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 pretigious professors Walt and Merscheim's exposure in the London Times (it was turned down by the Atlantic Monthy) 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 idealogy, 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 rabbi's to travel to Palestine on a fact finding mission. The rabbi's 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 na be quoted at legnth. "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 l948 and another 14% in l967. 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, Vladamir Jabotinsky, even and especially David Ben Gurion quietly articulated the need to drive the Arabs out. South African Prime Minister Henrik Verwoerd said in l96l 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 l948, 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 l948 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 Villiage of Dier Yassin. With Begin in command, Yitzhak Shamir, who was also to become a PM, and whose frankly facist organization The Stern Gang, actually made overtures to the Nazi's 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 Dier 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 l953 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 Israeli' 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 l948 and l967, 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 transfering 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 deligitimatize it.
Kovel writes, reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson, that no state has an absolute right to exist, hence all states are to some degree illigitimate, that states may be relatively or absolutely illegitimate, that a racist state is illegitamate, and Israel being an exclusively and discrimatory 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 it's chains."
He goes beyond the two-state solution, necessarily, because by steady aggression and agrandizement the Zionists have whittled the Palestinian territory down to 8% of the what it was in l948, 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 corruptred 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 forseen...."
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 Nazi's in the thirties, their forcing Jews in the deplaced 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 facist 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 enlighted 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.