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"Zionism is a complex phenomenon, adequately understood by only a small percentage of its critics and by even a smaller percentage of its supporters." - Michael Selzer

SIGMUND FREUD - Photo Credit: Max Halberstadt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

"It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically-burdened land. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives." - Sigmund Freud

                                       
ERICH FROMM - Photo Credit: By Müller-May / Rainer Funk, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org /w/index.php?curid=43921778

"The claim of the Jews to the Land of Israel cannot be a realistic political claim. If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse." - Erich Fromm

"I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from the practical considerations, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain — especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight without a Jewish state." - Albert Einstein

"Palestinians must no longer be subjected to the daily, often humiliating reminders that they lack basic freedom and control over their lives." - Paul Wellstone

ISAAC ASIMOV - Photo Credit: United States Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection. Call number: NYWTS - BIOG--Asimov, Isaac, Dr. [P&P]. Reproduction number: LC-USZ62-115121

"As usual, I found myself in the odd position of not being a Zionist........I just think it is more important to be human and to have a human heritage; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind." - Isaac Asimov

 
"When Zionism first appeared on the world scene most Jews opposed it and scoffed at it. Herzl was only supported by a small minority."-Nahum Goldmann

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN - Photo Credit: By Alexei Kouprianov -Own work,CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4118422
 

"What the Israeli governments do not realize is that neither Hamas nor Hizbullah need Israel. It is Israel that needs them, and needs them desperately. If Israel wants not to become a Crusader state that is in the end extinguished, it is only Hamas and Hizbullah that can guarantee the survival of Israel. It is only when Israel is able to come to terms with them, as the deeply-rooted spokespersons of Palestinian and Arab nationalism, that Israel can live in peace....... Both Palestinian and world public opinion is moving towards the one-state solution. And this is of course the end of the Zionist project. The three-element strategy of Israel is decomposing. The iron fist no longer succeeds, much as it didn't for George Bush in Iraq.......And will world public opinion continue to look sympathetically on Israel? It seems not. Can Israel now switch to an alternative strategy, of negotiating with the militant representatives of the Arab Palestinians, as an integral constituent of the Middle East, and not as an outpost of Europe? It seems quite late for that, quite possibly too late." - Immanuel Wallerstein

"They used to say Palestinians fight like heroes, now they say heroes fight like Palestinians....People have to liberate themselves because liberation is not a single act. It's a question of eternal vigilance.....Why should these Palestinians, who have lived in Jerusalem for hundreds of years, be evicted from their homes so that Jews from Brooklyn can live in them?" - Norman Finkelstein

"I think that my life's work in a sense has been associated with helping or identifying with those who are victims of injustice. If we look at the world today, there are many victims of injustice. But I think the Palestinians stand out as the most victimized people in the world. And symbolically, their struggle is one that engages people of conscience everywhere in the world in a manner that resembles the way the anti-apartheid movement worked effectively to undermine South Africa's claims of sovereignty and legitimacy. And I hope that this small role that I play contributes to that kind of process on behalf of the Palestinian" - Richard Falk

"Back in the 1980s the major American Jewish welfare organization adopted as its fundraising slogan "We are One." The implication was that American Jews were a united bloc. But we are not "one" and never have been. Ideologically, we are everything from anarchists to Zionists, working people to the gilded rich. Noam Chomsky is as Jewish as Irving Kristol, and Norman Finkelstein as Jewish as Alan Dershowitz. We are neither angels nor saints. And we are certainly not monolithic, despite perennial efforts to paint anyone critical of various aspects of Israeli policies as "self-hating" Jews" - Murray Polner

TONY JUDT - Photo Credit: http://quotesfor.org/inspirational-tony-judt-quotes/

"My own inclination, then, would be to focus elsewhere. If the Jews of Europe and North America took their distance from Israel (as many have begun to do), the assertion that Israel was "their" state would take on an absurd air. Over time, even Washington might come to see the futility of attaching American foreign policy to the delusions of one small Middle Eastern state. This, I believe, is the best thing that could possibly happen to Israel itself. It would be obliged to acknowledge its limits. It would have to make other friends, preferably among its neighbours." Tony Judt

"Israel has crossed the threshold from 'the only democracy in the Middle East' to the only apartheid regime in the Western world. The inevitability of such a transformation has been held out not by "Israel bashers" but by the country's own leaders." - Henry Siegman, a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America

URI AVNERY - Photo Credit: By Michael F. Mehnert [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

"What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet. In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel." - Uri Avnery

           
BRUCE JACKSON - Photo Credit: By Lydia Fish (source of this photograph) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

"There is an ever-growing number of organizations of American Jews trying to get the word out that the press and politicians should look beyond the noisy minority..... Perhaps they have been too polite. Perhaps they will have to start making the same kind of noise that has frightened Chuck Schumer and so many powerful people in Washington. Perhaps they will have to remind those politicians that they also vote and write checks, and that of all the things you can accuse us Jews of there is at least one that is true: we remember...." - Bruce Jackson

On Operation Cast Lead, the Israel code name for the attack on Gaza, Judge Richard Goldstone concluded that Israeli officers should face "individual criminal responsibility" for breaches of the laws of war. The Inquiry also found that there was a "systematic" Israeli policy of destroying food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and homes in order to "make the daily process of living, and dignified living, more difficult for the civilian population." Goldstone wrote that Israel's virtual blockade of the Gaza Strip, allowing in only the minimum necessary to sustain life, was "collective punishment intentionally inflicted." More than a few Jewish intellectuals and writers supported Judge Goldstone Commission's findings."

"Don't let the Zionist media fool you. There are hundreds of thousands of fervently anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews throughout the world, and we will never surrender to the Zionist idea...... Even secular Zionism has been a catastrophe for the Jewish people, but religious Zionism, combining two opposites into an unstable mixture, is leading the Jewish people to moral depravity. It is the complete inverse of the Jewish mission to be a light to the nations and bring peace to the world. -True Torah Jews

RABBI DANIEL LANDES - Photo Credit: By David Bogomolny (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

"We Religious Zionists Are in Deep Trouble. 'Krazy Kookniks' are now the cutting edge or logical extension of normative Religious Zionism, which today is overtly messianic, narrowly nationalistic, and in its Orthodoxy, essentially isolationist......The religious Zionist magic moment in Shabbat services is the prayer for the State of Israel – edging out the attention once given to the iconic Jewish prayer, the Shema – which describes Israel as "the first flowering of our deliverance." Rather than hope, religious Zionism threatens to become, in the souls and actions of its adherents, a dangerous dogma of a deaf and dumb Impatient Messianism that talks to no one but knows just "what to do" to those who stand in its way, Arab or Jew. " - Rabbi Daniel Landes, Director of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem

All quotes from Dissident Voice