EXERPTS FROM LITERATURE

82. 'Israeli Exeptionalism' by M. Shalid Alam;  Professor of Economics at Northeastern University in Boston.
page 9 ......Over time, this growing emphasis on the "radical uniqueness" of Israel would give rise to racist tendencies. Since the Jews were the chosen instrument of God's intervention on earth, some Jewish thinkers took this to mean that Jews were no subject to the laws of nature and society. In other words, as long as the Jews believed that they were acting as instruments of God's will, they did not have to place themselves under the laws of Gentile nations.

page 26.....In general, the Zionists wanted to believe that the Palestinians were not a people; they had no attachment to their land, no national identity, no national aspirations. If  they are not a people, then we can take away their land from them. The irony is palpable. The Jews - who were not yet a people, because they had no land they could call their own - asserted that the Palestinians, who had their own land, were not a people. This not so clever deception had only one end: so that people without a land could steal it from another people who had it.

page 34.....The tragedy of Israel is not fortuitous. Driven by history, chance, and cunning, the Zionists wedged themselves between two historical adversaries, the West and Islam, and by harnassing the strength of the first against the second, they have produced a conflict that can only grow deeper over time. In this conflict. Israel's triumphs are temporary, are indeed illusionary, since they evoke  deeper, wider response from the societies that suffer the devastation of its triumphs. In the long run, in the time scale of history, by relentlessly pressing its advantages, Israel only ensures that its adversaries will slowly  build the defences that will eventually rise to match Israel's military might and its expansionist ambitions.

page 36 .....In addition, the humiliation of the Islamicate has also given rise to radical factions- their numbers still minuscule - who have decided to use violence to achieve their political ends. This destabilizing dialectic has now brought the West itself into direct confrontation against the Islamicate. We are now staring into the precipice. Yet, there is little appreciation in the West of the scale of this impending disaster: or the will to pull back from it.

page 39....... David Ben Gurion, 1956  (quote) "Why should the Arabs make peace ? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country"

page 51....."History does not support the presence of an irrisistible Jewish yearning for Palestine.  "Why, during these thousands years have not the Jews really tried to return to this country ? Why was it necessary to wait until the end of the  Nineteenth Century for Herzle to succeed in convincing them of this necessity ?

page 61 Moshe Dayan, April 1956 (quote): "We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or a house".

page 71.... David Ben-Gurion, 1938 (quote) "I support compulsory transfer. I do not see in it anything immoral"
..................Benny Morris, 2004 (quote) "Without uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here".

page 83.....The changes in the spatial distribution of the world's Jewish population between 1800 and 1930 were equally important in preparing the grounds for Zionist success.In 1700, only about 16 percent of the world's Jews lived in Western and Central Europe and its overseas extensions, regions that would become centers of global capitalism over the next two centuries. At this time, 49 percent of the world's Jewish population lived in Eastern Europe and  35.5 percent in the Islamicate. This demographic weakness was remedied substantially by the middle decades of the twentieth century, due primarily to the growing migration of Jews to destinations westward.. In 1939, Europe's share of the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa had increased substantially. Most importantly, British Jewish population had increased from an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 in the early 1800s to 300,000 by 1914, due mostly to immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe since the early 1800s. The growth of Jewish population in the United States was more dramatic, having increased from 2,500 in 1800 to one million in 1900 and 3,6 million in 1920".

page 85......The long centuries of Jewish exposure to finance, commerce, estate management, and the crafts had equiped them better than most Gentiles to succeeed as international traders, bankers, speculators, industrialists, and stockbrokers in Europe's emerging capitalist economies.

..............Already, in the early nineteenth century, Jewish families owned thirty of the fifty-two private banks in Berlin; in Vienna, by the end of the nineteenth century, "40 percent of the directors of public banks were Jews or of Jewish descent, and all banks but one was administered by Jews."

