ON IMPASSE, INTERNATIONALISM, AND RADICAL CHANGE
April 22, 2021
Noam Chomsky, Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, is widely regarded as the world’s foremost public intellectual. First known for his pathbreaking linguistic work, Chomsky came to political prominence on account of his outspoken opposition to the US invasion of Vietnam. An icon of the New Left, he has since established an international reputation as a socialist activist and critic of US foreign policy, neoliberal state capitalism, the American news media, and the Israeli colonization of Palestine. As part of his voluminous scholarly output, Chomsky’s research on the Palestine question dissects the historical and contemporary role of the United States in underwriting and facilitating Israel’s systematic dispossession of the Palestinians. His best-selling works include Syntactic Structures (1957); Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood (1974); The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (1983); Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988); and Understanding Power (2002). He recently published his collected interviews by C.J. Polychroniou, including Illegitimate Authority: Facing the Challenges of Our Time (2023) and A Livable Future Is Possible: Confronting the Threats to Our Survival (2024), both with Haymarket Books.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Noam, it is wonderful to see you and to talk to you again. Thank you for taking the time. In 1967, you wrote an article on the responsibility of the intellectual, a piece that influenced my life. Not immediately—I was thirteen years old when the article appeared, so it happened a bit later! In 2019, an event organized to discuss this article at University College London (UCL) was censored, showing that your work is still regarded as dangerous and subversive to the powers that be.
This continued censorship of your article more than fifty years later raises the question whether much has changed. Does the new generation of intellectuals, of scholars, maturing into the twenty-first century still share in that responsibility? I ask you to look beyond Britain to the USA to say whether anything has changed in that part of the world, given your bleak view on American complicity in criminal policies at the time. This dates back to Southeast Asia in the early 1960s up to American involvement in the continued oppression of the Palestinians today. Has anything changed in Americans’ sense of responsibility, or even in the readiness to assume accountability for what is done overseas in their name, quite often with their intellectual support and money? Are we in a better position today when it comes to the courage and commitment of intellectuals?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Let me start by making a comment, something few people know about the article you refer to. It first appeared in 1966, in a place that would surprise you: the journal of the Hillel Foundation at Harvard University. That’s a very significant fact. In 1966, I gave a talk to the Hillel Foundation and they published it in their journal, Mosaic. In 1966, it was still possible to talk about Israel, Palestine, and the United States. From 1967, it became virtually impossible. Anyone who tried to mention it was a pariah.
A few years later in 1972, Abba Eban, the Israeli foreign minister at the time, had an article in the liberal Zionist magazine, The Congress Weekly, which was published by the American Jewish Congress. His article informed American Jews of their responsibility: to show that there is no difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. And anti-Zionism meant criticism of his government, the Labor government in Israel.
Eban gave two examples of how dangerous this anti-Zionism was. He was talking about what he called “Jewish self-hatred” and he named two people. I was one. Izzy Stone, I. F. Stone, was the other—a dedicated Zionist, but critical of Israeli government policies.
Eban says on the one hand, there are non-Jews who are antisemites. On the other hand, there are Jews who are consumed with a neurotic Jewish self-hatred. So that covers the spectrum. According to Eban, anyone critical of the government of Israel is an antisemite— and “it’s your duty to show it, Jewish community.” You have recently heard the same message in England very prominently. The way of destroying Jeremy Corbyn and a progressive Labour Party, by showing that anyone critical of Israel is an antisemite. They don’t put it in those words, but that’s what it amounts to.
Well, how much have things changed? Somewhat. For example, a kind of a bellwether of American intellectual opinion is the New York Review of Books, the major journal of left-liberal American intellectuals. Up until maybe two or three years ago, this regime held. It was impossible to discuss the issue. I used to write for the New York Review regularly, but not after I became publicly involved in Israel-Palestine issues. After that, anathema.
It has changed in the last year or two, strikingly. If you read the journal now, you can read highly critical articles of Israeli policy, typically by Israeli writers. That makes the criticism sort of tolerable. There’s a very strong article by Nathan Thrall that appeared in a recent issue. All of this reflects changes in public opinion in the United States. Those changes ultimately reflect themselves in intellectual opinion and maybe someday in policy. That’s a matter of some significance.
But as Israeli policies became more and more brutal, reactionary, and intolerable, general liberal opinion has shifted. People who identify themselves as liberal Democrats have shifted away from the almost Stalinist-style support for Israel to more support for Palestinian rights. And it’s showing up in the intellectual journals and it may show up in policy. Israel used to be the liberal darling in the United States, you couldn’t say a word about it. It wasn’t just not being able to write—meetings were broken up. I had to have police protection if I tried to talk about the topic, even in my own university. That’s all changed.
