Zionism Quotes

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I am frequently asked if I have visited Israel, whereas yet, it is simply assumed that I have. Well, I don’t travel. I really don’t, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t visit Israel. I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right. I can’t help but feel that the Jews didn’t really have the right to appropriate a territory only because 2000 years ago, people they consider their ancestors, were living there. History moves on and you can’t really turn it back. (#92 ff.)”
― Isaac Asimov, Asimov Laughs Again: More Than 700 Jokes, Limericks and Anecdotes

“Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.”
― Noam Chomsky

“If every single Jew born anywhere in the world has the right to become an Israeli citizen, then all the Palestinians who were chucked out of Palestine by the Zionist Government should have the same right, very simple.”
― Tariq Ali

“I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the day when 'it happens again' and the Jew-baiters take over. (And I don't pretend not to know what they are talking about: I have actually seen the rabid phenomenon at work in modern and sunny Argentina and am unable to forget it.) So then, they seem to think, they will take refuge in the Law of Return, and in Haifa, or for all I know in Hebron. Never mind for now that if all of world Jewry did settle in Palestine, this would actually necessitate further Israeli expansion, expulsion, and colonization, and that their departure under these apocalyptic conditions would leave the new brownshirts and blackshirts in possession of the French and British and American nuclear arsenals. This is ghetto thinking, hardly even fractionally updated to take into account what has changed. The important but delayed realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are a part of the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it. Why else does Israel daily beseech the often-flourishing Jews of other lands, urging them to help the most endangered Jews of all: the ones who rule Palestine by force of arms? Why else, having supposedly escaped from the need to rely on Gentile goodwill, has Israel come to depend more and more upon it? On this reckoning, Zionism must constitute one of the greatest potential non sequiturs in human history.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attacks on the twin towers and the pentagon and the American struggle in Iraq. These events swung American public opinion in our favor”
― Benjamin Netanyahu

“One of my first reservations about Zionism was and is that, semiconsciously at least, it grants the anti-Semite's first premise about the abnormality of the Jew.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“We will consider every hand who will try to take our weapons, as an Israeli hand.”
― Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah

“If you want to judge if a party is a Lebanese enough, let me say we take up arms and fight against the occupation of our land, is that Lebanese enough?”
― Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah

“Because for me, while Israel is a place, it has also always been a warning. A warning about the perils of building identity based on a re-traumatization rather than confronting our collective grief; about the dangers of building a group identity around insiders and outsiders; about what happens when once vibrant debate gives way to fiercely policed speech.”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

“The reactions of some on the left to the October 7, 2023, attack revealed with disturbing clarity the extent to which antisemitic thinking had found a home in my own political camp, even among erstwhile allies. Cheers for Hamas gunmen, glee at the killing of Israeli civilians, grotesque conspiracies of Jewish global control—all have appeared at pro-Palestine demonstrations. And to ignore this reality, as some prefer, is to do a disservice to the movement that is rightfully outraged over Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. Acknowledging the reality of antisemitism on the left is, in fact, wholly compatible with opposing Israeli war crimes.

Antisemitism on the left takes a different form than on the right, but it is no less real. Right-wing antisemitism imagines Jews as a threat to the authentic members of the organic nation; it figures Jews as a foreign, malign influence, usurping and corrupting the Volk. Contemporary left-wing antisemitism, by contrast, envisions Jews as the quintessential oppressors— the puppet masters and chief beneficiaries of capitalism, imperialism, and even white supremacy.”
― Joshua Leifer, Like Tablets Shattered

