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Overcoming Impunity

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Overcoming Impunity Published by Americans for The Link Middle East Understanding, Inc. Volume 42, Issue 1 Link Archives: www.ameu.org January-March 2009 BY JOEL KOVEL une 8, 1967. Israeli warplanes and boats attack the USS Liberty as it sits in international waters off the coast of Gaza, killing 34 sea- J men, wounding another 137, and leaving the high-tech surveil- lance vessel in ruins. President Lyndon B. Johnson calls off a rescue mission and issues orders that nothing further is to be said about the incident. To this day it is the only peacetime attack on a U.S. naval ves- sel that Congress refuses to investigate. That’s impunity. March 16, 2003. A D-9 bulldozer, made by Caterpillar in the United States and bought by Israel with U.S. taxpayer money, crushes Ameri- can citizen Rachel Corrie as she tries to prevent its demolition of a Pal- estinian home in Rafah, Gaza. Rachel is wearing an orange flak-jacket, (Continued on page 2) Joel Kovel, a retired medical doctor, is Professor of Social Studies at Bard College in Annandale, N.Y. The Link Page 2 (Continued from page 1) AMEU Board and speaking into a bull-horn under a of Directors cloudless sky—yet the Israeli military Jane Adas (Vice President) claimed that its driver could not see her The title of this issue, “Overcoming and that she slipped on debris roiled up Elizabeth D. Barlow Impunity,” could easily have been called by the bulldozer. No protest is Edward Dillon “Overcoming Censorship.” launched from the U.S. State Depart- John Goelet Our author, Joel Kovel, is a psy- ment, nor is one generated from within Richard Hobson chiatrist, academic, human rights activ- Congress, which shortly afterwards Anne R. Joyce ist and environmentalist who, in 1998, passed yet another resolution pledging ran as the Green Party’s candidate for Hon. Robert V. Keeley near-unanimous and unconditional U.S. Senator from New York. He is also Kendall Landis (Treasurer) Jewish, and when he wrote a book in support for the state of Israel. To this Robert L. Norberg (President) which he supported a one-state solution day, no action has been taken against Hon. Edward L. Peck to the Israeli-Palestinian question, i.e., a Rachel’s murderers. de-zionized, secular, democratic state Donald L. Snook in historic Palestine, he—and his pub- Israel lives and breathes impunity. Rosmarie Sunderland lisher—were told by the University of • It clandestinely built a nuclear Michigan Press that his book James M. Wall arsenal with full knowledge of the U. S. “Overcoming Zionism” had crossed the and in flagrant violation of America’s line and that U.M.P. would no longer AMEU National distribute it in the United States. stipulated goal of checking nuclear pro- Council liferation. Israel has refused to ac- Hon. James E. Akins To make sure that didn’t happen, knowledge its arsenal or to join any in- AMEU now carries the banned book in Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr. ternational covenants for the regulation its catalog (see page 13 and 14). And William R. Chandler we invited Dr. Kovel to summarize his and restriction of nuclear weapons. But David S. Dodge arguments for our Link readers. This while the U.S. government, politicians Paul Findley does not necessarily mean that we sub- and mainstream media obsess over a scribe to the one-state proposal. We O. Kelly Ingram future nuclear threat from Iran, the pre- believe the ultimate deciders must be sent menace of Israel’s nuclear weapons Moorhead Kennedy the Israelis and Palestinians them- goes unmentioned. Ann Kerr selves. For that to happen, though, we Mary Norton do believe that an open discussion of all • The candidates for the 2008 presi- the alternatives, including the one-state Marie Petersen dential election vied with one another proposal, is essential. over who is the better friend of Israel. Don W. Wagner Miriam Ward, RSM John F. Kennedy once wrote: “We In May 2008, Barack Obama went to are not afraid to entrust the American Washington where he pandered to the Executive Director people with unpleasant facts, foreign American Israel Public Affairs Commit- ideas, alien philosophies, and competi- John F. Mahoney tee (AIPAC), promising the Jewish state tive values. For a nation that is afraid to even more impunity, including undi- let its people judge the truth and false- hood in an open market is a nation that vided sovereignty over Jerusalem. Ac- is afraid of its people.” companying him on that trip was Illi- AMEU (ISSN 0024-4007) grants nois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, a permission to reproduce material In our continuing series, The Link’s fervid Zionist, who had volunteered to from The Link in part or in whole. Links, we interview James Ennes, Jr., assist the Israel Defense Forces during who was the lieutenant on the bridge of AMEU must be credited and one the 1991 Gulf War, and whose father copy forwarded to our office at 475 the USS Liberty when it was attacked by Israel in 1967. See page 12. was a member of the Jewish terrorist Riverside Drive, Room 245, New group, the Irgun. Six months later, York, New York 10115-0245. Tel. John F. Mahoney, Rahm Emanuel became President-elect 212-870-2053; Fax 212-870-2050; Executive Director Obama’s first political appointment as E-mail: [email protected]; Website: www.ameu.org. chief of staff. The Link Page 3 • Meanwhile, Israel has been shielded from cen- the universality of humankind. sure by more than 40 U.S. vetoes of U.N. resolutions Although I spent a great portion of my adult life and it continues to flout resolutions that variously in movements against racism, war, U.S. imperialism, demand the right of return of Palestinian refugees, the corruptions of media and mass culture, and— the cessation of its occupation of Palestine after the with special emphasis in recent years—the ecological 1967 war, or the taking down of the so-called ravaging of the earth, I remained relatively quiet “Separation Wall,” a monstrosity whose ostensible about Israel itself until the year 2000. This was not purpose is checking Palestinian terror, and whose for lack of aversion to Israeli policies, nor did I fear actual effect is to steal yet more Palestinian land, the accusation of anti-semitism, the identification of separate Palestinians from each other and their mea- which with criticism of Israel I had always regarded ger croplands, and keep them out of view of Is- as tedious, albeit pernicious, nonsense. My reticence raelis—in short, the Wall seals off the West Bank into stemmed, rather, from certain family conflicts. When a giant prison. Meanwhile Gaza has become the ex- the individuals concerned in these—chiefly my ample par excellence of collective punishment, one mother—passed away, my political development in of the gravest violations of human rights. Israel this sphere resumed and, as if to make up for lost knows it can thumb its nose at international law— time, gathered speed. and the principle of law—because it can count on the The brutality of Israel’s response to the Second backing of the U.S. superpower, even when that su- Intifada, which began in late September 2000, perpower itself is attacked by Israel, as happened in pushed the process into the open. I resolved to be 1967. one who would speak out and not hold back, and Impunity is license to do as one pleases, knowing began publishing articles critical of Israel. In 2003, that there will be neither restraint before nor punish- infuriated by the murder of Rachel Corrie and en- ment after the act. It is a conduit to nihilism, that is, a couraged by the support of people like Edward Said, moral degeneration in which everything is permitted I expanded the project into a book-length study. This and nothing is true. It is the absolute corruption that became “Overcoming Zionism,” published in 2007, comes with absolute, unchecked power. This is most about which more will be said later. pronounced in the occupation of Palestine, where In the course of my studies, the problem posed impunity is so marked, the balance of forces so one- by Israel seemed less the particular offenses of the sided, and the conflict so prolonged. The Israeli occu- Occupation or of Israeli foreign policy than of Zion- pation of Palestine is a culture medium for atrocity, ism itself, the defining logic of the Jewish state and which occurs at the far side of silence. When those its central dynamic. Having been a physician I was who should speak hold back, the perpetrator loses accustomed to think in terms of an underlying dis- his way and falls into a moral abyss. The silence ease pattern as the generator of manifest symptoma- which permits this in the case of Israel is largely tology. Accordingly, Zionism is the world-historical made, like D-9 bulldozers, in the United States, Is- disease of Jewry in the present epoch. It is the struc- rael’s giant patron and protective shield. tural disorder that drives ethnocentric chauvinism, As a citizen of the United States and a Jew de- ethnic cleansing of indigenous people, structural ra- scended from Russian-Ukrainian immigrants, I per- cism—and also the peculiar moral logic that shapes ceived this wanton criminality as a betrayal of the the Zionist power structure in the United States and moral identity of the Jewish people, whose wander- configures its impunity. There is a “bad conscience” ings across the globe were a veritable chronicle of the to Zionism, which results as the ancient identity of impunity of the powerful.
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