Overcoming Zionism

Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine

Joel Kovel

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780745325699
• eBook ISBN: 9781783715930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Israel is an incorrigible human rights offender because, by discriminating against Arabs, it is guilty of 'state-sponsored racism' argues Joel Kovel. Like apartheid South Africa, the best hope for peace in Israel is to return to the idea of a one-state solution, where Jews and Palestinians can co-exist in a secular democracy.

Kovel is well-known writer on the Middle East conflict. This book draws on his detailed knowledge to show that Zionism and democracy are essentially incompatible. He offers a thoughtful account of the emotional and psychological aspects of Zionism that helps us understand the relationship between ideology, culture and political processes.

Ultimately, Kovel argues, a two-state solution is essentially hopeless as it concedes too much to the regressive forces of nationalism, wherein lie the roots of continued conflict.

Part One

Coming to Zion

1

A People Apart

By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our harps.

For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”

How could we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!

Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.

PSALM 137 IS ONE of the most hauntingly beautiful passages in the Bible, and a virtual anthem of the Zionist cause. Its words of longing and faith have been recited on innumerable occasions over the years, no doubt often accompanied by real weeping. But what we read above is not the whole psalm. There are three more lines, which tend to get filtered out in the consideration of this text—and, I should think, rarely get read at Seder—but must be included in its meaning. Here they are, in the New Revised Standard Version:

Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!”

O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

I have read numerous commentaries on this famous Psalm, and none of them look askance at the last two lines celebrating vengeance taken on the children of Edom. If pressed, people will most likely say, well, that was the way they talked back then, everybody accepted the necessity of revenge, the talion law of an eye for an eye. Today we live in the advanced world whose supreme moment is given by liberal democracy, where the rule of Law replaces the talion principle. What counts in the Psalm is fidelity to Zion, immortalized in the powerful State of Israel. And Israel is just such an advanced society, a bastion of the Enlightenment, the “Only Democracy in the Middle East” as one is endlessly reminded, a precious jewel of Western civilization to be protected by all right-thinking people against the forces of Oriental darkness, or as some now say, “Islamo-fascism.”

As this is being written, in August 2006, Israel is bombing Lebanon, pulverising it with advanced technology provided by its mighty partner, the United States of America. The Lebanese force, Hizbullah, has retaliated with hundreds of rockets, which have caused much consternation and some loss of life, though the scale of damage, as has been the case throughout the wars between Israel and its “neighbors,” is of the order of ten to one against the Arabs. This is incalculably greater when infrastructure is taken into account. The bombs have caused an oil spill that has precipitated what may turn out to be the worst ecological catastrophe in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. Elsewhere, virtually every bridge has been destroyed in the country, which awaits the perdition of what is nicely called a “humanitarian crisis,” its advent hastened by Israel’s bombing of ambulances, fuel dumps, and indeed, humanitarian aid workers and UN observers. Over 1000 Lebanese had been killed by the end of the first week in August, less than 10 percent of them the combatants of Hizbullah—who are giving the Israel Defense Force (IDF) the devil of a time. Of the dead, about one-third are children. The “little ones” are sometimes dashed against the rock but more often dashed by rock-like things propelled by high explosives. So the rock comes to them, an advantage of air power, which spares the perpetrator’s conscience by removing him from the scene of the crime.

This kind of distancing might be enough for the US or British Air Forces, well schooled in concepts like “surgical airstrikes” and “collateral damage.” But where Israel is concerned a raw nerve intrudes that is not so easily dulled. The history epitomized by Psalm 137 bubbles to the surface and calls for more strenuous methods of moral damage control. For example, after the bombing of the Qana refugee camp in Southern Lebanon in which more than a score of children perished, a journalist published in the popular daily newspaper, Maariv, a sample speech of justification, which he recommended that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert deliver. A bit extreme for a PM who has to keep an international audience in mind, the speech nonetheless attracted wide attention and approval within Israel, and may be fairly brought forth as a précis of its basic exculpatory logic.¹ It had two main themes:

•

That Israel feels really bad about bombing little children but had to do it—and will do it “today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow… here, there and everywhere”—because it is facing “savages,” nay, “agents of the devil [that is, Hizbullah, who have] taken over their land [that is, Lebanon] and turned the lives of our children into hell.” It is Hizbullah who launched missiles from Qana, hence Israel, to protect its children, must bomb children of the Other. In other words, talion law reigns.

