% FROM THE NOAM CHOMSKY ARCHIVE
% http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu:/usr/tp0x/chomsky.html
% ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/user/cap/chomsky/
% Filename:    articles/
% Title:       Scenes from the Uprising
% Author:      Noam Chomsky
% Appeared-in: Z Magazine, July 1988
% Source:      Dan Epstein 
% Keywords:    Israel, Palestinians, intifada, occupied territories
% Synopsis:    
% See-also:    

SCENES FROM THE UPRISING
Noam Chomsky
June 1988


One of the great themes of modern history is the struggle of
subjugated people to gain control over their lives and fate.  In
April, I visited Israel and the occupied territories, where one
of these struggles has reached a level of dramatic intensity.  A
few months earlier, I was in Nicaragua, a remarkable example of
the will and ability of a desperately impoverished country to
survive---though just barely---and to resist the assault of a
terrorist superpower.  Somehow, whatever the amount of reading
and intensity of concern, it is just different to see it at first
hand.

The privileged often regard these struggles as an assault on
their rights, violent outbursts instigated by evil forces bent on
our destruction: world Communism, or crazed terrorists and
fanatics.  The struggle for freedom seems inexplicable in other
terms.  After all, living standards are higher in Soweto than
they were in the Stone Age, or even elsewhere in Black Africa.
And the people in the West Bank and Gaza who survive by doing
Israel's dirty work are improving their lot by standard economic
measures.  Slave owners offered similar arguments.

Being so evidently irrational, the revolt of the dispossessed
must be guided by evil intent or primitive nature.  Why should
one care about humiliation and degradation if these conditions
are accompanied by some measure of economic growth?  Why should
people sacrifice material welfare and rising expectations in a
quixotic search for freedom and self-respect?  On the assumption
that the basic human emotion and the driving force of a sane
society is the desire for material gain, such questions have no
simple answer, so we seek something more sophisticated and
arcane.  Two hundred years ago, Rousseau wrote with withering
contempt about his civilized countrymen who have lost the very
concept of freedom and ``do nothing but boast incessantly of the
peace and repose they enjoy in their chains. . . .  But when I see
the others sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life
itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so
disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free
and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of
their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages
scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword,
and death to preserve only their independence, I feel that it
does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.''

These words kept coming to my mind as I was travelling through
the West Bank, as they have before in similar circumstances.  It
is a rare privilege to glimpse a moment of a popular struggle for
freedom and justice.  Right now the uprising is just that,
wherever it may lead under the conditions imposed by the occupier
and the paymaster.

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