Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism
Another Public Service Announcement
Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism
The Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism arises in response to the troubling practice in the United States of suppressing alternative views on Israel/Palestine and Zionism, which is growing more desperate and severe. A major instance of this is the recent effort to force the University of Michigan Press to suppress the distribution of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine by Professor Joel Kovel and pressuring it to cancel its contract to distribute Pluto Press in the U.S.
The suppression of discussion of Zionism occurs within the context of a broader assault on academic freedom and critical thought; it is a concentrated expression of that assault. We need only look at the tenure battles of Norman Finkelstein (DePaul) and Nadia Abu El-Haj (Barnard), the assault on books written by Mearsheimer and Walt and by former President Jimmy Carter, and the canceling of the play 'My Name is Rachel Corrie' by the New York Theater Workshop.
We believe that such campaigns of suppression are wrong from every angle. They fly in the face of the most cherished constitutional traditions of democracy; they deprive the American public and government of the necessary viewpoints and information to conduct a debate on what are urgent, and certainly the most contentious, issues of policy; and as a result they make impossible a rational and just policy in the Middle East; they therefore promote endless regional war and terrorism and a continuing brutal colonial policy against a displaced population. Suppression of open discussion of Zionism is bad for everyone: for Palestinians, for Jews, for the citizenry of the United States, and indeed for the whole world.
Our goal is to actively confront and expose instances of such suppression, and open a democratic debate that is long overdue.
posted by temporal at 10/25/2007
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