Kovel Pulls No Punches

Why StandWithUs-Michigan Freaked

 

Joel Kovel's latest book entitled Overcoming Zionism is well worth reading because -- among other reasons -- it is a useful and necessary corrective to the campaign of Judea Pearl of the Daniel Pearl Foundation to depict principled anti-Zionism as racism.

 

The book speaks for itself. Unfortunately thanks to the efforts of Zionist censors and especially StandWithUs-Michigan Director Jonathan Harris, who tried to pressure the University of Michigan Press to cease distributing it and any other books from Pluto Press, Overcoming Zionism has become extremely difficult to obtain here in the USA.

 

Below I have provided some selected one and two sentence quotations. Where I have made ellipsis, I have tried to keep true to the meaning of the original text. If I have not done so, I apologize to Professor Kovel and to the reader.

1. While reading Seymour Seymour Hersh's largely forgotten book about the development of Israel's nuclear bomb I was struck by an off-handed sentence that the "CIA  had even been tipped off about the fact that Israel was raising large sums of money for Dimona from the American Jewish community." (p. 2)
2. Those ridden by Zionist logic are bound to project the accusation of antisemitism onto whoever troubles their bad conscience. (p. 7)
3. Alas, many commentators, and chief among them the ideologues of Zionism, insist on keeping up the ridiculous and demeaning charade that Jews, being the most [spiritually/ethically] advanced people, that is, the Chosen Ones, have been essentially innocent of all charges concocted by antisemites. (p. 25)
4. To be a nation, a people has to have an organic relation to a territory, and this the Jews lacked. They had instead a fantasied relation to a mythic territory, the Biblical Israel, which had to stand in for the real, habitable territory until this was gained. (p. 34)
5. All the historiographical exertions by generations of Zionist apologists cannot confer legitimacy on a project in which a variegated people held together by texts and a common faith, and whose actual ethno-national genealogies had been formed all over the map, suddenly decide after two thousand years that they have a real claim on a part of the earth just because it is the center of their Biblical identity. A two thousand-year-old claim would be laughed out of any secular court -- all the more so for the Ashkenazi Jews who comprise the main body of Zionists have little discernable link to the ancient inhabitants of Palestine. (p. 36)
6. The very weakness of the real claim [to Palestine] caused a totalization of the desire, with the result that Zionist nationalism became not the restoration of a land but the establishment of Jewish control over that land, and, coordinatively, the elimination of its indigenous inhabitants. (p. 37)
7. The whole history of the [Zionist] movement gives lie to this benign interpretation [that the Zionist settlers just wanted to live in peace side by side with their Arab hosts], and is still evidenced by the uncompromising, desperate tendency embedded in the conduct of Israel, including the notorious disregard for the rules of international conduct, which abundantly persists to the present day in "special claims," such as never disclosing the existence of its nuclear arsenal, refusing to take down the "apartheid wall" despite the verdict of the International Court of Justice, and innumerable other slaps in the face of world opinion. (p. 38)
8. Thus Vladimir Dubnow, in 1882: "The ultimate goal is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years ... The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland." (p. 45)
9. A Jew, therefore, could loath fascism at one level, but identify with its brutality at another. ... Thus some Jews could develop a national chauvinist reaction to the Holocaust, in which they might be expected to do unto others something of that which had been done unto them and their families. (p. 74)
10. If a Jew landed in a [German Nazi] concentration camp from 1934 to 1938 it was because he or she was a labor official, or a Communist, or a socialist or an anarchist -- categories into which, it must be added as a matter of fact (and for me, also as a matter of pride), many did fit. (pp 75-76)
11. For the fact that no one would expect Ben-Gurion to actually sacrifice Jewish children on the altar of Zionist nation-building does not mean that he didn't in fact set out to do just that on a smaller scale. (p. 78)
12. The fate of these stateless people [Palestinians dispossessed by Israel's expansion] was sealed by another law that would never have withstood constitutional scrutiny, that of confiscating property allegedly abandoned by Arabs. Thus arose the ghost-littered landscape of modern Israel, a nation built on stolen land. (p. 97)
13. Beneath all the proclamations about Arab terrorism and the ethical nobility of the Jewish state, expropriation by any means necessary is the master narrative necessary to comprehend the history of Israel/Palestine. And so we arrive at a land-grab state that, under the protective wing of its superpower patron, continues the annihilation of Palestinian society, the conversion of the Occupied Territories into a gigantic prison, and the steady expropriation of land. (p. 100)
14. In the meantime, we should recognize that what has been depicted here [the State of Israel] is no true democracy, and certainly not the only such creation in the Middle East. (p. 100)
15. Characteristically, it is the social toxicity of advancing capital that by destroying community, prepares the way for and ignites outbursts of fundamentalism. In the Jewish state, this takes on the additional dimension of being an instrument of ethnic cleansing. (p. 109)
16. But the Jewish state is most certainly an environmental bandit, even more so than the Asian giants. (p. 112)
17. Had not the revered Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization called the Palestinian people, "the rocks of Judea ... obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path?" ... Fear and loathing of the Arab translates readily to an augmentation of that characteristic Western attitude that the Zionists brought along with them to their Promised Land, namely that nature was inherently menacing in its "wild" state, and had to be "tamed" if civilization was to survive. (p. 114)
18. Since the 1930s the regime of force has held the highest place in Zionist society, as a liberator, a shield, and increasingly, a source of wealth. No propaganda trick is spared, then, to represent the IDF as Israel's pride and joy. (p. 119)
19. And here it needs be said that a society operating under the terms of Zionism, and engaged in the game of imperial expansion under the tutelage of the great destabilizer that is the United States, neither has nor deserves much of an ecological future. (p. 122)
