Chomsky and the Question of Palestine

Abstract

CHOMSKY' s work in linguistics and politics is much better known amongst Jews and Jewish communities than it is amongst Arabs and Arab communities. This is not entirely because Chomsky himself is a Jew who has written on subjects like Israel and Middle East politics that affect Jews very closely. Rather, I think, it is because Chomsky deals in terms as well as subjects in which Jews have been and continue to be prominent: his principal intellectual and professional contributions are to linguistics, a science whose existence is virtually dependent upon the university, which is where, more demonstrably and effectively than elsewhere in the United States, the Jewish presence is at once irresistibly attractive on some moral and most intellectual grounds and deeply troubled on some political ones. Moreover Chomsky has not only appropriated for himself the turf of political philosophy and hard contemporary analysis; he has done it with great moral authority, a style recognized by many Jews to be central to an important Judaic tradition in the West (which it is), and here Chomsky begins to be problematic for Jews with an insistence that no subject, not even Israel, can be exempt from rational analysis. I suspect that to many Jews Chomsky is a Jew who has pushed his Jewishness too far and too wastefully. As a brilliant Jewish colleague of mine put it to me recently, Chomsky hates Israel with such evidence and in such tones of harsh judgement that only a Jew could have done his hating so effectively. By contrast, those Arabs who know Chomsky or his work are likely to have a far less prickly sense of him. Not only has there been very little Arab knowledge of his professional accomplishments: there is a rather limited Arab familiarity with the terms, as well as the settings, of his political work. To us generally he is either known as a big name of some sort, or as someone to whom we can point with fairly uncompli-