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Joseph Massad Quotes
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Joseph Andoni Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, whose academic work has focused on Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli nationalism. He is also known for his book Desiring Arabs, about representations of sexual desire in the Arab world.Massad was born in Jordan in 1963, and is of Palestinian Christian descent,. He received his PhD in Political Science from Columbia in 1998. Wikipedia  

✵ 1963
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Joseph Massad: 83   quotes 4   likes

Joseph Massad Quotes

“It is Jewish supremacy that makes the question of Israel as a Jewish rather than an Israeli state sacrosanct, whose change would be non-pragmatic. It is a commitment to Jewish supremacy that makes the return of the Palestinian refugees a 'demographic threat' to the Jewish majority of Israel (which became a fact precisely because the Palestinians now seeking to return to their lands and homes were expelled from them in the first place). It is a commitment to Jewish supremacy that continues to legitimize the treatment of Israeli Palestinian citizens as third-class citizens. It is a commitment to Jewish supremacy that legitimizes the continuation of the occupation as a safeguard against threats to a Jewish supremacist Israel.”

Joseph Massad

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

Home , Question , Change

“However, [Novick] does not account for the reality that views of Israel as being "beleaguered" are part of the same Zionist and Israeli strategy positing rising anti-Semitism to garner more support and immigration to Israel after the pool of immigrants had dried up in the mid-1950s. His point is that the perception of anti-Semitism is what led to more talk of the holocaust. However, it is this causal relationship that is suspect. One could posit that perceptions of a "beleaguered Israel," "oppressed" Soviet Jews, and the new "anti-Semitism," as well as talk of the holocaust, are all part of the same phenomenon rather than being caused by each other. One could further posit a different causal relationship with much of the same evidence Novick provides: namely, that it is Zionism, Israel, and America's use of past Jewish victimization to advance the Zionist agenda that informs the exaggeration of the relatively mild Soviet discriminatory policies against Jews (among other national and religious groups facing similiar discrimination) as holocaustal, the presentation of Israel as a victim of the new Arab "anti-Semites," or the condemnation of any criticism of American Jewry's support for Zionism or any criticism of Israel as "anti-Semitic."”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
"Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness"

Support , Reality , Past , Parting

“[I]t is the publicness of socio-sexual identities rather than the sexual acts themselves that elicits repression”

Joseph Massad

Ibid., p.197.
Desiring Arabs

“The cornerstone of Jewish supremacist thought is the commitment to establishing a Jewish state, where Jews (whether as a 'chosen people', as Europeans with a mission civilisatrice, or as a historically persecuted group who must be liberated at whatever cost) would have rights qua Jews over non-Jews, and all the accoutrements that follow from such a racially supremacist system.”

Joseph Massad

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

People

“Institutionalized white supremacy in the United States and South Africa ended when the costs of maintaining it became too high to bear by white supremacists in both countries. It was only after the costs became high that people and rulers in both countries opted to end the institutionalized basis of white supremacy.”

Joseph Massad

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

People , Country

“However, the only way these arguments acquire any purchase is in the context of an international, read western, commitment to Jewish supremacy, wherein Jews are seen as white Europeans defending white European values and civilization against the primitive Arab hordes.”

Joseph Massad

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

Way , Reading

“Indeed, the PLO's submission to Israel's rewriting of the conflict had begun even before Oslo: part of the price for the Madrid Conference was the repeal, in December 1991, of the 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 (XXX) characterizing Zionism as "a form of racism and racial discrimination."”

Joseph Massad

Ibid.
On the PLO

Parting

“As I have discussed Zionism's colonial pedigree elsewhere, in this article I will focus on this supremacist grid, an analysis of which, I believe, is a prerequisite of the victory of the Palestinian struggle.”

Joseph Massad

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

Victory

“Surely, if Israel can accommodate more millions of Jews in its small territory, it could conceivably do the same for the Palestinian refugees whom it expelled and whose land it invites these Jews to colonize. Yet all solutions that have been advanced by official and nonofficial Palestinians and Israeli Jews to resolve the refugee 'problem' seem to agree on the non-pragmatism of the return of the refugees to their lands.”

Joseph Massad

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

Problem

“The more recent practice of writing numbers on the arms of thousands of Palestinians who have been crammed in Israeli detention camps since February 2002 through the present further demonstrates the Nazi system as a model for the Israeli army.”

Joseph Massad

Massad, "The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle", Interventions, 2003
On Comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany

“The Arab countries, understanding that the arrival of holocaust survivors in Palestine would increase the Zionists' numbers and manpower, introduced a UN resolution calling for West countries to take in the holocaust refugees. All the countries that supported the partition plan resolution voted against or abstained on the refugee resolution.”

Joseph Massad

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

Understanding , Support , Country

“Jewish demographic supremacy, which has always been the ideological cornerstone for imposing ethno-racial Jewish supremacy in Palestine (however the Jewish 'race' or Jewish 'ethnicity' may be defined), is as old as the Zionist movement itself. It was the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, who, in his Zionist musings, understood that European Jews would have to establish their ethno-racial supremacy through demographic supremacy.”

Joseph Massad

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