Joel Kovel, ‘Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine,’ London, Pluto Press, 2007, ISBN: 0-7453-2569-6, pp। २९९,

रेविएव बी सम।Joel Kovel, ‘Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine,’ London, Pluto Press, 2007, ISBN: 0-7453-2569-6, pp। 299

The Author is a famous left-wing writer and College Professor in Social Studies, and a major critic of US and Israeli governmental policies in the Middle East, and Western policies in general, in the rest of the so-called ‘developing’ world. He worked as a doctor and a psychiatrist in various American hospitals and research establishments for over twenty four years, but eventually quit the system over dissatisfaction with the direction that the US public health service was headed. Joel is a well-known anti-racism activist and social ecologist, as well as a member and former Presidential candidate for the Green Party in the US. His previous best work was ‘White Racism’ (1972) which won him a National Book Award. His work is so controversial in America that the Library of Congress, one of the world’s largest libraries and a compulsory repository of almost all published material in the US, does not have a copy. Nor does Joel’s own institution, Bard College in Annandale, New York.

‘Overcoming Zionism’ is Kovel’s first book about the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has appeared rather late, given his long history of left-wing activism and publishing in the US. The book is a compilation of the many essays undertaken by the Author on the state of Israel and the Israel-Palestine conflict and mainly published in the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun, to which the Author has been a major contributor since its inception. He details his early life, as the child of East European immigrants to New York and raising as a Zionist American Jew, coupled with the later adolescent rebellion against the religious-cultural traditions of his ancestors. Joel sees himself a non-Jewish Jew, in that he no longer believes in the particularistic Jewish traditions that separate Jews from other people. In that sense, Joel is a universalist-humanist in the ‘liberal’ Western tradition.

Joel Kovel identifies with those Jewish people who have left their tribal origins and constricted backgrounds and have embraced the whole world as their pasture and area of action. The Author sees himself as being part of the post-enlightenment tradition of Jewish intellectuals, such as Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Proust, Eistein, Kafka, Wittgenstein and Rosa Luxembourg. Kovel defines “the true glory of being Jewish is to live on the margin and across boundaries” (Prologue, p. 8). For Kovel, Zionism is nothing but ‘Jewish tribalism at its worst’ (p.8). In this book, the Author essentially advocates the singular transformation of the state of Israel to accommodate all segments of the population of the Holy Land. Like Israeli leftist critic, Michael Warschawski of Matzpen fame, Kovel too recommends and exhorts Israel to be de-Zionised and integrated into the rest of the Middle East[1] (p. 220).

By self confession, the Author is an angry man in this book. He is truly furious at the ‘racist-apartheid’ attitude of the Zionist people of the state of Israel in their treatment of the Palestinian Arab people in their own homeland. Kovel states that the only solution to the Israel-Palestine problem is to have a bi-national secular democratic state in the territory of the former British mandatory Palestine. In this sense, Joel’s book joins the increasing body of literature that points towards such an option as a solution to the Israel-Palestine problem. Joel is unanimous in his condemnation of the Jewish state as a racist state in the mode of the former ‘apartheid’ South African minority-ruled state. Kovel feels that more than ending the occupation in Palestine, well-meaning people in the world should focus on ending Zionism, which is the pathological-sociological condition that produces the ongoing Israeli ‘occupation’ of the Arab inhabited areas of Israel-Palestine. Indeed, he advocates a relentless critique of Zionism as a movement that has caused so much uprooting and misery in the 20th century and given the present circumstances, looks like continuing certainly well into the present century also.

Kovel deals in great detail with the kind of racism affecting Israeli society at large. This is not only directed against the Arab minority, but also intra-Jewish racism as manifested by the European (Ashkenazi) elite against Jews of North African and Asian origin (Sephardim). As a Jewish American, from Ukrainian immigrant stock, he is well-aware of the impact of racism on the social and political fabric of society, especially as referred to earlier; he has made a special study of white-black racism in the US. While many modern Israelis may go to any extent to deny this, to quote from famous New York Jewish Attorney and Human Rights activist Michael Steven Smith here, “Racism is in the nature of a colonial settler state.”[2] Kovel refers to the widespread denial among Israelis that they are a racist society and people; despite the prevalence of numerous survey results that point towards the inability of the majority of Israelis to co-habit with Palestinian Arabs. As Kovel states, ‘for Israel to admit racism would be to put it in the same category as the apartheid South African state and would be an obvious reason for the de-legitimisation of the state’ (p.164).

