One State for Palestinians and Jews in Palestine

By James G. Abourezk

JOEL KOVEL HAS written a sensational book, Overcoming Zionism (available from the AET Book Club), that is a stellar addition to the literature on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. As expected, however, his views were not well received by the Zionist leadership in America, who responded with their usual tactics of attempting to silence anyone who steps outside the circle of approved Zionist dogma. Along with other recent authors, Kovel has become a target of the Zionist propaganda machine and its unrelenting campaign to keep American readers in the dark about Israel.

The charge of “anti-Semitism” has been so overused that it now bounces off those who are accused. That’s unfortunate, as there are racists in this country who need to be branded as racists. But over-use of the term by defenders of Israel—in particular, the use of it against people who clearly are not racists—has diminished its effectiveness. As some would say, the Israeli Lobby has dulled its pick.

Israel’s minions have hurled the charge with increasing frequency lately, trying their utmost to silence a new crop of critics who are becoming more and more difficult to suppress given perception of the role of the Zionist state in fomenting the catastrophic invasion of Iraq. First, in early 2006, they were hit by the Mearsheimer and Walt article in the London Review of Books, which was followed last fall by their book exposing the Israel Lobby, a well-researched volume that left Alan Dershowitz and others, to say it kindly, sputtering in their denunciations. These attack dogs have charged that the book contains inaccuracies, that the research is shoddy, along with other vague criticisms. But one can never find anything specific beyond general allegations, and, more importantly, Dershowitz et al. don’t argue that the basic thrust of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (available from the AET Book Club) is not true.

Then former President Jimmy Carter attracted the attention of the Lobby with his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (also available from the AET Book Club). Because people were bound to listen to what Mr. Carter had written, he became the target of an organized campaign, which even descended to allegations of Nazi influence, to discredit him as well as his book.

Book after book, and article after article, exposing the brutality of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians continue to pour out, bringing on the increasingly desperate efforts to silence criticism of Israel. Even Archbishop Desmond Tutu became the target of Lobby pressure when he was invited to speak at St. Thomas University in Minnesota. After a couple of rabbis and others from the Minnesota branch of the Israel Lobby complained to the Catholic priest who headed the school, the invitation was cancelled. It was only later reinstated after the incident drew a great deal of embarrassing press coverage.

The list goes on. Under pressure by Dershowitz and other attack dogs employed by the Israel Lobby, Norman Finkelstein, a strong critic of Zionism, was denied tenure at De Paul University. And it is no secret that the Lobby organized the attack on President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad of Iran when he was to speak at Columbia University, resulting in Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger making a fool of himself as he labored to appease the Lobby—which, not incidentally, is backed by major real estate interests whose backing Bollinger needs to expand Columbia into Harlem.

In New York City, the school system had set up an Arabic-language school, appointing as its head Debbie Almontaser, a veteran teacher in the school system. She was also a Yemeni who wore a hijab. That combination proved too much for Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper, The New York Post, which ginned up some anti-Arab racism by headlining that Ms. Almontaser had refused to denounce T-shirts being sold by an Arab woman’s organization in New York. The slogan that displeased the Post was, “Intifada NYC.” Ms. Almontaser told the Post reporter who had asked her about it that the word meant “shaking off.” That, and nothing more, was enough to pressure her out of her job, after which Danielle Salsburg was appointed to run the Arabic-language School, despite the fact that she spoke no Arabic.

Now the same thing has happened with Joel Kovel and his 2007 book, Overcoming Zionism. Published by Pluto Press in England, it was distributed in the U.S. by the University of Michigan Press. But heavy Zionist pressure resulted in the University of Michigan Press withdrawing the book from distribution (see December 2007 Washington Report, p. 23). The pressure came first and foremost from a group called “Stand With Us/Michigan,” an offshoot of another Israeli Lobby group, “Campus Watch,” headed by that great humanitarian, Daniel Pipes, who is in the forefront both of the pro-Israeli Lobby as well as the anti-Muslim Lobby. Joel Beinin, then professor of Middle East history at Stanford University, and now director of the Middle East Studies Department at the American University in Cairo, said this of Campus Watch:

“Campus Watch…compiles dossiers on professors and universities that do not meet its standard of uncritical support for the policies of George Bush and Ariel Sharon. Among other things, this may be Pipes’ way of taking revenge on the scholarly community after failing in his own pursuit of an academic career in Middle East studies.[....]

Roger Van Zwanenberg of Pluto Press, asked this question when he was informed of the action by Stand With Us:

“How can a privately funded body with a narrow perspective, a deeply unscholarly invective and all the characteristics of a public bully be influencing a major U.S. University in the USA under the false rubric of scholarship?”

Fortunately, under sustained pressure from people outraged by its action, the University of Michigan Press (UMP) reversed itself and resumed distribution of Overcoming Zionism. UMP also backed away from efforts to cancel its distribution contract with Pluto; however, as of this writing, the effort to rid itself of this obnoxious and radical influence has resumed (see <www.CODZ.org>). Kovel describes what the Zionist Lobby did with respect to Overcoming Zionism as, in essence, a “book burning.” But thanks to the outcry, the controversy has boosted sales the book, which has otherwise been completely overlooked by the mainstream media, and even by a left press which has largely internalized the taboo against serious criticism of Israel.

Joel Kovel was trained as a physician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. He left these professions in the mid-1980s because they conflicted with his radical politics and took up a position at Bard College in upstate New York, where fresh tensions have recently arisen over his outspoken anti-Zionism. After all, one of the trustees of the college has been the ultra-Zionist Martin Peretz, who now owns The New Republic magazine. (Years ago, in a phone conversation, I accused Peretz of making what was a fine liberal magazine into the house organ for the Israeli Lobby. Needless to say, he was not amused, because at the time he was writing an article about the speaking honoraria I was receiving from Arab Americans shortly after my election to the Senate.) Notwithstanding, Kovel plans to teach this fall a course at Bard entitled, “Zionism and Its Discontents.” I might add that Kovel writes with great clarity and superb insight into his subject matter.

