressed the New Republic reviewer. Timerman bitterlycondemns “the Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia professors who wentalong with [the PLO] for years”; they were “allies or accomplices,” orsimply “vain and frivolous academics who wanted to prove a thesis.”“The principal task of the academics should have been to confrontPalestinian terrorism with a clear and convincing picture of the politicalreality,” but instead “they preferred to feel important glorifying anobsolete and reactionary image, that of terrorist machismo”; “more thanone U.S. scholar considered it a privilege to review the world situationwith Arafat.” “They seized upon the idea of the historical inevitability ofa Palestinian state,” while failing to work “with the moderates amongthe Palestinians and the Arab world within the bounds of a politicalstrategy.” And with others (e.g., Western Europeans), “they allowed thePLO to avoid the issue with ambivalent insinuations that not even thegoodwill with which some of us in Israel heard them could convince usthat they accepted anything less than the destruction of our country.”Had these miserable academics met their responsibilities, “they couldhave forced the creation of a Palestinian state despite the obstructions ofIsraeli reactionary groups.”Again, there are some problems. First, note the typical falsificationswith regard to Arab “moderates” and “political strategy”; thus it isunexplained, for example, why PLO support for a two-state settlementsince the mid-1970s drove Israel into such a panic, and failed toconvince those with Timerman’s “goodwill” that “they accepted anythingless than the destruction of our country.” And as well, the typicalfalsifications with regard to Israeli opinion: it was not certain “Israelireactionary groups that opposed the creation of a Palestinian state, butthe Labor Alignment, along with the Likud. As of 1980, only about 1/10Classics in Politics: The Fateful TriangleNoam Chomsky