As he mentions in the very autobiographical prologue to the book, Zionism today is nothing but a re-incarnation of historic European colonialism, or a kind of virulent tribalism linked with the extremely dangerous poison of majoritarian nationalism, which has created so much havoc in the West and in the modern world, over the last one millennia (p.6). Kovel details how difficult it is to mention the question of Israeli racism or apartheid in the US, given the extent of support for the Zionist state in America. He quotes from Theodore Herzl, seen as the founder of modern Zionism, to show that it was the earliest desire of the earliest Zionist ideologues to evacuate and dispel the native Arabs from Palestine (p.48). Kovel is very cynical about the future of Zionism in Israel, as is evident from the recorded introductory talks about the present book under review, available on his website (www.joelkovel.org).[3] He quotes from Thomas Jefferson to state that all states in the world are illegitimate to a certain degree or the other (p.202). In this sense he believes that the state of Israel is also illegitimate. Joel deals with the common accusation against him as being essentially ‘anti-Semitic,’ stating that criticising Israel is almost always considered ‘anti-Semitic’ in the West. Joel makes the point that racism in all its forms has been the worst form of human behaviour known to man. The excuse of anti-Semitism has often been used to justify counter-racism on the part of the Jewish people. Joel chronicles the often concealed fact that most Jewish people, at least in the West, are brought up in the notion that they are ethically superior. ‘The Zionist logic engenders a racist resolution’ according to Kovel.[4]

Kovel relates how one of the contradictions of the state of Israel is the fact that Israel insists on regarding itself as a democratic state in the Western liberal perspective, while actually much the opposite is true. The Author is quite clear that the modern Israeli state is an ethnocracy, a state meant for the welfare of the ruling dominant white Westernised Ashkenazi Jewish group in Israel. Kovel’s book is not the first that breaks new ground over the allegation that Israel is an ‘apartheid’ society. Jimmy Carter’s latest book has already stolen the match on this issue.[5] Issues dealing with the impact and power of the ‘Jewish Lobby’ on Capitol Hill have already been academically exposed with the publication of Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s article in the London Times.[6]

The Author in this, his latest book, painstakingly reveals some of the inner thought processes of the leaders of the Zionist movement such as Chaim Arlosoff, Vladimir Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion who privately, if not publicly, advocated the need to evacuate and disperse most of the Arab people of Palestine. He writes in the mode of many of the ‘new’ revisionist historians of Israel like Benny Morris, Avi Schalim and Ilan Pappe. Kovel is no supporter of Morris whose hard-headed ‘realist-racist’ attitude towards the native Arab people of Palestine is out rightly condemned in this book. The Author repeatedly makes the comparison between the present Zionist state of Israel and the former ‘Apartheid’ state of South Africa. Kovel does not spare any of the previous former premiers of Israel such as Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon whom he freely castigates as being members of terrorist organisations, etc. In his book, Kovel also reveals the extent of collaboration between the pre-independence Yishuv and the Hitlerite regime in Germany over the status of German-Jewish property. He narrates the ‘Deir Yassin’ incident in which over a hundred Palestinian villagers were murdered in cold blood in one single massacre. Kovel believes in accordance with most standard historians that the incident at Deir Yassin along with many other similar massacres, most of which have been successfully concealed and are still to be researched in detail, were ultimately responsible for the mass flight of Palestinians from the state of Israel.
In his book, Joel gives us revealing details of big-town America’s dealings with Zionist Israeli businessmen and the activities of right-wing Americans in supporting the state of Israel through various large-scale ‘Zionist’ donations to both major American political parties as well as to establishing various ‘centres of excellence’ in Israeli academia. Kovel relates how every US President since Eisenhower has tried to control Israel’s nuclear policy without success, given the power of Israel’s US Jewish and Christian support lobby. His book is dedicated, in part, to the memory of Rachel Corrie, the American teenager killed in Gaza, when protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah. Joel is clear when he states that he believes in the right of the state of Israel to exist, but not in the mode it is in now. Joel is also clear when he postulates about a future secular democratic one-state solution, termed in his words Palesreal-a state that as in post-Apartheid South Africa would support the rights of the ‘white’ Jewish population as well. He ends the book with the story of a Palestinian man who he names Ahmad, a native of East Jerusalem who has spent 17 years in Israeli jails. Through Ahmad, Kovel mouths the defining ideology of the Palestinian people in the face of overwhelming odds as manifested in the Israeli state, which he correctly defines as ‘Sumud’ (Arabic for steadfastness).

