Wednesday, July 19, 2006
More Adventures with Chomsky!
While I'm at it, at the end of the same Chomsky interview mentioned in the comments here, he gives a quote from Moshe Dayan, adressing the Palestinians: "we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave".
(Actually that's the wording he quoted in a Guardian article from 2002, which is presumably more authoritative than his quote from memory in the interview. This 1991 article gives the the quote slightly differently and places it in the context of "a Rafi meeting of September 1967, [at which] there was a dispute between [Shimon] Peres and Dayan").
But various Google searches gave me nothing at all except references to Chomsky himself using the quote. That's hardly strong evidence that it's made up or something, but has anyone else ever heard that quote?
Pre-emptive Update!: Right. After a lot (for a blogpost) of complicated google-research I tracked down the sourcing of the quote to this section of Deterring Democracy (avilable online in its entirety) - where the relevant reference is, I think, "Beilin op. cit., 42-3". Op fucking cit, great. Tracking back to here - "Yossi Beilin, Mehiro shel Ihud (Revivim, 1985)".
Yip, it's in fucking Hebrew. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)
The first thing I got on googling that, was this post. This worried me, since once you end up at dedicated anti-Chomsky sites featuring the phrase "self-hating Jew", well, that smell is the swamp. However, without relying on the mercifully defunct blogger "dhimmi" (beyond - is this too much? - trusting that Chomsky's quoted reply is authentic) I did learn that Chomsky wrote this:
without mentioning that these were not actually Ben Gurion's own words, just his sentiments, and seems to imply this would mislead only "people who are really desperate to defend their own crimes".
Make of it what you will.
(Christ, but that was the most annoying - and least lazy - thing I've ever put on this fooking blog-thing.)
(Actually that's the wording he quoted in a Guardian article from 2002, which is presumably more authoritative than his quote from memory in the interview. This 1991 article gives the the quote slightly differently and places it in the context of "a Rafi meeting of September 1967, [at which] there was a dispute between [Shimon] Peres and Dayan").
But various Google searches gave me nothing at all except references to Chomsky himself using the quote. That's hardly strong evidence that it's made up or something, but has anyone else ever heard that quote?
Pre-emptive Update!: Right. After a lot (for a blogpost) of complicated google-research I tracked down the sourcing of the quote to this section of Deterring Democracy (avilable online in its entirety) - where the relevant reference is, I think, "Beilin op. cit., 42-3". Op fucking cit, great. Tracking back to here - "Yossi Beilin, Mehiro shel Ihud (Revivim, 1985)".
Yip, it's in fucking Hebrew. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)
The first thing I got on googling that, was this post. This worried me, since once you end up at dedicated anti-Chomsky sites featuring the phrase "self-hating Jew", well, that smell is the swamp. However, without relying on the mercifully defunct blogger "dhimmi" (beyond - is this too much? - trusting that Chomsky's quoted reply is authentic) I did learn that Chomsky wrote this:
"During the 1948 war, he [Ben Gurion] held that "To the Arabs of the Land of Israel only one function remains -- to run away."
without mentioning that these were not actually Ben Gurion's own words, just his sentiments, and seems to imply this would mislead only "people who are really desperate to defend their own crimes".
Make of it what you will.
(Christ, but that was the most annoying - and least lazy - thing I've ever put on this fooking blog-thing.)
