Examples of Hate Speech

[Rootsie]

"During the 1970's and 1980's a very successful divestment campaign was waged in the US and Europe which undoubtedly had an effect on the end of Apartheid. The Israeli occupation of Palestine and destruction of human rights and democracy is at least as severe as that of the South Africans. A similar moral and political response is in order at this time."
(Daniel Boyarin, some date around 2005)

"A tour of Gush Katif presents the disengagement in a different light. A group of 7,500 people turned the life of the 1.3 million Arabs into a hell. They appropriated a large percentage of the land and the water and cut off the residents of Khan Yunis from the sea. The roads are for Israelis only; the local residents travel on twisting dirt roads strewn with roadblocks. The occupation has caused an employment rate of 60 percent! One factory in the settlement of Kfar Darom (an enclave inside the Dir al-Balah refugee camp) uses more water to wash bugs out of lettuce than all the drinking water allotted for the residents of the refugee camp. Apartheid at its most shameful."
(Nehemia Strasler, 22 April 2005)

"The farmers of Gush Katif are demanding an increase to the compensation offered them. They have forgotten the generous government assistance they received when they came to the Gush: Grants, loans and free land. Nor are they talking about what pains them the most: The cost of labor. At present, they pay residents of Khan Yunis who work in their hothouses NIS 40 for a long and hard day's work: Shameful exploitation in conditions of slavery. When they move northward they will be forced to pay the minimum wage. Is such a scandal possible?

Therefore, before we pity them, we should pity the Jewish people, which has paid for this superfluous adventure in blood and money, and only now, belatedly, has decided to put an end to the disgraceful apartheid in the Gaza Strip."
(Nehemia Strasler, 22 April 2005)

"We, the (undersigned) professors and lecturers in British universities in consultation with the Anti-Apartheid Movement:
   1    Protest against the bans imposed on Professors Simons and Roux;
   2    Protest against the practice of racial discrimination and its extension to higher education;
   3    Pledge that we shall not apply for or accept academic posts in South African universities which practise racial discrimination.
(Various British academics, 1965)

"I think that it [the academic boycott of South Africa] has certainly made a number of people sit up and take notice, especially the so-called liberal universities. They thought that just as a matter of right they would find acceptance because they were allowing blacks into their establishments. I mustn't belittle them too much, I think that they did stand up for academic freedom and so forth, but I don't think myself actually that they were sufficiently vigorous and the boycott helped to knock sense into their heads, to realise that they did have a role in seeking to undermine that vicious system [apartheid].

I would, I think, now still say that we maintain [the academic boycott] insofar as, if for instance academics from here [Britain] want to go to South Africa then you want to look at who is inviting them. Under whose auspices are they going? Are they going to institutions that have a good track record in their opposition to apartheid? But I would say that as things begin to ease up, this ought perhaps to be one of the first of the constraints that goes to give some of these people the reward.

But I would myself say it is important for academics outside of South Africa also to say they want to reward places like UWC [University of the Western Cape] which stuck their necks out and then let these others get the crumbs that remain from the table.

... [UWC has made] a quite deliberate political commitment [to support the liberation struggle.] ... The present Vice-Chancellor, Professor [Jakes] Gerwel, at his installation ... said it was going to become the intellectual home of the left, which obviously put many cats amongst several pigeons. But what he was really saying was that too many of our ... institutions have pretended that there is a kind of neutrality, which people claim is the right position for intellectual educational institutions, whereas that neutrality or supposed neutrality is really a support of the status quo. ... Jakes was saying, especially at a time when it was unpopular, 'We are on the side of the downtrodden, we are going to work for the upliftment of our people.' We [Tutu was Chancellor of the UWC] were the first university to give an honorary degree to someone who in popular parlance amongst whites had been a terrorist, Mr Govan Mbeki. Now of course other places are suddenly getting onto that particular bandwagon. One university has decided that it is going to give an honorary degree to Nelson Mandela. But of course now it is popular to do so."
(Desmond Tutu, June 1990)

"[Regarding the Palestinian rebel courts during the Great Revolt:] their justice and common sense does not appear to me to be inferior and their expedition is demonstrably superior to that of H.M.G."
(Elliot David Forster, some date in 1936-39)

"Another American, security coordinator William Ward, who is described as a "square general," is having a hard time understanding how the demand for Abu Mazen to make order in his house fits in with the chaos that the Israeli political mechanism is encouraging in the Palestinian security mechanisms."
(Akiva Eldar, 26 April 2005)

"Haim Yifrag is one of them [the settlers in Netzarim in the Gaza Strip]. He grows organic cherry tomatoes for export to Marks & Spencer."
(Chris McGreal, 30 April 2005)

"I can understand and even support an academic boycott in the framework of a total and global economic, political and cultural boycott till Israel will not withdrawal to the lines before the 1967 war. This is the real SA model that was indeed utile and succeeded."
(Baruch Kimmerling, 30 April 2005)

"I had to fight with my friends (in London), on the issue of Jewish socialism to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadruth; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there."
(David Hacohen, 15 November 1969)

"To buy dozens of dunams from an Arab is permitted but to sell, God forbid, one Jewish dunam to an Arab is prohibited."
(David Hacohen, 15 November 1969)

"Stone-throwing by the undercover forces is part of the way in which they operate in such instances [peaceful Palestinian demonstrations which the IDF wishes to disrupt]."
(Lieutenant-Colonel Tzahi, 28 April 2005)

"Military sources [Lieutenant Colonel Tzahi] … added that the undercover forces had only started throwing stones after Palestinian youths had adopted such tactics. 'Stone-throwing by the undercover forces is part of the way in which they operate in such instances,' the sources said."
(Arnon Regular, 29 April 2005)

"Someone up there in the occupation echelons must have studied Ben Kingsley's film long before "the Gandhi Project" got started and reached the conclusion that nonviolent resistance is not in Israel's interest. To thwart this threat, Israel employs soldiers whose task is to turn a peaceful demonstration into a violent one, by infiltrating it undercover and throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. During the demonstration, the army uses these stones as a pretext to break the demonstration by force, using tear gas, salt, or rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition. In the aftermath, this stone-throwing – pictured by army photographers who surely don't miss the stones thrown by their own comrades – enters the world media as propaganda, depicting the peaceful demonstrators as dangerous stone-throwers."
(Ran HaCohen, 2 May 2005)

"In a state that respects the law, this college [the College of Judea and Samaria] would never have been founded in the first place. Its establishment constitutes a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention, which Israel tries to ignore."
(Gideon Levy, 8 May 2005)

"Sharon cannot cancel the evacuation, lest he ignite George Bush's rage. But nor can he actually go through with it. That's the perfect situation as far as he is concerned: an eternal limbo, an evacuation that neither lives nor dies."
(Amir Oren, 10 May 2005)

"The taboo has been shattered at last. From now on it will be acceptable to compare Israel's apartheid system to its South African predecessor."
(Omar Barghouti, 12 May 2005)

