[NYTr] Kovel: Overcoming Zionism - Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Tim Murphy )activ-l) - Jul 29, 2007

[Note: Joel Kovel will be speaking in Vancouver on September 20, 2007
-TM]

BOOK REVIEW:

OVERCOMING ZIONISM: 

Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine

by Joel Kovel, 2007, 299 pages
Pluto Press, London * Ann Arbor

Reviewed by Michael Steven Smith

Joel Kovel has given us an impressive important book. The first
printing of OVERCOMING ZIONISM sold out without a single review, major
or otherwise. The Library of Congress, which has copies of nearly
everything, still doesn't have it on its shelves. Neither does the
library at Bard College, where he teaches. Nevertheless word of this
extraordinary work is spreading. The taboo in the United States (not
Israel) against seriously discussing and criticising Zionist Israel has
been broken with the publication of Jimmy Carter's bold book labeling
the situation in the Occupied Territories "apartheid" and with
prestigious professors Walt and Merscheim's exposure in the London
Times (it was turned down by the Atlantic Monthly) of the power of the
Israeli lobby. I anticipate that OVERCOMING ZIONISM is going to get a
long run.

Kovel takes the discussion on how to "overcome" Zionism exactly where it
ought to be and articulates how this may be accomplished. He writes
beautifully, even poetically, not just on Zionism's sordid history, but
on its ideology, its ethics, even on the terrible ecological
devastation in Israel itself, where every river is polluted, some to
lethal levels. And he writes with courage and hope.

Kovel believes that the creation of Israel in l948 as a colony of
settlers who established an exclusively Jewish state has created a
multi-faceted disaster, that it was "a dreadful mistake" and should be
undone, with Israel de-Zionized and integrated into the middle east.
His solution to achieve this is stated in the book's subtitle: Creating
a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. Kovel's last chapter is
captioned Palesreal: A Secular and Universal Democracy for
Israel/Palestine. This is an elegant solution. He lays out an action
program to accomplish this. How did Kovel, a Jew from Brooklyn, the
oldest son of Ukrainian immigrants who did well, moving Joel and the
family to "the purgatory of Baldwin, Long Island", come to this radical
critique and equally radical solution?

Joel graduated from Yale and became a rising star in the medical
profession. He taught at a medical school before giving it up,
switching careers, and taking a social science professorship at Bard
where for a time he held the Alger Hiss chair. He is still there, the
only Marxist on the faculty. This book is not going to further his
career.

What kind of Jew am I, he asks, and answers "a very bad one." More
accurately he defines himself as what Isaac Deutscher called "a
non-Jewish Jew." Not that he is not spiritual. He writes of reaching
for the infinite. But he is not religious. Being part of a sect is too
narrowing and confining. He identifies with the Jewish heretics who
transcended Jewry, but who are nonetheless part of the Jewish
tradition, "...starting with Spinoza, then Marx, Freud, Proust,
Einstein, Kafka, Wittenstein and Rosa Luxemburg," the great geniuses of
modern thought. He writes that like them, "the true glory of being
Jewish is to live on the margin and across boundaries."

Kovel writes that for Jews, their ethical reference point is the tribal
unit. Since ancient times as hill people on land east of the
Mediterranean they set themselves off as "a people apart", chosen by
Jehovah, with whom they have a covenant. In Kovel's view, "...Zionism's
dynamic was drawn from the most tribal and particularistic stratum of
Judaism, and its destiny became the restoration of tribalism in the
guise of a modern, highly militarized and aggressive state", which they
implanted in the center if Islam. Herein lies the tragedy.

At the turn of the l9th century, a Zionist conference in Vienna
delegated several rabbis to travel to Palestine on a fact finding
mission. The rabbis arrived and cabled back, "the bride is beautiful,
but she is married to another man". The Zionist Jews had "a fantasied
relationship to a mythic territory....and that has been the fatal flaw
in Zionism, both before and after the conquest, and why we call it,
ungenerously but truthfully, a bad idea."

Kovel writes incisively of what ensued and deserves to be quoted at
length. "A tremendous struggle would be necessary, therefore, if the
Zionists were to dislodge these inhabitants, and only a tremendously
concentrated desire could suffice to energize that struggle." There
were great difficulties. "...the resistance of those who stood in the
way would have to be displaced; the exigencies of geo-politics; and
one's own inner being, which would have to be retooled from the
self-image of an ethical victim to that of a ruthless conqueror. All of
these obstacles could be dealt with by signing on to Western
imperialism and capitalism." Jewish suffering and persecution became
justification for aggression in asserting the "outlandish claim of a
territory controlled 2500 years ago by one's putative ancestors."

