Joseph Massad Quotes (83 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Massad, "The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle", Interventions, 2003, based on an earlier and shorter article entitled "On Zionism and Jewish supremacy", New Politics, 2002.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

“Western social Darwinists, who include modernisation and development theorists and their kindred spirits (UN agencies, human rights organisations and activists, NGOs, the IMF, the World Bank, the US State Department, etc) would see the possible "advance" of the Arab world (as well as the rest of the "underdeveloped" world) toward a western-defined and sponsored modernity as part of a historical teleology wherein non-Europeans who are still at the stage of European childhood will eventually replicate European "progress" toward modern forms of organisation, sociality, economics, politics and sexual desires. What is emerging in the Arab (and the rest of the third) world is not some universal schema of the march of history but rather the imposition of these western modes by different forceful means and their adoption by third world elites, thus foreclosing and repressing myriad ways of movement and change and ensuring that only one way for transformation is made possible.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid., pp. 49-50.
Desiring Arabs

“While Wiesel assailed the silence of the world about the Jewish holocaust throughout his career, he required that Jew and gentile alike remain silent about Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness"

“But in fact the Jewish tragedy did not create the Palestinian catastrophe. Zionism had sought to dispossess the Palestinians and establish its state long before the Jewish holocaust. Also, only one-third of holocaust survivors ended up in Palestine, mostly because they could not go to the United States. Furthermore, the claim made by some Zionists and Palestinians that the international support for the establishment of Israel resulted from the world community's sense of guilt for failing to rescue Jews from the Nazis is unsubstantiated.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?"

“All those in the Arab world who deny the Jewish holocaust are in my opinion Zionists.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
On Anti-Semitism

“The conference was not a lonely effort. None other than Israel’s President Moshe Katsav welcomed the attendees. Reflecting the predominant Jewish supremacist views among Israeli and American Jews, the conference was co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, the Israeli Defense Ministry, the Jewish Agency, the World Zionist Organization, the National Security Center at Haifa University, and the Israeli National Security Council of the Prime Minister’s Office. The conference featured fifty speakers: senior government and military officials – including ex- and future prime ministers – university professors, business and media personalities, as well as American Jewish academics and operatives of the US Zionist lobby.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

Joseph Massad: Trending quotes

“Indeed, racist views about the demographic 'threat' that the Palestinians constitute for a Jewish supremacist Israel are not confined to Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Jewish right wing (which is anyway a majority in Jewish Israel), but are also voiced by liberal and leftist Israeli Jews. In December 2000, the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Herzlia Interdisciplinary Center in Israel held its first of a projected series of annual conferences dealing with the strength and security of Israel, especially with regards to maintaining its Jewish supremacist character. One of the 'Main Points' identified in the 52-page conference report is the concern over the numbers needed to maintain the Jewish supremacy of Israel.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

“Novick, Finkelstein, and Chmiel have made important and crucial contributions to a topic about which little discussion has taken place, namely the rise in holocaust consciousness in the United States. All three books are indispensable for anyone interested in understanding how international Zionism, Israel, and the United States have collaborated in producing an elaborate ideological defense system of Israeli crimes, crimes which are supported, funded, and supplied by the U. S. government.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness"

Books , Understanding , Support

“For the Gay International, transforming sexual practices into identities through the universalizing of gayness and gaining 'rights' for those who identify (or more precisely, are identified by the Gay International) with it becomes the mark of an ascending civilization, just as repressing those rights and restricting the circulation of gayness is a mark of backwardness and barbarism.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
Desiring Arabs

Universe

Joseph Massad Quotes

“It was the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, who provided the Israelis with their best propaganda linking the Palestinians with the Nazis and European anti-Semitism. Fleeing British persecution, the mufti ended up in Germany during the war years and attempted to obtain promises from the Germans that they would not support the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Documents that the Jewish Agency produced in 1946 purporting to show that the mufti had a role in the extermination of Jews did no such thing; the only thing these unsigned letters by the mufti showed was his opposition to Nazi Germany's and Romania's allowing Jews to emigrate to Palestine.”

