Rating: 
Summary: Noam Chomsky, as always, brings clarity to this world
Review: Noam Chomsky delves into a delicate subject for many Americans, Israel and the politics surrounding our unwavering support of their regime. Chomsky, himself a nominal Jewish American, takes an academic and objective approach to examining the "special relationship" between the US and Israel and the dynamics surrounding the specific exchanges that have gone on for decades. What is apparent is that Chomsky has learned and given in great detail certain specific information about Israel's actions that make those who support Israel nervous and outraged. Chomsky doesn't pull any punches when he describes Israel's reasons for invading Lebanon and the illegality of that action. He discusses the role of American Jewry and their attempt to intertwine the tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust of WWII with the destiny of Israel. To speak out against Israel, Chomsky argues, is to be dubbed anti-Semitic. The fear of being called anti-Semitic has stopped many Americans from discussing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in an objective manner (as they would with other similar situations). He goes on to discuss the politics of the Arab-Israeli wars, popular perception and myth, and the reasons behind what motivates America to support Israel's actions with little or no criticism (even in the face of worldwide condemnation). For skeptics and other critics Chomsky includes prodigious notes and primary sources on the subject and leaves room for little doubt as to his reasoning. The newer updated version has a foreword written by Edward Said that is quite poignant and apt: "There is something profoundly moving about a mind of such noble ideals repeatedly stirred on behalf of human suffering and injustice." I couldn't have said it better myself. Far from being "anti-Semitic," this book is an honest analysis by a courageous academic crusader, willing to disregard his supposed religious affliation for the greater good and to serve the cause of justice and truth in reporting. Chomsky is not for those readers seeking an easy answer to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and is not certainly not for those without an open mind. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Illogical, mean-spirited and wrong
Review: Noam Chomsky tries here to indict Israel, but the text makes very selective use of the historical record and replies on the faulty premise that the U.S. now and has always pursued a plan to dominate the Middle East via a "client state"--Israel. Despite Chomsky's claim, Israel was not a "client state" in 1948, 1956 or even 1967. In fact, only Harry Truman's insistence tipped the U.S. to support the United Nation's 1948 partition plan -- and Israel's founding. The U.S. remained neutral and often hostile to Israel through the Six Day War. Chomsky also argues unconvincingly that "Israel has been the primary "aggressor" in this conflict. He forgets the highly aggressive Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the 1948 Arab promise of a "war of annihilation," which cost nascent Israel a catastrophic near 1% of her population, including 600 Israeli civilians captured and mutilated beyond recognition. As Werner Cohn notes in Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (available online), Chomsky devotes only parts of two pages, taking events entirely out-of-context. Chomsky devotes only two paragraphs to the pivotal 1929 Arab riots, which on the basis of one eyewitness (whom many others contradict), he blames entirely on the Jews. He admits that in August 1929, Arabs massacred 133 Jews, including 70 Jews killed in a "most ghastly incident" in Hebron. He also quotes Christopher Sykes' Cross Roads to Israel--but excises Sykes' key point, that Hajj Amin el-Husseini instigated the riots when Arabs murdered a Jewish boy for innocently kicking a ball into an Arab garden, that he considered his enemy "the Jewish people," and that his henchmen carried clubs through Jerusalem to threaten them. Chomsky skips the inconvenient 1973 Yom Kippur attack on Israel, and focuses on events beginning in 1982, with the false notion that Israel consistently rejected "any political settlement" with Arabs. He speciously cites a "flood" of letters to the U.S. media in "strikingly similar format," falsely inferring that the U.S. media and government supported "establishment of a Greater Israel." To prove this, he notes among other things profiles of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, whose "state worshipping" he terms worthy of the "annals of Stalinism." Good grief. Chomsky unfortunately avoids noting that Israel's 1982 incursion into Lebanon came only after decades of cross-border terrorist raids and bombardments that had taken thousands of civilian lives. His time line also conveniently a major proof that Israel is far from intransigent: the 1979 return of the Sinai to Egypt (including Israeli-developed oil wells and resorts), only 12 years after Nasser's (renewed) 1967 vow to erase Israel from the map. Meanwhile, Chomsky hardly touches on considerable Arab