•

But there is another, deeper narrative superimposed on this, quite specific for Israel and its Zionist ideology. This narrative overrides mere matters of fact^2 with the power of its great theme, the immemorial suffering of the Jewish people, the complicity of the rest of the world in this, the imminence and omnipresence of catastrophe, and the necessity of Israeli counterforce to prevent its recurrence. Here is some of the rhetoric:

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time you understood: the Jewish state will no longer be trampled upon. … Today I am serving as the voice of six million bombarded Israeli citizens who serve as the voice of six million murdered Jews who were melted down to dust and ashes by savages in Europe. In both cases, those responsible for these evil acts were, and are, barbarians devoid of all humanity, who set themselves one simple goal: to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the earth, as Adolph Hitler said, or to wipe the State of Israel off the map, as [Iranian President] Mahmoud Ahmedinijad proclaims. And you—just as you did not take those words seriously then, you are ignoring them again now. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaders of the world, will not happen again. Never again will we wait for bombs that never came to hit the gas chambers. Never again will we wait for salvation that never arrives. Now we have our own air force. The Jewish people are now capable of standing up to those who seek their destruction …

This narrative is foundational for Israel, and we shall take up its particulars in the pages ahead. Here we emphasize once again how far back it goes, and how steadfastly it recurs in a kind of eternal return, holding Zion within its grip. For the ancient texts are not just about the flow of events; they constitute events, enter their marrow, and fly out of the mouths of later generations like flocks of starlings. Ran HaCohen, an outstanding commentator within contemporary Israel, has culled some interesting specimens of recent discourse from its “liberal intellectuals” as they justify Israel’s latest war. A good deal of what they say resembles the dry rationalization of apologists everywhere for crimes of state.³ But some of the material has the sound of undigested Old Testament wrathfulness breaking through the clouds like a bloody sunset.

The editor-in-chief of Israel’s largest daily newspaper demands on the front page that Israel

wipe out villages that host Hezbollah terrorists … [and] wash with burning fire the Hezbollah terrorists, their helpers, their collaborators, and those who look the other way, and everyone who smells like Hezbollah, and let their innocent people die instead of ours. (Yediot Ahronot, July 28, 2006)

Poet and self-proclaimed leftist Ilan Shenfeld writes:

March on Lebanon and also on Gaza with ploughs and salt. Destroy them to the last inhabitant. Turn them into an arid desert, an uninhabited, turbid valley. Because we yearned for peace and wanted it, and our houses we destroyed first, But they were a wasted gift for those murderers, with beard and Jihad bands, who shout: “Massacre now!,” and who have neither love nor peace, neither god nor father. […] Save your people and make bombs, and rain them on villages and towns and houses till they collapse. Kill them, shed their blood, terrify their lives, lest they try again to destroy us, until we hear from tops of exploding mountains, Ridden down by your heels, sounds of supplication and lamentation. And your pits will cover them. Whoever scorns a day of bloodshed, He should be scorned. Save your people, and make war. (Ynet, July 30, 2006)⁴

And dash the little ones against the rock … Psalm 137 is a microcosm of the Old Testament, whose beauty, grandeur and spiritual majesty coexists with a kind of hellfire celebrating every kind of violence including mass murder. It is the latter feature which thrives in modern-day Israel. Our overwrought Israeli intellectuals must have read Deuteronomy, Moses’ Valedictory Address to his people and of special importance to Zionism. Here we learn that the Israelites struck down King Sihon, “along with his offspring and all his people. At that time we captured all his towns, and in each town we utterly destroyed men women and children. We left not a single survivor”—except for livestock, which were taken as spoil [2: 33–35]. Then there was King Og of Bashan, who received the same fate, “in each city utterly destroying men, women and children,” and again taking the livestock as booty [3: 6]. Later, Moses says that the enemy nations should be cleared away “little by little; you will not be able to make a quick end of them, otherwise the wild animals would become too numerous for you. But the LORD your God will give them over to you and throw them into great panic, until they are destroyed.” [7: 22–23]—a passage that could well have been bandied about as plans for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians were hatched—just as the following pertains to Israel’s external wars, including, falsely, that of 2006: “Every place on which you set foot shall be yours; your territory shall extend from the wilderness to the Lebanon and from the river, the River Euphrates, to the Western Sea. No one will be able to stand against you. ...” [11: 24–25]

Among the last words of Moses to the people we find the following, which epitomize both the grandeur of the Old Testament and the deeply problematic, vengeful spirit of the Zionism that has been one of his legacies:

I will make My shafts drunk with blood,

and my sword will eat up flesh,

from the blood of the fallen and captive,

from the flesh of the long-haired foe.

