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Noam Chomsky, Darling of Haaretz
This week Noam Chomsky, the famed MIT linguist and radical political writer and activist, was denied entry into Israel. The Israeli Left is up in arms.
Boaz Okon, legal commentator for left-leaning Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily, called the barring of Chomsky “a foolish act in a…series of recent follies” that “may mark the end of Israel as a law-abiding and freedom-loving state, or at least place a large question mark over this notion.” Going on to call Chomsky a “globally recognized intellectual,” Okon claimed “it would not be exaggerated to say that the decision to silence Professor Noam Chomsky is an attempt to put an end to freedom in the State of Israel.”
For his efforts, Okon made it to the New York Times where he was quoted by its Israel correspondent Ethan Bronner. Bronner called Chomsky “an outspoken critic both of American and Israeli policy.” Bronner was also able to quote Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, that “The idea that Israel is preventing people from entering whose opinions are critical of the state is ludicrous; it is not happening. This was a mishap. A guy at the border overstepped his authority.”
In Bronner’s telling, “Mr. Regev suggested that if Professor Chomsky tried to enter again, he would succeed.”
If it wasn’t paranoid, one might suspect that even the “right-wing” Netanyahu government has a special department for tripping up people who are loyal to Israel and want to defend it. In 2008—under the left-of-center Olmert government—Israel barred two other virulent enemies, Richard Falk and Chomsky’s disciple Norman Finkelstein, from entering. Regev—in the name of his boss—should either explain that those, too, were mistakes and Israel should gladly welcome all of its worst slanderers, or not speak until he and his boss work out some sort of coherent policy.
But to get back to the Israeli Left’s reactions, Bradley Burston of the far-Left daily Haaretz also quoted Okon on the barring of Chomsky. In doing so, Burston kicked off an 1100-word diatribe against Israel as a “state headed for fascism” that uses the words fascism, fascist, and fascistic a total of twelve times, including calling Chomsky’s exclusion “fascism by rubber stamp.” Another Haaretz commentator, Gideon Levy, was more precise, asserting that “When Israel closes its gates to anyone who doesn’t fall in line with our official positions, we are quickly becoming similar to North Korea.”
But the honors went to Haaretz’s editorial on the issue, haughtily titled “Declaring War on the Intellect: Israel and Noam Chomsky.”
“By stopping the illustrious American scholar Prof. Noam Chomsky at the Allenby Bridge,” Haaretz wrote,
Going on to call Chomsky “a controversial and bold intellectual” who “bluntly and acerbically attacks any government that he thinks deserves it,” Haaretz said it would be
So there you have it. Chomsky, according to Okon, Bronner, Regev (speaking for Netanyahu), Burston, Levy, and Haaretz is at most a “critic,” but more significantly, for some of them, an “illustrious scholar,” a “superior intellect,” and a “bold intellectual” whose presence should honor anyone including the state of Israel, which could only have barred him in an act of careless folly or fascistic madness.
Who, actually, is Noam Chomsky? This useful overview notes, among much else, his admiration and apologetics, sustained over a decade and a half, for the genocidal Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Closer to Israeli concerns, Chomsky—an American Jew who lived briefly in Israel during the 1960s and knows Hebrew—has made the following statements (again, among many others) over the years, each of them documented on this site:
Robert Wistrich, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, notes in A Lethal Obsession, a widely praised overview of contemporary anti-Semitism published in January, that Chomsky “stooped to the level of offering support to [notorious French] Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson and defending his credentials.” Chomsky, who contributed a preface to a 1980 Holocaust-denial book by Faurisson,
Two and a half decades later, in May 2006, Chomsky’s enthusiasm for Jew-hatred was again on display when he paid a fawning visit to Hezbollah in Lebanon and said “Hezbollah’s insistence on keeping its arms is justified.” Chomsky was also quoted (see the video) as telling his hosts that “the victory achieved by the resistance is a victory for all the peoples that fight injustice and oppression,” and had himself filmed standing beside a destroyed Israeli vehicle.
Less than two months later, when Hezbollah used its arms to mount the murderous cross-border attack against Israel that triggered the Second Lebanon War, Chomsky told a radio interviewer that he hoped Hezbollah’s actions could yield results.
Okon’s and Haaretz’s reactions, then, to Israel denying entry to Chomsky—an apologist for genocide, exponent and promoter of Holocaust denial, and terror groupie—can at best be ascribed to gross, inexcusable ignorance. Or, if it is not ignorance, one does not like to think what else could drive them to verbally pommel their government and country and extol Chomsky in this episode.
And, to repeat, the Prime Minister’s Office has acquitted itself miserably in this affair as well.
About P. David Hornik
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Beersheva and author of the book Choosing Life in Israel.