hostilities to Israel over 55 years. Thus, Chomsky sidesteps the critical fourth, fifth and sixth corners that make the complex Middle East "triangle" hexagonal--Arab incarceration of Arab refugees, Arab expulsion of 900,000 Jews from Arab lands and Arab oppression of other non-Muslim peoples, including Sudanese Christians and animists, Iraqi and Turkish Kurds, Egyptian Copts and Moroccan Berbers. Chomsky tries to convince readers of "persistent and sinister" ideological American Jewish plot creating false "illusion about Israeli society and the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict," and presenting "the major obstacle to an American-Palestinian and Israeli-Palestinian dialogue." In short, Chomsky falsely blames the Jews--for everything. This book was first issued in 1983 by Noontide Press, the publishing arm of California's neo-Nazi Institute for Historical Review. As Werner Cohn reports in Partners in Hate, IHR's catalogue prominently features Holocaust denial, Nazi-era propaganda films banned for sale in Germany, hate literature by Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, the late Father Coughlin--and the crème of its choice selections, the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. One hesitates to judge a book solely by the audience that favors it. Then again, Chomsky likens Jewish, Israeli and Zionist actions to those of Hitler in all 12 of his references that that tyrant, a rather base idea. One more reason to heave this book out with the proverbial bathwater. --Alyssa A. Lappen
Rating:
Summary: detailed, a great reference
Review: noam chomsky's "the fateful triangle" is justifiably one of the standard references on the israel/palestinian conflict. it is not an extensive survey of the israel-palestine conflict, but a look at the relations between the important political players in the US, israel and palestine, and their relationships with each other. the author has been a zionist since before the establishment of the state of israel, but is a staunch supporter of palestinian rights and sovereignty. in addition, he an exemplary writer on world events, bringing depth of knowledge and analysis to clear expositions of american foreign policy. he may therefore have been the most appropriate person to write a book on the US's relation to israel and the palestinians. the book succeeds admirably. the book starts from the "accommodationist" position that both jews and palestinians are entitled to states in historic palestine, and analyses in detail israel's rejectionism - its opposition to a palestinian state - and US support for it. the book was originally written during israel's war on lebanon. it explores israel-US relations mostly as they pertain to the israeli occupation of palestine following its conquest in 1967. chomsky makes a persuasive case that as israel intensified its occupation, palestinians moved closer to accommodation, creating a "political threat" to israel that resulted in israel's successive invasions of lebanon, for the purpose of eliminating the PLO as a political threat. one of the strengths of the book is that it goes beyond the standard analysis of US-israel relations through state policy, and examines in great detail the attitudes of american media and intellectuals towards israel, the palestinians and arabs more generally. chomsky finds that the american intellectual establishment - liberal and conservative alike - adopts an almost worshipful attitude towards the jewish state, dismissing or ignoring the viewpoints and concerns of palestinians, arabs, pro-peace israelis and humanitarian opinion more generally. in this respect, chomsky argues, the attitudes of the american intellectual establishment at the time of his writing mirrors the attitudes of the american intelligentsia towards soviet russia in the 1930's. the media's reporting is found to be similarly biased. the great detail in which this is documented makes the book a good reference on this subject, though an update would be welcome. (another good book on the subject is "blaming the victims", edited by edward said and christopher hitchens.) similarly, chomsky doesn't just analyze US-israel relations in terms of the israeli state, but also discusses israeli intellectuals, the peace camp and other social sectors. the discussion of the US state's backing of israel is the part of the analysis most up for challenge, in my opinion. chomsky attributes the backing mostly to america's geopolitical interest in middle eastern oil. this point of view has been challenged by others who have written about the power of the pro-israel lobby. given that the focus of the book is on U.S.-israel relations, chomsky might have spent some more time addressing this point of view. an important feature of "the fateful triangle" is its incredibly density. this means that it's rich in material, but also that it's a tough slog. i wouldn't necessarily recommend a thorough reading of this book, unless you are interested in all the details. instead, read the parts that interest you most, and familiarize yourself with its contents by skimming the rest of the books. its main value is as a reference.
