Leading American ecosocialist Professor Joel Kovel has been sacked from his post at Bard College, NY, for his anti Zionist views. Joel, an advisory editor of Socialist Resistance and author of many books, including Red Hunting in the Promised Land, a study of anticommunist repression in America, has himself been witch-hunted.
Joel has taught at Bard College for 21 years, but in February 2009 he was notified that his contract would not be renewed.
Joel became widely known among ecosocialists in Britain for his ground breaking book The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or The End of the World, published in 2002. However, it was the publication in 2007 of his latest work, Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel-Palestine, which sparked the attacks which have led to his dismissal. As a result of an attack campaign by McCarthyesque Zionist groups such as Stand With Us, the University of Michigan Press stopped distribution of Joel’s book. Public outcry forced UMP to restore Overcoming Zionism to its list, but they then ended their long-standing distribution contract with Pluto Press, Joel’s publisher.
Joel’s dismissal is the culmination of a series of attacks on him by the college authorities dating from October 2002, less than a month after the publication of Zionism’s Bad Conscience, his first article critical of Israel and Zionism.
Joel says that “this termination of service is … motivated neither by intellectual nor pedagogic considerations, but by political values, principally stemming from differences between myself and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism. There is of course much more to my years at Bard than this, including another controversial subject, my work on ecosocialism (The Enemy of Nature). However, the evidence shows a pattern of conflict over Zionism only too reminiscent of innumerable instances in this country in which critics of Israel have been made to pay, often with their careers, for speaking out.”
“A fundamental principle of mine is that the educator must criticize the injustices of the world, whether or not this involves him or her in conflict with the powers that be. The systematic failure of the academy to do so plays no small role in the perpetuation of injustice and state violence. Therefore, if the world stands outraged at Israeli aggression in Gaza, it should also be outraged at institutions in the United States that grant Israel impunity. In my view, Bard College is one such institution. It has suppressed critical engagement with Israel and Zionism, and therefore has enabled abuses such as have occurred and are occurring in Gaza. This notion is of course, not just descriptive of a place like Bard. It is also the context within which the critic of such a place and the Zionist ideology it enables becomes marginalized, and then removed.”
For further details, go to the website of The Committee for the Open Discussion of Zionism: www.codz.org
Send letters opposing Joel’s dismissal to:
President Leon Botstein president@bard.edu
Executive Vice-President Dimitri Papadimitriou dpapadimitrou@bard.edu
Sean Thompson