MAKE ISRAEL A NON JEWISH SECULAR DEMOCRACY
by Helen Gavaghan in Manchester, UK
Sociologist and New York-based peace activist, Joel Kovel, outlined personal arguments for a deeper understanding of Zionism if one is to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He spoke at a meeting of the Manchester branch of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC) in January (21st).
PSC groups around the UK hold meetings to raise funds for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and provide a forum to understand the conflict and explore possible solutions. Often much anger and distress are expressed.
Speaking from the perspective of an academic sociologist Mr Kovel traced the ideas of Zionism in the 1930s through to modern day Israel. His central belief is that no solution to the conflict will be found until Israel gives up the notion of being a Jewish State. This applies, he said, whether the region adopts a one, two, three or no State solution.
Though he finds the idea of a no-State solution attractive, he thought that a strategic goal needs to be a one-State solution, one which is secular and democratic.
When challenged to say whether it would be fair for Jewish settlers to remain he sidestepped the question, reiterating that, whatever happens, for the solution to be effective Israel needs to give up the idea of being Jewish. He is himself what he called a “no Jewish Jew”, which, he said, was a well worked out model.
The most troubling element of his talk was the rise of fascism and the expressions of racism he was aware of in Israel. For example, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre want to build a Museum of Tolerance over a Muslim grave yard in Jerusalem, he said.
Sociologically he described parallels in the racism found in the early US, in South Africa and now in Israel. Transformative events had overturned State racism in South Africa and the US (the Civil War of the mid 19th Century).
What makes a State fit to be a State, he asked? The answer being the existence of internal corrective mechanisms. No State, he says, has the inherent right to remain as a State.
But the influences of Zionism, which played a strong part in the formation of Israel, will be hard to fight. Before Israel existed a national homeland was created in the imagination. Zionism wanted to inject settlers into an already fraught situation. “The only way was with violence and terror.”
Before the Second World War Zionists were talking of buying property from absentee landlords – the concept of gentle expropriation. At the end of the War other options were considered as to how to help the holocaust survivors, for example repatriation for those rescued from the concentration camps. But there was terrible guilt in the West and a need to assuage the terror.
At first Israel had the greatest social equality of any developed country and was sustained by the notion that it would make the desert bloom. But history unfolded on a different trajectory. Now it is an unequal society and Palestinians have become a savagely oppressed people.
His message was that the racism, societal inequality and lack of internal corrective political mechanisms make Israel, as currently constituted, an untenable State.
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Mr Kovel is a qualified physician and was professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein Memorial Hospital in New York until 1984 when he turned to social studies as an alternative. He served as a doctor in Vietnam. Many of his ideas appear in his book <a href=http://www.joelkovel.org/>
Understanding Zionism</a>, and he is preparing a second edition.
Helen Gavaghan is the publisher and editor of the bimonthly magazine, Science, People & Politics.
Submitted to TMS by email.
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I wrote this article in 2010 (not 2011) after I had contacted the Transecnd Media Service to “sell” them a report of Dr Kovel’s talk to the Manchester branch of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign on 21st January, 2010. The editor of Peace Journalism’s Perspective commissioned and edited the piece.
I made contact with the Transcend Media Servies because I have published an article by its founder, Professor Johan Galtung, which I think is a work of genius. That article is in Science, People & Politics at http://www.gavaghancommunications.com/sppgaltung.html. The file is stored on http://www.gavaghancommunications.com