Joseph Massad

Massad, in "Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?", Journal of Palestine Studies, 2000
On the Mufti of Jerusalem

War , Home , Support

“Take Jacques Derrida as another example, who when lecturing in occupied Jerusalem in 1986 stated his position as follows: 'I wish to state right away my solidarity with all those, in this land, who advocate an end to violence, condemn the crimes of terrorism and of the military and police repression, and advocate the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied territories as well as the recognition of the Palestinians' right to choose their own representatives to negotiations, now more indispensable than ever.' Derrida, however, felt it necessary to assert in his speech that the Israeli State's 'existence, it goes without saying, must henceforth be recognised by all'. Despite Derrida's opposition to White supremacist South Africa in the mid-1980s, he believes that Israel, a racist Jewish state, should be recognised by all.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

“Zionism's anti-Semitic project of destroying Jewish cultures and languages in the diaspora in the interest of an invented Hebrew that none of them spoke, and in the interest of evicting them from Europe and transporting them to an Asian land to which they had never been, is never examined by these intellectuals. Nor do they ever examine the ideological and practical collusion between Zionism and anti-Semitism since the inception of the movement.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

“Nowhere in his justification does [Etienne] Balibar note the fact that Israel is a racist Jewish State; his opposition is only to its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

“Such commitment extends to the maintenance of the exclusive Jewish symbolism that Israel deploys, ranging from its Jewish flag and national anthem (which only speaks of Jews) to its ceremonial national days and the practices of institutionalized discrimination against its Arab non-Jewish citizens in every facet of life.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

Life

“What is at stake for the authors of these proposals, and of many others, is Israel’s maintenance of its Jewish supremacist character (dubbed its 'Jewish character').”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

“What Zionism remained unashamed about throughout its history, however, was its commitment to building a demographically exclusive Jewish state modeled after Christian Europe – a notion pervaded, as the following will illustrate, by a religio-racial epistemology of supremacy over the Palestinian Arabs, not unlike that used by European colonialism with its ideology of white supremacy over the natives.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

History

“It is only by making the costs of Jewish supremacy too high that Israeli Jews will give it up. This can be done by the continuing resistance of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to all the civil and military institutions that uphold Jewish supremacy.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

“Paramount among such events is the Jewish holocaust during World War II, which Zionists used for propagandistic purposes to assert their "right" to Palestine to which they had laid their suspect colonial claim half a century earlier. In appropriating the holocaust and its victims, Zionism and Israel asserted that any acknowledgment of the holocaust is an acknowledgment of Israel's "right to exist," and conversely that any attempt to deny Israel its alleged right to exist was perforce a denial of the holocaust.”

Joseph Massad

Massad, in "Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?", Journal of Palestine Studies, 2000
"Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?"

War , World

“[Peter] Novick does not mention that there has never been much self-questioning by Zionists on what they could have done more to save European Jews, or perhaps, given the history of collaboration of the Zionist movement with the Nazis, whether they could have done less to hurt them.”

Joseph Massad

Massad, "Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness", Journal of Palestine Studies, 2002
On Alleged Zionist Collaboration with Nazi Germany

History , Question , Hurt

“Like the major US- and European-based human rights organisations (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International) and following the line taken up by white western women's organisations and publications, the Gay International was to reserve a special place for the Muslim countries in its discourse as well as its advocacy. The orientalist impulse … continues to guide all branches of the human rights community.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid., p. 161.
Desiring Arabs

Women , Communication , Country

“No matter how much Zionism continues to resurrect it and claim it as the excuse for its racist violence against the Palestinians, the holocaust does not justify Israel's racist nature.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

Nature

“The most recent campaign [by the “Gay International”] has targeted the Palestinian Authority (PA). The campaign started two years after the eruption of the second intifada. Articles published in the US press, written by Israelis or pro-Jewish activists, claimed that Palestinian “gays” are so oppressed that they could only find refuge in “democratic” Israel. Interviews with such “gay refugees” recounted horrid torture by PA elements. Indeed, the effort was inaugurated by US Congressman Barney Frank himself, who used the occasion to praise Israeli “democracy”…”

Joseph Massad

Ibid., p. 188 (footnote)
Desiring Arabs

Democracy , Effort

“The Gay International and its activities are largely responsible for the intensity of this repressive campaign.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid., on the "Queen Boat Affair", p.184.
Desiring Arabs

“Israel insisted on freezing the moment at which the holocaust survivors became such.”

Joseph Massad

Massad, in "Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?", Journal of Palestine Studies, 2000
Views on Israel and Zionism

“Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry is a short but important and necessary addendum that advances important critiques of Novick and makes its own contribution to the debate by discussing aspects that Novick did not include.”

