My money says that Noam Chomsky will get in to the West Bank within a day or two; exiling him is killing the Israeli brand. Speaking from Amman, Chomsky has likened Israel to a Stalinist regime in its denying him entry, Amira Hass reports.
Yesterday I said that Noam Chomsky is a left Zionist. I asked Norman Finkelstein about his friend. "The accurate term is a CULTURAL Zionist, meaning he (like his father) was (and remains) committed to the revival of Hebrew culture in Palestine. Politically, before 1974 he supported a version of binationalism but after 1974 believed it was not politically feasible anymore and supported the international consensus for a 2-state settlement, although fully aware of its limitations."
Robert Barsky’s superb bio of Chomsky fills the picture in somewhat. Barsky says that as a young man Chomsky was associated with Avukah and Hashomer Hatzair, leftwing Zionist movements that promoted Jewish emigration to Israel because of their concerns with anti-Semitism in the west. But Chomsky did not believe in a Jewish state. "The creation of such a state would necessitate carving up the territory and marginalizing, on the basis of religion, a significant portion of its poor and oppressed population, rather than uniting them on the basis of socialist principles," Barsky writes. By the 1970s, Chomsky endorsed "a gradual move towards binationalism."
