Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Fifth Freedom
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
119
East Jerusalem was seized by the authorities when it reported settler
attacks against Arabs after a prisoner exchange. An Arab bimonthly was
shut down permanently in 1983, and the censor closed an Arab
newspaper in Jerusalem for three days when it published an obituary of
two young Arabs who died in a mysterious car explosion in 1985. 350
books are officially banned in the occupied territories, along with others
known to him personally, Knesset member Matti Peled (an Arabist and
retired general) reports, including Hebrew translations of Theodore
Herzl’s diaries, Isaac Deutscher’s Non-Jewish Jew, books on Israeli
military and political history, a translation of “To live with Arabs” by Elie
Eliachar, the dovish president of the Council of the Sephardic
Community in Israel, a book on the religious West Bank settlers (Gush
Emunim) by the well-known Israeli journalist Danny Rubinstein, among
others. Art exhibitions are censored; a Palestinian artist was given a sixmonth
jail sentence on the charge that the colors of the Palestinian flag
appeared in the corner of a painting. Arab plays have repeatedly been
banned on political grounds, and a Hebrew play by an Israeli jailed for
refusing military service was banned in September 1985 “on purely
political grounds,” Dan Fisher reports. The Hebrew press is also subject
to censorship—as well as extensive self-censorship. Journalists are not
permitted by the censor to publish abroad material that has appeared in
the Hebrew press. All outgoing mail and packages are subject to
censorship, and may be opened freely by the 58 people assigned to this
task. Surveillance of telephone conversations is so extensive that the
censor has intervened directly in telephone conversation, Knesset
member Michael Bar-Zohar reports. 74
But we hear no cries that the US must arm and direct terrorist forces
to attack Israel. Nor does the US Congress offer “humanitarian aid”
(another Orwellism) to guerrilla forces resisting South African repression
or opposing the illegal South African occupation of Namibia, or