“In the American Jewish collective consciousness, the Holocaust has functioned as the historical glue of the postwar synthesis. The Holocaust illuminated America’s exceptional goodness by contrast to European barbarism and by virtue of America’s defeat of the Nazis. It confirmed the absolute necessity of Israel as existential insurance policy. It reinforced the necessity of the open, liberal society for Jewish flourishing. Holocaust memory concretized a shared sense of victimhood, a sensitivity to the historically precarious nature of Jewish survival, and a filial duty that, for many American Jews, is often the primary reason they give for their continued Jewish identification. But this is a role the Holocaust can fulfill for only so long. While creative opportunists continue feverishly to mine the event for content, this is just another indication that the Holocaust is leaving the realm of present memory, transforming, like the Spanish Inquisition, into a matter of the distant Jewish past.”
― Joshua Leifer, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life

“تغيَّرت الصورة قليلاً في الفترة من 1932 – 1944 إذ هاجر 265 ألف يهودي، وهو أعلى رقم بلغته أفواج المهاجرين أثناء الانتداب. وهذا لا يعود إلى العروق
الأزلية إياها، وإنما إلى وصول هتلر إلى السلطة، ولذا قال أحدهم إنه إذا كان هرتزل هو ماركس الحركة الصهيونية، أي منظّرها، فإن هتلر هو لينين الصهيونية، أي من وضعها موضع التنفيذ.”
― عبد الوهاب المسيري, انهيار إسرائيل من الداخل

“إذا كان هرتزل هو ماركس الحركة الصهيونية، أي منظّرها، فإن هتلر هو لينين الصهيونية، أي من وضعها موضع التنفيذ.”
― عبد الوهاب المسيري, انهيار إسرائيل من الداخل

“Leave it to the monkeys,
and every secular democracy
soon turns into a fanatic republic -

Christian Republic of America,
Islamic Republic of Turkey,
Jewish Republic of Palestine,
Sanatan Republic of India,

all run by prejudice legalized as piety,
and no humanity to speak of -
jungle grows tall in every corner,
survival of the chosen as ape gospel.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“So long as there is occupation, there is no Hanukkah.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“No Rome, no Reich, no Zion, above the human.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“Women are indigenous to their bodies,
Palestinians are native to their home.
Privilege cannot buy righteousness,
nor can blind faith redraw chromosome.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“The soil is older than every border,
older than flags and state decree.
Earth is property of no brute empire,
nor promised prize of manifest atrocity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“The Christian Church is the original religious persecutor of planet earth, British monarchy is the original terrorist organization of planet earth, Druncle Sam is the planet's longest running pandemic, Israeli state is the planet's youngest delinquent.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“In 1902, Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the arch-imperialist of southern Africa, and urged him to support Zionism "because it is something colonial." In "The Iron Wall," Jabotinsky called the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine "natives," whom he compared to the Sioux Indians. He called his fellow Zionists "colonists," who resembled the Pilgrim Fathers and Joshua Ben Nun.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“By the time the Arab armies attacked, Zionist forces had already largely depopulated Jaffa and Haifa, Palestine's two largest cities. The war's most notorious massacre of Palestinians, in which Zionist militias killed more than a hundred men, women, and children in the village of Deir Yassin, occurred in April. When Jewish leaders claim the Arab invasions drove Palestinians to leave, they've got the causality reversed. "It was not the entry of the Arab armies that caused the exodus. It was the exodus that caused the entry of the Arab armies," concluded the historian Walid Khalidi after consulting extensive Arab government documents and press reports.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“That fall, Israeli troops entered the largely Catholic and Greek Orthodox Palestinian village of Eilaboun in the Galilee. According to the filmmaker Hisham Zreiq, who used oral histories, Israeli documents, and a UN observer report to reconstruct events, the troops were met by priests holding a white flag. Soldiers from the Golani Brigade responded by assembling villagers in the town square. They forced the bulk of Eilaboun's residents to evacuate the village and head north, thus serving as human shields for Israeli forces who trailed behind them, in case the road was mined. After forcing the villagers to walk all day with little food or water, the soldiers robbed them of their valuables and loaded them on trucks that deposited them across the Lebanese border. According to an eyewitness, the roughly dozen men held back in the town square were executed in groups of three. The people of Eilaboun were comparatively lucky: some were allowed to return. During Israel's war of independence, Zionist forces depopulated roughly four hundred Palestinian villages. Many were looted. Most were totally destroyed.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“Attend a forum on Israel at most American synagogues or listen to an Israeli official being interviewed on TV, and you're unlikely to hear about Israeli land law or the separate legal systems that govern Jewish citizens and Palestinian noncitizens in the West Bank, or the rules that determine when Palestinians can leave the Gaza Strip. That's no accident. It's because any genuine inquiry into Palestinian life under Israeli control would expose the duplicity of claiming that Israel offers Jews mere "self-determination.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“And under international law, there is a word for legal dominance based on ethnicity, religion, or race—a word that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even Israel's own leading human rights group, B'Tselem, say applies to Israel. It is not "self-determination." It is "apartheid." Apartheid is violent. Because Palestinians in Gaza live under the control of a state that is not accountable to them - whose citizenship they cannot attain and whose leaders they cannot choose - most have spent the bulk of their lives under blockade, unable to leave a territory less than half the size of New York City that Human Rights Watch calls an "open-air prison." Because Palestinians in the West Bank live under the control of a state that is not accountable to them, Israeli authorities routinely jail their children. Between 2000 and 2023, Israel detained more than 13,000 Palestinian children, according to estimates by Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP). Of the 766 West Bank children that DCIP interviewed, it found that 97 percent had been interrogated without a family member present, 75 percent had suffered physical violence, and 23 percent had been held for at least two days in solitary confinement.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“But earlier generations of Zionists, who were less invested in Jewish innocence, made such comparisons themselves. "Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized," wrote Jabotinsky in 1923. "That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing.”
― Peter Beinart