"I had the same, only greater, differences of opinion with Noam Chomsky, who is my personal friend for quite a time, on the subject of AIPAC and the influence of the Jewish lobby in general as you have. What is more, a number of mutual friends of Chomsky and me have also tried to influence him, in vain, on that point.
I am afraid that he is, with all his wonderful qualities and the work he does, quite dogmatic on many things. I have no doubt that his grievous mistake about the lack of importance of AIPAC, which he repeats quite often, helps the Zionists very much as you so graphically described."
(Israel Shahak, May 2005)

"Over the years Congress has been at the ready to give Israel additional funding, even when money has been unavailable for essential domestic programs, as happened in 2002 when the Senate, after defeating a bill that would have provided $150 million for inner-city schools that had been impacted by 9-11, turned around and tucked an additional $200 million for Israel into the Homeland Security Bill as if Israel had been targeted that day and not New York and Washington."
(Jeffrey Blankfort, May 2005)

"The settler associations in the Old City are partially supported by donors, but most of their budgets come from public and government money, as when the St. John's Hostel was purchased with funds provided by then-housing minister David Levy."
(Danny Rubinstein, 15 May 2005)

"We still need this truth today, the truth of the power of war, or at least we need to accept that war is inescapable, because without this, the life of the individual has no purpose."
(Yitzhak Shamir, some date before 1996)

"What did bring down the racist regime in South Africa was the general boycott - economic, political, military and cultural - a boycott of which the academic component was minuscule, and not a separate element.

If we cannot rid ourselves of the affliction of the occupation itself - and by the way, in South Africa an effective white anti-apartheid movement did crystalize, completing the external pressure that brought down the system - it is better to initiate a widespread external form of pressure, not a boycott that will further weaken Israeli civil society.

Ostensibly, a general boycott of the regime in Israel is not possible as long as the (almost) total support of the U.S. in our self-destructive policy is assured.

Nevertheless, there are signs that even this situation might change gradually, especially if the regime continues to commit systematic and systemic acts of stupidity like the upgrading of the Ariel College. If so, there is a real chance for a change in internal public opinion as well, which may make it worthwhile even for Israeli academe to suffer from the boycott until we purify ourselves completely from the impurity of the occupation."
(Baruch Kimmerling, 17 May 2005)

"I do not admit… that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia… by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race… has come in and taken its place."
(Winston S. Churchill, 1937)

"In other words, AP had video footage of an Israeli soldier specifically and intentionally shooting a young Palestinian boy who was not attacking them, and they erased it. I don’t know how often they do this."
(Alison Weir, July 2005)

"we felt that it was highly misleading that stories with a Palestinian byline and West Bank dateline were being written by Israeli and Jewish correspondents living in Israel—that one ethnic group in the conflict actually wrote news stories purported to be by reporters from the other ethnic group in the dispute."
(Alison Weir, July 2005)

"I’m a Jew before being a journalist, before someone pays me to write. If I find a negative thing about Israel, I will not print it and I will sink into why did it happen and what can I do to change it. ... [Even even if I eventually write about negative incidents that happen in Israel, I would try to find the way] to shift the blame."
(Uzi Safanov, 2001)

"On campus there is already so much anti-Israeli sentiment that we have to be careful about any additional criticism against Israel. This is our responsibility as Jews, which obviously contradicts our responsibilities as journalists."
(Marita Gringaus, November 2001)

"As a journalist in the 1970s, I found that a rigid bias against objective reporting and in favor of Israel was a prerequisite for employment with a daily newspaper in the Cox chain. I never understood why, since I saw no evidence the major advertisers in the media market were Zionists."
(John Wheat Gibson, 2005)

"They reinforce that, as Jews in the media, you have responsibly to help Israel. This is not reporting; this is PR. I am Zionist, but it doesn't mean you can't be critical of what happens in Israel."
(Deborah Meyers, November 2001)

"Freedom to produce and exchange knowledge and idea was deemed sacrosanct regardless of the prevailing conditions. There are two key faults in this argument. It is inherently biased because it only regards as worthy the academic freedom of Israelis. The fact that Palestinians are denied basic rights as well as academic freedom due to Israel’s military occupation is lost on those parroting it."
(Omar Barghouti, 31 May 2005)

"For decades, Israeli academic institutions have been complicit in Israel’s colonial and racist policies. Funded by the government, they have consistently and organically contributed to the military-security establishment, and, therefore, to perpetuating its crimes, its abuse of Palestinian human rights and its distinct system of apartheid."
(Omar Barghouti, 31 May 2005)

"Not only do most Israeli academics defend or justify their state’s colonial narrative, they play a more active role in the process of oppression. Almost all of them obediently serve in the occupation army’s reserve forces every year, thereby participating in, or at least witnessing in silence, crimes committed with impunity against Palestinian civilians. In the last 38 years of Israel’s illegal occupation, very few of them have conscientiously objected to military service in the occupied territories. Those who have politically opposed the colonization of Palestinian land in any public form have also remained in a depressingly tiny minority."
(Omar Barghouti, 31 May 2005)

"I will be the first to admit that Israeli academic institutions are part and parcel of the oppressive Israeli state that has … committed grave crimes against the Palestinian people."
(Baruch Kimmerling, 26 April 2005)

"… the Israelis have just announced that they are going to destroy nearly 100 Palestinian dwellings. This comes a couple months after they announced they were going to build 3500 new dwellings on Palestinian land. What other government in the world is behaving this way with its neighbors?"
(Juan Cole, 1 June 2005)

"As could be predicted, the reaction of the Israeli Right to Yavin's documentary was to demand that he be fired. Cultists always want to intimidate people into silence. If they can't do that, they want to make them careful what they say. If they can't do that, they try to deprive them of a place to say it. If they can't do that, they demand that the person be fired. If that doesn't work, they smear the person with all sorts of falsehoods in hopes of discrediting the critic with the media and the thinking public. All cults use the same methods. Because they insist on being the only voice heard on the issues of importance to them, and they are completely ruthless and single-minded in accomplishing this goal of effective censorship."
(Juan Cole, 1 June 2005)

"In terms of the Zionist ethos, the best work was done in the south. If not for that work, Ahmed and Mustafa would now be holding a discussion about us, and I prefer me holding a discussion about Ahmed and Mustafa. ... Anyone who tells you that there was no ethnic cleansing here will be lying, and anyone who tells you that without the ethnic cleansing Israel would have been established will also be lying."
(Yair Farjun, 3 June 2005)

"In the present reality, I see difficulty in producing a stable situation of end-of-conflict within that paradigm [the two-state solution]. [A two-state solution is] not relevant. It is a story that the Western world tells with Western eyes. And that story does not comprehend the scale of the gap and the scale of the problem. We, too, are sweeping it under the carpet."
(Moshe Ya'alon (Yaalon), 1 June 2005)

"Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin has decided that the legislature will not determine the procedures to be used for returning real estate which belonged to Holocaust victims to their heirs [because it] could lead to the creation of a precedent by which Palestinian refugees could demand a return of property"
(Amiram Barkat, 7 June 2005)

"I don't care about occupying the land. I supported the Allon plan. I think Israel was entitled to make border adjustments to secure its safety. I think the terrible mistake made in 1967 was to fail to distinguish between the annexation of the land, mostly unoccupied land, and the occupation of the cities."
(Alan Morton Dershowitz, 8 June 2005)

"Judea and Samaria [West Bank] and the Gaza area are lands seized during warfare, and are not part of Israel."
(High Court of Justice (Bagatz), 8 June 2005)

"The international community cannot turn a blind eye to the continued discrimination against Palestinians in their own homeland. What we witnessed on our trip this weekend is worse than the apartheid regime in South Africa."
(John Gormley, 7 June 2005)

"You have to differentiate between Israelis [who are demonstrating against the fence]and Palestinians [who are doing the same]. Where there are Israelis, you don't fire rubber [coated bullets]."
(Tzachi Segev, 20 May 2005)

"Since 1967 we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people."
(Haim (Chaim/Hayim) Yavin, May 2005)

"Choosing not to cover an issue that is recognized by many as an important topic is actually making a very strong statement on what is our collective identity. This is exactly the case when the Israeli media decides not to cover the issue of the wall, though all the European media are focused on it."
(Daniel Dor, June 2005)

"There is, in Israel, an acute sense of being blamed by the whole world for whatever is happening in this part of the world. We, Israelis, think the whole world is blaming us for something that never happened. And it never happened because we didn't receive any information about it. And we didn't receive any information about it because if something sounds different from the mainstream Israeli narrative, then it is immediately reframed."
(Daniel Dor, June 2005)

[Rootsie]

"[Haim Yavin's public criticism of the occupation] is not the first time that a personality representing the general Israeli consensus expresses sudden criticism of the Israeli occupation. ... The most important element is what the public does with such a strong criticism of the Israeli machine. Yavin's reports will not change the audience's perception of the conflict but only their perception of Haim Yavin as a person. Now they know he is a leftist and this is where the public discussion stops."
(Daniel Dor, June 2005)

"Where were he [Haim Yavin] and his colleagues, the television broadcasters ... while the outrage was created - the nightmare that Yavin is now discovering? ... By criticizing the occupation, Yavin took one step to save his dignity. As a former director of Israel Television and the head of its news department he was part of a system that is hiding the truth about the territories from the Israeli public."
(Gideon Levy, June 2005)

"In Israel there is strong self-censorship on behalf of the media, which is much more dangerous than any government or military censorship."
(Gideon Levy, June 2005)

"[Israelis] half-truths and sometimes even lies. European citizens know better what is happening in the Palestinian territories than most Israelis who live only a few kilometres away."
(Gideon Levy, June 2005)

"Since that time [when Barak started lying about the Camp David negotiations in 2000] the Palestinians have been constantly suffering and their agony has had no echo in the Israeli media. On the Israeli side, the media only shows the suffering of its own people, ignoring the roots of terror, which is the Israeli occupation. For this [state of affairs], every Israeli citizen is responsible as these actions are taken in their name."
(Gideon Levy, June 2005)

"Before anything changes in the Israeli media's coverage of the territories, we will have to go through much more blood and many more lies."
(Gideon Levy, June 2005)

"The Baer/Baron debate, then, revolved around issues of unity versus diversity of Jewish fates, choices, and identities. Little, if any, residue of this debate still exists, unfortunately. This is due, in part, to the Holocaust ..., but also thanks to a remarkable propaganda success of the Zionists, who have made world Jewry align with their view. Question the singularity of the State of Israel as the ultimate expression of Jewish nationalism, and you risk being accused of anti-Semitism; do so as a Jew, and you should expect to be dubbed a self-hater."
(Yosef (Yosi) Grodzinsky, 7 June 2005)

"The Holocaust put an end to the intense debate regarding the relationship between the Jew and the forming Zionist entity. In its shadow, it has often been said, Jews could no longer be safe anywhere but in Eretz Yisrael, their homeland. Jews, on this view, should either live in the Jewish national home in Palestine, or support it vigorously, because it is their fallback option, should all hell break loose. I have been hearing the rhetoric about Israel’s role as a “safe haven” for Jews in danger since my childhood; rarely have I heard the opposite position, one that’s in fact valid today, to my mind: that the State of Israel and its actions actually put world Jewry at risk."
(Yosef (Yosi) Grodzinsky, 7 June 2005)

"It is important to see the utilitarian logic behind the Zionist stance: As the ultimate goal was to populate Palestine with multitudes of Jews, they tried to target weak Jewish populations. Strong communities were less interested in Palestine immigration: When things are good, as they were in America (relatively speaking, of course), why move to a war zone? Thus a decision was made to focus on the Jewish DP camps, and envoys were dispatched to Germany, driven by Ben-Gurion’s vision to bring 250,000 survivors from Germany to Palestine. If this is the goal, then a Jew heading west is not an asset. This is why the Zionists objected to initiatives aimed at evacuating Jewish child survivors from Germany right after the war. This is a shocking affair. Several thousand sick, malnourished, and vulnerable orphans, still at great risk, were forced by the Zionists to stay in the camps, even though arrangements were made for them to arrive to safety in England and France."
(Yosef (Yosi) Grodzinsky, 7 June 2005)

"Serious manpower shortages led the Israelis to look for volunteers for the IDF in the DP camps. Survivors were reluctant: “We have already smelled fire,” said many “let others smell it now.” The failure to recruit volunteers led to a forced conscription, officially enacted on April 11th, 1948. It brought 7,800 new draftees to Palestine, a significant addition to the fighting army. I recognize that the thought of a Zionist forced conscription in the U.S. controlled zone of Germany sounds insane. Yet it actually happened, as massive documentation I discovered in the Jewish DP archives in New York and Tel Aviv indicates: The American military government quite generously let the DPs run their camps as almost fully autonomous localities; Zionist survivors, together with envoys from Palestine, organized and took control of these camps early on, as I detail in the book. When the time came, they could exercise this control, sending holocaust survivors to fight in a land they had never seen, whose language they did not speak, and most importantly, for a cause they did not necessarily support."
(Yosef (Yosi) Grodzinsky, 7 June 2005)

"As rabbi Michael Lerner, in his preface to my book, puts it “Zionist arrogance did not start with the Palestinians”. Primo Levi, in his book The Truce, tells about a post-war incident where Zionists hooked up an extra car to a train he was riding on his long way home from Auschwitz. They were focused, self-assured, confident, he writes. They did not ask anyone whether they could connect their car to the train – they just did it. Many good things happen in this way. But not always. Regarding Holocaust survivors, the Zionists were focused, clear headed, with a coherent plan. That’s no small matter. Yet this self-assurance – ever so familiar to many a reader I’m sure – has also led to much suffering and destruction."
(Yosef (Yosi) Grodzinsky, 7 June 2005)

