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Tue, Jan 22, Joel Kovel will discuss his book
Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in
Israel/Palestine-- Coolidge Corner Theater, Boston @7pm
Sponsored by Bostonians for One Democratic State in Israel-Palestine
Prof. Kovel will be introduced by Brookline's own Alice Rothschild, the
author of
"Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian
Trauma and Resilience" and cochair of Jewish Voice for Peace
www.brokenpromisesbrokendreams.com <http://www.brokenpromisesbrokendreams.com>
Following his talk there will be a question and answer session for community
discussion,
followed by a book signing and, for those of you who would like to
continue the conversation, dinner at Fugaku, 1280 Beacon St at 9pm.
Joel spoke on John Grebe's "Sounds of Dissent" on Saturday,
and on
Sherif Fam's "This Week in Palestine", and on David Goodman's
"Radio with
a View" yesterday-- and by all accounts I've heard, people appreciated
hearing his ideas--
Joel takes a gentle but firm stance, calling for Justice for the Palestinian
people and a good conscience for those that support Israel. His book discusses
the history of Zionism, and ends with a call for a new state that represents
all of its citizens, with equal rights for all, independant of ethnic
background.
For book reviews see www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Zionism
http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Zionism-Creating-Democratic-Palestine/dp/0745325696
JOEL KOVEL COMES TO BROOKLINE
Dennis Fox Column for the Brookline TAB:
Here in Brookline we love controversy. From Town Meeting to the weekly TAB
to school classrooms, we disagree publicly, and usually respectfully enough,
about issues large and small -- parking rules and sidewalk snow, high-stakes
testing and racial profiling, presidential power and the war in Iraq. Next
Tuesday, though, the town's tolerance will be tested when Joel Kovel challenges
conventional thinking about Brookline's one undebatable topic: the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
Kovel, a former psychiatrist, is both an academic and an activist. A Bard
College professor of social studies, he was the New York Green Party's senatorial
candidate in 1998 and lost his bid to be the Greens' 2000 presidential candidate
to Ralph Nader. He writes frequently in journals that Brookline's liberal
and left-of-liberal residents are likely to read. During his Boston visit
he'll speak elsewhere about topics such as ecosocialism.
It's Kovel's new book, however, that's aroused the pro-Israel forces' ire.
In Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine,
Kovel explores in dizzying detail a broad array of themes certain to discomfort
Israel's supporters. His appearance will likely raise the same tired objections
facing Mazin Qumsiyeh, who spoke at Brookline High School last September
despite frantic efforts to pressure school officials to ban him.
Kovel's critics did briefly persuade the University of Michigan Press to
stop distributing his book, which is published by Pluto Press, a small publisher
in the United Kingdom. Michigan soon backed down and resumed distribution,
but Kovel's critics have not given up. One of the things I learned during
the years I wrote a regular TAB column was the lengths to which some of
Israel's supporters will go to keep the public ignorant about Middle East
realities.
I like to think I was a bit more open-minded when I was a teenage Zionist
myself. According to the left-humanist Zionism I had internalized, Israel's
manifestly unjust policies toward its own Arab citizens, obvious even before
the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, would someday give way to
a humanist, socialist society in which Jews and Arabs would live as equals.
At least that's what I thought when I moved to Israel for what I intended
to be the rest of my life.
When I returned to the US in 1973 I was no longer a Zionist. Some combination
of growing political awareness, nagging logical questions, and personal
transformation had turned me away from what had been the primary focus of
my life. But actively rejecting the very rationale for a Jewish state was
just too big a leap.
In 2002, my TAB column addressed the questionable arrest a year earlier
of Amer Jubran during a Coolidge Corner protest against Israel Independence
Day. For a while I tread cautiously and somewhat inconsistently. I tried
to spark discussion in Brookline while catching up on the political landscape
and then, in two visits to Israel and the West Bank, the physical and personal
landscape. My explorations, which included re-connecting with old friends
and meeting Israeli and Palestinian students, professors, activists, and
others, confirmed my long-time suspicion that Israel's identity as a Jewish
state -- at Palestinian expense -- fails the test of justice.
Despite its sharp clarity, Joel Kovel's book was not an easy read. His careful
critique of just about everything the Zionist movement taught me four decades
ago was painfully direct. Although neither Brookline Booksmith nor the Brookline
Public Library carries the book despite the attention it's received, several
essays on his website provide a good sense of Kovel's position (www.joelkovel.com
<http://www.joelkovel.com/> ). Kovel will talk about the book on January
22 at 7 pm, unless his critics pressure the Coolidge Corner Theatre to cancel.
