A Lesson from Noam Chomsky about Israel and Iran

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern time. Our guests will be two brothers, Yehuda and Joel Beinin. Yehuda is a landscape architect in Kibbutz Shomrat in northern Israel. Joel (“Joey” to his family and friends) is Emeritus Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University. On October 7, 2023, Yehuda’s daughter, Liat Atzili, who lives in Kibbutz Nir Oz, was abducted by Hamas, and spent 54 days in captivity in Gaza before being released. Yehuda’s son-in-law, Aviv Atzili, was killed in the October 7th attack. The experience of Liat and her family are recounted in the 2025 documentary, Holding Liat. In the film, Yehuda and Joel offer different understandings of the political context in which October 7 occurred. I’ll ask them to elaborate on their views, and to talk about how an ideologically diverse Jewish and Israeli family grapples with an experience of terrible trauma.

Cited in Today’s Video

Noam Chomsky vs David Frum on human rights.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Eric Baker argues that to preserve academic freedom, US universities should cut their ties to the US military.

972 Mag chronicles the spike in emigration from Israel.

Nader Hashemi on potential US strikes on Iran.

On January 19, I’ll be speaking at the Free University of Brussels.

On January 26, I’ll be speaking with Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina.

On January 27, I’ll be hosting a fundraiser near Asheville for the Gaza Soup Kitchen, a grassroots initiative, led by people in Gaza, which serves hot meals to thousands daily across ten kitchen sites. Ninety-nine percent of funds raised go directly to feeding and supporting the people of Gaza. Register here: https://givebutter.com/FairviewNC (donation amount is $100 and address to be provided after registration).

On February 12, I’ll speaking at the Conference on the Jewish Left at Boston University.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, one of my favorite things is when I get emails from people who disagree with me but have a genuine kind of question or argument they want to make. You know, it’s very different than when people just kind of email to say, you know, what an a*****e I am. But, you know, people who have, like, a genuine argument that they want to hear responded to.

And I got an email like that the other day, and it was kind of in the wake of these demonstrations in Iran. And the person said, about progressives, he said, ‘I often see intense focus on Israel without proportional attention to severe human rights violations in Iran, China, Russia, and elsewhere.’ And it’s a really, really important point, I think, to answer. And, and it’s a debate that’s been going on for a long time.

And his question reminded me of this remarkable video, this remarkable clip, of a conversation decades ago between Noam Chomsky and David Frum—Chomsky and Frum, of course, both much younger at that time. David Frum was quite a young man but still appears to be having some of the kind of hawkish tendencies that he became later well known for. And, in their interaction, Frum says, when we think what we focus on as Americans in terms of our foreign policy concerns, Frum says there should be, ‘an equality of corpses,’ by which he means we should treat all deaths in which people are killed by a regime equally, irrespective of who does it.

And Chomsky argues no. Chomsky says, actually, we should care more about those deaths that are committed with American participation, with American complicity. Not, of course, because the lives matter more, but simply because we have a greater moral obligation because we participated in their killing. And Chomsky says, ‘it’s a very simple ethical point. You’re responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions. You’re not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else’s actions.’

And I think this is something that we kind of intuitively kind of understand if we take it out of the realm of foreign policy and just think about interpersonal, you know, interactions, right? If I am, God forbid, beating up on someone, I have a greater responsibility to stop doing so than I do to stop my neighbor who is beating up on someone, partly, again, because I am the one who’s committing this despicable action.

It’s also, just as a practical matter, a lot easier for me to stop that action than me to stop the neighbor, right? Again, I may well also have an obligation to do something about what my neighbor is doing, but it’s a much more complicated business. I have to literally go, what am I gonna go kind of fight my neighbor to make sure my neighbor is not fighting against the other person? That might well be a valuable thing to do, but in the hierarchy of things that I should do, if I have a limited amount of time, the first thing I should do is to make sure that I am not beating up on anybody.

And Chomsky cites the great Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov as an example. It’s a really, really interesting point to make because Sakharov is rightly a hero—was a hero—to hawks in the United States, right, hawks in the United States who love to talk about the Soviet Union’s human rights abuses, but didn’t like to talk about the human rights abuses of the United States, was complicit in all around the world during the Cold War.

And Chomsky kind of turns it around and says, if you notice, Andrei Sakharov is not talking about America’s human rights abuses. He’s talking about the human rights abuses in the Soviet Union because they’re the ones that he is complicit in, right? And so, he’s saying Sakharov should be a model for us, which is that Sakharov focuses on the human rights abuses that he, as a Soviet citizen, is responsible for because he, through his tax dollars, is paying for them.

Again, none of this is to say that we should not care about people who are being killed, brutalized in Xinjiang under Chinese, what the U.S. is called genocide in China, or Russians suffering under Vladimir Putin, or certainly these very brave Iranians who are risking their lives to overthrow this horrifying regime. We should care about them deeply. And to the degree that we can do something positive in accordance with our best understanding of what they want us to do, we should do that.

But if the question is, is it wrong to focus more attention on what Israel has done in Gaza than what Iran is doing to its own people, Chomsky’s answer—which I find convincing—is yes, it is morally justifiable because Israel’s crimes are being committed with American weapons. And the Iranian regime’s crimes are not being committed with my tax dollars. And so, there is a clear moral argument: All human beings’ lives are equally valuable. All tyranny is equally wrong.

But when you think about what you can do, Chomsky’s argument, which is that you should focus first on the things that you, as an individual, because of the country in which you live, are responsible for because you are paying for them, I think that argument is convincing. And I think it’s important to distinguish that argument from the argument that defends human rights-abusing regimes just because they’re anti-American. I have no sympathy for that kind of apologia whatsoever. But that kind of apologia, which denies terrible human rights abuses in Iran or China or Russia or Venezuela, is fundamentally different from an argument that says all human rights abuses are horrendous, but it is ethically understandable that we would focus first and foremost on those human rights abuses for which we are personally responsible.

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