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<DIV><FONT size=2>The Coolidge Corner Theater Marquee--</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>From Raymond Deane's review below:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV>"Kovel believes that "the world would be a far better place without
Zionism." Nobody reading this invaluable book can come away with the illusion
that universal values are not at stake in the campaign against Israel's crimes,
and Western governments' backing for them."<BR></DIV>
<DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV><FONT size=2><FONT face="Courier New" size=2>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=4><STRONG>Tomorrow night, Tue, Jan 22, Joel
Kovel will discuss his book</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=4><STRONG>Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single
Democratic State in</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=4><STRONG>Israel/Palestine-- Coolidge
Corner Theater, 7pm</STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2><STRONG><FONT color=#000000>Sponsored
by</FONT> </STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2><STRONG><FONT color=#000000>Bostonians for One
Democratic State in Israel-Palestine</FONT></STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2><STRONG><BR> </DIV></STRONG></FONT>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Prof. Kovel will be introduced by Brookline's
own Alice Rothschild, the author of </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>"Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and
Palestinian </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Trauma and Resilience" and cochair of Jewish Voice for Peace
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><SPAN class=a><FONT color=#008000><A
href="http://www.brokenpromisesbrokendreams.com">www.<B>brokenpromisesbrokendreams</B>.com</A></FONT></SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><SPAN class=a></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><SPAN class=a>Following his talk there will be a question
and answer session for community discussion,</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><SPAN class=a>followed by a book signing and, for those of
you who would like to</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><SPAN class=a>continue the conversation, dinner at Fugaku,
1280 Beacon St at 9pm.</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><SPAN class=a></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><SPAN class=a>Joel spoke on John Grebe's "Sounds of Dissent"
on Saturday, and on </SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><SPAN class=a>Sherif Fam's "This Week in Palestine", and on
David Goodman's "Radio with</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><SPAN class=a>a View" yesterday-- An effective and logical
voice</SPAN></FONT><FONT size=2> calling for Justice for the Palestinian</DIV>
<DIV>people and a good conscience for those that support Israel. His book
discusses</DIV>
<DIV>the history of Zionism, and ends with a call for a new state that
represents</DIV>
<DIV>all of its citizens, with equal rights for all, independant of their
ethnic background.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Hope to see you there,</DIV>
<DIV>peace,</DIV>
<DIV>Amy Hendrickson</DIV>
<DIV>ps. let me know if you'd like to be on the Bostonians for One State email
list--</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>For more book reviews see</DIV>
<DIV> <A
href="http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Zionism-Creating-Democratic-Palestine/dp/0745325696">http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Zionism-Creating-Democratic-Palestine/dp/0745325696</A></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV></FONT></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>Book Review: "Overcoming Zionism" <BR><FONT class=text14>Raymond Deane,
<I>The Electronic Intifada,</I> 13 May 2007 <BR><BR><FONT class=content>
<TABLE cellSpacing=2 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=right border=0>
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<TR>
<TD><IMG height=404 alt=""
src="http://electronicintifada.net/artman2/uploads/1/070513-overcoming-zionism.jpg"
width=260 border=1> </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>Born in 1936 in Brooklyn of
Ukrainian Jewish parents, Joel Kovel is the author of 10 books and over 100
articles. He practiced psychiatry and psychoanalysis for 24 years, abandoning
them in the mid-1980s partly because of dissatisfaction with the US health
care system and partly because of his intensified and multifarious political
activism on the left. Describing himself as an "eco-socialist," in 1998 he was
the Green party candidate for Senator from New York and two years later sought
that party's Presidential nomination, losing out to Ralph Nader. Since 2003 he
has been Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly journal, <I>Capitalism Nature
Socialism</I>.<BR><BR><I>Overcoming Zionism</I>, his first book on the
question of Israel, is a contribution to the growing body of literature
advocating "a single democratic state in Israel/Palestine." However, while
Kovel's subtitle is longer than his title, it is the devastating critique of
Zionism that occupies eight of the book's ten chapters. What is unique about
Kovel's project is its multi-perspectival nature: he demolishes Zionism from
historical, political, cultural, environmental, ethical, and psychological
perspectives, and still has space left for elegant invective and stimulating
digression. In a word, his argument isn't merely empirical, but in the
broadest sense philosophical and often requires considerable concentration
from the reader: such concentration is amply rewarded.<BR><BR>Zionism seeks
"the restoration of tribalism in the guise of a modern, highly militarized and
aggressive state." It "cut Jews off from what history they did possess and led
to a fateful identity of interest with antisemitism, which became ... the only
thing that united them." It "fell into the ways of imperialist expansion and
militarism, and showed signs of the fascist malignancy." Zionists and their
ilk -- those who build literal and metaphorical separation walls -- are "the
splinters under the skin of humanity." In short, "if you sign on to the idea
of a Jewish state, you are taking the particularism that is the potential bane
of any state, mixing it with the exceptionalism that is the actual bane of
Judaism, and giving racism an objective, enduring, institutionalized and
obdurate character." Israel, he concludes, has "turned itself into a machine
for the manufacture of human rights abuses."<BR><BR>This is no mere gratuitous
catalogue of execration, however. The reference to "exceptionalism" is
essential to Kovel's analysis. Exceptionalism leads at all times to racism.