Rating:
Summary: detailed, a great reference
Review: noam chomsky's "the fateful triangle" is justifiably one of the standard references on the israel/palestinian conflict. it is not an extensive survey of the israel-palestine conflict, but a look at the relations between the important political players in the US, israel and palestine, and their relationships with each other. the author has been a zionist since before the establishment of the state of israel, but is a staunch supporter of palestinian rights and sovereignty. in addition, he an exemplary writer on world events, bringing depth of knowledge and analysis to clear expositions of american foreign policy. he may therefore have been the most appropriate person to write a book on the US's relation to israel and the palestinians. the book succeeds admirably. the book starts from the "accommodationist" position that both jews and palestinians are entitled to states in historic palestine, and analyses in detail israel's rejectionism - its opposition to a palestinian state - and US support for it. the book was originally written during israel's war on lebanon. it explores israel-US relations mostly as they pertain to the israeli occupation of palestine following its conquest in 1967. chomsky makes a persuasive case that as israel intensified its occupation, palestinians moved closer to accommodation, creating a "political threat" to israel that resulted in israel's successive invasions of lebanon, for the purpose of eliminating the PLO as a political threat. one of the strengths of the book is that it goes beyond the standard analysis of US-israel relations through state policy, and examines in great detail the attitudes of american media and intellectuals towards israel, the palestinians and arabs more generally. chomsky finds that the american intellectual establishment - liberal and conservative alike - adopts an almost worshipful attitude towards the jewish state, dismissing or ignoring the viewpoints and concerns of palestinians, arabs, pro-peace israelis and humanitarian opinion more generally. in this respect, chomsky argues, the attitudes of the american intellectual establishment at the time of his writing mirrors the attitudes of the american intelligentsia towards soviet russia in the 1930's. the media's reporting is found to be similarly biased. the great detail in which this is documented makes the book a good reference on this subject, though an update would be welcome. (another good book on the subject is "blaming the victims", edited by edward said and christopher hitchens.) similarly, chomsky doesn't just analyze US-israel relations in terms of the israeli state, but also discusses israeli intellectuals, the peace camp and other social sectors. the discussion of the US state's backing of israel is the part of the analysis most up for challenge, in my opinion. chomsky attributes the backing mostly to america's geopolitical interest in middle eastern oil. this point of view has been challenged by others who have written about the power of the pro-israel lobby. given that the focus of the book is on U.S.-israel relations, chomsky might have spent some more time addressing this point of view. an important feature of "the fateful triangle" is its incredibly density. this means that it's rich in material, but also that it's a tough slog. i wouldn't necessarily recommend a thorough reading of this book, unless you are interested in all the details. instead, read the parts that interest you most, and familiarize yourself with its contents by skimming the rest of the books. its main value is as a reference.
Rating:
Summary: A ONE-SIDED DIATRIBE
Review: Not meant for folks who want a balanced and serious retrospective on the relationship between the 3 peoples. Chomsky and Said both have serious Pro-Palestinian agendas, and their academic credentials are widely known to be lacking serious content. Great Palestinian fluff piece, if that's what you're looking for. Extremely disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: Call it a treaty on moral decadence
Review: The main idea on this book is that Israelis and its supporters have descended in a downward moral spiral, as they perpetrated or turned a blind eye to ethnic cleansing, human rights abuses against Palestineans in the occupied territories. After you read this book, you will find yourself really bothered everytime you read in the mainstream press that "Israel is a democracy" or other platitudes repeated ad nauseam by apologists of Israel's apartheid regime or Arab-haters. The only silver lining is that eventually oppression ends. It happened before in South Africa. The Soviet Union is gone. Soon Israel's occupation may even end. Or perhaps that is just a dream?
Rating:
Summary: No use in reading this book
Review: The main problem with Said and Chomsky is that there is no need to read their books at all, you know they will attack the US, talk about the rights of the palestinians (but mostly forget the rights of many other minorities in ths world suffering more than them), accuse Israel of deciding what America will do, picture all the arabs as victims, and so on... Do these two ever evolve? do they ever change their minds? or are they stuck in the same thoughts without letting any fact change their minds? You've read one of their books and you've read them all, and the reviews for and against are also the same for and against.