"The Palestinian people today have all the attributes of nationhood. They have national consciousness. They have territorial continuity where most of the Palestinians live. They have a Palestinian history of decades, marked by struggles and wars. They have a diaspora with a strong affinity to their birthplace. They have national awareness of a common disaster, common victims, sufferings and heroes. The nation has a vision, its own literature and poetry. The Arab Palestinian nation is perhaps the nation with the most obvious signs of identity and the strongest national unity, among the Arab nations. This nation consists of some two million Arabs, half of them in the occupied territories on the western bank of the Jordan and the other half on the eastern bank of the Jordan. Some of them are dispersed throughout the Arab world. ... [It is paradoxical] that Zionism was the reason for the creation of the Palestinian nation, but the Palestinian nation must be seen as a fait accompli. ... [In 1967, Israel went to war against neighbouring countries but] the problem of our ties with the Palestinian Arabs now takes precedence in the complex of our ties with the Arab world. It is more important than the problem of our ties with the Arab world and therein lies the key to solving our problems with the countries of the region."
(Aryeh/Arie (Lova) Eliav, November 1968)

"As far as those refugees who remained inside the territory under Israeli control, we can do something to solve the situation now. ... We have a moral obligation to do this since Israel's independence was achieved at their expense and they paid with their bodies, their property and their future... They are the victims of our independence."
(Amos Elon, 18 June 1967)

"Machsom Watch activists say they have seen the idea behind the checkpoints policy actually written in a military document: Keeping the Palestinian population under permanent uncertainty. Precisely the same principle, then, used to "break down" recruits during basic training, is applied to an entire population, children and adults, women and men, sick and elderly."
(Ran HaCohen, 15 June 2005)

"There can be little doubt that if Palestine were overrun by the Nazis nothing less than complete annihilation would be the lot of the Jews of this country."
(Moshe Shertok, 17 April 1942)

"On nearly every front and in nearly every battle, the Jewish side had the advantage over the Arabs in terms of planning, organization, operation of equipment, and also in the number of trained fighters who participated in the battle."
(Eyal Naveh, 1999)

"A senior Interior Ministry official said the difference between former Population Administration director Herzl Gedge and current director [Sassi] Katzir is that Gedge considered preventing the entry of non-Jews to be a matter of principle."
(Shahar Ilan, 4 July 2005)

"This is a good foundation for a discussion of the question of whether there ever was a 'true Zionism' that did not dispossess the Arabs of this land."
(Tom Segev, 27 May 2005)

"I really don't like the plan to destroy everything... We wanted the disengagement to bear a message of the budding of reconciliation. We didn't want a message of nakba; but here they are going for a D-9 [bulldozer] solution. I find that appalling. It goes against history... We are going to leave behind an area that will look like it has been hit with an atom bomb... In my opinion, it's a nightmare. This is not what peace looks like; this is what war looks like."
(Yonatan Bassi, July 2005)

"The fence was born, first and foremost, to prevent them from continuing to murder us ... [It] also makes [Jerusalem] more Jewish."
(Haim Ramon, 11 July 2005)

"The fence was born, first and foremost, to prevent them from continuing to murder us ... [It] also makes it [Jerusalem] more Jewish. The safer and more Jewish Jerusalem will be, it can serve as a true capital of the state of Israel."
(Haim Ramon, 11 July 2005)

"When I raised the issue of the alternative route [for the wall], [the head of the Civil Administration, Brigadier General Ilan] Paz openly admitted that the alternative route was irrelevant because the consideration in determining the route is demographic."
(Daniel (Danny) Seidemann (Zeidman), June 2005)

"At the end of June 1967, the committee of directors general for Jerusalem affairs decided that the inhabitants of East Jerusalem would receive only services that had previously been provided by the Jordanian authorities, at the same level and to the same extent."
(Akiva Eldar, 12 July 2005)

"Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness."
(Menachem Mendel Schneerson, 1965)

"If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value. There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life."
(Yitzhak Ginsburgh, 26 April 1996)

"The difference in the attitudes about non-Jews in the Halacha and the Cabbala is well illustrated by the difference expressed specifically in regard to non-Jews who have converted to Judaism. The Halacha, although discriminating against them in some ways, treats converts as new Jews. The Cabbala is unable to adopt this approach because of its emphasis upon the cosmic difference between Jews and non-Jews. The Cabbala explains that converts are really Jewish souls consigned firstly to non-Jewish bodies as punishments and later redeemed by conversion to Judaism either because the punishment ended or because a holy man interceded. This explanation is part of cabbalistic belief in metempsychosis, which is absent in the Halacha. According to the Cabbala, a satanic soul cannot be transformed into a divine soul by mere persuasion."
(Israel Shahak, 1999)

"The result may well be absurd and intolerable. While every Jew in America and the Ukraine who has never lived in Israel will be able to immigrate with his non-Jewish spouse in accordance with the Law of Return, an Israeli citizen, Jew or Arab, will be forced to emigrate from here if he/she chooses to marry a non-Jew."
(Haaretz editorial writer, 15 July 2005)

"Israel will act in a very resolute manner in order to prevent terror attacks and [militant] fire while the disengagement is being implemented. If pinpoint response proves insufficient, we may have to use weaponry that causes major collateral damage, including helicopters and planes, with mounting danger to surrounding people."
(Eival Giladi, 22 June 2005)

"Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be helped to leave the areas that have been conquered."
(Moshe Carmel, 31 October 1948)

"There is a reason to believe that what is being done . . . is being done out of certain political objectives and not only out of military necessities, as they claim sometimes. In fact, the transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs from the boundaries of the Jewish state is being implemented . . . the evacuation/clearing out of [Palestinian] Arab villages is not always done out of military necessity. The complete destruction of the villages is not always done only because there are no sufficient forces to maintain a garrison."
(Aharon Cohen, 10 May 1948)

"Most of them [the Palestinians on the West Bank] can be driven out. If the numbers were smaller it would be easier, but the problem can be solved in principle. It would not be a humane move, but war in general is not a humane matter."
(Yitzhak Rabin, a week before he was appointed GOC Northern Command in 1956)

"The battle cannot end at this moment. If it stops now, before a decisive position is reached, we must be aware that the casualties might be in vain, and that we have no way of being sure that the war will not break out again, after a period of calm. Right now the objective is to see that the Israeli army’s historical victory will bring true peace."
(Uri Avnery, June 1967)

"This war cannot end without an action against the Syrians. We must either fight against them or receive an immediate surrender as a clear and open admission of defeat of the policy of 'popular war of liberation'."
(Uri Avnery, June 1967)

