Special Repeat: Joel Kovel on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Special re-airing of excerpts of Joel Kovel interview on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Audio here!

Due to the recent events in Israel, we have postponed our interview with Stephanie Koontz until March, and instead bring to you excerpts of an interview we conducted last year with Joel Kovel regarding his controversial book, Overcoming Zionism.  The producers and hosts of Equal Time for Freethought hope for a quick end to the colonialist assaults on Palestine and the Palestinian people in Gaza, and urge the incoming President (Obama) to break with the U.S. government’s current position on Israel so as to at least prevent further genocidal acts by the apartheid state.  Personally, as a person of Jewish descent, I can not more strongly urge all American Jews (religious or secular) to call upon Israel to live up to the cosmopolitan history of the Jewish tradition and demand the occupation and Zionism are both replaced with humanistic change.  Shalom & Salaam.

Show 163: Michael Neumann – The Case Against Israel

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Humanism is a sociopolitical philosophy concerned with promoting, among other things, a behavior of peoples via ethical and moral interactions.  These ethics and morals include compassion, truth, honesty, interconnectedness, and fairness, and a resort to reason and the understanding of cause and effect in society.  Humanists, therefore, tend to look at the philosophical and scientific underpinnings of human behavior – studying both the biological and anthropological nature of our species – toward the attempt of creating a truly egalitarian, planetary culture – a culture, while not diminishing local cultures, strives for a universal humanity where violence, war, racism, and other social injustices become obsolete.

So what is a humanist take on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict?  Is there a way to look at this conflict not from an Arab or Jewish point of view, or even a political or historical point of view?  And if so, what would we learn from such an exploration?

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