Dear friends,
I have recently puublished in Tikkun Magazine an article, "Zionism's Bad Conscience," which has aroused some interesting reaction. In the belief that open debate on the great issues of our time is essential, I offer below its URL. Any comments are welcome.
<http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0209/article/020911b.html>
Joel Kovel
==========
[an excerpt:
>None of this denies the racism that blocks the modern democratic
>state from keeping its promise. But there is a big difference
>between a state that fails to live up to its social contract because
>of a history saturated with racism, and one where the contract
>itself generates racism, as has been the case for a settler-colonial
>Israel which claims to be both a democracy and an ethnocracy
>organized by and for the Jewish people. Under such circumstances,
>racism is not an historical atavism, but an entirely normal, and
>constantly growing, feature of the political landscape. To have a
>state created expressly for one people constantly eats away and
>mocks the democratic-emancipatory aspects of Zionism. Zionism, in
>short, is built on an impossibility, and to live in it and be of it
>is to live a lie.]