Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians

Supporters of Israel must willfully overlook or deny that nation's long history of human rights violations and military aggression, Chomsky writes, and they will continue to do so as long as Israel is strategically useful towards "the U.S. aim of eliminating possible threats, largely indigenous, to American domination of the Middle East region." In the course of elaborating his argument, Chomsky cuts through the myths and distortions that appear in mainstream media accounts; the damning facts that he so systematically assembles portray a government more brutally and overtly racist, perhaps, than even apartheid-era South Africa. Three new chapters, drawing upon material from Z magazine and other publications, incorporate such developments as the Palestinian uprising, Israel's war on Lebanon, and the ongoing "peace process."

Chomsky's research is truly impressive. This book contains roughly 1,550 footnotes, with a huge range of sources, including mainstream right newspapers (i.e. Wall Street Journal) and papers on the left (i.e. New York Times). He also refers to a number of Israeli historians (i.e. Morris and Shlaim), and both liberal and conservative Jewish magazines (commentary and Dissent), also left-wing and mainstream liberal magazines (i.e. New Republic and Z mag). You can disagree with the ideology and the point of view, but you cannot deny the sheer volume of sources. Chomsky is Jewish and is not an anti-semite, but he applies harsh and rigorous (perhaps occasionally unfair) standards to the state of Israel, which is the product of the policy of genocide implemented against European Jewry during WWII. There is no need to compare the Israeli atrocities to the atrocities of the Nazis; it gets historians and scholars alike nowhere in penetrating into the truth of the current conflict.