Interview with Noam Chomsky on the situation in West Asia following the Israeli assault on Gaza.

Coming directly to the reasons for the Israeli attack on Gaza, do you believe that there could be a larger plan at work that has as its planner the U.S. aiming to finally provoke Iran to enter the ongoing conflict?

I doubt it. It would have been highly unlikely for Iran to respond more than verbally to the attack. There is a straightforward reason, I believe. Israel wants to take over the valuable parts of the West Bank and to leave the remnants of Palestinian society barely viable. And it, of course, wants to do so without disruption. It has succeeded, by violence, to suppress resistance within the West Bank. But the other part of occupied Palestine, Gaza, is still not completely under control. For other reasons, Israel has refused to abide by any of the ceasefires that have been reached and intends to maintain the siege that is suffocating Gaza. Invasion was a means to suppress resistance to its ongoing (U.S.-backed) crimes in the occupied territories.

Why is Obama quiet? It suits him to speak on economic matters or Iraq, but on Israeli atrocities he has not made a single statement.

Obama made it clear long before that he is a passionate supporter of Israeli policies. In his campaign, he emphasised that he was a co-sponsor of a Senate resolution in 2006 barring any interference with Israel’s criminal aggression in Lebanon. He also called for Jerusalem to be the permanent and undivided capital of Israel, a position so outrageous that his campaign had to claim publicly that his words did not mean what he said. I wrote about this a year ago, in a book published before the elections, simply relying on his formal positions. For some reason, many people prefer illusions about him. But one cannot charge him with concealing his extremist positions.