Michael Stanislawski > Quotes

“One profoundly understated poem by an American Yiddish poet raised as a Zionist in Eastern Europe, Kadya Molodowsky, began: O God of Mercy Choose— another people. We are tired of death, tired of corpses, We have no more prayers. Choose— another people. We have run out of blood.”
― Michael Stanislawski, Zionism: A Very Short Introduction

“Many Ultra-Orthodox women did work outside the home, but given the neglect of secular studies in schools for girls and young women, they lacked many skills necessary for even low-level jobs in the modernizing Israeli economy. As a result, a significant number of Ultra-Orthodox families lived on welfare payments from the government. At the same time, Ultra-Orthodox men did not serve in the military (unlike the Orthodox Zionists.) When Ben-Gurion agreed, before the formation of the state, that men studying in the Ultra-Orthodox yeshivot would be exempt from the draft, there were only several hundred such students; by the turn of the twenty-first century the number had grown to sixty thousand, and these exemptions were strenuously defended at all costs by the Ultra-Orthodox political parties, who most often played a crucial role in the formation of coalition governments.”
― Michael Stanislawski, Zionism: A Very Short Introduction

“In the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and hence over the very meaning and legitimacy of Zionism, thrust itself into the very center of global politics. There is no simple explanation for this development. In the Zionist world the right wing is certain that this is merely a recurrence of anti-Semitism, now masked as anti-Zionism, unfairly scapegoating the Jews, yet again, for the world’s sins, and there is indeed substantial evidence that all too often anti-Zionism is indeed used as a mask for anti-Semitism. But most anti-Zionists are not anti-Semites, and the two ideologies cannot be lumped into one. The left insists that it is the Occupation that is at fault for the spread of anti-Israel sentiments and policies: reach a peace treaty with the Palestinians and the opposition to Israel will dissolve.”
― Michael Stanislawski, Zionism: A Very Short Introduction

“all-too-frequent claim that modern Jewish nationalism was born in response to anti-Semitism or to the outbreak of violent attacks (“pogroms”) against the Jews which began in the Russian Empire in 1881–82 is quite simply wrong: the first expressions of this new ideology were published well before the spread of the new anti-Semitic ideology and before the pogroms of the early 1880s.”
― Michael Stanislawski, Zionism: A Very Short Introduction

“Indeed, it is an absolutely crucial fact that in the history of Zionism from Herzl to Netanyahu, not one single leader of the movement or prime minister of the state has been a believing and observant Jew: not Herzl, Nordau, Weizmann, Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion, Sharett, Eshkol, Peres, Shamir, Rabin, Sharon, Barak, Olmert, or Netanyahu; even Begin, who displayed a more respectful stance on religion and observance, was by no means a practicing Jew.”
― Michael Stanislawski, Zionism: A Very Short Introduction