Joel Kovel’s book written by a well-known American Jewish scholar and humanist is one of the most thought-provoking, multi-layered and consistent analysis of the situation in Palestine I came across.   Its spirit is that of egalitarian inclusion and moderation and it is precisely this spirit that compliments the serious scholarship undertaken to back up his arguments. In this history-transforming book, scholarly authority combines with uncompromising moral conviction to expose the roots of a tragic chronicle that is constantly unfolding in historic Palestine.

   Despite its title the book’s argument does not merely touch Zionism or Israel. The saying of the book is aimed at Jewish people wherever they are, encouraging them to look critically at themselves and thus with restored pride and dignity. Kovel traces the deep origins of Zionism, as well as the wide worldly support it gets with the aid the self-conscripted world Jewry, to tribal inclinations that constantly seeks to set the Jewish people as “people apart”. Both Jewish survival and their troubled history with other nations owe much to their tribal tendency. The settler colonisation of Palestine was a tribal ‘home-coming’. However secular Zionism originally was, it had already internalised tribal justification. Victim mentality and choseness conceal hidden aggressive tendencies towards non-Jews.

   Kovel shows how Zionists ideologues from the most militarised to the mildest harboured tribal phobia and aggression which could spare no empathy to the people who lived in historical Palestine. The result was that the indigenous population in Palestine was gradually dispossessed, ethnically cleansed in 1948 and has never been allowed to return. The separatist mentality of tribalism has been effectuating systematic racial discrimination against Arabs through racial basic laws and policies, using every opportunity to portray them as a ‘demographic threat’ despite them being, at least on paper, ‘equal’ citizens of the State of Israel. In the Jewish state, any notion of democracy is structurally and legally constrained for the enhancement and protection of the tribe.

   Kovel argues that the many shades of Israeli identity constantly unite behind the ultimate tribal-identification despite the apparent secularism of many Israelis and despite Israel’s multi-ethnic nature. The process of mirroring in which identity can overcome identification in self interpretation and contestation is highly constrained to a member of the tribe. It is tribal consciousness that prevents so-called Israeli ‘humanists’ to confront the deep contradictions that underline their positions and go all the way to criticise the racist foundations of their state. It is this tribal hold of the mind that abuses Holocaust memory and does its utmost to erase other memories. It is tribal mentality that conscripts all the world to ensure that the denial of injustices that happens in, and a result of, the colonisation of Palestine, as well as current inequality within Israel, remain untouched. All the world become hooked in this tribal mentality by letting Israel off the hook of so many International legal pronouncement pending against it.   A world that is captive of the Jewish tribe and blackmailed to protect it, entrenches the ambit of the moral wrong in the 1967 occupation of the West Bank Gaza and East Jerusalem rather then extending this wrong to the whole of historic Palestine.    It is the despicable protection of tribalism that bestows on the statement that “Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state” a higher and extremist status rather than the statement that hails the fundamental interests of the people who are constantly dispossessed and oppressed by the premise that grounds Israel’s existence and actions.

  Thus, the oppression, dispossession of, and discrimination against, Palestinians, is a world problem. Tribal-based coordinates of ‘pragmatism’ and the ‘never again the Holocaust’ rhetoric blocks any reflection and serious discussion about the possibility of de-colonisation towards and the establishment of civic and egalitarian constitution all over historic Palestine. Tribe trumps equality. It is that seemingly reasonable but in fact callous world endorsement of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and to commit crimes that makes this colonisation so unique and ruthless.

   Kovel discusses the origin of anti-Semitism as a lie regarding the origin of Christianity crudely implicating Jewish part in the death of Christ – a lie that has been tragically put to the very service of continuous resurrection of tribal Judaism.   The deep forces that shape history and historians are exposed with ruthless honesty.   Kovel’s argument of how anti-Semitism and Zionist nationalism nourish one another is enlightening.   Kovel shows that rather than fulfilling its aim as a spiritual home and a haven for Jews, the State of Israel is sure to take the entire world on a violent route, inter alia violence against Jews, with its obsession with its tribal crave of maintaining its Jewish majority and character. One of Kovel’s insights is that tribal thinking has the tendency to produce and utilise the very anti-Semitism that it seem to try eliminating. The implication of Kovel’s arguments is that Israel is a state whose tribal core pushes it to commit suicide, metaphorically speaking, suicide that, like the biblical suicide bomber Samson, is fated to take the whole world with it.