“But here's the problem with our community's tendency to blame Palestinians for their own oppression. Even when Palestinians do the very things Jews ask of them—when they recognize Israel, help the Israeli military keep Israelis safe, and protest nonviolently-Jewish institutions still act the same way. Israel didn't stop bulldozing Palestinian homes when the PLO recognized its existence. AIPAC didn't demand a settlement freeze when Fayyad became prime minister. The ADL didn't start condemning the imprisonment of Palestinian children when Palestinians employed nonviolence. We demand that Palestinians produce Gandhis, and when they do, American Jewish organizations work to criminalize their boycotts and Israeli soldiers shoot them in the knees. No matter what strategy Palestinians employ in their fight for freedom, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies work to ensure that it fails.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“One thousand prosecutors at The Hague cannot stand even for a second against this pure truth pronounced by llana Buskila," Netanyahu insisted, "against the justness of our moral path." Such statements can best be understood as a kind of theology.
Israel is righteous by definition. Its war in Gaza remains moral even when its crimes are documented for all to see. More than sixty years ago, Hannah Arendt warned that Jewish nationalism contained this danger. "The greatness of this People was once that it believed in God," she wrote in 1963. "And now this people believes only in itself?" That's the real meaning of Netanyahu's words. When he proudly declares that a Jewish state cannot be judged by any external standard, he is making that state - and the Jewish people for whom it speaks - an object of worship. And, as in the Bible, idolatry usually accompanies other sins. You "raise your eyes toward your fetishes, and you shed blood," the prophet Ezekiel rebuked the Israelites in the sixth century BCE. "You have committed abominations." He could have been speaking about this war.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

“But it’s crucial to distinguish condemnations of Israel and Zionism that deploy antisemitic concepts from the condemnation of Israel and Zionism itself, which is no more bigoted than opposing any other state or political ideology. Israeli and American Jewish leaders constantly conflate the two. They deploy charges of antisemitism to try to silence criticism of a war whose morality they can't defend. They claim it's bigoted to propose replacing Jewish supremacy with equality under the law. And in their zeal to defend Israel, they often ally with far-right politicians whose white Christian nationalism threatens Jews.”
― Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning