Joseph Massad: Racist

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Arab Studies. Explore interesting quotes on racist.

Joseph Massad: 166 quotes4 likes

“The Jews are not a nation… The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist.”

Massad, in a lecture at Oxford University, March 2002
Views on Israel and Zionism

“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.”

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

“The holocaust tragedy has been abducted by Israeli strategists, with few Jewish protests, for Israel's ideological acrobatics. As Palestinian recent history has shown, no Palestinian engagement with the holocaust will be satisfactory to Israel and its supporters. Israeli demands that Palestinians recognize the holocaust are not about the holocaust at all, but rather about the other part of the package, namely recognizing and submitting to Israel's "right to exist" as a colonial-settler racist state. The Palestinian authority has given up, but the Palestinian people should continue to resist this Zionist package deal. Their resistance is the only remaining obstacle to a complete Zionist victory, one that seeks to be sealed by Zionism's rewriting of both Palestinian and Jewish histories.”

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

“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.”

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.”

Ibid.
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

“While most of these intellectuals have taken public stances against racism and white supremacy, have opposed Nazism and apartheid South Africa, seem to oppose colonialism, old and new, most of them partake of a Sartrian legacy which refuses to see a change in the status of European Jews, who are still represented only as holocaust survivors in Europe. The status of the European Jew as a coloniser who has used racist colonial violence for the last century against the Palestinian people is a status they refuse to recognise and continue to resist vehemently.”

Ibid.
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

“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.”

Ibid.
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

“In arguing against Zionism's designation of the Palestinian revolution as "terrorism," Arafat likened the Palestinian resistance to the American Revolution, the European anti-Nazi resistance, and the anticolonial struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. After reviewing the British and Zionist outrages against the Palestinian people, Arafat emphasized that "all this has made our people neither vindictive nor vengeful. Nor has it caused us to resort to the racism of our enemies… For we deplore all those crimes committed against the Jews, we also deplore all the real discrimination suffered by them because of their faith." Arafat concluded by calling on Jews to oppose racism and desist from supporting the racist Israeli state, enjoining them to live as equals with Palestinians in a democratic Palestine.”

Ibid.
On the PLO

“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.”

Ibid.
"The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre"

“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.”

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.”

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

“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.”

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"

“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.”

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

“The only thing threatening Jews is its [Israel's] commitment to Apartheid and its racist people.”

Massad, as quoted in Columbia University's newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, in February 2007
Views on Israel and Zionism