   Kovel is at pains to show us that this tribal thinking that characterises the legalism of Talmudic Judaism is not a characteristic of Judaic thinking. He does not want to essentialise Judaism into tribalism. Kovel argues that tribalism and the anti-Semitism it both fights against and nourishes could not be in sharper contrast to the prophetic tradition of Judaism, a tradition that uses the creative force of Jewish existence as the forces of radical social criticisms and reform, a one which produced the likes of Marx, a one which is capable of forming the ground of, and providing the impetus to, universal ethics, morality and Human Rights.

   Deep down Zionism has a tribal psyche, one that constantly needs to maintain the conditions to define itself by radical separation, through the instigation of violence if necessary, namely through creating the conditions for the demonisation and gangsterisation of the people who are Other to it and against it. The notion of separation (apartheid) originates in tribal thinking. Guilt and bad conscience are just the façade of the inability of thinking to relinquish its tribal separatist core.

  Kovel masterfully connects many frameworks of analysis to show that the self-preservation of Zionism unleashes the tribal warfare of controlling the accumulation and movement of Capital in order to hinder the historical momentum of social changes. Tribalism champions ecological destruction, pushing Palestine beyond its limits by excessive urbanisation and population and by destroying the desert for the use of Jewish people (action masqueraded as “making the desert bloom”). Last but not least, tribal mentality makes super-powers dance to its flute. Kovel reminds us just how lobbying world powers to fight the Zionist wars on behalf of the Jewish tribe has been masterfully carried out in the United States by the Israeli Lobby. The account of the alliances between Christians fundamentalists who see Zionism as the vehicle for eventual return of Christ is equally disturbing.

   Kovel then turns his gaze to the state of Israel, that state which could only be created by massive expulsion, whose education for tribal and militarised rationality can only be maintained by a set of racial laws that govern property rights, educational curricula, economic rights, movement rights, immigration rights and of course political stakes while presenting itself and indeed hailed as a paragon of democracy. The incompatibility between Zionism and democracy hints at the deeper ontological actuality that tribalism can never develop egalitarian sentiments towards the fundamental interest towards all others can not develop constitutional guarantees of their deep interests. Tribalism must end up preserving the most ruthless and stubborn form of ethno-nationalism or Ethnocracy in which the tribal identity is sure to find thousand violent ways to reinvent its self-imposed ghetto.

  Kovel holds the mirror to the face of world Jewry for lending themselves to protect that state thereby becoming themselves complicit in the constant generation of hatred against Jews, hatred that in turn continue to fuel the tribal survival.   Kovel demands nothing short of soul searching on behalf of Jews of that surplus which is left of their Jewishness once tribal tendencies have been overcome. No doubt that many Jews in the world will try to talk down this pearl of humanistic account.   The tribe can not sustain self criticism. The hatred to the tribe to all others is projected onto those who criticise it from within – being dubbed Self Hating Jews.

  Kovel scholarly exploration and moral intuition led him to the conclusion that it is not merely Zionism that needs to be deconstructed. It is not merely showing that Jewish and democratic state is an oxymoron like so many people did before. It is very easy to deconstruct Zionism as a political ideology but the social and political voice needs to find a connective tissue to the ontological tribal origins of which Zionism is a conclusion and a symptom.

   Kovel’s range of research perspectives is impressive and his analysis is razor-sharp. His thesis relies on primary historical scholarship and combines it with thoughtful philosophical reflections and novel connections.   This book is a truly thinking text that has the form of argument backed up by wide range knowledge. As such it traverses many intellectual frameworks. Kovel’s ability to bring together historical scholarship, philosophy, theology, Marxist analysis, ecological critique, statistical data and link all those to current everyday stories is truly agile and breathtaking.

   The book ends with a proposal for a single democratic state for all people Jews and Arabs, who live in Palestine thus ending colonial rule there and establishing an egalitarian and free constitution over a clear demos. It is important to note that he is not alone in proposing that. In July 2007, a group of leading ex Israeli and Palestinians Academics and Activists met in El Escorial Madrid to discuss the urgent reasons and possibilities for a one state solution in Palestine.   In complete resonance with Kovel the group in El Escorial was not merely claiming that a partition of Palestine is not viable but that it is fundamentally unjust playing to the hand of Zionism by entrenching that right of Israeli Jews to occupy, dispossess and discriminate those who lived and now live in what is now the State of Israel.

   It is evident that this book brings together a lifetime of intellectual pursuits, wisdom and personal struggle to save what Kovel sees a gem Judaic being gave to humanity and save this gem from the tribal aberrations. Pluto Press should be praised for its courage in providing the platform for a very important intellectual, perhaps crucial, call for all the world to wake up from the sedation and blackmail of Zionism and tribalism. The University of Michigan should be praised for shouldering this most important service to humanity by distributing Pluto books in the United States.