Now, it is quite possible in these circles to be very critical of Israel. Support for Israel has shifted to the evangelical community, which is huge in the United States, and to ultraright nationalists, military and security, and the “committed.” That also leaves opportunities for change in policies—we haven’t seen it yet, but this has a way of affecting things. So with regard to intellectuals, yes, there has been a change, largely caused by Israel’s violence and brutality.
I give talks on this constantly, and you could see exactly when it turned. [Operation] Cast Lead, for example—the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon—had a big effect. Before that I was still getting police protection, but after I was drawing big crowds. I was giving the same talks. The more Israel moves to the right—the more brutal and harsh its policies become, the harder they are to suppress—the more we see changes in attitudes. Also among intellectuals, and, to a limited extent, in the press.
That’s the way things change, that’s how activism on the ground has a way of shifting attitudes. It means shifting what is sometimes called the Overton window—the range of things we are permitted to talk about within the mainstream framework. You can push a little at the edges and if the proper activities are undertaken, it could have an effect on policy.
ILAN PAPPÉ: In many ways I would share your optimism, although in the United Kingdom, and also in Palestine, there are countermeasures taken from above—by individual people and local lobbies. In the UK the Prevent program also targets any events that deal with criticism of Israel. Recently, we’ve been exposed to a different kind of assault on freedom of speech when it comes to Israel and Palestine through the new definitions of the Holocaust denial, where criticism of Israel is equated with antisemitism and denial of the Holocaust. Just recently, the secretary of state for higher education, Gavin Williamson, considered withdrawing funding for universities if they do not endorse the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of Holocaust denial. This is a definition that equates criticism of Israel with Holocaust denial, as I mentioned before.
We had a debate about the IHRA issue at the Institute recently, and our students raised concerns that echoed how you felt at the time about the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. You raised this concern in our joint book, On Palestine, among other places. On the one hand, there is a wish to continue struggling in this country—and also I suppose in the United States—against any attempt to silence criticism of Israel by weaponizing antisemitism as a principal tool of intimidation. On the other hand, there is a worry that freedom of speech, rather than the plight of the Palestinians, becomes the main focus of the solidarity movement. How can we balance both legitimate concerns, without forgetting the primary motivation for solidarity? Because many people feel that one comes at the expense of the other. I know that this is one of the worries you had at the time, where a focus on freedom of speech rather than the topic that freedom of speech is supposed to serve, would divert attention from the real issues at hand.
NOAM CHOMSKY: I think the increase in intensity of efforts to silence discussion on this topic is a sign of increased desperation among supporters of Israeli policy. As they see the control of opinion slipping out of their hands, they’re resorting to harsher and more desperate measures to try to block any discussion, any condemnation. In a way, it’s sort of a good sign to see the extremism of attempts to silence discussion—it means the situation is getting out of their control.
It used to be much easier in England. In the late ’80s or ’90s, the editor of Index on Censorship, which is concerned with issues of freedom of expression, decided that it would be interesting to try to open the discussion to an area that George Orwell wrote about: suppression of thought in free societies. The journal had been focused on Eastern Europe and attempts to silence dissidents there—the editor himself was an Eastern European dissident. I should mention that Orwell’s essay about how unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force in “free” England was itself suppressed. His introduction to Animal Farm was published only thirty years later.
The editor of Index wanted to do the same thing: open up Index on Censorship for just one article about how ideas are suppressed within free societies. So I wrote an article on how discussion of Israel/Palestine is suppressed in the United States without the use of force, by other means. The roof fell in—he had to retire and the journal was closed. There was a huge attack on Index for allowing this to happen. It turned out later that the attack was initiated and orchestrated by a leading exponent of freedom of speech and a person who was an old friend, Isaiah Berlin.
The journal was later reconstituted and it hasn’t gone in this dangerous direction again in the years that followed. That was then—you could just silence things. Now, it’s not so easy. It’s harder and therefore the effort to follow Abba Eban’s advice from fifty years ago, to tar any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, has intensified. I think it’s all reflection of the fact that, indeed, Israeli policies are becoming increasingly difficult to defend. And it’s necessary for them to resort to means of suppressing opinion—if possible, shifting the topic to antisemitism in order to marginalize criticism.