20. [According to Martin Peretz:] Why even bother with this miserable people, who have contributed nothing to world civilization and are merely one rather insignificant member of the set of stateless nations? In fact, the only interesting thing about the Palestinians is that the Jews have blessed them by being their neighbors. (p. 129)
21. Behind this ratio stands a very intricate relationship, which implies a certain "zionification" of the United States, a kind of mutual adaptation that enables the support system to function routinely and to a degree automatically according to a cybernetic mechanism in which even the slightest criticism of Israel is met with howling accusations of antisemitism. (p. 132)
22. Israel craved [the Iraq] war unreservedly, whereas in the United States significant countervailing voices to the endeavor were heard from senior officials from the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations, who correctly foresaw the catastrophe that would follow upon the invasion. (p. 134)
23. In the neocon promotion of extreme unilateralism, these latter-day messianic Zionists are turning the United States as well as Israel into a "People Apart." (p. 136)
24. AIPAC is a lobby like no other in its ability to intimidate the legislative as well as the executive branches of government. (p. 136)
25. It can be said that Zionism conquered the Democratic Party with the checkbook and the Republicans with their resort to the sword. (p. 138)
26. To say that AIPAC has bought itself a Congress and hence can get them to dance to its tune is more than metaphor. (p. 138)
27. It is a remarkable phenomenon, specific, I should think, to the State of Israel, that its obsession with being the victim of terrorism goes hand in hand with the fact that no fewer than three of its prime ministers have been world-class terrorists, in the sense of having commanded major military and paramilitary operations whose purpose was to sow a climate of fear and panic through the targeting of civilians.
28. The most notorious example [of extolling terrorism against Palestinians] was Leon Uris' 1958 novel Exodus, a celebration of Zionist paramilitaries inspired in part by Sharon's exploits (and chiefly by [Yitzhak] Rabin). Of non-existent literary merit, Uris' work exceeded the influence of Gone With the Wind as a romantic defense of ethnic aggrandizement. (p. 154)
29. ... to look in depth at the Israeli relation to terror does tend to vitiate the obsessive harping on Palestinian terror. (p. 155)
30. ... the bad conscience of Zionism moves in the opposite direction, to join the cycle of vengeance that stains human history... who could have foretold back then [1948] just how cruel and coldly malevolent would be the direction given to Israeli state aggression by the bad conscience? (pp. 158-159)
31. The liberal Zionist tries to solve the riddles of bad conscience by squaring the circle. He returns to the same starting point, of Jewish ethnocracy, only he has provided it with a more enduring and less episodic basis than the state terrorist. (p. 161)
32. We would hold in this regard that 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; that the basis structure of Zionist racism is set forth by the bad conscience; and that the racist character of Israel constitutes its most basic indictment, that it is state-structured racism. (p. 163)
33. ... Zionism has woven an amazing web of deception to conceal its racism and evade the linkage with South African apartheid. (p. 165)
34. In their construction of a Jewish state the founders of Israel drew upon centuries of experience in rabbinical obfuscation. In contrast to apartheid South Africa, which attempted to clothe its racism with utopian rhetoric, the Zionist state devised regulations to show that it was not racist at all. (p. 167)
35. Think of how much better the "great American democracy" would be if it were to begin to confront its murderous past -- one sign of which would be to build a great museum about the annihilation of indigenous cultures, and another one on the slave trade and its consequence, alongside, or even, haven forfend, instead of the Holocaust museum, which deflects attention from America's lost history. (p. 191)
36. The notion of a "democratic Jewish state" is ipso facto racist. (p. 206)
37. [South African] Prime Minister John Vorster, whom the British had interned for Nazi sympathies, paid Israel a state visit in 1976 and was toasted by [Yitzhak] Rabin for "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa; the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence." A few months later, South Africa officially stated that "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples." (p. 212)
38. Many senior Israeli officials came to believe that the Jewish state could not have survived without the support and financial aid of apartheid South Africa -- all during a period when Israel was manifestly opposing apartheid. (p. 212)
39. With the unending condition of crisis dictated by its internal contradictions, the Jewish state, obsessed with a "security" that will never come, expresses its inner being in the constant, unrelenting devouring of what is not Jewish. Within this context the "Two-State" option becomes for Zionism a necessary idiocy, and has been so from 1947 right through to George W. Bush's "roadmap," the latest flap with Hamas, and the now victorious Kadima Party, which in early 2006 talked about tucking in the borders of the state by lopping off a few impracticable settler communities from the West Bank while retaining IDF presence where they have stood. (p. 215)
40. ... Israel will always be aware that its giant patron can abandon it as swiftly as it has taken it under its wing once strategic considerations of internal politics change. (p. 216)
41. Thus the Two-State notion is essentially a code word for the maintenance of the status quo. Within Israeli discourse the notion of "Two-State" simply means, then, the continued aggrandizement of the Jewish state along with a more or less negligible "other state" on an ever shrinking fragment of land.  (p. 217)
42. On the other hand, the bringing down of Zionism and the entire imperial attitude it serves has tremendous potential for reversing the Islamic-fundamentalist tide, which principally defines itself in reaction to Western interventionism. (p. 218)
43. So long as Israel remains Zionist, there will never be a viable Two-State resolution. (p. 218)
44. By 1958, [Martin] Buber had washed his hands of the one-state idea and said so at a lecture: "I have accepted as mine the state of Israel, the form of the new Jewish community that has arisen from the war. I have nothing in common with those Jews who imagine that they may contest the factual shape which Jewish independence has taken." (p. 219)
45. [Mutual recognition] is 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 [Nakba], and toward his nihilist and paranoid defense of Zionism. (p. 241)

 

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