    Kovel’s main achievement is that he advances a thesis that reconnects Zionism to the Jewish Question. He shows an internal tension within Jewish thinking and does not succumb to simplistic severance of the Zionist question and the Jewish question. Inspired by books like Kovel, the Jewish Question needs to be dwelled upon even more than Kovel was able to do in this book. There are many ways in which his courageous lead is sure to be further dwelled upon and canvassed. On the one hand, it can be claimed that he was wrong to open up any link between the debate on Zionism and the one on Judaism/anti-Semitism. By contrast, it can be claimed that his linkage did not go far enough because some Jewish universal accounts can still shows echoes of tribalism. For example, Emmanuel Levinas’ claim that the Jewish heritage constitutes universal ethics of radical alterity and that this ethics is different to the Greek’s notion that otherness is already an attribute of thinking-Being, smacks of tribalism. Any claim to Jewish exclusive prophecy that is dressed as universal is highly problematic to say the least.   Jewish constant marginality and separation coupled with assimilation is not free of problems. . Kovel is highly aware of how the historicity of the inherent separateness of “people apart” has lead to half-hearted and tension-bound assimilation, anti-Semitism and persecution, period of relative equilibrium, theoretical developments of a rootless theoretical umbrella for cosmopolitanism and of course, ethnonationalism. (pp. 19-20)

   What is important, though, that no argument that link Jewish thinking and Zionism should be silenced ab initio ridiculing it as anti-Semitic. Big issues that touch all humanity hang here in the balance and they must be debated openly. Freedom of Speech should reign as Voltaire reminded us.

  A critique of tribalism can also be criticism of the West’s calculative, representational, methodology-bound, legalistic and technical thinking. The fact that the world joins the tribe and thus becomes itself a tribe, the actuality of it being assimilated into the tribe, forming the apartheid implicated in the axis of evil, is something that requires serious contemplation and debate. Deep inside Palestine is the locale that threatens unleashing those skeletons of humanity out of the cupboard.

  What Kovel’s book did me is to awaken the possibility and importance of exploring the most of controversial of questions. This question would explore the role and the power of various manifestations of tribal mentality in leading up to the Holocaust. In this respect, could it be that world tribalism and its child, Zionism, constitute the most sinister form of Holocaust denial and forgetfulness?. The supremacist monopoly to Holocaust memory in Israel can be argued to be a hint at this yet deeper denial of this colossal attempt at extermination. The denial of the Holocaust is not an argument of numbers and facts. Such arguments by the well-known Holocaust revisionists are themselves form of denial of primordial ontological processes. We must not let the issue of tribalism off the hook by arguing about facts and numbers. The Holocaust did happen and humanity should never never forget its Being. And yet, so tragically, it does.   A deep philosophical critique of tribalism must also make us brave enough to look at the ontological unfolding that lead to the Holocaust, listening to what the undisputed horrors of the Holocaust tell us in a deepest and most mysterious of ways. Doing this will indeed be to remember and to contemplate it. Deep understanding is more primordial than the legalism and moral abhorrence in the coordinates of which the Holocaust is currently imprisoned.

  It is important that a free platform is given to those who go develop this link in many directions.   It is important to allow for a serious debate and disagreements. The tendency of not merely construing Zionism as a cause but merely as a symptom is very urgent. Silencing by treating Zionism just as another political conflict would normalise deep denial that casts its shadow over humanity, a shadow that will ultimately serve Israel’s domination and oppression.

   Growing up in Israel, so many times did I come across so charming people that when push comes to shove align themselves behind the racist statehood of the state. Many celebration of love and coexistence are conditional upon unconditional acceptance of the premise of a Jewish state. It is tribalism that prevents people to see that national self determination does not require a Jewish state.  Joel Kovel set us all, as humans, a challenge of justice and love. To find a path to tribal mentality is sure to be torturous. The book is written in such a spirit intending to start the ball rolling towards a peaceful revolution that will replace the Jewish state with a single state which will enshrine equality and liberty of all its citizens as its main goal. A state that will not cause our ethical reflection drop dead upon hearing the word ‘Holocaust’. We must start not only to utter but to shout with conviction, as humans, that Israel has no moral right to preserve the premise of its statehood that has been inflicting so much misery.   Kovel demonstrates just how urgent it is to generate new thinking about the idle and disastrous chatter ‘two states solution’ of and the ‘peace process’ which is based on it.

 

Oren Ben-Dor was born in Haifa and grew up in Nahariya, Israel. He lived there until the age of 25. He teaches legal and political philosophy at the School of Law University of Southampton. His books Constitutional Limits and the Public Sphere (2000) and Thinking About Law: In Silence with Heidegger (2007) are published by Hart Publishing, Oxford.

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