"At the beginning of last week, the government decided to speed up the construction of the separation fence in the Jerusalem area, which will also surround and imprison the residents of three East Jerusalem neighborhoods: the Shoafat refugee camp, and the Salaam and Dar Khamis neighborhoods in Anata. For more than a year and a half from the time the route was set, the state was in no hurry to build, and it delayed replying to the petitions filed by attorney Danny Seideman on behalf of neighborhood residents. Now, when all the spotlights are on the incidents surrounding the disengagement, the state is rushing to construct a concrete wall and watchtowers, which have cut off the residents from their city and their entire way of life."
(Amira Hass, 21 July 2005)

"One implication of this belief is that questions of borders automatically assume cosmic proportions. The very discussion among Jews of the possibility of relinquishing land is abhorrent. To express the intimate bonds they feel to the land, fundamentalists commonly invoke images of the Land of Israel as a living being. Territorial concessions and the destruction of settlements then become 'the severing of a limb from a living body,' as Rabbi Chaim Druckman, a member of the Knesset and a disciple of Kook, said in 1982 in condemning Israel's withdrawal from the Yamit district of the northeastern Sinai peninsula."
(Ian Lustick, Fall 1987)

"We Jews were driven away from the Holy Land and scattered all over the world because we had fallen short of the task God conferred upon us. We had been chosen by Him to preach his word, but in our stubborn pride, we began to believe that He had made us a chosen nation for our own sake and thus we betrayed Him."
(Jacob Israel De Haan, 1922)

"And there is yet another abomination that even the Berlin Wall did not lay claim to: the intention of ethnic dilution. It was not accidental that the line was chosen to leave on the other side 130 thousand registered Jerusalemites. 55 thousand of them actually live inside the Metropolitan area, 70 thousand in the periphery. It was not unintentional to increase the burden on the Palestinians on both sides. And it was not unintentional that the government established a ‘Community Administration’ to treat this population, a decision that is a cynical and hypocritical joke. ‘Hospitals will be erected, travel will be organized, the border crossings will be made easier, post office branches will be set up along with representative offices of the Ministry of Interior….’ Everything that has not been done over the last thirty years will now be done, to celebrate the completion of the wall."
(B. Michael (pen name for Michael Barizon), 12 July 2005)

"The Jewish population [of Palestine] contains many persons at least as intelligent as the average British official, while masses of the Arabs are entirely illiterate and little removed in intelligence from the donkeys these gentle people habitualy accelerate with the aid of rusty nails."
(Frederick Hermann Kisch, 28 August 1929)

"I think that the Jewish people have a mission: to bring an example of culture to the world. By culture I mean the example of living with your neighbor in peace. These teachings were started with the Ten Commandments. In the beginning, Jewish law was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But in the later centuries you had the practice of forgiveness and all the ethics, which eventually summarized in the Sermon on the Mount. In Jewish thinking, the mission of Zionism was to live the Judaic law and to live in peace."
(Joseph William Abileah, early 1970s)

"Kibbutzes? They are colonial communities based on a fundamental lie."
(Ilan Halevi, 2000)

"If a man can satisfy four women at the same time, then good for him."
(Yaish ben Yahia, 2000)

[Rootsie]

"Israel, in fact, is no different than racist South Africa as long as it presents itself as Jewish state instead of a state of all its citizens."
(Shulamit Aloni, July 2005)

"Since it is difficult for the refugees here to communicate with the outside world, we have an obligation to convey what we can of their opinions and thinking at the present time...

Above all else, they desire to go home -- back to their lands and villages which, in many cases, are very close. Apparently, they do not hesitate to go back to the changed culture which is growing in Israel. This desire naturally continues to be the strongest demand they make; sixteen months of exile has not diminished it. Without it, they would have nothing for which to live. It is expressed in many ways and forms every day. 'Why keep us alive?' -- is one expression of it. It is as genuine and deep as a man's longing for his home can be. In the minds of the refugees resettlement is not even considered."
(AFSC Gaza Unit, 12 October 1949)

"It is important no to idealize Ahad Ha'am. ... Unlike [Martin] Buber, he did argue that the Jews must be a majority in Palestine. He could be racist. He objected, for example, to the suggestion in [Herzl's novel] Altneuland that a homeland for the Jews should lead to liberation and nationhood for the 'negroes' of Africa."
(Jacqueline Rose, 30 April 2005)

"We owe it to ourselves to be cruel. Let us once master the situation and we will be able to say: let the massacres happen, but we, we save the Yishuv before all else, we uphold its future because today it is in the Yishuv, and only there, that the desriny of our people is alive."
(World Zionist Organization, 8 May 1922)

"I have accepted as mine the state of Israel, the form of the new Jewish community that has arisen from the war. I have nothing in common with those Jews who imagine that they may contest the factual shape which Jewish independence has taken."
(Martin Buber, 1963)

"Like Buber, one of my father's relatives (Leon Roth), was a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem at the time. He also witnessed the atrocities committed against the Palestinian Arabs in the name of the 'Jewish State'. Unlike his colleague Buber, however, he resigned his post and returned to Britain. Buber, on the other hand, sold out."
(Uri Davis, March-June 2002)

"Is it really necessary that the lives of two nations living together in one place depend on the solely political concepts of majority and minority? Has not the time come to try to put the concept in different terms? And isn't it possible that this particular location and our particular situation may be just the circumstances in which to begin trying? True, it is very difficult, very, very difficult; it demands tremendous daring, and in order to accomplish it courageous and independent thinking is required, capable of formulating a new means to achieve new goals. But whoever knows our situation thoroughly, knows that we have no other choice; only here, if anywhere lies the true path--all other paths are deceptive."
(Martin Buber, 1962)

"Our national desire to renew the life of the people of Israel in their ancient homeland however is not aimed against any other people. As we enter the sphere of world history once more, and become once more the standard bearers of our own fate, the Jewish people, who have constituted a persecuted minority in all the countries of the world for two thousand years, reject with abhorrence the methods of nationalistic domination, under which they themselves have so long suffered. We do not aspire to return to the land of Israel with which we have inseparable historical and spiritual ties in order to suppress another people or to dominate them."
(Martin Buber, 1921)

"In an article he published in Ma'ariv on August 12, 1987, Mr. Sharon confirmed that as minister of defense, he planned Operation Peace for Galilee such that it was intended from the outset to bring the IDF to the outskirts of Beirut. As to the question of whether Mr. Sharon misled the prime minister on this point, that can be answered by posing another question: Did prime minister Menachem Begin know, when Operation Peace for Galilee was launched, that the IDF intended to reach the outskirts of Beirut? Based on the above, the answer is that he did not. The prime minister intended to carry out an operation of the scope that was authorized by the cabinet, that is, up to 40 kilometers from the Israeli border, and with an estimated duration of two days."
(Benny Begin, 1996)

"Menachem Begin knew very well that he had been duped by Sharon."
(Uzi Benziman, 17 May 1991)

"In an affidavit submitted by Colonel (res.) Ilan Wechselbaum, the colonel testifies that he heard Sharon order Major-General Avigdor Ben-Gal to attack the First Syrian Division and then promise Prime Minister Begin on the phone that our forces would move carefully so as not to provoke a clash with the Syrians."
(Moshe Negbi, 23 August 2002)