Joseph Massad

Massad, "Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness", Journal of Palestine Studies, 2002
"Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness"

“[I]t is the very discourse of the Gay International which produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid., pp. 162-3
Desiring Arabs

“Just as Zionism appropriated the tragedy of the holocaust to justify its atrocities, Wiesel was to legitimize that link in much of his discourse about the colonial settlement.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness"

“Arafat himself frankly expressed his 'understanding' and 'respect' of the Israeli need to maintain Jewish supremacy in an editorial he published in the New York Times. He shamelessly asserted: 'We understand Israel's demographic concerns and understand that the right of return of Palestinian refugees, a right guaranteed under international law and United Nations Resolution 194, must be implemented in a way that takes into account such concerns'. He proceeded to state that he is looking to negotiate with Israel on 'creative solutions to the plight of the refugees while respecting Israel’s demographic concerns”

Joseph Massad

i.e., 'respecting' its Jewish supremacist concerns.
Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

Law , Way , Understanding , Time

“Indeed, even before the 11 September attacks, there was little evidence that the holocaust had ever ceased being used as a bulwark to defend the state interests of Israel and its atrocities against the Palestinians and neighboring Arab countries. This was not a spontaneous development but the result of design. Indeed, it had become a matter of course to expect Palestinian victims of Israeli terror to pay obeisance to the Jewish holocaust before, or even instead of, criticizing Israel.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness"

Country

“Such a Zionist scenario misses the fact that the majority of American Jews are so assimilated into "whiteness" that they are no longer Jews, religiously or culturally, except by name.”

Joseph Massad

Massad, "Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness", Journal of Palestine Studies, 2002
On American Jewry

“The PLO has accepted this burden of vigilance. It has always made a point of demonstrating its sympathy with the Jewish victims of the holocaust and in condemning the Nazi regime.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
On the PLO

“The history of Arab Jews who were abducted into the Zionist project late in the game is in turn irrelevant to the curricula of Israeli schools, wherein only the history of white European Jews is taught as the relevant history of all Jews.”

Joseph Massad

Massad, on the refugees of the Jewish exodus from Arab lands, in "Curriculum reform should start in the U.S. and Israel," Al-Ahram, 2003
On Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries

School , History , Game

“When these European intellectuals worry about anti-Semitism harming the Israeli settler's colony, they are being blind to the ultimate achievement of Israel: the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew. Unless their stance is one that opposes the racist basis of the Jewish State, their support for Palestinian resistance will always ring hollow.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

Support

“According to this Jewish supremacist Weltanschauung, and in line with anti-Semitic rhetoric, not only will Jews be supremacists over the native Palestinians whom they conquered and must continue to conquer; they are also said to be supreme on a global scale. The complicity between Zionism and anti-Semitism has become complete.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

“Deutscher, it would seem, never stopped to consider that European Jews could have still fled as refugees without becoming colonists.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?"

“Arafat's prospective visit to the museum recalls Anwar Sadat's visit to Yad Vashem in 1977 in the company of Menachem Begin. Sadat's visit was also a symbolic submission to the Zionization of the holocaust and to its appropriation by Israeli propagandists for their own purposes.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
On the PLO

“Moreover, although Israel’s Jewish character was never part of the negotiations, it has always been made explicit that transforming Israel into a non-Jewish (read non-racist) state is not pragmatic.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

Reading , Parting

“It is not the same-sex sexual practices that are being repressed by the Egyptian police but rather the sociopolitical identification of these practices with the Western identity of gayness and the publicness that these gay-identified men seek.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
Desiring Arabs

Men , Sex

“What is it about the nature of Zionism, its racism, and its colonial policies that continues to escape the understanding of many European intellectuals on the left?”

Joseph Massad

Massad, in "The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre", Al-Ahram, 2003
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

Understanding , Nature

“Gamal 'Abd al-Nasir and later Yasir Arafat were subjected to similar slander because, like Husayni, they opposed Zionist colonialism.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
On the Mufti of Jerusalem

“Palestinians and Arabs were not the only ones cast as Nazis. Israel was also accused — by Israelis as well as by Palestinians — of Nazi-style crimes. In the context of Israeli massacres of Palestinians in 1948, a number of Israeli ministers referred to the actions of Israeli soldiers as "Nazi actions," prompting Benny Marshak, the education officer of the Palmach, to ask them to stop using the term. Indeed, after the massacre at al-Dawayima, Agriculture Minister Aharon Zisling asserted in a cabinet meeting that he "couldn't sleep all night… Jews too have committed Nazi acts." Similar language was used after the Israeli army gunned down forty-seven Israeli Palestinian men, women, and children at Kafr Qasim in 1956. While most Israeli newspapers at the time played down the massacre, a rabbi rote that "we must demand of the entire nation a sense of shame and humiliation… that soon we will be like Nazias and the perpetrators of pogroms." The Palestinians were soon to level the same accusation against the Israelis. Such accusations increased during the intifada. One of the communiqués issued by the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising defined the intifada as consisting of "the children and young men of the stones and Molotov cocktails, the thousands of women who miscarried as a result of poison gas and tear gas grenades, and those women whose sons and husbands were thrown in the Nazi prisons." The Israelis were always outraged by such accusations, even when the similarities were stark. When the board of Yad Vashem, for example, was asked to condemn the act of an Israeli army officer who instructed his soldiers to inscribe numbers on the arms of Palestinians, board chairman Gideon Hausner "squelched the initiative, ruling that it had no relevance to the Holocaust."”

