- 02 Apr 2015 02:34
#14543003
You know, the one the Israeli propaganda trot out every time the think there is a risk of a viable settlement being reached?
Noam Chomsky in a recent interview put this so-called charter into perspective:
He then talked a bit about the Likud charter and the rank hypocricy of the Israelis - which I don't want to cause a distraction with right now...
And then he raises the more interesting story of another charter - the PLO one, written in the 1960s, and was pretty much the Likud charter in reverse (we want everything):
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-world ... dchildren/
Of particular interest is the bold part. While only speculation on Chomsky's part - I strongly believe he is right bang on the money - and it applies just as much with regards to the Hamas charter.
The charter is irrelevant, and it is an embarassment to Hamas. They want to disown it - but they can't be seen to back down in the face of Israeli aggression. And Israel knows this.
Noam Chomsky in a recent interview put this so-called charter into perspective:
The charter was produced by, apparently, a handful of people, maybe two or three, back in 1988, at a time when Gaza was under severe Israeli attack. You remember Rabin’s orders. This was a primarily nonviolent uprising which Israel reacted to very violently, killing leaders, torture, breaking bones in accordance with Rabin’s orders, and so on. And right in the middle of that, a very small number of people came out with what they called a Hamas charter.
Nobody has paid attention to it since. It was an awful document, if you look at it. Since then the only people who have paid attention to it are Israeli intelligence and the US media. They love it. Nobody else cares about it. Khaled Mashal, the political leader of Gaza years ago, said: look, it’s past, it’s gone. It has no significance. But that doesn’t matter. It’s valuable propaganda.
He then talked a bit about the Likud charter and the rank hypocricy of the Israelis - which I don't want to cause a distraction with right now...
And then he raises the more interesting story of another charter - the PLO one, written in the 1960s, and was pretty much the Likud charter in reverse (we want everything):
There is an interesting history about the so-called PLO charter. Around 1970 the former head of Israeli military intelligence, Yehoshafat Harkabi, published an article in a major Israeli journal in which he brought to light something called the PLO charter or something similar to that. Nobody had ever heard of it, nobody was paying any attention to it.
And the charter said: here’s our aim. Our aim is it’s our land, we’re going to take it over. In fact, it was not unlike the Herut claims except backwards. This instantly became a huge media issue all over. The PLO covenant it was called. The PLO covenant plans to destroy Israel. They didn’t know anything about it, nobody knew anything about it, but this became a major issue.
I met Harkabi a couple years later. He was kind of a dove, incidentally. He became pretty critical of Israeli policy. He was an interesting guy. We had an interview here at MIT, in fact. Incidentally, at that time there was material in the Arab press that I was reading saying that the Palestinians were thinking about officially throwing out the charter because it was kind of an embarrassment.
So I asked him, “Why did you bring this out for the first time just at the time when they were thinking of rescinding it?” He looked at me with the blank stare that you learn to recognize when you are talking to spooks. They are trained to pretend not to understand what you’re talking about when they understand it perfectly.
He said, “Oh, I never heard that.” That is beyond inconceivable. It’s impossible that the head of Israeli military intelligence doesn’t know what I know from reading bits and pieces of the Arab press in Beirut. Of course he knew.
There’s every reason to believe that he decided to bring this out precisely because he recognized, meaning Israeli intelligence recognized, that it would be a useful piece of propaganda and it’s best to try to ensure that the Palestinians keep it. Of course, if we attack it, then they’re going to back off and say: we’re not going to rescind it under pressure, which is what’s happening with the Hamas charter.
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-world ... dchildren/
Of particular interest is the bold part. While only speculation on Chomsky's part - I strongly believe he is right bang on the money - and it applies just as much with regards to the Hamas charter.
The charter is irrelevant, and it is an embarassment to Hamas. They want to disown it - but they can't be seen to back down in the face of Israeli aggression. And Israel knows this.