Chomsky: Hamas had won free and fair elections

The United States has been punishing the Palestinians for voting for the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas in 2006, Noam Chomsky said on Wednesday.

According to a UN press release, Chomsky was speaking during a meeting at the UN headquarters in New York, organised by the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. Wednesday’s meeting came in the framework of the UN’s decision to mark 2014 as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

Chomsky is a highly esteemed international public intellectual and Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has authored several books and written dozens of articles about global political issues, including the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Commenting on the latest Israeli war on Gaza, he said that the Israeli occupation escalated its aggression and that this is what elicited the response from Hamas.

“There was a pattern of ceasefires reached that Israel had disregarded while continuing its assault on Gaza and building more settlements in the West Bank,” Chomsky reportedly said. “Hamas observed the ceasefire until an Israeli escalation elicited a Hamas response.”

Chomsky noted that the Israeli occupation insists on preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state, quoting an Israeli official who once told the Israeli press that the goal of disengagement in the Gaza Strip was to freeze the peace process to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian State and to ensure that diplomacy was removed from the agenda.

The reality on the ground, however, was that Israel never loosened its military grip on what he called the “ruined territory” for a single day.

According to the American scholar, while analogies are often made between the situation in apartheid-era South Africa and the Israeli policies in Palestine, “that is misleading, as South Africa had relied on its black workforce” to maintain power.

He continued: “Israel has no such attitude towards the Palestinians. If they leave, or die, that’s fine.” He also pointed out that this was the only “realistic alternative to the two-state settlement, and it would continue as long as the US supported it”.

However, Chomsky said he believes that the American youth are driving a change across the country that could, in the long term, alter US foreign policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.