JEWISH CRITICISM OF ZIONISM
Israel Shahak, Head of the Israeli League for Civil and Human Rights писал(а): I would say the only human response to Holocaust is to try not to be like Nazis, in word or in deed. What brought the Holocaust was the racist attitude towards Jews, the division of German society into Jews and non-Jews on grounds of race. This is exactly the same thing that is happening in Israel.
Nathan Chofshi, old Jewish settler, who witnessed the birth of the Jewish state писал(а): We came and turned the Arabs into tragic refugees. And still we dare slander and malign them, to besmirch their name; instead of being deeply ashamed of what we did, and trying to undo some of the evil we committed, we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them.
Professor Jacobo Timerman, the world-renowned author and human-rights activist писал(а): Israel's great hypocrisy consists in disguising her policy of occupation with security arguments similar to those utilized by the Argentine generals to justify their bloody dictatorship. The real objective of Israel's policy is to expel all Palestinians and seize their lands. . . . There is a second hypocrisy shocking in its obscenity: the utilization of the Holocaust to justify alleged Israeli fears of a new extermination. It is used as an excuse for the policy of wiping out the Palestinian identity which has been implemented in Israel for the past 20 years, as if an unproven future danger were sufficient reason to commit crimes against a defenseless nation today.
I. F. Stone, the award-winning American Jewish journalist писал(а): Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist. Jews might fight elsewhere for their very security and existence -- against principles and practices they find themselves defending in Israel.
Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the renowned scholar of Judaism and philosophy and the editor of several volumes of the Encyclopedia Hebraica писал(а): The big crisis of the Jewish people is that the overwhelming majority of the Jews genuinely desire to be Jewish -- but they have no content for their Judaism other than a piece of colored rag attached to the end of a pole and a military uniform. The consciousness and the desire to be Jewish did not vanish, rather they are transformed today into a Judeo-Nazi mentality.
Other leading Israeli critics of Zionism and of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians include Professor Danny Amit ("There is a basis for an Israeli-Palestinian strategy of joint struggle," MERIP Reports, May 1983), Uri Avnery (Israel without Zionists, 1968), Yoram Binur (My Enemy, My Self, 1989), Uri Davis ("Journey Out of Zionism," in Journal of Palestine Studies, summer 1970), Boaz Evron ("Holocaust: The Uses of Disaster," in Radical America, fall 1983), the late Simha Flapan (The Birth of Israel, 1987), Isaac Hasson ("Can Israel Be a Democratic State?" in The International Humanist, December 1987), Amnon Kapeliouk (Sabra and Shatilla, 1984), Peretz Kidron ("Truth Whereby Nations Live," in Blaming the Victims, edited by Hitchens and Said), Felicia Langer (With My Own Eyes, 1975), the late Livia Rokach (editor of Israel's Sacred Terrorism, 1980), Ur Shlansky ("Eyewitness in Gaza," in Radical America, fall, 1983), Professor Jacob Talmon ("Self-Determination for Palestinian Arabs: An Open Letter," in Jewish Liberation Journal, November-December 1969), Georges Tamarin (The Israeli Dilemma: Essays on a Warfare State, 1973), and Lea Tsemel ("The Political Prisoners," Arab Studies Quarterly, spring/summer 1985). This list is by no means complete.
In other countries Jews are also expressing concern about Israel's policies towards the Palestinians and about the direction that Zionism is heading. In Canada there are several Jewish organizations that are sharply critical of Israel's policies. One of the most active is Jews for a Just Peace.