Kovel correctly analyses, again along the lines of Michael Warschawski that the gargantuan struggle being played out in Israel today, is between the reactionary forces of Zionism, in an albeit aged spectrum, and the desires and aspirations of an entire generation of young Israelis who have been brought up in a post-Zionist ‘Capitalist-Globalist’ climate, and desire above all to be classified as normal human beings without the trauma of any inherited ‘holocaust-rightist’ baggage attached to them. To quote from Kovel’s appropriation of the language of Warschawski, “for them (the ‘new Israelis’), solidarity with Palestinians is evidence of their engagement with a broader solidarity with all who suffer oppression.”[7] Kovel is quite clear that the problem with the state of Israel is not the ‘illegal’ occupation of the West Bank, but the whole issue of the ideology of Zionism and the question of the Jewish nature of the state. In this context, the Author advocates that the new watchword of the leftist-liberal struggle should not be ‘post-Zionism’ but ‘anti-Zionism,’ which can again be defined as ‘an overcoming of Zionism through active struggle.’(p. 221)
Kovel is also equally quite clear that the two-state solution is no longer an option. Palestinians effectively control only 8% of the West Bank state, mainly the city limit areas of major Palestinian urban areas that are subject to invasion by Israeli troops at anytime. Palestinians are today isolated from each other and cut off economically and socially from each other. Their present habitations are economically unviable and they are completely dependent on foreign aid to survive. Kovel is uncompromising when it comes to the way that well-meaning people should respond when coming into contact with Zionism and the state of Israel. He advocates an open fight against the state, using all means, except open violence. In short, like the army of non-violent activists active in Palestine-Israel, Kovel also advocates a kind of ‘pro-active non-violent’ approach to actively resist the Zionists and their supporters, mainly in the West.
Kovel recommends campaigning against and boycotting Western multi-national corporations that actively fund and support the state of Israel through the transfer of sensitive technologies and military and industrial hardware. In short, Kovel advocates putting into place the entire machinery of the anti-Apartheid struggle against the former South African state into the struggle against the Zionist state of Israel. While Kovel does not call for the end of the state of Israel, he supports the right of return of all the Palestinian refugees to the state of Israel. He feels that the best method to undo the ‘Jewish-ness’ of the state of Israel is to encourage the return of the Arab migrants and refugees from the Holy Land. Already the population of the entire Israel-Palestine, west of the Jordan River, is divided roughly equally between Jew and Arab.
Kovel’s book is extremely sensitively written and has been written in a very simple style, a style that incorporates many different stories within its pages and still does not seem to overwhelm the reader. One advantage of this book is the all-embracing bibliography available at the end including, unusually a wide-ranging website list. The crux of the book is the argument that the ideology called Zionism and Western liberal democracy are highly incompatible. A two-state solution is not the solution to the conflict at all as this envisages the division of the Holy Land on the basis of 20th nationalism which was the essential reason for the outbreak of the Zionist-Arab; Israel-Palestine conflict in the first place.

[1] Micheal Warschawski, ‘On the Border,’ (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005), p. 25.
[2] Micheal Steven Smith’s Review of Joel Kovel’s book ‘Overcoming Zionism’ is available on the ‘Law and Disorder Radio’ and accessible at http://lawanddisorder.org/michael-smiths-review-overcoming-zionism, viewed August 4, 2007.
[3] The recorded speech by the Author given in Toronto can be accessed from the webpage of the New Socialist magazine at http://www.newsocialist.org/index.php?id=1233, accessed August 3, 2007
[4] Ibid.
[5] Jimmy Carter, ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,’ (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2006)
[6] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, ‘The Israel Lobby,’ the London Review of Books, Vol.28, No. 6, 23 March 2006. Available at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html, Accessed August 4, 2007.

[7] Michael Warschawski, p. 193