Overcoming Zionism a new book coming our by joel kovel

Joel Kovel, author of Overcoming Zionism, said, "What we don't have is any kind of real debate on this subject in our country at this time ... basically these Zionist repression groups have had pretty much a free hand ... that's why I wrote the book. I mean, I wanted to -- I disregarded all the taboos, that you're not supposed to talk about Israel in any depth in this country."

[The distributor dropped his book after receiving threatening emails from a Zionist pressure group.] "They panicked this summer when they dropped my book. I mean, they were pressured by this Zionist watchdog team." [But the Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism
was able to convince them to continue distributing it.] "We have a committee forming, Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism, codz.org. And we're planning a conference and all. But the committee leapt into action, and we were amazed at just how eloquent and, you know, basically fed up a lot of people were with being intimidated by these kinds of tactics. They just want to suppress an open discussion of this subject. ... I grew up in a very conventional Jewish home, except for the fact that there was a lot of division on this subject, so I think from an early age I learned to take a certain distance from it and to think critically about it."

"The Jewish people have been, you know, very largely deprived of a real opportunity to look at what's going on in the state of Israel."

"The notion of Zionism, as that there is this kind of destiny of the Jewish people to have their own state, is just the wrong idea. And it's an idea that requires signing onto imperialism. It means signing onto ethnic cleansing. It means -- despite everything that has been said about it, it means basically becoming a racist situation, where you're oppressing an indigenous population and depriving them of their right to existence ... I join hands with those people who feel that the time has come to basically think of Israel in the same category as South Africa, as a state that just has gone wrong and needs replacement ... the comparison was interesting, because Tutu and other leaders of the freedom struggle in South Africa who visited Palestine have always been asked, well, how does it compare? And he says, well, it's not the same thing, Israel is actually worse. He actually said, Israel is a worse place than Apartheid South Africa was."

http://tinyurl.com/36dqpw
"This is much worse than apartheid." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu
see link

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10...

University of Michigan Press to Continue Publishing Joel Kovel's "Overcoming Zionism" After Initially Dropping Book Due to Rightwing Criticism
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/10/2...