"To say that Arik Sharon doesn't tell the truth is about as necessary as saying the sun rises every day."
(Yechiel Kadishai, 1991)

"Only then will the old and young in our land realise how great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought from afar; whose homes we have inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest; the fruits of whose gardens, orchards and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we robbed, we put up houses of education, charity and prayer while we babble and rave about being the ‘people of the Book’ and the ‘light of the nations!’"
(Martin Buber, January 1961)

"We need for this land as many Jews as it is possible economically to absorb, but not in order to establish a majority against a minority."
(Martin Buber, 1946)

"Sharon and the Israeli leadership always try to make Israelis believe the lie that the Palestinians want to throw us to the sea. In fact, we are the ones who commit war crimes against humanity, and I hope Sharon will face justice."
(Shulamit Aloni, July 2005)

"I want to note that National Union Knesset Member Benny Elon recently said that settlers intend to embitter the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank, until they emigrate from here. I see testament to that in the existence of an IDF unit comprising radical religious soldiers, who are no different than animals in their daily behavior."
(Shulamit Aloni, 29 July 2005)

"the terror utilized by Israel in the territories is worse than Palestinian terrorism"
(Shulamit Aloni, July 2005)

"We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course the Arabs attacked us in August. Since they have no armies, they could not obey the rules of war. We are obliged to look into the deeper causes of this revolt. We have been in Palestine for twelve years without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people. ... We have set ourselves goals which by their very nature had to lead to conflict with the Arabs. We ought to have recognized that these goals would be the cause, the just cause, of a national uprising against us. [such as the fact that we have not] even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous peoples."
(Hans Kohn, 1929)

"On hearing screams in a room I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child's head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cut, but on seeing me he tried to aim the stroke at me, but missed; he was practically on the muzzle of my rifle. I shot him low in the groin. Behind him was a Jewish woman smothered in blood with a man I recognized as a[n Arab] police constable named Issa Sherif from Jaffa in mufti. He was standing over the woman with a dagger in his hand. He saw me and bolted into a room close by and tried to shut me out-shouting in Arabic, "Your Honor, I am a policeman." ... I got into the room and shot him."
(Raymond Oswald Cafferata, 1929)

"This government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the State of Israel."
(Harry S. Truman, 15 May 1948)

"The Arab ladies ask Lord Allenby to remember and tell this to his government ... The mothers, daughters, sisters of the Arab victims are gathered here to make the world witness the betrayal of the British. We want all the Arabs to remember that the British are the cause of our suffering and they should learn from the lesson."
(Tarab Abdul Hadi, 15 April 1933)

"The next massacre is brewing almost openly. .. it is clear to everyone that the [right-wing] rioters are attempting to ignite a fire as the evacuation of settlements approaches"
(Haaretz editorial writer, 28 March 2005)

"An underground, which might be even ridiculous, doesn't need the masses for a spectacular act. You can just put a gun in the hand of a young man, point out a target and he will execute the job. The damage might be heavy, because the beginning of violent and murderous activities in the state of Israel might be the beginning of a civil war."
(Nathan Yellin-Mor, 6 October 1978)

"I am not certain of the legal position, but what should be done - do it [the expulsion of the residents of the Moroccan Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem] quickly, and let the God of Israel be with you."
(Ya'akov (Ya'acov) Shimshon Shapira, June 1967)

"If Lord Shaftesbury was literally inexact in describing Palestine as a country without a people, he was essentially correct, for there is no Arab people living in intimate fusion with the country, utilising its resources and stamping it with a characteristic impress; there is at best an Arab encampment."
(Israel Zangwill, 1920)

"[The region is] a country without a nation [which should be matched to] a nation without a country ... Is there such a thing? To be sure there is, The ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!"
(Lord Shaftesbury, 30 July 1853)

"At present Palestine supports only six hundred thousand people, but, with proper cultivation it can easily maintain two and half millions. You are a people without a country; there is a country without a people. Be united. Fulfil the dreams of your old poets and patriarchs. Go back, - go back to the land of Abraham."
(John Lawson Stoddard, 1891)

"Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country. The regeneration of the soil would bring the regeneration of the people."
(Israel Zangwill, 1901)

"In the power of my authority as Military of Jerusalem, immediately after the city was liberated in 1967, I gave orders that Arab inhabitants be evacuated from the Western Wall area and from the Jewish quarter in the Old City. They were given, in agreement, alternative housing in Jerusalem and its environs."
(Shlomo Lahat, 26 July 2001)

"When James McDonald concluded his term as the first ambassador to Israel, a cynic remarked that a diplomat less openly friendly to Zionism might prove more advantageous to Israel."
(Marie Syrkin, 10 November 1951)

"Regarding the Galilee, Mr. [Moshe] Sharett already told you that about 100,000 Arabs still now live in the pocket of Galilee. Let us assume that a war breaks out. Then we will be able to cleanse the entire area of Central Galilee, including all its refugees, in one stroke. In this context let me mention some mediators who offered to give us the Galilee without war. What they meant was the populated Galilee. They didn’t offer us the empty Galilee, which we could have only by means of a war. Therefore if a war is extended to cover the whole of Palestine, our greatest gain will be the Galilee. It is because without any special military effort which might imperil other fronts, only by using the troops already assigned for the task, we could accomplish our aim of cleansing the Galilee."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1948)

"In this context let me mention the pioneering work of Erskin Childers [Irish journalist]. Childers was first to show that the Zionist claim that Arab propaganda had called on the Palestinians to run away from their homes was a gross lie. He inspected all broadcasts [the BBC recorded them and kept transcripts as did the American government] of the Arab radios of the time to find that no such call had ever been made."
(Israel Shahak, some date before 1999)

"the ideals of Hitler which I like: ethnic homogeneity, the possibility of exchange of ethnic minorities; the transfers of ethnic groups for the sake of an international order which for me are a particularly valuable feature."
(Yitzhak Tabenkin, some date before 1971)

"Our aim is the entire Land of Israel on both banks of the Jordan, whose borders are: from Lebanon to Sinai, from the desert to the sea. All this should become a Jewish state, dedicated to Jewish revival. ... [I hope] that some day the Arabs will be content to change their place of residence and will depart from here to another place."
(Yitzhak Tabenkin, March 1944)

"This feeling of solitude which resulted from the threat of extermination was one of the ‘secrets’ of our victory, and we must imprint it in our memories as a consideration in our decisions in the future."
(Yitzhak Tabenkin, 1967)

"This is something that determines the character of the nation… Jews too have committed Nazi acts."
(Aharon Zisling, December 1948)

