The American linguist Noam Chomsky has made no comments about the Israel-Gaza war, which started nine months ago. It is a surprising silence. Of Jewish origin, he lived in a kibbutz in northern Israel in 1953.
Besides being a linguist, Chomsky is a respected international political analyst. Of his more than one hundred books, four are specifically about Israel – its wars, governments, and aggressions against the Palestinian people. Despite hundreds of requests from the world press, he has not analyzed the Hamas attack on October 7 and the destruction of Gaza because he had a massive stroke last June. He has difficulty speaking, and the right side of his body is numb.
Before the stroke, he was always driving his car, giving lectures, studying, and writing about language, science, and politics. He frequently traveled from Arizona, where he lives on a ranch, to conferences around the world, with admirable clarity. An emeritus professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona in the United States, he was attended by local doctors. They minimized his medication and intravenous feeding. They said there was not much to be done and that all that was left was to wait for the outcome. He is 95 years old and married to Valeria Chomsky, a linguist from Rio de Janeiro.
She read what she could about strokes. She talked to several doctors, some of them Brazilian. She saw that her husband was improving – he recognized people, regained consciousness, and communicated with decreasing difficulty. She concluded that to speed up his recovery, it was better to modify the treatment. She decided to bring him to São Paulo, where the couple has had a residence since 2015 – they live between there and here. This was also advised by doctors, who believed he would receive specific care. Valeria rented an ambulance jet and hired two nurses. Besides being expensive, the trip was, in her words, "long, painful, and stressful." The small plane, with limited range, had to make two stops. He was admitted to an intensive care unit. He is visited daily by a neurologist, speech therapist, and pulmonologist. His condition has improved significantly. He left the ICU and is now in a regular room.