Kovel addresses the dilemma of liberal and left Zionists who still imagine,
as I no longer can, that a Jewish-but-democratic state is possible. Along
the way he enumerates universal principles of justice to support his thesis
that Zionism's logic could only lead to a state built on inequality and
expulsion. Dropping my own Zionist identity meant rejecting the position
that what matters most is what's good for the Jews. Along with Kovel and
a growing number of other Jewish Americans willing to rethink long-held
assumptions, it seems clear to me today that justice is the appropriate
bottom line.
Book Tour Itinerary
16-20 APRIL SCOTTISH PSC TOUR
Accommodation: David Miller
15th April Depart Heathrow: 15.15
Arrive Glasgow: 16.40
BMI Flight No: BD8 Reference No: 2U369H
16th April Stirling Event
17th April Glasgow Event
18th April Edinburgh Event
19th April Afternoon: Strathclyde
Evening: Dundee
20th April Depart Glasgow: 13.25
Arrive Heathrow: 14.45
BMI Flight No: BD7 Reference No: 2U369H
21-22 April Weekend in London.
Currently free
23-26 APRIL IRISH PSC TOUR
Accommodation: James Bowen
23rd April Depart Heathrow: 14.15
Arrive Cork: 15.30
Aer Lingus Flight No: E1715 Reference: 24RS3B
Cork Event
24th April
Limerick Event
25th April
26th April Dublin Event
27th April Depart Dublin: 09.05
Arrive Heathrow: 10.25
BMI Flight No BD122 Reference: 2U8LXO
28th April London
Currently free
29 APRIL JEWS AGAINST ZIONISM DAY SCHOOL
Lucas Arms, Grays Inn Road WC1
30 APRIL – 2 MAY NORTH WEST PSC TOUR
30th April Liverpool PSC Meeting - tbc
1st May Chester PSC Meeting - tbc
2nd May Halifax PSC Meeting - tbc
3-7 MAY LONDON EVENTS
3rd May Bookmarks Launch
4th May
5th May
6th May Leave for Denmark
Reflections on September 11
November, 2001
The grim shadow over our future cast on September 11, 2001 occurred between
the composition of The Enemy of Nature and its release, and could not
be incorporated into its argument. Yet its significance is such as to
call for some brief observations: First, because much of this book was
written during a period of rampant economic growth, its main theme, of
the relentless expansive pressure of capital, might seem less important
given the current brutal downturn of the world economic system. However,
the same basic principles hold. For the pressure itself is what counts,
whether or not it succeeds in imposing growth. Capital is a crisis-ridden
system, and although there is never any clean correlation between crises
in the economy and those of ecology, the integrity of ecosystems is sacrificed
at either end of the economic cycle. When the economy grows, sheer quantity
becomes the dominating factor; while when, as now, it heads downwards,
the diminution in growth acts as a signal causing environmental safeguards
to be loosened in order to restore accumulation. Second, the crisis posed
by fundamentalist terror and that of global ecological decay share certain
basic features. As we will see in the following pages, the ecological
crisis is like a nightmare in which the demons released in the progressive
domination of nature on a world scale come back to haunt the master. But
something of the same holds for terrorism. Fundamentalismís rebellion
is often seen as against modernity, but this only begins to matter in
the context of imperialism, that is, the progressive domination of humanity
on a world scale. In the species of imperialism known as globalization,
the dissolution of all the old ways of being is part and parcel of forcibly
imposed ìfree trade.î Fundamentalisms arise within disintegrating peripheral
societies as ways of restoring the integrity of ravaged communities. The
project becomes irrational because of the hatred induced by powerlessness,
and as it does, turns toward a pattern of terror and counterterror in
a cycle of vengeance. The dialectics of terror and ecological disintegration
are joined in the regime of oil. This constitutes, on the one hand, the
chief material dynamic of the ecological crisis, and on the other, the
organizing principle for imperial domination of those lands where the
conflict is being fought out. Petroleum fuels industrial society; and
the growth of the West is necessarily a growth in the exploitation and
control of those lands where it is most strategically located. As these
happen to be largely Islamic, so is the stage set for the great struggle
now unfolding. This is not the place to take up the conduct of this struggle
except to say that it needs to be joined at the root of its causes. From
this perspective, resolving the ecological crisis and freeing humanity
from terroróincluding, to be sure, the terror inflicted by the superpower
on its victims--are two aspects of the same process. Both require the
overcoming of empire, which requires the the undoing of what generates
imperialism over nature and humanity. It is an illusion to think that
this can be achieved without a profound restructuring of our industrial
system, and by implication, our whole way of being. The grip of imperialism,
whether of oil or otherwise, cannot be broken within the terms of the
current order. Hence what is required to overcome global warming and the
other aspects of the ecological crisis goes also for terror. A world must
be built that does not need the fossil fuel economy, a world, as is argued
in what follows, beyond capital.
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