However, segments of the left, very mistakenly, are joining this—not on the issue of criticizing Israel, but on other things. What’s called “cancel culture” is an effort to try to prevent the kind of talk that they don’t want to hear. It’s wrong in principle and it’s a gift to the right wing. What it means is those who have power will use it for their interests. So, yes, these problems arise all the time, and you need to keep your eyes on the main issue. The main problem is not academic freedom in Britain and the United States—it’s the plight of the Palestinians. Anything that diverts attention from that, from what’s going on and what we can do about it, is completely wrong.
And there is a lot that can be done, including things that are not discussed, possibly because they’re so important. When something very topical is not discussed, you should be concerned. For example, there is something that, on the surface, doesn’t appear to be related to Israel/Palestine, but in fact is very closely related. That’s Iran. Right now it’s on front pages, there is constant talk of the “great threat of Iranian nuclear weapons programs”—supposed programs. There’s a sense that we need to do something about it.
Actually, there’s something very simple to do, which everyone knows but no one is allowed to talk about. That has to do with Israel. A very simple way to solve the alleged problem of Iranian nuclear weapons is to institute a nuclear weapons–free zone in the Middle East. That would reduce tensions and have enormous positive effects. Why isn’t it being done? Iran is strongly in favor of it and the Arab states have been strongly in favor of it for thirty years. The Global South is overwhelmingly in support of it. There is no criticism from Europe—they would go along with it. The option is blocked because the United States vetoes it, most recently under Obama. And the United States vetoes it because it does not want Israeli nuclear weapons to be open to inspection. In fact, the United States does not acknowledge the existence of nuclear weapons in Israel, though it’s not in doubt. And the reason is that American law would come into play, raising the question of whether any US aid to Israel is legal.
It is an important point that could be pushed by an activist group. They could bring to the American public the fact that we’re facing serious threats of war in order to preserve the huge flow of military and economic aid to Israel, and to Egypt, incidentally. These points have a lot of resonance among the American population, and they could lead to raising serious questions about the nature of US support for Israel. Even a hint of withdrawing support would have a big impact on Israel’s policies. Israel has been very dependent on the United States for support since the 1970s, when Israel adopted a clear policy of choosing expansion over security. This meant relying on the United States for protection—it is a very fragile system.
These are possible actions that could be done immediately with a big effect on global politics, and in particular on Israel/Palestine. But they’re not presented to you every day in the newspapers—you need to think them through and see the interconnections. And there are many.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes, I am as optimistic as you are about changes in the media, even when reading the more respectable American and British media outlets. Being a fellow in an Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, with colleagues who are experts on the history and present realities in the Arab and Muslim worlds, there still is a sense that even the best of the media provides a very superficial, sometimes even malicious, framing of the Arab world. For instance, the idea that sectarianism has been in the Arab world since time immemorial, which gives little hope for reasonable, rational solutions. Or that religion in the Middle East always is fanatical. Those of us who study history and present realities in the region always worry about how distorted and destructive these images are.
With this in mind, I would like to move away from Palestine and ask how you see the impact of social movements in the United States. For the time being, the Black Lives Matter movement appears to be successful, while the jury is out on social movements like Occupy Wall Street. How do you view the future of these social movements? If I may add to this, how do you view the special circumstances in which we live now due to the COVID-19 pandemic? Some people optimistically believe that the pandemic inadvertently opened new vistas and opportunities for creating a counter-alliance of internationalism and solidarity that challenges the neoliberal capitalist interpretation and praxis of internationalism. Based on narrow economic interest and projects of privatization, a neoliberal vision of internationalism perpetuates the social and economic marginalization of nonwhite and nonelite groups.
Is there a new hope for counter-internationalism coming out of the pandemic? Can it take place only in the virtual world? How far can—and should—it take place on the ground, as before the age of internet? And are you hopeful that these mass movements can still have an impact on policies from above, whether American domestic and foreign policy, or other countries’ foreign policies?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Let’s look at those movements that you mentioned. The best way to think about those kinds of questions is very concretely. What has been done? What can be done? Let’s take the Occupy movement, which is widely believed to have failed. I was very much involved in it and I don’t think it failed—I think it was a big success. Remember that Occupy was not a strategy, it was a short-term tactic. You can’t occupy Zuccotti Park forever, only for a couple of months.
