27.
ISRAEL AND ZIONISM

 

"Israel's claim to the Holy Land rests on the existence of God. If

it was not God's will that they possessed Canaan, the nations

can reproach them as mere conquering brigands."

Herman Wouk, Jewish novelist, p. 186

                  

"Is Zionism racism? I would say yes. It's a policy that to me

looks like it has very many parallels with racism. The effect is

the same. Whether you call it that or not is in a sense

irrelevant."   
        Desmund Tutu, South African Archbishop and activist
against apartheid, [in HOFFMAN, p. 15]


"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives to try
to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy
cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance."
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1963, p. 102

 

"Zionism ... must after Auschwitz be a Christian commitment as well
[as a Jewish one] ... The post-Holocaust Christian must repent of the
Christian sin of suppressionism ... Without Zionism, Christian as well
as Jewish, the Holy Spirit cannot dwell between Jews and Christians in dialogue ... Christians after the Holocaust, we have seen, must be
Zionists on behalf not only of Jews but also of Christianity itself."

Emil Fackenheim, Jewish author, p. 285, 305

 

"If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts
the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways."

Arthur Koestler, [in GILMAN, p. 33]

 

"Is there anything more common than the transformation of

persecuted into persecutor ... ?

Maxime Rodinson, p. 9

 

"In the twentieth century, men -- all of us -- find themselves

compelled to commit or condone evil for the sake of preventing

an evil believed to be greater. And the tragedy is that we do not

know whether the evil we condone will not in the end be greater

than the evil we seek to avert-- or be identified with."

Emil Fackenheim,  [in BELL, p. 317]

 

"If Israelis know about oppression, it is mostly from the

oppressor’s end of the gun sight."

Benjamin Beit Hallahmi,  Israeli

professor at Haifa University

 

              "One of the major problems with Israeli democracy is that it has

              no constitutional guarantees of human rights. To my knowledge

              it's the only functioning democracy without such provision."

                                                 Asa Kasher, Israeli philosopher,

                                                 [in BRANDT, J., 2000, p. 10]

     "Israel is working on a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews,
      according to Israeli military and western intelligence sources ... In developing their       "ethno-bomb," Israeli scientists are trying to exploit medical advances by identifying       genes carried by some Arabs, then create a genetically modified bacterium or virus.       The intention is to use the ability of viruses and certain bacteria to alter the DNA
       inside their host's living cells. The scientists are trying to engineer deadly
       micro-organisms that attack only those bearing the distinctive genes. The
       programme is based at the biological institute in Nes Tziyona, the main research
       facility for Israel's clandestine arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.
       A scientist there said the task was hugely complicated because both Arabs and
       Jews are of semitic origin. But he added: "They have, however, succeeded in        pinpointing a particular characteristic in the genetic profile of certain Arab
       communities, particularly the Iraqi people." The disease could be spread
        by spraying the organisms into the air or putting them in water supplies.
       The research mirrors biological studies conducted by South African scientists
       during the apartheid era and revealed in testimony before the truth commission.
       The idea of a Jewish state conducting such research has provoked outrage in
       some quarters because of parallels with the genetic experiments of Dr Josef
       Mengele, the Nazi scientist at Auschwitz."
        -- Uzi Mahnaimi and Marie Colvin, The Sunday Times [London, 11-15-98]

 

"A good many Israelis see that if conflict with the Arabs

 continues, they are in danger of becoming like the Germans

from 1933 to 1945 -- accomplices if not perpetrators of

permanent oppression."  
Norman Birnbaum, Why, p. M5

"The 'Israeli criterion' as the key indicator in assessing anti-
Semitism has increasingly been widened. The label of anti-Semite
is no longer limited to those who reject the legitimacy of the

Jewish state. Criticism of Israeli governmental policies and

actions has also entered into the calculus ... As the 'Israeli

criterion' for evaluating anti-Semitism has become broader,

it  has more and more impaled individuals and groups on the
liberal-to-left of the political spectrum on the charge of
anti-Semitism."
Arthur Liebman, 1986, p. 352

"Nor is there solid evidence that marginality increases humaneness.
Freud felt that, on the contrary, Jewish history had produced some
negative psychological results. In his essay, 'Some Character Types

Met with in Psychoanalytic Work,' he discusses the 'exception':
the person who justifies his rebelliousness and claims special

favor to himself by some injury he has suffered and of which he
considers himself blameless. Such people, Freud notes, often feel
quite justified in injuring others. He refers to Shakespeare's Richard
III as a prime example of the type. In the midst of this discussion
Freud notes:'For reasons which will easily be understood I cannot
communicate very much about these and other case histories.
Nor do I propose to go into the obvious analogy between

deformities of character resulting from protracted sickness
in childhood, and the behavior of whole nations, whose

past has been full of suffering.'As [Jewish psychoanalyst]
Theodore Reik points out, thereference is obviously to Jews."
-- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, 1982, p. 113


"The Holocaust came to be regularly invoked -- indeed,
brandished as a weapon -- in American Jewry's struggles
on behalf of an embattled Israel."

-- Peter Novick, 1999, p. 145

 

"A guy gets interviewed by a top Israeli general to be an Israeli
spy. As a test, the general asks, 'If you had a chance to kill an
Arab or a cat,which one would you kill first?' ''Why the cat?'
'You're hired!' the general says."
Joke told by an ulta-Orthodox Jew to Stephen Bloom,
2001, p. 224

 

"The elements of the Jewish heritage that are hostile to non-Jews

have long been known to the world, and anti-Semitic writings

quote them at length. Until recently few would have seriously
asserted that these passages reflect the opinions of Jews in our

own generation. But, when religious extremists inject a

contemporary relevance into these passages ... they acquire a

new and dangerous significance. They provide ammunition for

anti-Semites, who can assert that the true Jewish character is

revealed not when Jews are subjugated in Christian or Muslim

societies, but precisely when they are free. It is in their natural

environment, not in subjugation, that they dare disclose their

true face, and the nations of the world must redefine their

attitudes in view of the strong Jews rather than the impotent Jews."                         

Yehoshafat Harkabi, former head of

Israeli military intelligence, p. 179-180

 

"Only in fantasies about an all-embracing Jewish conspiracy

did a Jewish banker and a Jewish anarchist report to the same

                     boss."                           
Stanislaw Krajewski, Jewish-Polish

author, The Jewish, p. 64

 

"It may be the case that [post-Holocaust] the authentic Jewish

agnostic and the authentic Jewish believer are closer than at

any previous time."
-- Emil Fackenheim, Jewish theologian, in

                                                 Sack, J., p. 135                                    

         

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