"I only know that Sharett wrote in his diary, relating to the `stinking affair' in Egypt (in which Israeli agents placed bombs in movie theaters in Cairo, to cause conflict between Egypt and Britain), that `there was a similar case in Iraq.' He doesn't explain, but Sharett apparently suspected that the Mossad had tossed the grenade [which was thrown into the central synagogue in Baghdad in 1951]."
(Avi Shlaim, August 2005)

"For Ben-Gurion, the top priority was aliyah (immigration), and the large reservoir of Jews was no longer in Europe, but in the Arab countries. We are not refugees, nobody expelled us from Iraq, nobody told us that we were unwanted. But we are the victims of the Israeli-Arab conflict."
(Avi Shlaim, August 2005)

"I didn't feel shame, but I was astonished. I knew that in every country there's a gap between rhetoric and practice, but I don't know of any country where the gap is as great as in Israel. All the leaders speak about peace, Golda Meir used to say that she was willing to travel anywhere in the world to make peace. But these were not truthful words. In the archive, in the Israeli papers, I found that all the Arab leaders were practical people, people who wanted peace."
(Avi Shlaim, August 2005)

"Take, for example, Hosni Zaim [the Syrian chief of staff who took over the government in 1949 and was deposed a few months later]. He said that his ambition was to be the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel. He proposed an exchange of ambassadors, agreed to absorb a quarter of a million Palestinian refugees in Syria, but demanded that the border pass through the middle of Lake Kinneret. He didn't issue any ultimatum about the rest of the refugees. I was astonished by the Israeli reaction. Ben-Gurion said: First we'll sign a cease-fire agreement with Syria, then we'll see. That destroyed my childhood version. It's not that Ben-Gurion didn't want peace, he wanted peace, but on the basis of the status quo. Israel said at the time that there was nobody to talk to. The truth is that Israel was actually saying that there was nothing to talk about."
(Avi Shlaim, August 2005)

"He [Benny Morris ]went off his rocker, and expressed racist views. That undermines him as a scholar."
(Avi Shlaim, August 2005)

"According to Shlaim, the first 10 years of the State of Israel prove this argument. King Farouk of Egypt wanted an agreement, and Israel rebuffed him. King Abdullah of Jordan wanted an agreement, and Israel rebuffed him as well. We have already mentioned Zaim of Syria. Even the archenemy Nasser, writes Shlaim in one of the surprising revelations of the book, sent emissaries and even a personal letter to then-prime minister Sharett, to put out feelers for an agreement. He was also turned down out of hand."
(Meron Rapoport, 11 August 2005)

"The book [Avi Shlaim's "Iron Wall"] gives a clear sense of a state that could not get enough. Moshe Dayan, then chief of staff, pressed for war with Egypt to capture the Gaza Strip and Sharm el-Sheikh, and "raised a suggestion" to capture the West Bank. Yigal Allon pressed for remedying the "long-term mistake" made in 1948, by capturing and annexing the West Bank. Ben-Gurion toyed with this idea and once with another idea; in 1956, a moment before the Sinai Campaign, he explained his great dream to his new friends from France: Israel would occupy the Sinai Peninsula, take over the West Bank and dismantle the Kingdom of Jordan, and reach the Litani River in Lebanon, establishing a Maronite state in northern Lebanon. The entire Israeli leadership (with the exception of Moshe Sharett), says Shlaim, adopted the idea of the "iron wall." The only argument was about where to place it."
(Meron Rapoport, 11 August 2005)

"Bar-On was active in Peace Now, and he does not really have any argument with Shlaim as to the facts. He has a serious disagreement with him regarding Shlaim's interpretation of them. It's true that Israel rejected all the Arab proposals, he says, and it's true that up until May 1967, the Arabs had no real plan to attack Israel. But the Arab proposals were unacceptable, and the war was unavoidable, because the Arabs could not forget what the Israelis had done to them in 1948."
(Meron Rapoport, 11 August 2005)

"It's true that from 1955 on, Dayan pressed for war with Egypt. He begged the Old Man [Ben-Gurion] to embark on `a war of deterrence,' and the Old Man didn't agree. In December 1955, Dayan met with 50 officers and asked them who supported a war of deterrence. All of them, with one exception, voted in favor. Dayan didn't receive permission from Ben-Gurion to embark on a war of choice, but he did get permission to cause the situation to deteriorate. In one of the retaliation operations in the demilitarized area in Nitzana, he wanted to leave the forces in place until morning, in the hope that Egypt would attack."
(Mordechai (Moraleh) Bar-On, August 2005)

"Shlaim, on the other hand, considers Dayan and Ben-Gurion the source of all evil. Ben-Gurion was a wicked man, Dayan thought in terms of a perpetual conflict. Sharett was the only one who tried to fight them. He represented another school, a school that believed that dialogue with the Arabs was possible, that what Israel did, and even what Israel said, affected the dynamics of the conflict."
(Meron Rapoport, 11 August 2005)

"Sharett thought that if we behaved nicely, the Arabs wouldn't make trouble. And if we didn't behave nicely, Arab hatred would increase. I think that he was mistaken on two counts. There were 750,000 Palestinian refugees in Israel, we screwed them in 1948, they had good reasons for hatred, so what if we added another two or three kilos of hatred? If it was possible to carry out a good operation, it had to be done. The basic situation in the Arab world was refusal to accept the situation of 1948, and it was childish to think that anything would help."
(Mordechai (Moraleh) Bar-On, August 2005)

"Israel did not want to get peace under the minimal conditions that the Arabs were willing to discuss: the UN Partition Plan borders and the return of the refugees. Had we agreed to that, there would be no State of Israel today."
(Mordechai (Moraleh) Bar-On, August 2005)

"Shlaim told me when we were still in the cafe that since he was a child, Israel has looked to him like an 'Ashkenazi trick' of which he doesn't feel a part. 'I'm not certain even now that I know how that trick works.'"
(Meron Rapoport, 11 August 2005)

"The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was 'given' by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict."
(Bertrand Russell, February 1970)

[Rootsie]

"The extravagant physical variety in the streets of Israel suggests that the idea of "Zionist racism" is quaint. But if that is a malicious accusation, there is a deeper problem for Israel. The truth is that Zionism is not racism, it is colonialism. More than that, while it isn't ethnic nationalism posing as civic, it is colonialism posing as anti-colonialism."
(Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 8 August 2001)

"Zionism was a product of the heyday of European nationalism and imperialism and emerged at a time, it should be remembered, when those were both widely seen as progressive forces. Only in the 20th century did imperialism and "Eurocentricity", come to be thought the gravest of evils - and Zionism is inescapably Eurocentric."
(Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 8 August 2001)

"[My admiration for Israeli achievement is combined] with the strongest condemnation of her crime against the original Arab population and the campaign of lies she has waged ever since."
(Herbert Bernard Levin, 1955)

"In the early days of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl was candid in private about the possible need to remove the indigenous Arabs of Palestine but evasive in public, sometimes claiming that the Arabs would welcome the Zionists, sometimes ignoring them completely."
(Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 18 October 1999)