During its brief period, the Occupy tactic broke open the issue of radical inequality, which had been suppressed. It became a major issue, which other movements and policy focused on. That’s a breakthrough, it’s an achievement. But more was hoped for—activists in Occupy were hoping to carry out neighborhood organizing on similar issues. They succeeded to some extent, but not as much as what was hoped. That’s the way movements work.
Now let’s look at Black Lives Matter. The movement has been enormously successful, even before the murder of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter had penetrated large parts of American society, not only the Black community, and had general popularity way beyond what social movements ordinarily have. After the Floyd assassination, it just exploded. There were massive demonstrations all over—solidarity, Blacks and whites together. These were overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations, with maybe a little bit of property destruction around the fringes. But of course that was what the right-wing media focused on.
Black Lives Matter had two-thirds popular support in the United States—that is incredible for a popular movement. It’s far beyond what Martin Luther King had, even at the peak of his popularity, and it remains very high. Of course, the right wing is making extreme efforts to try to demonize the movement, saying it was all about violence, trying to murder whites, and so on and so forth. Just about every Republican state right now is either considering or passing legislation to effectively ban popular demonstrations.
For example, the state of Oklahoma just made it legitimate for the driver of a car to hit, and even kill, demonstrators, under some false pretense. These legislations show desperation across the board to try to stop popular activism. And there are parallel efforts in Republican states to prevent voting, specifically to reduce the danger of popular votes. That’s desperation. And unfortunately, there is support for it—Trump was brilliant at tapping the poisons that run just beneath the surface of American society, giving them justification. It’s leading to a very serious problem. Almost half the population is now consumed with terror about what’s called “the great replacement”—that the white, traditionally Christian population is being overwhelmed and destroyed, faced with genocide by immigrants and Blacks.
I’m old enough to remember this in the 1930s—the reaction to the growth of successful popular movements, which are having a major impact. The [Bernie] Sanders campaign was an astonishing success that broke with over a century of American political history. American elections are pretty much bought by concentrations of economic power—you can predict the outcome of an election with remarkable probability, simply by looking at campaign spending. Sanders totally changed that. He became the most popular political figure in the country and virtually won nomination with no support from wealth or power. He faced the same kind of attacks that we saw against Corbyn in the British media, whether ignoring, denunciation, or lies. But he broke through. He is now the head of one of the most important committees in the Senate, the Budget Committee, with major influence. Others came in on the Sanders wave and the movements are increasing.
All of this can continue to happen. Now, what about the effect of the pandemic? Looking at it closely tells you a lot about our culture and our level of civilization. The question is international, like global warming and other major crises—there are no boundaries, which is obvious in the case of Covid.
It’s very striking to see what is happening. It’s understood by everyone that unless vaccines go quickly to the poor areas—to Africa, Asia, and other regions—the virus will mutate and lead to new variants. Some may be extremely lethal, like Ebola, and some may be uncontrollable. It will come back and hit the rich, it will devastate them. That’s known.
So what are the rich countries doing about it? They are preventing vaccines from going to the poor areas. Rich countries are monopolizing vaccines, well beyond what they can use. They are storing vaccines “just in case,” not distributing them to the poor countries, even though leadership knows very well that this is a suicidal course. If you are the leader of a rich country, it’s more important to guarantee the profits of big pharmaceutical corporations, their “intellectual property rights,” than to save yourself from destruction. Let alone the ethical issue of how many Africans and Asians will be killed. This tells you something about the level of civilization in the highest circles.
But actually there are a few countries who are internationalist— one in particular: Cuba. It’s the one genuinely internationalist country in the world, which sends doctors all over. A year ago, at the beginning of the pandemic in Europe, there was a serious outbreak in northern Italy. Northern Italy happens to be very close to two rich countries, Germany and Austria, that are in the same union as Italy—the European Union. At that point, rich countries had the pandemic fairly under control, they had lots of resources. Did Germany and Austria send any help to northern Italy? No.
But Cuba was willing to send doctors to northern Italy during the pandemic. A couple of weeks ago, the US Department of Health and Human Services issued its 2020 report, the last under the Trump administration. It is full of self-congratulation. If you read it closely, there’s an interesting paragraph buried inside, which details how the United States is reacting to the Covid epidemic in places of severe outbreak, like South America or in Panama. The department congratulates themselves on having pressured the government of Panama to refuse and remove the Cuban doctors who had come to assist—because “we have to stop Cuba’s malign influence in the western hemisphere.”
