Norman Finkelstein on how many young Jews are opposing Israel's war on the people of Gaza

You look at what the evidence shows, not based on biased sources or naturally-biased sources, but on the available evidence.  And I tried to be a strict adherent of the two principles of truth and justice and that's where I landed.  And I think frankly that's where most of the world has landed and it's also, incidentally but not trivially, it's where a large part of the young Jewish population has landed.  If you go to the demonstrations now, the ones that have garnered the headlines, say the one in Grand Central Station, it was overwhelmingly Jewish.  It was all organized by Jewish organizations, young people mostly, but not entirely.  The Statue of Liberty demonstration: again, it was Jewish young people who organized the demonstration.  So this idea that it's somehow polarized ethnically is belied by the facts.

Now I will wholeheartedly admit that when I first started out we were a handful of people, Jews who opposed what Israel was doing.  But the spectrum has radically changed in recent years.  I'm just one among a large number, a sea of Jews who oppose what's going on, not because they're self-hating, not because they're indifferent to the faith of Israelis, but because the evidence is overwhelming.

You started out by saying you're not knowledgeable about the topic.  Fair enough.  There are 10,000 topics I'm not knowledgeable about and where you have much more knowledge, I'm quite certain of that.  But this is not a particularly complicated situation right now.  The Israeli government is openly, unabashedly, flagrantly, blatantly - it's declared a war of genocide on the people of Gaza.

~ Norman Finkelstein, "Israel vs. Palestine with Norman Finkelstein," 8:10 mark, November 17, 2023

Murray Rothbard on the early Zionist movement

[W]hat was world Zionism?  Before the French Revolution, the Jews of Europe had been largely encased in ghettoes, and there emerged from ghetto life a distinct Jewish cultural and ethnic (as well as religious) identity, with Yiddish as the common language (Hebrew being only the ancient language of religious ritual).  After the French Revolution, the Jews of Western Europe were emancipated from ghetto life, and they then faced a choice of where to go from there.  One group, the heirs of the Enlightenment, chose and advocated the choice of casting off narrow, parochial ghetto culture on behalf of assimilation into the culture and the environment of the Western world.  While assimilationism was clearly the rational course in America and Western Europe, this route could not easily be followed in Eastern Europe, where the ghetto walls still held.  In Eastern Europe, therefore, the Jews turned toward various movements for preservation of the Jewish ethnic and cultural identity.  Most prevalent was Bundism, the viewpoint of the Jewish Bund, which advocated Jewish national self-determination, up to and including a Jewish state in the predominantly Jewish areas of Eastern Europe.  (Thus, according to Bundism, the city of Vilna, in Eastern Europe, with a majority population of Jews, would be part of a newly-formed Jewish state.)  Another, less powerful, group of Jews, the Territorialist Movement, despairing of the future of Jews in Eastern Europe, advocated preserving the Yiddish Jewish identity by forming Jewish colonies and communities (not states) in various unpopulated, virgin areas of the world. 

Given the conditions of European Jewry in the late 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, all of these movements had a rational groundwork.  The one Jewish movement that made no sense was Zionism, a movement which began blended with Jewish Territorialism.  But while the Territorialists simply wanted to preserve Jewish-Yiddish identity in a newly developed land of their own, Zionism began to insist on a Jewish land in Palestine alone.  The fact that Palestine was not a virgin land, but already occupied by an Arab peasantry, meant nothing to the ideologues of Zionism.  Furthermore, the Zionists, far from hoping to preserve ghetto Yiddish culture, wished to bury it and to substitute a new culture and a new language based on an artificial secular expansion of ancient religious Hebrew. 

In 1903, the British offered territory in Uganda for Jewish colonization, and the rejection of this offer by the Zionists polarized the Zionist and Territorialist movements, which previously had been fused together.  From then on, the Zionists would be committed to the blood-and-soil mystique of Palestine, and Palestine alone, while the Territorialists would seek virgin land elsewhere in the world.  

Because of the Arabs resident in Palestine, Zionism had to become in practice an ideology of conquest.

~ Murray Rothbard, ""War Guilt in the Middle East," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Spring-Autumn 1967

The first Aliya, early Jewish immigrants to
Ottoman Palestine, 1882-1903

Henry Kissinger on Judaism

If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic...  Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.

~ Henry A. Kissinger, as quoted in Walter Isaacson's 1992 biography Kissinger

1992

Jordan Peterson on antisemitism as a canary in the coalmine

I'm also more sensitive to any signs of antisemitic catastrophe from studying the Holocaust for the length of time that I did.  I've always regarded Jews as the canary in the coalmine and I think the reason that the Jews are the canary in the coalmine is because they're a successful minority.  If a culture can tolerate a successful minority, it's pretty damn robust and it's not very resentful.  And as soon as a culture starts to get resentful, the Jews make an easy target...

