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I received this message from Professor Noam Chomsky this summer in response to my article Security or Demography: The West Bank Barrier as a Demographic Tool.

From: chomsky[at]MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: West Bank Barrier
Date: June 16, 2007 19:27:29  IDT
To: kris[at]harmonicminor.com

Interesting, and well done, but I’m quite skeptical about the value of such inquiries, for a number of reasons.  Here’s a few.
 
You say it is a “highly contentious point” whether a barrier on the Israeli side of the Green Line would have achieved whatever security effects the Separation Wall does.  I don’t agree with that at all.  It’s an obvious point.  In fact it could have achieved far better results, since it could be impregnable, patrolled heavily on both sides of the fence, etc. Furthermore, even accepting (for argument’s sake)  the idea that for security Israel somehow needs intrusion into the West Bank, then why not just build a wall a fixed distance from the Green line, say 5 km (or whatever number one wants), thereby excluding the Maaleh Adumim salient and the Ariel salient, and the many other illegal communities?  Plainly, that would be at least as effective for self-defense.  The whole discussion seems absurd.  I’ve followed the arguments, and they don’t stand up to a moment’s inspection.  About as clear an evasion of the obvious as can be imagined.  We should also be more than a little disturbed, I think, by the universal acceptance in the West that the question of “security” reduces to the security of Israelis, that is, to the rich and powerful state closely linked to the US and EU, while there is no security problem for those under the jackboot.  The racism is stunning, even given the ineradicable imperial mentality.
 
As for question Israel’s motives, that’s a polite way of putting the fact that the motives have always been transparent, and have now been formalized in the “convergence” plan and Bush’s explicit authorization of the settlements.  It’s not “100% demography,” or even close.  If it were “demography” the West Bank settlements could be built in the Galilee or the Negev.  It’s expansion, which takes over some of the most arable land, the pleasant suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and – crucially — the water resources of cis-Jordan, already largely taken by the hijacking of the former Jordan river.  That leaves the Palestinian enclaves completely unviable, as is the purpose.  Same with the cantonization, which persists under the Sharon version, virtually without meaningful change.  The map reveals that clearly (particularly when we see that most of what’s left to Palestinians is stony desert).  And it now extends with the annexation of the Jordan Valley as well as the “seam” and the elaborate infrastructure projects that ensure that illegal settlements outside the wall will be able to exist in luxury and easy connection to Israel proper without ever seeing an Arab.  There’s no meaningful question about US-Israeli motives, not only in this example.  Nor have they ever been hidden.  They were explained clearly enough by Moshe Dayan, perhaps the most sympathetic to the Palestinians among Israeli leaders, when he was in charge of the occupied territories, where Israel would establish “memshelet keva,” permanent occupation, he told his cabinet colleagues, adding that we must tell the Palestinians that we have no solution for them, “they will live like dogs,” and whoever will leave, will leave, and we’ll see where that leads.  There has been no departure from that stand, with the exception of a single week in Taba in January 2001, in negotiations that were really getting somewhere until Barak called them off prematurely.
 
Noam Chomsky