It is interesting to follow Dr. Kovel’s intellectual growth, from a young man living in a Zionist family steeped in the ethics of Judaism to someone who became unable to justify the arrogance of the Zionists in Israel as they systematically destroyed anyone who was in their way.

The Covenant with God, a doctrine which governs the moral lives of Jews, has been transformed by the arrogance of Zionism into a different set of ethical rules that gave approval to destroy or to damage the “Others”—meaning non-Jews—who were obstacles to Zionist ambitions in Palestine. Judaism was the first “guilt culture”; accordingly, guilt took over when one did not follow the rules laid down by their God, Yahweh. Kovel sees this guilt as intolerable to Zionists, however, because of the conflict between their high redemptive ideals and the rules of engagement, which were conveniently changed to allow Zionists to ethnically cleanse Palestine in order to make room for an exclusive Jewish state. This contradiction has led Zionists to racism in order to devalue their victims, along with the vicious need to attack and discredit all critics.

Dr. Kovel’s views on the Palestine-Israel conflict had been slowly evolving over the years, until, during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by the Israeli military, he had an epiphany of sorts. He then began to radically question his Zionist upbringing, strongly believing that this was no way for Jews to act. He began to write on the theme in 2001 after Ariel Sharon “took his goons to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,” which started the second intifada.

Kovel’s objective is to convince more American Jews to act against U.S. policy, which enables Israel to continue its bad behavior. Israel, he believes, acts with impunity because of the uncritical support given to its actions by American Jews. Translated into the political muscle of AIPAC, this overwhelming support forces American politicians to maintain their silence on the issue. “Giving Israel a blank check has done so much harm to the whole world, but also to the Jewish people,” Kovel says.

Jews Must Speak Out

“I have no hesitation to speak out—in fact, I believe it is incumbent on Jews to speak out against what is happening in the Middle East,” he insists.

“We should treat Zionists as human beings and tell them that, as human beings, they’ve made a major mistake. It’s a way to help Zionists recognize the evil resulting from their actions vis-à-vis Palestine. Jews will be well served by drawing back from what Israel has done,” Kovel says.

He believes that a coterie of “thugs” working to suppress dissent from the Israeli propaganda line has gathered around Israel as an anti-human state. By doing its dirty work, they become a “culture medium “ for the various types of intellectual pathogens who float to the top.

Needless to add, Kovel has been called by his Zionist critics anti-Semitic, or at times, a self-hating Jew, but, he says, “that blunderbuss approach has no effect on me.”

On the subject of either a one-state or two-state solution to the conflict in the Middle East, Kovel believes that, ultimately, this is to be decided by the people on the ground. He also believes, however, that the Israeli occupation has destroyed the material foundations of a decent state for the Palestinians. Israel has stolen too much land through its efforts at creating the wall, its refusal to give building permits to Palestinians, its ecological destruction, and its actions in general, which have prevented the Palestinian people from building the communal basis for an independent state.

The creation of Bantustans is the most that Israel has offered to the Palestinians. This is similar to what the apartheid regime created in South Africa. The Bantustans were basically “holding pens,” created for the black population; but at that, they were better than what the Palestinians have now under Israeli occupation. If one looks at what George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice are promoting as a resolution to the conflict, this is no more than raising the level of the Palestinian people to what the global community regarded as unacceptable under South African apartheid.

From another angle, what would be required for a successful two-state solution is the transformation of Israel in the process, to demilitiarize itself and allow real sovereignty to the Palestinians. But, as Dr. Kovel says, “While this would be great, it would not be Israel anymore.”

That kind of dream is impossible because it ignores the true reality of Israel. For while people have been made to believe that Israel is a normal state, it is not. It is a state predicated on superiority over all Others as an exclusive Jewish state. “It cannot relax or relent in this goal,” Kovel points out. “An exclusive Jewish state would no longer exist if it did.”

Furthermore, he adds, “If a Palestinian state were created, this could well clear the way for the ‘transfer’ of Israeli Palestinians out of Israel to their own state”—obviously more ethnic cleansing and not an acceptable outcome.

An exclusive Jewish state can only be maintained by authoritarianism and military rule. Thus if a Palestinian state were to be created, Israel would have to be fundamentally transformed, which is the only way it could allow the Palestinians to live as human beings.

Dr. Kovel’s vision of the near future is that the American Jewish community would become able to overcome the wealthy American Zionist elite that keeps the Israeli Lobby as a dominant force in U.S. politics. This, then, could create the precondition for a decent outcome. He points to South Africa as a formerly racist state that was transformed by its creation of a one-state solution, doing away with what was then a two-state situation which allowed the kind of apartheid that so disgusted the world (though needless to add, falling well short of a real transformation).

Dr. Kovel devoted a section of his book to the death of Rachel Corrie. To him, she symbolizes the thousands of Palestinians who have been killed to further the Zionist dream. “Her death brought it all home,” Kovel says, with the abandonment of her case by the U.S. government and the atrocity of how she died, trying to save a Palestinian home from being destroyed by an American-made bulldozer, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.

I feel comfortable in saying that, after the loss of our greatest Arab-American intellectual, Edward Said, Dr. Joel Kovel is filling that void with his deep and strongly held feelings of ethics and morality, as well as his superior ability to communicate them.

James G. Abourezk is a former U.S. senator (D-SD) and founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He currently practices law in Sioux Fall, SD.