In the headlines you read that Brazil is a disaster area, they don’t have vaccines. Yet the United States praises themselves for having convinced the government of Brazil not to accept the offer of vaccines from Russia, which are exactly the same as Western vaccines. And that’s happening worldwide. There is pressure to develop a “people’s vaccine,” which will break the monopolies—much of the pressure comes from countries like Cuba and China, who claim that they will provide free vaccines. Whether or not they will, I don’t know. But the rich and powerful are refusing. The United States has an excess of vaccines that it cannot use, which is all piling up in warehouses.
President Biden graciously decided to release some of the vaccine excess to other countries. Which ones? Canada, which is the world champion in storing vaccines that it cannot use. What about Asia or Africa? Mexico is the second country that received vaccines from the US, as part of a bribe to the Mexican government to prevent desperate refugees from fleeing to the American border. That’s called “generosity,” in terms of Western civilization, and it is beyond what the European countries are doing.
So, what are the prospects for internationalism? I don’t see it from leadership. Maybe there can be popular movements on the ground, moving toward genuine internationalism on all fronts. Saving ourselves from destruction by the next pandemic and overcoming the desperate crisis of environmental destruction can be done. But it’s not going to come from leadership. It can come from popular activist pressures, the way things have happened in the past. That’s what we need to look at.
ILAN PAPPÉ: My last question actually ties in with your final remark about where we should hope for change—not coming from the elite, but rather from social movements who share international solidarity. International agendas can eventually influence local struggles, like the movement for freedom and liberation in Palestine. And this really is a question for our student community— those who work on decolonization, those who work in Palestine, or those who work in other parts of the world. Many ask themselves about the utility of believing that one can change politics from above or from within, in their own personal careers. Or should they hope, maybe even cherish the prospect of being part of grassroots movements of revolution—involved in radical action from below and by that contribute to more just society?
For instance, can what you termed many years ago a “corporatocracy” be reformed from within? Or can it only be challenged from the outside? This is a question of a career pattern for our graduates, whose healthy instincts against injustice will hopefully stay with them for as long as possible.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the official line, which one should always view with considerable skepticism, is that “changes come from leadership.” Enlightened leadership views the situation realistically, the intelligent men of the community—men, of course—think things through and decide what is right, and then they make decisions to the benefit of all. That’s what you learn in school, that’s what you read in the newspapers.
There’s an element of truth to it. When legislation is passed, it’s passed in Congress or Parliament. When decisions are made in corporate boardrooms, they’re made in corporate boardrooms. But why are they made? Why some decisions and not others? Here we go back to the popular forces that are changing the conditions under which decisions are made. If you leave it to corporate boardrooms, they’ll use fossil fuels to the maximum. “It doesn’t matter if fossil fuels destroy the world—who cares? We’ll make more profit tomorrow.” It’s the nature of the institution.
Go to the top banks. They’ll invest in fossil fuels because they can make money that way. They know the consequences, but this doesn’t fit within the institutional framework. The same is true of legislatures. On the other hand, if corporate boardrooms look out the window and see what they describe as “the peasants coming with the pitchforks”—reputational risk, in polite terms—then groups of leading CEOs and major business groups will address the public. They will say, “Yes, we realize that we’ve made mistakes, but now we are going to overcome them.” They claim to become what used to be called “soulful corporations,” “who will work for the benefit of the common good, so trust us and go home.”
And they will actually do something, which is not meaningless. You can press them to do things that are worth doing, like getting the banks to reduce their investment in fossil fuels. On the other hand, if you look closely when ExxonMobil says, “OK, we realize that we did something wrong, we need to work on renewable energy,” they’re putting money into sustainable energy through carbon capture. That is, technologies that will allow them to continue to use fossil fuels to the maximum. Because maybe, somehow, someone will figure out a way to get the poison out of the air after we put it in. Those are the things we need to be looking for.
It’s the same in the political system. Some people in the political system genuinely want significant change—in the United States, we just saw it two days ago. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the young representatives who came in on the Sanders wave, and Ed Markey, a senator from Massachusetts who has been interested in the environment his entire career, instituted legislation on a Green New Deal. This is exactly what needs to be done. It is detailed and feasible—worked out as to how it will provide a better life, better jobs, and overcome the climate crisis. The deal is now on the legislative agenda. And that is a result of a great deal of activism on the part of mostly young people, like Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement. That’s how things change.
So, yes, decisions are made in the Senate, in Parliament, in the corporate boardrooms—but under circumstances and conditions that are established, to a significant extent, by popular action, activism, and demands. That interaction is there. It has always been and it will continue to be. It’s not one or the other, but both.