Joel Kovel

The next local event on the Israeli – Palestinian / Arab conflict featured Joel Kovel. He is opposed to peace now based on establishment of a Palestinian state next to the Israeli one; as you could expect from the headings of the two preceding postings, mainly concerning Dr. Aruri's June talk. There I criticized that, instead of stating a 2-state peace honestly in the announcement, it was pretended that there would be discussion of “peace prospects” with an end to “40 years of occupation” i.e. of the lands taken in the June 1967 war, in line with the "2-state solution". The hope that these “global consensus" peace efforts will fail so that, after decades of more mayhem and suffering, the whole original State of Israel, formed in 1948, might be labelled occupied territory and finally be eliminated, was evidently known not to be acceptable to ordinary people (yet?).

The Kovel event was held at Simon Fraser University's downtown Vancouver centre, possibly because the librarians were on strike, but the same, and related, people seemed to be in control.The hype about the stature of the speaker was also comparable, largely from earlier appearances elsewhere on the tour to advertise his latest book, Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine.

The local topic was announced as "Zionism and its Discontents". "Dr. Joel Kovel is a medical doctor, psychoanalyst, and social science professor, and has [earlier] written books on ecology, nuclear terror, psychoanalysis, Nicaragua, white racism in the US, and McCarthyism. He ran for Senator in New York state for the Green Party". [The new book is referred to simply as “Overcoming Zionism" rather than by the full name.]

“ Amidst all the reports that fill our media on the conflict involving Israel, the political philosophy of Zionism rarely is discussed. Yet it is central to understanding daily events in the Middle East”. So I wondered what could possibly be meant by such philosophy. Having listened to the talk now, I can't think of anything Kovel said about that. There wasn't even a definition of “Zionism” to start with.

Come to think of it, I had heard all he said of the substance of his talk before, mostly more than once, and some a little too often, so that more repetition is beginning to bother me. There is the one about Golda Meir claiming that there are no Palestinians or there is no Palestinian people, neither of which would qualify as Zionist wisdom; but she surely didn't mean that the persons who had begun to call themselves Palestinians (rather than just Arabs) did not exist. And then there was the one about “a land without people for a people without land”, evidently really said by some early Zionist leader. I first began hearing about that a couple of decades ago from anti-Zionists, never during my years as committed Zionist in the 1930s to early 40s and subsequent non-Zionist decades; and surely had not immigrated joyfully (“Aliyah”, i.e. as Zionist) just to fill some empty space.

There was nothing I can recall as factually wrong or deliberately deceptive. In response to several questions at the end, his answer was that that's discussed in his book, which seemed unusual; but he was on a book tour. This was before the book became unavailable for a while following pressure on the University of Michigan Press (distributor for Pluto Press, the British publisher). While that tends to be a good indication that the book has something significant to say, the byzantine manipulations, with infiltrations and front organizations practiced in this propaganda war, make that somewhat less reliable an indicator. The ease with which that censorship was licked may also be significant.

Unlike the case with Aruri, who had announced a forthcoming visit of anti-consensus heavyweight Ilan Pappe, who had just held a well publicised public dialogue with 2-state champion Uri Avneri, I was not about to ask a question about Kovel's opinion of Avnery; but someone else did. After a very brief response from Kovel, the moderator (Greenberg) intervened. When he claimed in a paternalistic / dismissive tone that Uri Avnery doesn't really know about Palestinians, I interjected: He knows more than you (without waiting to be recognized).

On the way out, I was asked, maybe by the questioner, if I knew Avnery personally. The answer to that is negative, but I know quite a lot about him. In addition to reading what he writes for some time now, in which he reveals a lot about himself, I can evaluate the authenticity better than most; having been born about two years and 30 miles apart from him in Germany. And we had some other fairly close encounters. He just wrote of the 1948 generation of which he was part; as was I. There have also been differences; which may still be worth discussing some day. But in the absence of an organization like his Gush Shalom here, I have better things to do than becoming the last, lone advocate of the global “consensus” (and Avnery) in the Canadian West.

My rather indifferent impression of Kovel's talk, and failure to get his book, need not mean that it wouldn't be informative reading for anyone else. In a glowing review by Raymond Deane, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6885.shtml he calls it an “invaluable book”. His only (minor) reservation is that it deals only fleetingly with the proposed new state.

Amy Goodman's interview was largely about the temporary censorship. But she also explores his pertinent background. He is likely to have been a “red diaper baby”, and his views may reflect the mostly hostile relations between Zionists and Jewish communists / sympathizers. I had touched on that hostility briefly (postings of November 23 and 30, 2004) when I described witnessing the entry in 1939 of the Red Army into the town of Kovel, where Joel's ancestors clearly no longer lived when they acquired the Kovel family name; but probably ought to elaborate, since it is likely to still explain the attitudes of many on both sides of that conflict (there is some elaboration in the golB version, where it can be found near the end in the right column of the last but one 2007 entry).

At least as significant would be a discussion of what Joel Kovel has to say about solar energy; in the context of his interest in Marxism and in environmental matters. Those evidently are closer to his main interests, as also emerges from the Wikipedia article about him. On solar energy he writes like a clone of Exxon, dismissing sunshine as too diffuse, thus expensive; but he keeps a tenuous revolutionary escape clause that may be worth discussing. On (non-solar) environmental matters he has interesting, sane evaluations and attitudes in his (modified Marxist) Ecosocialist Manifesto http://www.iefd.org/manifestos/ecosocialist_manifesto.php (Michael Lowy coauthor); apparently written to mark one and a half centuries since Marx and Engels did theirs..

Pasteur, Marx, Engels et al in student occupied Sorbonne courtyard, May 1968.

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