Derek J. Penslar > Quotes

“The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg wrote in the early 1920s that Jews had initiated the world war to obtain their state in Palestine. Yet because they were incapable of any of the creative or administrative labor required for statecraft, Rosenberg claimed that what the Jews called a state would really be a power base for their global, nefarious economic operations. In turn, Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that a Jewish state, “endowed with sovereign rights and removed from intervention of other states,” would become “a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.”
― Derek J. Penslar, Zionism: An Emotional State

“Far more than Polish nationalism, however, Zionism has been and continues to be a global project with multiple goals. These goals are as disparate as enduring peace and security for the state of Israel, the advent of the messiah, strengthening Jewish ethnic consciousness and warding off assimilation in the diaspora, and the transformation of Jews into authentic, harmonious, and productive beings imbued with military prowess and civic virtue. Not only do these goals remain unattained despite the achievement of Jewish statehood, there is also no foreseeable point at which they could be attained. Zionism remains, therefore, a permanent revolution and as salient in the twenty-first century as it was at the end of the nineteenth. Greater than the sum of Israeli or diaspora Jewish institutional structures, Zionism is part of the emotional substrate of Jews throughout the world.”
― Derek J. Penslar, Zionism: An Emotional State