Norman Finkelstein Quotes
Israel has been a stage on which American Jews have played out their fantasies of toughness - often from Martha's Vineyard.
Finkelstein, Norman. Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End. OR Books, 2012.
He also expressed his pleasure with the British Balfour Declaration granting the Jews their own country in part of Palestine ({594001}). Wilson had earlier committed himself to support the Zionist claim for Palestine. See {585124}.
This is the first statement of a Jewish nation since Biblical Times.
Mr. Brandeis was Louis D. Brandeis, first Jewish Supreme Court Justice and one of the leading Zionist world leaders. Theodor Herzel is generally credited with being the father of Zionism but his treatise was written in 1895. Four years earlier, Blackstone, a Methodist Evangelical Minister, had drafted what has come to be called the Blackstone Memorial, which was a petition to President Benjamin Harrison to have American foreign policy work to return the Jews to Palestine where they would have a state and government. The petition was signed by over 400 notables. Straus, Brandeis and other Jewish Zionists credited Blackstone even though history has almost forgotten him. See {614860} for quotes from the Blackstone Memorial.
The advocacy of the Jewish Return to the Holy Land was not first suggested or stated by European Jewish Zionists. Brightman was not only the first Christian to urge the return of the Jews, but the secon person of any faith to suggest it. He was only preceded by a Jewish refugee from the Spanish Inquisition--Joseph Nasi in 1561.
This quotation is very surprising for most people. Reading the text alone, most of us would assume that it came from someone when the Zionist movement was fighting for a Jewish homeland in what is now Israel. Or just before the UN decision in 1947 to partition Palestine. However, it came from one of our founding fathers in Colonial times. Adams was by no means the only Founding Father with this point of view. Fundamentalist Protestants have put much credence in God’s granting the area for the Jewish People—then as today.
Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist, former professor, and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007.