........"in an age when the press was the only mass medium, cultural or otherwise, the liberal press [in Europe] was largely a Jewish press"

page 88.....In addition to the internal migration of Jews in Europe - from small towns and rural centres to the cities, and from Eastern Europe to destinations in Central and Western Europe - there occurred a migration of similar magnitude from all over Europe, to the new world and especially  the United States.   The cross-Atlantic migration of Jews was pregnant with consequences for the Zionist movement. Because of these migrations, by the third decade of the twentieth century, the United States became home to the world's largest concentration of Jews.

page 91......Once Zionism began to draw substantial support from Jewish communities in the West, and from important centres of Jewish power - in finance, industry, politics, media and academia - we can expect that these Jewish communities would increasingly use their influence to mobilize the support of Western governments.

page 123....In the 1930's, the Nazis banned all Jewish organizations, except those with Zionist aims; they even allowed the Zionists to fly their blue-and-white flag with the Star of David at its centre. In violation of the Jewish boycott of the Nazi economy, the Zionists promissed cash and made concessions to Nazi Germany if they directed Jewish emigrants to Palestine......Brenner has documented several episodes of collaboration between Zionist mainstream Jewish organizations and fascist governments in Germany, Italy and Japan.

page 139.......Zionism was a grave assault on the history of the global resistance to imperialism that unfolded even as the Jewish colons in Palestine laid the foundations of their colonial settler state. The Zionists sought to abolish the ground realities in the Middle East established by Islam over the previous thirteen hundred years. They sought to overrun the demography of Palestine, to insert a European presence in the heart of the Islamicate, and to serve as the forward base for the Western powers intent on dominating the Middle East. The Zionist could succeed only by combining the forces of the Christian and Jewish West in an assault that would almost certainly be seen as the, latter-day Crusade to marginalize the Islamicate peoples in the Middle East. It was delusional to assume that the Zionist challenge to the Islamicate would go unanswered.

page  154........When all the advences of the Zionist movement are brought together - the dramatic growth in the cadre of  activists, the mass mobilization of Jews, and the support of the American Jewish establishment, we begin to acquire a better estimate of the political influence that the Zionist movement could now exercise over the U.S. political system. The Zionists had now become a force in the elections to the Congress and the president, and they had built up a network for lobbying congressmen, senators, and the White House.

page 168.....Far from making concessions to Palestinians and Arabs to advance peace, Israel had an opposite interest in escalating its conflicts with the Arabs. American support for Israel could only increase as Israel succeeded in escalating its conflicts with its adversaries. Israel was free to deny the Palestinians the right of return, attack the Palestinians in the refugee camps in Gaza and Jordan, accelerate the influx of Jewish colonists into Israel, augment its military superiority over the Arabs, and engage in frequent attacks against Arab targets.    Anything that provoked Arab belligerence would bring rich payment offs in higher levels of American support.  (emphasize added)

page 193.....The value of annual economic and military assistance to Israel increased dramatically in 1970 and 1974, never dipped below $ 3 billion between 1985 and 2000, and has declined only trivially since then. Moreover, Israel has received this aid on terms that are not available to other recipients. For many years now, the Congress has approved aid commitments to Israel automatically, without any discussion or dissent. Israel has received all its aids in the form of grants since 1985, spends most of it on weapon systems, receives all of the assistance at the beginning of each year, bypasses the Department of Defence in making military purchases..............

page 200.....The equation of the Jewish lobby with a narrowly defined "pressure group" is misleading. We have argued - a position that is well supported by the evidence - that Jewish protagonists of Zionism have worked through many different channels to influence public opinion, the composition of political classes, and political decisions. They work through the institutions and media that shape public opinion to determine what Americans know about Israel, how they think about Israel, and what they can say about Israel. (emphasize added)
Once we recognize the scale of the financial resources the Israel lobby commands, the array of political forces it can mobilize, and the tools it commands to direct public opinion on the Middle East, we would shrink from calling it a lobby.