Just as anti-Semites single out the Jews from the rest of humanity as objects
of hatred, Zionists accept the Jews' destiny as "a people apart" and deduce
from the history of Jewish suffering a right to transcend the laws of
humanity, subjecting the Palestinians to unspeakable brutality with apparent
impunity.<BR><BR>Exceptionalism brings separation (for which the Afrikaner
word is "apartheid"), but also alienation and estrangement. Chaim Weizmann,
Israel's first president, called Palestinians "the rocks of Judea ...
obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path," a remark, Kovel
observes, that "also devalues the landscape and undercuts Zionism's
romanticisation of the Palestinian earth, tipping the balance toward the
domination of nature." Thus Kovel neatly introduces his critique of Zionism's
disastrous ecological record: "Estrangement ... is the human form taken by
ecological breakdown; it is a failure of recognition between human agents,
which ... splits humanity from nature as well as itself. It follows that the
most severely estranged society will also be the most subject to
eco-disintegration."<BR><BR>Another key concept here is bad conscience: indeed
this book stems from a lengthy 2002 essay called "Zionism's Bad Conscience."
Kovel points out that on three occasions the Israeli state has been led by a
former terrorist: Menachem Begin (prime minister from 1977-83), Yitzhak Shamir
(1983-92, with a break in 1984-6), and Ariel Sharon (2001-6). This record
"does tend to vitiate the obsessive harping on Palestinian terror" and "is
combined with obsessive claims of democratic virtue and appeals to the ancient
sufferings endured by Jews and their high ethical standards." The need to
patch over the split between "the powerful ethical component to Judaism" and
"the commission of dreadful crimes and the honoring of those" who have
perpetrated them leads to "a species of collective conscience ... As it grew
into a state ..., the conscience needs of Zionism grew with the state's need
for legitimation and became more complex and internally riven." In such a
conscience "a kind of badness, a sense that something is noxiously wrong,
persists within the social body." It is also "a conscience that works badly,
impeding internal development ... Badly, too, in that it brings evil and
suffering into the world and propagates them."<BR><BR>Kovel's rich analysis of
the workings of this bad conscience uncovers it throughout the Israeli body
politic, as well as in the propaganda discourse that seeks to legitimate the
crimes of Zionism to the world. A vivid case-study is provided by the "new
historian" Benny Morris, a self-proclaimed "leftist" who in January 2004 in a
notorious interview with the <I>Ha'aretz</I> journalist Ari Shavit claimed
that Ben-Gurion should have finished the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,
that Palestinians should be put in cages, and that "the great American
democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the
Indians."<BR><BR>Kovel comments: "Morris realises that the Jewish state would
not have arisen without committing massive terrorism, but he is stunned and
falls into the black hole of race hatred to justify the deed ..." The
acceptance of responsibility and mutual recognition constitute "a recovery of
memory that is also a recognition of history -- the recognition Benny Morris
couldn't stand when he turned away from the truth he had uncovered about the
Nakhba, and toward his nihilist and paranoid defence of
Zionism."<BR><BR>Clearly if the dis-integrative tendencies inherent in Zionism
are to be counteracted, then re-integration must be sought via the one-state
solution. Kovel itemises the factors that render the conventionally advocated
two-state solution both physically impossible and morally unconscionable. For
Israeli (and pro-Israeli) discourse "the notion of 'Two-State' simply means
... the continued aggrandizement of the Jewish state along with a more or less
negligible 'other state' on an ever shrinking fragment of land ... Thus if the
basic condition for a Two-State solution is that there be two functional
states on the ground, the Two-State solution has been annihilated." It has
become "a script for the posturings of statesmen, the filling of airtime on
the networks and column-inches in the press ..."<BR><BR>Kovel rejects "the
whole idea of a volkisch state for any singular kind of people ... simply
because ... people do better when they are mixing and mingling in conditions
of a rich diversity." He finds "an Islamist state as objectionable as a Jewish
state" but is more concerned about transforming the latter because "my people
and my country are responsible for Zionism's success ..." He claims that the
US/Israel axis (which provokes him to the characteristic query: "as with the
discoveries that certain dinosaurs had two brains, one in the head and one in
the tail, just where does the executive thinking arise?") "has been over the
years by far the most powerful indirect cause for the rise of political Islam
in its theocratic form ... a Westerner who wishes to undercut the power of
Islamic fundamentalism cannot do better than work for the overcoming of
Zionism."<BR><BR>Given the length and depth of the critique of Zionism and the
concomitant argument against two states, some readers may feel that the case
for a single "secular-universal state" -- which Kovel dubs "Palesreal" -- is
made a little perfunctorily. However, it is the logical culmination of
everything that comes before, and clearly Kovel did not see it as part of his
brief to explore in excessive detail the modalities for establishing such a
state. He lays down three practical principles for activism: "Speak the truth
about Israel" -- i.e. counteract the propaganda of "the tentacular Zionist
lobby;" "Deprive the Zionist state of what it needs" -- i.e. cultivate
academic, cultural and economic boycotts; and "Bring Palestinians home" --
i.e. foreground at all times the Right of Return of Palestinian
refugees.<BR><BR>From an activist point of view, one of the dilemmas has
always been whether to advocate explicitly a two-state or a one-state
solution. Most solidarity campaigns deliberately avoid taking a stance on this
issue, which is deemed best left to the judgment of the Palestinians
themselves. However, as Kovel points out, the logic of repeatedly emphasising
the Right of Return "contain[s] within itself both the necessary and
sufficient condition for bringing down Zionism in an entirely peaceful way"
and seeks to overcome Zionism "by dissolving the logic of Jewish
exceptionalism and particularity."<BR><BR>Kovel believes that "the world would
be a far better place without Zionism." Nobody reading this invaluable book
can come away with the illusion that universal values are not at stake in the
campaign against Israel's crimes, and Western governments' backing for
them.<BR><BR><I>Raymond Deane is a composer, and a founding member and former
chairperson of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity
Campaign.</I><BR></FONT></FONT></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV></BODY></HTML>