The Israelis took 78% of the territory in 1948 and another 14% in 1967.
The logic of Zionism - to create an ethnically pure Jewish state - led
to organized terrorism; "the essentials had been put in place by the
mid-1930s" and the opportunity came in l948. The leaders of Zionism,
Chaim Arlosoroff, Vladimir Jabotinsky, even and especially David Ben
Gurion quietly articulated the need to drive the Arabs out. South
African Prime Minister Henrik Verwoerd said in 1961 something the
liberals wouldn't: that the Zionists "took Israel from the Arabs after
the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with
them, Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state." 

When the smoke lifted in 1948, 531 Arab villages had been destroyed,
some 750,000 Palestinians driven out. Three Israeli Prime Ministers
have been world class terrorists, bent on ridding Palestine of its
natives.. In 1948 Menachem Begin organized the dynamiting of the
British headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 88
persons, including 15 Jews.

That year also saw the terrorizing of the Village of Deir Yassin. With
Begin in command, Yitzhak Shamir, who was also to become a PM, and
whose frankly fascist organization The Stern Gang, actually made
overtures to the Nazis to create a Jewish state along totalitarian
lines, took part in the operation.

This most odious act of ethnic cleansing took place in the peaceable
Arab village on April 9, l948. Under Begin's command, "acting in
collaboration with the Zionist leadership,"..."an elite force descended
on the village and systematically set about to slaughter its people,
disemboweling a pregnant woman, raping others, taking prisoners and
then shooting them, and not stopping until noon the next day when 93
villagers lay dead". The terror at Deir Yassin was a decisive factor in
the Arab exodus. The ethnic cleansing had been clearly planned by the
Zionists leadership, as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has documented
(The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine). Thus the Zionists established
Israel with a crime against humanity. 

The corrupt and now comatose Ariel Sharon, the third Israeli terrorist
PM, was actually found guilty by an Israeli court for permitting the
Sabra and Shatilla massacre in Lebanon in l982, where estimates are as
high as 3000 Palestinian refugees were killed, mostly knifed to death
by Lebanese falangists in their refugee camp with the facilitation of
Sharon. In 1953 Sharon led a cross-border raid in Qibya, Jordan "in
which the community was reduced to rubble, with 45 houses blown up and
69 people killed, the majority women and children." He repeated his
mass murder in Lebanon last year, using American made cluster bombs. It
is truly remarkable, as Kovel points out, that a terrorist could ascend
to national leadership three times and "scarcely anybody has bothered
to ponder its meaning."

Insightfully, Kovel writes that the ensuing bad conscience of the
Israelis and their "resulting feelings become projected and turned into
the blaming of others - whether these be expropriated Palestinians or
critics of Israel, who become either anti-semites and/or that curious
entity, the 'self-hating Jew.' "

Israel, as a racist state, discriminates in the critical areas of
immigrants, settlements, and land development. Any Jew in the world who
can show that his grandmother on his mother's side was Jewish may obtain
automatic citizenship, yet the Arabs expelled in 1948 and 1967, despite
international law and United Nations resolution 194, are not permitted
their right to return. 92% of the land in Israel is administered by The
Jewish National Fund, which does not allow its use by non-Jews.

Racism is in the nature of a colonial settler state. What is remarkable
is the degree in which Zionists deny this. Kovel gives examples of a top
Israeli general calling Palestinians "drugged cockroaches in a bottle,"
he cites the 2006 poll where more than two-thirds of Israelis would
refuse to live in the same building as Arabs, where the idea of
transferring Arab citizens with voting rights out of the country is
popular, and where soccer fans curse and attack Arab members of their
national team. But to admit of this racism would be to put Israel in
the same camp as apartheid South Africa and delegitimitize it.

Kovel writes, reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson, that no state has an
absolute right to exist, hence all states are to some degree
illegitimate, that states may be relatively or absolutely illegitimate,
that a racist state is illegitimate, and Israel being an exclusively
and discriminatory Jewish state is a racist state. He concludes that
"The problem then is with Zionism and the Jewish state as such, and not
its illegal occupation of the West Bank." The point he arrives at is to
change it, "to dissolve the Jewishness of the state. For this, one does
not smash or trample Zionism; one overcomes it and frees people from
its chains."

He goes beyond the two-state solution, necessarily, because by steady
aggression and aggrandizement the Zionists have whittled the Palestinian
territory down to 8% of what it was in 1948, leaving the natives with a
negligible fragment, without much water, polluted, economically
unviable, denuded of its agriculture, isolated by Israeli-only roads,
and partly encircled by an obscene wall.

