Ariel Benson: The case against Chomsky

It is hard to think of two speakers more different than Rudy Giuliani and Noam Chomsky. While Mayor Giuliani was busy consoling America after the horrific attacks of Sept. 11, Professor Chomsky, an M.I.T. linguist, spent his time blaming the U.S. itself for the attacks.

Although the Social Planning and Events Committee should be commended for sponsoring a variety of speakers, it is important that people know when a speaker conveys messages of discrimination and distortion.

Yesterday at Irvine Auditorium, Chomsky became the first person to sign a petition to call for the University divestment from Israel, following a speech in which he compared the United States to a totalitarian dictatorship.

But Chomsky’s bizarre and extreme views should be no surprise. Several years ago, he wrote an approving introduction to a vile book by the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, in which Faurisson claimed that the Jews were responsible for World War II, denied that Anne Frank ever existed and argued that there were never any Nazi death camps in Europe.

What is perhaps surprising is that a number of groups on campus have followed Chomsky’s lead and have the audacity to single out Israel, of all the countries in the world, for divestiture. But there are no justifiable reasons to isolate Israel, whose record on human rights is comparable to those of the best in the world, especially considering the constant threat to its existence.

Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East; it is the only state that protects both freedom of speech and religion and offers full rights to women and minorities. Facing daily threats of Palestinian terrorism, Israel takes extraordinary steps to make sure that innocent Palestinians are not harmed.

Contrast that, for example, to Jordan, which killed more Palestinians in September 1970, “Black September,” than Israel has during her entire existence.

Yet on a number of college campuses around the U.S., faculty members and students have signed petitions calling for divestiture from Israel as long as Israel continues to pursue policies that the petitioners claim violate international law.

One such claim the petitions make is that Israel’s actions with respect to the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights are inconsistent with the United Nations resolution drafted following Israel’s victory in 1967’s Six Day War.

This move by the U.N., Resolution 242, does call for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” However it also requires that there be “recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” As long as Israel’s security is threatened, it has the right to control the “occupied territories.”

An additional claim made by the supporters of divestiture is that Israeli settlements do not comply with the Geneva Convention, which maintains that an “occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into territories it occupies.”

This convention, drafted after the Second World War, intended to prevent countries from forcibly displacing people to make room for its own. However, it in no way restricts the voluntary movement of individuals to any land. Israel has not displaced masses of Palestinians to make space for its people. There is no reason that Jews should be forbidden from living in those areas any more then any other land should be free of Jews.

Many countries include lands claimed by others, among them China, Russia, France, Turkey, Iraq and Spain, but Israel is the only one to withdraw and to offer statehood to the people claiming the territory under its control. Indeed, since the Oslo peace accords, over 97 percent of the Palestinian population has been transferred to the control of the Palestinian Authority.

Nonetheless, in 2000, the PA rejected statehood and instead turned to a campaign of terrorism against innocent people.

Why not encourage divestment from Saudi Arabia, which practices religious and gender-based apartheid? What about Russia and its fight with Chechnyan separatists? Or Spain, which occupies the Basque Country?

The list could go on and on. To single out Israel is pure anti-Semitism.

Ariel Benson is a College sophomore from Highland Park, N.J., and a Daily Pennsylvanian staff member.

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