~ Jordan Peterson, interview with Piers Morgan, Piers Morgan Uncensored, 4:20 mark, November 3, 2023

CJPME on British policy on Jewish immigration to Palestine from 1919 to 1948

What was the British policy on Jewish immigration? 

British policy regarding Jewish immigration into Palestine evolved during the mandate period, as did the Jewish European response to it. 

A policy favouring it from 1919 to 1930: The British were in favour of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.  The first Zionists, under the Ottoman Empire, had been able to establish themselves in the country under the protection of foreign consulates, notably British ones.  Nonetheless, in the wake of the increase in immigration during the 20th century’s first decades, Arab Palestinians began pressuring Great Britain, which found itself in the political crossfire.  From the 1930s on, the British authority began providing fewer immigration certificates than there was a demand for.  But the real change in policy took place in 1939. 

Restrictions and criminalisation of Jewish immigration to Palestine from 1939 on: In an attempt to mollify the Arab Palestinian population, Great Britain emitted in 1939 a “white paper” restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 people over five years and limiting the purchase of land by Jews.  The creation of an independent Arab state within 10 years was also intended.  However, the policy did not really slow Jewish immigration, because it opened the door to illegal immigration at a moment when the persecution of Jews in Europe was only intensifying. Until WWII began, and even after, tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine.  Despite the interception of some ships by the British, many immigrants were able to establish themselves in Palestine. 

The immigrants also found out how to establish themselves in Palestine thanks to gaps in the British system of regulation.  For example, given that students were not obliged to have an immigration certificate to study in Palestine, many people enrolled at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem then remained in the country. Some young women entered the country declaring fictitious marriages to Palestinians.  Still others arrived as tourists and never left.  In the end, between 1939 and 1948, 118,228 Jews reached Palestine, despite the British restrictions. 

After the war, Great Britain jailed thousands of the illegal immigrants in detention camps in Cyprus.  This attempt to staunch immigration failed, and Britain was reproached for it in the post-Holocaust context.

~ Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, "Jewish Immigration to Historical Palestine," CJPME Factsheet 181, November, 2013

CJPME on Jewish immigration to Israel after 1948

Has immigration been promoted after the creation of the State of Israel?

After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, all limitations on Jewish immigration were lifted, which triggered a large influx of migrants and displaced persons after WWII.  The State of Israel also passed the Law of Return, under which any Jewish person has the right to immigrate to Israel. 

The newcomers came from Europe, counties in the Near East, and the Maghreb.  Jews in Arab countries, such as Iraq, faced growing public hostility because of the conflict in Palestine and later as a result of Israel’s creation at Palestinian Arabs’ expense.  Fearing for their security, most Arab Jews eventually chose to emigrate, in response to hostile Arab governments and encouragement by Israeli representatives and agents who were eager to bring them to Israel.  This combination of factors led to the nearly total disappearance of ancient Jewish communities in the Near East and Maghreb.  Immigration leapt again in 1989-90, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of borders in Eastern Europe.

Today: In total, the State of Israel has absorbed 3.1 immigrants since its creation, 1 million of them between 1990 and 1999.  The State of Israel has in fact strongly encouraged Jewish immigration with the objective of ensuring that the majority of Israel’s population remains Jewish, despite Arab Israelis’ high birthrate.  Today, however, large-scale immigration is almost non-existent, with many residents leaving the country.

~ Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, "Jewish Immigration to Historical Palestine," CJPME Factsheet 181, November, 2013

Ilan Pappé on the lack of Jewish compassion for the suffering of Palestinians

Today I cannot understand educated American Jews or educated Christian Jews or educated Israelis who don't even feel a compassion towards the Palestinian suffering.  I don't even want to begin with justifications and so on, but I think the worst thing I meet in Israel, which really disturbs me, is the lack of compassion.  Of course you can see it now and you would say, "ok, now you should understand that [they] show no compassion by now [for] two thousand two hundred children that already were killed in Gaza because of the revenge."  But really?  In 2023, members of the democratic society cannot show compassion to 2,000 babies that were killed, whatever the context of what had happened?  I don't accept it.  

So I think there is something sick in the nation that I'm very glad that I liberated myself from this...  If we don't have this impulse of basic humanity within Israeli society, we will have to wait for its defeat from the outside, which I don't want... because I think it would be horrible and what we've seen Saturday [bombing Gaza] is just a prelude.  So I really hope that they will change from within and get a more universal perspective: what they have done and what they are doing.

~ Ilan Pappé, "Declassified Israeli Documents Reveal Dark Truths," The Majority Report, 6:00 mark, November 5, 2023