Nations, O gladden His people,

for His servants’ blood will He avenge,

and vengeance turn back on His foes

and purge His soil, His people.

[32: 42–43]⁵

HOW IS ZION TO BE UNDERSTOOD?

The Judaic way of being begins with a leap of negative logic. Among the social formations of the ancient world there emerged a grouping of hill tribes whose identity was based upon refusing to be like the others. It called itself Israelite, and the notion of separateness remained, to appear throughout the Pentatuech, the five books of its chronicle, which collectively became the Torah, Judaism’s precious affirmation of its history and being. In the fourth Book, Numbers, the seer Balaam announces the theme directly: Behold, it is a people dwelling apart, not counting itself among the nations.⁶ The ancient Israelites were the only people who refused to grant validity to the gods of their neighbors, in contrast to what Ronald Hendel has called the “basic cultural translatability in the ancient Near East,” in which peoples would freely borrow spiritual motifs from each other.⁷ By affirming apartness, the tribes developed a sharply internalized identity whose spiritual reflex was to become the God, Yahweh. Thus they became the “Tribes of Yahweh,” a title given to them by the Liberation theologist and historian Norman Gottwald, who saw in the Israelites’ struggles with the principalities of the time a discovery of the possibility of emancipation.⁸ This is plainly true.

But so is the converse: Becoming a people apart, with a godhead to match, may help account for the extraordinary durability of the Jewish identity, but it also equipped it with an enduring sense of conflict, both within itself and with other nations, and can lead to domination as well as emancipation. There is no mystery to this. Paraphrasing John Donne, we are none of us an island, thus no people can really live apart, no matter how high they build separation walls. Those who try to do so only aggravate history. They are the splinters under the skin of humanity.

Looking at the matter a bit more closely, we see the existential choice to live as a “people apart” to be a launching point for a dialectic whose further development was shaped, first, by the kinds of reactions others would have to this, and then by the counter-reactions of Israelites (later under names such as Hebrews, Jews and Israelis) in order to adapt to others. This sets into motion that process of struggle and self-definition, which makes Jewish history so interesting and varied, but also so troubled. The process could undergo lulls for considerable periods of equilibrium during which Jews were reasonably comfortable in the larger world; it could burst into spasms of terrible persecution, massacre and exile when things became destabilized; it could take forms known as “homelessness,” “rootlessness,” “cosmopolitanism,” etc., at various points; it would allow them to play an essential role in navigating the universal alienator we call money, and so help to bring about capitalism; and it could also cause them to develop pockets of deep and dark atavisms through isolation and withdrawal from the world. We find the origins of the malaise called antisemitism in this dialectic; and we also find the reaction to antisemitism known as Zionism.

The theological reflex of being a people apart is known as the Covenant, a kind of promise bestowed by Yahweh upon his people, and first encountered in Genesis with respect to Abraham, the original Patriarch:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.⁹

The Covenant is a very conditional promise, as Abraham discovered when Yahweh asked for the sacrifice of his son Isaac as a sign of loyalty. The Old Testament is seeded with passages in which the God of the Hebrews scolds his people and threatens to bring about every kind of calamity should they disobey or forget him. We see a variation in Psalm 137’s imprecation to “let my right hand wither” if the Jew forgets Jerusalem—which, turned around, means that the power to wreak vengeance, in today’s world, the power of the IDF, will be restored once Jerusalem is remembered, or what comes to the same thing, if Yahweh is obeyed. Yahweh was the internal reflex of the apartness of the Israelites, and the peculiar mode of organization of their moral world made the Jewish people into the original guilt culture. Guilt is not the same, however, as recognition of wrongdoing and the taking of responsibility to bring about change. That is its overcoming. Too often, it becomes a signal calling for the replacement of responsibility with blame and accusation, and the repetition of wrongdoing, as we explore below.

The contrast between the Covenant between ancient Israel and its God, on the one hand, and animistic or Asian religions, on the other, could not be starker. In these latter, voices abound, but as a plurality that is distinct from, yet continuous with, the sensuously lived world.¹⁰ For Judaic being there is one voice, male and dissociated from any image,¹¹ in other words, abstracted from the sensuous world, and experienced...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Part One Coming to Zion
• Part Two the Jewish State
• Part Three Zionism Overcome
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index