Rating:
Summary: Splendid critique of Zionism
Review: The original edition of this book was published in 1983. This edition adds three new chapters, on the Intifada, on Israel's 1993 attack on Lebanon, and on the peace process. It provides a vast wealth of information about Israel's appalling treatment of the Palestinian people. Chomsky also shows how the US state subsidises every Israeli attack on Lebanon, and how it pays for every prohibited biological weapon and every instrument of torture that its forces us. For 22 years now, Israeli forces have illegally occupied sovereign Lebanese territory. The war will only end when the Lebanese people finally expel the invader from their land. Chomsky acknowledges that the Palestinian people's courage and solidarity have forced the Israeli state to withdraw from Gaza and most of the West Bank. Their Intifada defeated what he rightly calls 'the US-Israeli strategy of integrating the occupied territories into Israel' and ended Israel's brutal and lawless occupation of those parts of Palestine. Unfortunately though, Chomsky fails to appreciate that this was a great achievement. The peace agreements ratifying this were a big step forward, in the face of well-nigh overwhelming odds, towards the Palestinian people's successful exercise of their right to national self-determination and sovereignty. Like Edward Said (whom Pluto Press chose to write a Foreword), Chomsky attacks the agreements and the Palestinian people's representative, the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Said says the agreements were 'an unnecessary line of Arab capitulation'. But as Chomsky acknowledges, 'realistic alternatives may be much worse.' If so, why publicly revile the PLO for signing the agreements? Chomsky claims that the US state rules supreme and that all other states are mere agents and clients of the USA. According to this view, the PLO, like the Israeli Government, is a US puppet; further, any advance by the Palestinians or anybody else is plainly impossible, so it must be denied and reviled when it is achieved. This defeatism is a left variant of US triumphalism.
Rating:
Summary: Unreliable history and dubious politics
Review: The reader looking for a scholarly and disinterested account of the relations among Israel, the Arab world and the United States since 1948 will not find it here. The polemical nature of Fateful Triangle is evident in what it leaves out, and in its unreliable use of source material; its bias is exemplified in a monocausal and malign attribution of responsibility for all that is bad to the United States and Israel. There is nothing contingent in its presentation of historical outcomes: they are assumed to have been planned by elites, specifically the forces of American big business, their agent the US government, and its client, the state of Israel. The first thing to say about such teleology is that it eschews historical method. But it also evidences a slanted story that ignores salient facts, such as shifting alliances among state actors and a tradition of fierce anti-Semitism among those hostile to Israel's founding. No account of Israel's founding can be taken seriously that does not locate the urgency of the matter in the destruction of 70 per cent of European Jewry in the gas ovens of an evil regime. Yet Chomsky's references to Hitler, in every single case, are means of denigrating Israel and the Zionist movement: such-and-such a characteristic of the Jews is said to be analogous to Hitler. Apart from anything else (and there is much that could be said about it), such a polemical device is just bad history, for it ignores the genuine pro-Nazi force in Palestine. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, was a fervent supporter of Hitler and paid a state visit to Nazi Germany in 1943. About this man and his anti-Zionist agitation, Chomsky says not a word; the principal Arab leader that the Zionist pioneers had to contend with does not appear in the book at all. The book gets no more reliable or balanced. Rather than Israel's being created by US fiat, its cause had astonishingly little sympathy among western statesmen in the immediate post-war period. The British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who inherited the responsibility of the Palestine Mandate, was frankly hostile to the Zionist cause. The United States, which before the Second World War forced one upon her had scarcely had a foreign policy at all, was by no means an instinctive sympathiser with the Jewish cause either. Had it not been for the idealism, humanity and genuine liberalism of Harry Truman, US policy might well have followed the realpolitik urged by George Marshall and abandoned the Jews in Palestine to the tender mercies of the Mufti's followers. Right through the 1950s, the United States was hardly an instinctive supporter of Israel; ironically, given the current state of Middle East politics, the principal western ally of Israel at that time was France. All of this history is overlooked in this morality tale of good (the Arab masses) and evil (the US and its client state). At best, the account is simplistic and unreliable. But at times its bias becomes more than wearisome. If, as Chomsky would have it, history is shaped by malevolent forces, then it raises the question of who those forces are. The attentive reader of Fateful Triangle will notice some subtle insinuations of a Jewish conspiracy manipulating world events. What are we to make, for example, of Chomsky's heavy implication that the terrorist Abu Nidal was an Israeli agent? If you believe there are grounds for suspecting that the bomber of a synagogue in Vienna and the assassin (fortunately unsuccessful) of the Israeli ambassador in London was controlled by Mossad, you had better have plausible evidence to back up your suspicion. Chomsky has none, and indeed makes no attempt to cite any. And that characteristic says much about the nature of this book.
