I respect Noam Chomsky. He’s a brilliant thinker with much to teach us on morality, language, education, and so many other issues. But he recently said something that not only makes no sense. It’s actually absurd:
“Israeli intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies – what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015.”
Before even getting into how ridiculous this statement is, I should point out that 1) he has only one example of an Israeli politician defying the great American puppet master, and 2) it has nothing to do with… elections.
Now to why it’s absurd.
The United States is one of the strongest – if not the strongest – countries in the world, economically, politically, militarily, and culturally. Israel is not. Yes, we have a strong army, and many times it isn’t used in the right way, but never has the Israeli army been used to literally overthrow another nation’s government.
Yes, we have a fairly strong economy, but huge wage gaps and an unnecessary reliance on foreign aid stunts our growth.
Politically, we have little influence. AIPAC, which is run not by Israel but by insecure Diaspora Jews trying to promote a “friendship” between nations that helps them avoid questions of dual loyalty, claims to do a lot for Israel. But let’s face it, US politicians would continue giving military aid to Israel with or without AIPAC because these politicians support the military industrial complex. US aid to Israel, like military aid to countless other nations, is really just an American government subsidy to its own arms industry.
Culturally, Israel has zero influence. An embarrassingly large sector of Israeli society tends to ape Western cultural norms, not the other way around. Take a look at any attention-seeking celebrity on Twitter and you’ll see just what a positive cultural influence Israel has on the world (BDS much?). The claim that Israel would even be able to influence American elections is grossly out of touch with reality.
Even if Jerusalem could somehow interfere with US elections, or even if Russia could for that matter, is the American public really supposed to believe that the US and its citizens are so weak, so susceptible to manipulation, that a foreign government would be able to convince the hundreds of millions of potential voters – many of whom anyway vote along party lines – to change their mind?
All this talk is just an attempt to explain away the phenomenon that is Donald Trump’s election. This is unnecessary: Trump was elected because he tapped into a deep feeling that many American citizens hold and reached out to people who have felt marginalized by their political representatives for years. He might be an unhinged atrocious human being with indefensible policies, but the fact of the matter is that his presidential campaign was just better than anyone else’s.
Now let’s assume for the moment that somehow Israel did manage to interfere in American elections. Without getting into too much detail (there are several books already written on this topic), the way the US political system is arranged allows for almost no actual change at the Executive branch level. The two party system in which candidates from both parties take money from the same corporations and lobby groups is a farce moonlighting as “democracy.” The president is a figurehead for a system that never really changes. Sometimes a marginalized group will be given a token concession to give the illusion that the people have any say in how their lives are run, but for the most part, the US is on a political trajectory that no presidential election can stop. At most, Trump’s election will be just a four- to eight-year blip.
And I’ve never seen such hypocrisy as American politicians and civilians complaining that a foreign nation is meddling in their affairs. Interfering in elections, coercing democratically elected leaders, overthrowing governments, and straight up military invasion in certain extreme cases are prominent features of US foreign policy, regardless of which party sits in the White House (we Israelis still remember V15, when the Obama administration attempted to oust Netanyahu).
To make a long story short, Chomsky’s claim is absurd, and even if it weren’t, the American people have no right to complain about Israel or anyone else interfering in their system until they demand that their own government stop meddling in the internal politics of other nations.