Joseph Massad

Massad, in Palestinian and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission? in the Autumn 2000 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies.
On Comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany

Women , Men , Children , Education

“Anti-Semitism is alive and well today worldwide and its major victims are Arabs and Muslims and no longer Jews.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
On Anti-Semitism

“Mark Chmiel's Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership is a case study illustrating the politics of holocaust memory through examining the life of its prime architect, Elie Wiesel, who has made a successful and profitable personal career of the holocaust.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness"

Life , Study , Memory , Success

“Moreover, the lie that the film propagates claiming that I would equate Israel with Nazi Germany is abhorrent. I have never made such a reprehensible equation.”

Joseph Massad

Massad, in "Intimidating Columbia University" in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, on the short film Columbia Unbecoming concerning claims of mistreatment of students with opposing viewpoints. (2004)
On Comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany

Lie

“Since its inception, Zionism's Jewish supremacy borrowed much from anti-Semitic rhetoric. Not only did Herzl agree with anti-Semites that it was Jews who 'caused' anti-Semitism but also with the anti-Semitic conclusion that the end of anti-Semitism could only be brought about by the removal of Jews from gentile societies.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

“The response of Palestinians and Arabs to Israel's linkage has varied. Some, falling into the Zionist ideological trap, reasoned that if accepting the Jewish holocaust meant accepting Israel's right to be a colonial-settler racist state, then the holocaust must be denied or at least questioned.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?"

Question

“In his recent book, 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real', famed Slovenian socialist intellectual Slavoj Zizek tackles the Palestinian question in a most unoriginal manner. What concerns him most is not the foundational racism of Zionism and its concrete offspring, a racist Jewish state, nor the racist curricula of Israeli Jewish schools, the racist Israeli Jewish media representations of Palestinians, the racist declarations of Israeli Jewish leaders on the right and on the left, or the Jewish supremacist rights and privileges guiding Zionism and Israeli state laws and policies -- all of which seem of little concern to him -- but rather Arab 'anti-Semitism' which should not be 'tolerated.”

Joseph Massad

Arabs are in fact reacting to Zionist Jewish colonialism and its commitment to European white supremacy in Jewish guise.
Ibid.
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

Books , School , Law , Question

“In keeping with the Protestant Reformation's abduction of the Hebrew bible into its new religion and its positing of modern European Jews as direct descendants of the Ancient Hebrews, post-Enlightenment haters of Jews began to identify Jews as "Semites" on account of their alleged ancestors having spoken Hebrew. In fact the ancient Hebrews spoke Aramaic, the language in which the Talmud was written, as well as parts of the bible.”

Joseph Massad

Massad, in "Semites and anti-Semites, that is the question" in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. (2004)
On the Talmud

Religion , Parting

“All solutions that ignore the maintenance of Jewish supremacy in Israel will fail. Unless the elimination of Jewish supremacy becomes the major goal of a real 'peace process', all other solutions will simply perpetuate the conflict.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

Peace

“The Jewish supremacists in Israel, both rulers and population, have not paid much for the maintenance of Jewish supremacy. They have not only maintained the land they conquered but constantly expanded it. They have not only been able to eke out a living but also prospered economically, socially, and culturally.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

“The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating.”

Joseph Massad

Massad, in his book Desiring Arabs (2008).
Desiring Arabs

People , World , Universe

“Unlike Arafat or Nasir, Sadat had been an avid admirer of Hitler… In assessing Sadat's enthusiasm for Hitler, however, it should be noted that unlike the many Zionist leaders (of both the Labor and Revisionist camps) who collaborated with the Nazis, some up to 1941 but others as late as 1944, Sadat only supported them from afar.”

Joseph Massad

Massad, in "Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?", Journal of Palestine Studies, 2000
On Alleged Zionist Collaboration with Nazi Germany

Support

“Israel's continued refusal to change its Jewish supremacist character or its racist policies toward the Palestinian people is portrayed in the international press and by official Israeli rhetoric as a defense of its 'democratic' principles and in defense of a Jewish people whose historic persecution came to a halt only because of Zionism's intervention.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

People , Change

“[T]he Gay International is destroying social and sexual configurations of desire in the interest of reproducing a world in its own image, one wherein its sexual categories and desires are safe from being questioned”

Joseph Massad

Ibid., p.189.
Desiring Arabs

World , Question

“Israeli Jewish society in Israel, as well as the Israeli leadership, continues to uphold Jewish supremacy as sacrosanct and non-negotiable.”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"