NOAM CHOMSKY: SANS $4B U.S. AID, ISRAELIS WON’T BE KILLING PALESTINIANS

Internationally-known linguist and social critic Dr. Noam Chomsky has blasted the United States for subsidizing the violence of Israel’s ruling Zionist clique, saying that without the annual $4-billion military aid received by Tel Aviv, “Israel would not be killing Palestinians en masse.”

In an interview with C. J. Polychroniou of Truthout on May 12, 2021 (Thursday, May 13, 2021, in Manila), Chomsky, who has written dozens of books and who continues to be a Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said “for what became the dominant tendency in the Zionist movement, there has been a fixed long-term goal. Put crudely, the goal is to rid the country of Palestinians and replace them with Jewish settlers cast as the ‘rightful owners of the land’ returning home after millennia of exile.”

Chomsky condemns the continuing crime that Israel commits in Palestine, saying ”Israel has been a highly valued US client since the demonstration of its mastery of violence in 1967. Law is no impediment. US governments have always had a cavalier attitude to US. law, adhering to standard imperial practice. Take what is arguably the major example: The US Constitution declares that treaties entered into by the US government are the ‘supreme law of the land.’ The major postwar treaty is the UN Charter, which bars ‘the threat or use of force’ in international affairs (with exceptions that are not relevant in real cases). Can you think of a president who hasn’t violated this provision of the supreme law of the land with abandon?”

The substantial Israeli nuclear arsenal should, under US law, raise serious questions about the legality of military and economic aid to Israel. That difficulty is overcome by not recognizing its existence, an unconcealed farce, and a highly consequential one, as we’ve discussed elsewhere. US military aid to Israel also violates the Leahy Law, which bans military aid to units engaged in systematic human rights violations. The Israeli armed forces provide many candidates, Chomsky argued.

“Trump went beyond his predecessors in providing free rein for Israeli crimes. One major contribution was orchestrating the Abraham Accords, which formalized long-standing tacit agreements between Israel and several Arab dictatorships. That relieved limited Arab restraints on Israeli violence and expansion. The Accords were a key component of the Trump geostrategic vision: to construct a reactionary alliance of brutal and repressive states, run from Washington, including [Jair] Bolsonaro’s Brazil, [Narendra] Modi’s India, [Viktor] Orbán’s Hungary, and eventually others like them. The Middle East-North Africa component is based on al-Sisi’s hideous Egyptian tyranny, and now under the Accords, also family dictatorships from Morocco to the UAE and Bahrain. Israel provides the military muscle, with the US in the immediate background,” Chomsky concluded.

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