While in Israel for an academic conference last spring, Noam Chomsky, the brilliant linguist and iconoclastic political critic, addressed a group of Palestinian intellectuals.

After 20 years of harsh and unrelenting criticism of Israel's treatment of Arabs -- criticism that has, in part, tempered Chomsky's access to establishment media and fashionable academic circles -- the Palestinians might well have expected Chomsky to preach to the converted.

Instead, a flap erupted when ...