What to do? Speak the truth about Israel. Expose the Zionist lobby.
Force it to register as an agent of a foreign government. Bring
lawsuits for violation of human rights, like the Center for
Constitutional Rights did against an Israeli general for mass killing
in a village, or another against the U.S. Caterpillar company for
making gargantuan bulldozers sold wittingly to the Israeli army for the
express purpose of house demolition, one of which, incidentally, ran
over and murdered Rachel Corrie, to whom Kovel partly dedicates his
book. Place Israel where it belongs, in the company of apartheid South
Africa. Cut the threads of Israel's support system, boycott it
academically, economically, and culturally.

Palestinians are the largest and oldest refugee population in the world.
Central to the campaign against Zionist Israel is to support their
right of return. Zionism can thus be brought down in an entirely
peaceful manner. The Right of Return is more basic than liquidating the
occupation, which would leave the Zionist state unchanged. The Right of
Return would require the end of the occupation as a pre-condition and
can directly undo the Jewishness of the state with the returnees having
full and equal rights. Even now, counting the occupied territories, the
population is roughly 50/50, Jew and Arab.

Kovel calls the new state "Palisrael". This new entity could reshape
itself according to the precepts of recognition and responsibility,
which points to a society organized along essentially non-capitalist
lines. He asks, "What else is a true democracy except a form of society
in which people collectively self-determine their lives, and therefore
their means of producing that life?"

Joel Kovel knows that this "will not come for a long time, perhaps it
will never come, given the awesome wealth and power at the command of
the empire, and its craven press, cowed public, and corrupted political
consciousness. Or perhaps it will...Given the larger meaning of Israel,
its fate will depend on the convulsions awaiting the world system,
upheavals whose content cannot be precisely foreseen...."

He concludes: "Such is the reality facing dreamers for a better world: a
slim chance, and a long haul. As ever, it is the journey that counts,
the seeking of good conscience, good will, and good comrades."

It is difficult to review this rich multi-layered book in a short
review. Much had to be passed over, like the Zionists' collaboration
with the Nazis in the thirties, their forcing Jews in the displaced
persons camps in Europe to immigrate to Israel, their misuse of the
holocaust, the interpenetration of the governments of Israel and
America and the services to imperialism the Israelis give, like their
support of the Contra wars, the Zionist lobby, the acquiring of the
atomic bomb by Israel, which Kovel sees as the single greatest barrier
to nuclear non-proliferation. 

Kovel's background as a psychiatrist is evident in his wise
understanding. Judaeophobia in Nazi Germany "draws from a time when
Jews were, if not blameless, at least powerless and were made to pay
the debts demanded by the anti-communism of the fascist state and by
Christendom's bad conscience." He calls it "intellectual barbarism" to
take current Arab criticism of Israel as "anti-semitism", but he well
understands that given the circumstances the Arabs have shown "the
whole spectrum of human response...ranging from emancipatory and
nonviolent expression to crude atavisms including racist belief, and in
the case where the invader is set up as a Jewish state, anti-semitism." 

He is widely read on the subject (the book has an excellent
bibliography, with websites) and has traveled to Israel/Palestine. What
kind of state have they wrought? Kovel's indictment is this: Israel is
the most dangerous place on earth for Jews. It now has the largest gap
between rich and poor in the whole industrialized world. Forty percent
of the population lives below the poverty line. Half of the Israeli
families cannot meet their monthly bills. Kovel reports that the
immediate cause of this has been a fierce neoliberal assault on the
poor and the public sector. 

"Israel provides the worst primary and lower secondary education in the
Western world..." Socialist ideals lie in ruins, "with the extreme
right-wing religious fundamentalists playing a far larger role in Israel
than the enlightened socialism that was to have been the emblem of the
new Jewish society." As a result a serious amount of outmigration is
taking place with in 2004 some 760,000 Israelis living abroad. Jews
leaving Russian prefer, ironically, to go to Germany.

I am sending OVERCOMING ZIONISM, to comrades and friends, including a
political prisoner, where prison rules restrict to ten the number of
books a prisoner can have in his cell. I think that if persons
following the current discussion and concerned about the problems of
Jews and Zionism and Israel and the Arabs and the middle-east, even
world peace, could have but one book on the subject on their shelf, it
should be this one.


[Michael Steven Smith, author and New York City Attorney, worked in
Israel in 1959 and was a member of the National Lawyers Guild fact
finding team just before the first intifada in l985. He returned and
testified before a United Nations committee on human rights. His
cousin, an Hungarian refugee from the Nazis, was the last soldier to
die in the l967 war. His youngest brother lives four miles from the
Lebanese border.]