Rating: 
Summary: mixed reaction
Review: The value of this book lies in its articulation of an extreme--though rarely wholly implausible--interpretation of the Middle East conflict. That extreme-yet-credible interpretations can be mounted on both sides (with Joan Peters' comparably scholarly _From Time Immemorial_ supporting the other "pole") attests to the conflict's intricacy. In light of this intricacy, one must endeavor to see how things look from multiple perspectives. What justifies Chomsky's extreme interpretation--at least up to a point--is the traditional failure of the American press to portray Israel realistically. Where some have sought merely to correct the official (distorted) image, Chomsky confronts it with a (distorted) mirror image. While this has value, it also has its risks, not least for impressionable readers. A few points where informed/critical readers will take issue are: 1. There was a time when the mass Palestinian exodus was blamed on bad advice from the Arab governments. Today it is known that many Arabs were forcibly expelled. Yet Chomsky actually goes so far as to deny, inaccurately, that the Arab governments played any roll in encouraging the Arab flight. 2. Behind Nasser's gruff exterior, Chomsky seems to have detected a warmly outsretched hand. Chomsky's basis for dismissing American depictions of Nasser (based on well-documented vows to destroy Israel, which Chomsky doesn't acknowledge) are, apparently, some less agonistic moments of Nasser's in Europe. Yet Chomsky fails to explain why, with conflict looming, Nasser's more subdued face should have been seen as the key to his true intentions. (Is it hard to believe that leaders find it useful to play to different audiences?) 3. Chomsky uncritically cites Begin's comparison of the Lebanon "war of choice" with the 1967 war as evidence that the latter was optional ("We did not know for sure that Nasser would attack...") Thus, where some would accuse Begin of being cynically manipulative--garnering support for a dubious war by comparing it to highly successful one--Chomsky takes Begin at face value, as offering a sincere commentary on the 1967 war! 4. Chomsky claims that he himself has been "consistently harsh" towards the PLO, yet he doesn't ask whether his reasons for this harshness might also have been reasons for the Israelis to mistrust the PLO's early peace overtures (in addition to the former's colonial motivations). If mistrust of the PLO was a factor, then we have a zero-sum-game, very different from the one-sided "rejectionism" Chomsky ascribes to the Israelis. 5. This brings us to the elephant in the middle of the room: Chomsky fails to acknowledge the well-known fact that many in the Arab world have expressly favored cynically exploiting the peace process as a step towards Israel's ultimate destruction. In light of this, it seems touchingly naive to maintain, as Chomsky does, that the PLO underwent a deep and abiding psychological transformation from "rejectionism" to "accommodationism" between 1970 and 1976, and that the failure to jump at the PLO's peace overtures can only be a sign of racist rejectionism on the part of Israel and the US. 6. Chomsky makes heavy weather over the PLO's "scrupulous" adherence to its cross-border ceasefire in the 1980's, in contrast with Israel's countless violations. Wholly omitted is the fact that international PLO terror (the cessation of which Israel had demanded as a condition of the ceasefire) continued to flourish during that period. 7. Chomsky quickly concludes that given the negligible Jewish presence on the East Bank in 1921, the Zionists could not have objected to Britain's parcelling out 3/4 of Mandatory Palestine to form Transjordan. But this ignores the possibility that some of that land could have figured in an acceptable Arab-Israeli compromise (had the Arab side been open to one). 8. Chomsky criticizes the attitude of Chaim Herzog and other Israeli politicians, who have unabashedly been guided by the question, "What is good for the Jews?" Yet he fails to consider how different history might have been if Arab leaders had shown a similar pragmatic commitment to pursuing "what is good for the Arabs"! With these points noted (and there are plenty more where they came from), the book remains valuable for debunking the myth that Israel's leaders have consistently been devoted to peace in the face of monolithic Arab intransigence, for emphasizing that the Israeli Labor party is far more heavily implicated in Israel's colonial policies than is generally understood in the U.S., and for helping to unmask the dehumanizing brutality of the occupation. At the same time, I am saddened to think that an opportunity for real moral clarity was squandered in this book.
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