Overcoming Zionism:Joel Kovel: Review

Joel Kovel was fired from his post at Bard College after writing this book. The special relationship between Israel and the US Zionist lobby runs deep, as he illustrates in its pages. Now he has become a victim of them. Reading Overcoming Zionism it is easy to see why the Zionists would be gunning for him. As Ilan Pappe says elsewhere, “this is a very simple story: a story of dispossession, of colonisation, of occupation, of expulsion.”

In his book Joel Kovel gives an excellent introduction to the history of Judaism, the rise of Zionism, the creation of Israel and the ensuing conflicts. He describes how the contradictions within Zionism mean that there can never be peace or democracy for Jews or Arabs in the region as long as it exists. In order to achieve peace Zionism must be displaced by a single secular democratic state, whose practical set-up he maps out: speak the truth about Israel; deprive the Zionist state of what it needs to sustain itself; and bring Palestinians home.

The first part of the book is devoted to an examination of the gestation of Zionism in the nineteenth century. From their very inception Jews have always been “a people apart”, says Kovel, and this “apartness” created a “dialectic”, giving rise first to anti-Semitism and in response to this, to Zionism. However, he is careful to point out that this should not be seen as a way of arguing that the persecution Jews have suffered throughout the centuries should be considered being brought upon themselves.

Zionist nationalism insists on a Palestine for Jews alone, and of course the Holocaust allowed Zionism to claim Israel after 1948 as an essential haven for Jews. He says: “this complex of feeling still persists, and, turned into guilt, shadows the debate on Israel, making even committed anti-imperialists and champions of justice into crypto-Zionists, who despite themselves, end up following the Israeli line.”

But Kovel shows how, rather than a haven, Israel has proven a trap for Jews since they live under constant threat, adding further to a defensive mindset and justifying the Zionist method of setting themselves apart.

In part two he describes the character of the Jewish state. He sketches an outline of the class nature of a democratic state and says that the Jewish state could never adhere to this model. He describes how the Israeli state was forged under “conditions of emergency” which put democracy and therefore human rights on the back burner. Under these conditions two laws were introduced which sealed the fate of the indigenous non-Jewish population.

Firstly, through the Law of the Land Israel immediately dispossessed about 200,000 Arab citizens and their descendents, denying them access to 95% of the land forever. “Whatever the revolutionary bona fides of Zionist struggle, the fact remains that this obscure measure, snuck into place as a transitional device, would become the foundation stone of the permanent dispossession of Palestinian people.” Secondly, the Law of Return gives automatic citizenship and its rights to any Jew in the world and would never have withstood the scrutiny of a constitution should one have been promulgated at Israel’s birth.

In the third part he examines the inherently racist nature of Zionism, structured around settler colonialism: “Zionism became profoundly racist once it achieved its state, nor can it ever cease being racist so long as the Jewish state is its necessary expression.” He says that those who advocate the idea of a Jewish state accept “in one moment, a state that systematically denies basic human rights to a fraction of its people and systematically grants another set of people superior rights over them.”

In the final chapters he asks – what can be done? He concludes that a racist state is absolutely illegitimate and that therefore Israel has no right to exist in its present form. He denies this is an anti-Jewish ambition, arguing that “the only thing that will have to go in the transition . . . is the Zionist dream.”

Kovel is undoubtedly right that a single secular state is the only way of achieving peace and justice for Palestinians. But his notion of a peaceful path to this goal (“quite unlikely to be sure – but by no means impossible”) is idealistic.

He fails to grasp just how tenaciously and murderously the Zionist ruling class will defend their state, nor how the Islamic states in the region will face constant belligerence, covert and overt, as Zionism is obliged to fight all those who resist Israel’s claims to Jewish privilege and all those who harbour Palestinian refugees with an ambition of returning to their homeland. Only through a process of sharp polarisation within Zionist society, leading to mass rejection of Zionism by Jewish workers themselves and the tearing down of Zionist laws and state structures that underpin them, can a unified secular state be built.

Kovel has raised interesting and thought-provoking arguments. This book was published two years ago but the recent Zionist massacres in Gaza have only underlined the correctness of the case he makes.

Recent elections in Israel too have revealed the ugly growth of extreme, ultra-extreme and ultra-ultra-extreme Zionist factions, gaining more support and presence in government. This book, although idealistic in its solutions, does successful demolish the idea that a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict has any chance of success. Any serious socialist wishing to defend the right of Israel to exist would do well to read this book first and to dwell on the sentiments Kovel expressed in the statement made after he was fired from his teaching job.

“A fundamental principle of mine is that the educator must criticise the injustices of the world, whether or not this involves him or her in conflict with the powers that be. The systematic failure of the academy to do so plays no small role in the perpetuation of injustice and state violence. In no sphere of political action does this principle apply more vigorously than with the question of Zionism; and in no country is this issue more strategically important than in the US, given the fact that US support is necessary for Israel’s behavior. The worse this behavior, the more strenuous must be the suppression of criticism. I take the view, then, that Israeli human rights abuses are deeply engrained in a culture of impunity granted chiefly, though not exclusively, in the US – which culture arises from suppression of debate and open inquiry within those institutions, such as colleges, whose social role it is to enlighten the public.”

Mon 01, June 2009 @ 23:05