"All of this crept up unawares on the left, which in my lifetime has changed its tune on Israel and Palestine in a way that might even seem capricious. Anyone younger than 40 might not guess how popular Israel and Zionism once were on the left. An adulatory profile of David Ben-Gurion written in 1955 treated him as a noble hero, and reproached him only for having devoted his military force to conquering the empty Negev desert in 1948, when he 'might have cleared the hills of Samaria'. It also sympathised with Ben-Gurion's dread that Israelis might be 'Levantinised'. This did not appear in the Jewish Chronicle or a rabid Israeli publication, but in the NS. That was the spirit of the age. If you wanted to read anti-Zionist polemics at that time you had to turn to the far right, to a magazine such as the Mosleys' European."
(Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 18 October 1999)

"the Palestine issue is partly a colour issue [in which] an Indian nationalist, for example, would probably side with the Arabs."
(George Orwell, 1945)

"Yet, the importance of Hebron is not only due to the history of the forefathers and mothers of our nation. After Saul, the first king of Israel, fell on his sword during the war with the Philistines,... David, who succeeded him as king, had asked G-d: “Shall I advance towards one of the cities ofJudea?” G-d answered him: “Advance!” then David asked: “Where to shall I go?” and G-d answered: “To Hebron.” And David went upthere, and Judah’s people came and anointed David there as king of the House of Jehuda (II Samuel 2:4) ...So all the elders of Israel came to the king, to Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord, and they anointed David King of Israel” (II Samuel 5: 13),and in Hebron indeed was the greatest kingdom Israel has had until this day. ...We shall make a terrible mistake if we are notgoing to settle Hebron, the earlier forerunner and neighbour of Jerusalem, with an ever-growing Jewish community in the shortest time! This will also bring a blessing to its Arab neighbours. Hebron is worthy of being Jerusalem’s sister."
(David Ben-Gurion, 25 January 1970)

"Yet, the importance of Hebron is not only due to the history of the forefathers and mothers of our nation. After Saul, the first king of Israel, fell on his sword during the war with the Philistines,... David, who succeeded him as king, had asked G-d: “Shall I advance towards one of the cities ofJudea?” G-d answered him: “Advance!” then David asked: “Where to shall I go?” and G-d answered: “To Hebron.” And David went upthere, and Judah’s people came and anointed David there as king of the House of Jehuda (II Samuel 2:4) ...So all the elders of Israel came to the king, to Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord, and they anointed David King of Israel” (II Samuel 5: 13),and in Hebron indeed was the greatest kingdom Israel has had until this day. ...We shall make a terrible mistake if we are notgoing to settle Hebron, the earlier forerunner and neighbour of Jerusalem, with an ever-growing Jewish community in the shortest time! This will also bring a blessing to its Arab neighbours. Hebron is worthy of being Jerusalem’s sister."
(David Ben-Gurion, 25 January 1970)

"One of the hallmarks of Ben-Gurion's greatness was that the man knew what to say and what not to say in certain circumstances; what is allowed to be recorded on paper and what is preferable to convey orally or in hint."
(Benny Morris, 9 May 1989)

"There is no doubt that from the moment [the Peel proposal was submitted] ... the problem of the Arab minority, supposed to reside in that [prospective Jewish] state, began to preoccupy the Yishuv's leadership obsessively. They were justified in seeing the future minority as a great danger to the prospective Jewish state - a fifth political, or even military, column. The transfer idea ... was viewed by the majority of the Yishuv leaders in those days as the best solution to the problem."
(Benny Morris, 9 May 1989)

"In the absence of the European Jews, the state of Israel had to bring in Jews from Arab countries. Ben Gurion compared them with the Africans who were brought in as slaves to America."
(Tom Segev, April 1998)

"Hitler, more than he hurt the Jewish people, whom he knew and detested, hurt the Jewish State, whose coming he did not foresee. He destroyed the substance, the main and essential building force of the Jewish state. The state arose and did not find the nation which had waited for it."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1954)

"[The Jews of Europe were] the leading candidates for citizenship in the State of Israel."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1949)

"The Jews of Europe, in his [Ben-Gurion's] words, were: 'the leading candidates for citizenship in the State of Israel'. This, to him, was the true significance of the Holocaust: 'Hitler, more than he hurt the Jewish people, whom he knew and detested, hurt the Jewish State, whose coming he did not foresee. He destroyed the substance, the main and essential building force of the Jewish state. The state arose and did not find the nation which had waited for it.' In the absence of that (European) 'nation', the State of Israel had to bring in Jews from Arab countries. Ben Gurion compared them with the Africans who were brought in as slaves to America."
(Tom Segev, April 1998)

"There are countries---and I was referring to North Africa--- from which not all Jews need to emigrate. It is not so much of quantity as of quality. Our role in Israel is a pioneering one, and we need people with certain strength of fiber. We are very anxious to bring the Jews of Morocco over and we are doing all we can to achieve this. But we cannot count on the Jews of Morocco alone to build the country, because they have not been educated for this. We don't know what may yet happen to us, what military and political defeats we may yet have to face. So we need people who will remain steadfast in any hardship and who have a high degree of resistance. For the purpose of building up our country, I would say that the Jews of Eastern Europe are the salt of the earth."
(Moshe (Sharret/Sharet) Sharett, 12 December 1948)

"Moshe Sharett, in speaking with the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, put it differently:
'There are countries---and I was referring to North Africa--- from which not all Jews need to emigrate. It is not so much of quantity as of quality. Our role in Israel is a pioneering one, and we need people with certain strength of fiber. We are very anxious to bring the Jews of Morocco over and we are doing all we can to achieve this. But we cannot count on the Jews of Morocco alone to build the country, because they have not been educated for this. We don't know what may yet happen to us, what military and political defeats we may yet have to face. So we need people who will remain steadfast in any hardship and who have a high degree of resistance. For the purpose of building up our country, I would say that the Jews of Eastern Europe are the salt of the earth.'"
(Tom Segev, April 1998)

"At the first session of the first Knesset there were three Arab members out of the 120: the Arabs of Israel had been allowed to vote and be elected. One of the Arab MKs appeared in the assembly wearing a tarboosh, another wore a traditional keffieh and aqqal (all traditional Arabic headdresses). Yosef Weitz, of the Jewish National Fund, who was among the guests, saw this as a bitter insult. 'It chilled the heart and angered the soul,' he noted later in his diary. He asked himself what those Arab MKs felt when they swore allegiance to the state. 'Isn't it filled with lies and deceit? No. Nevertheless, I do not want there to be many of them. Perhaps they will integrate into society. But it will take several generations before they become loyal to the state.'"
(Tom Segev, April 1998)

"The political aims of the martial rule [imposed on the Palestinian population of Israel] were summed up in the following words, contained in a top secret memorandum: 'The government's policy ... has sought to divide the Arab population into diverse communities and regions. ... The municipal status of the Arab villages, and the competitive spirit of local elections, deepened the divisions inside the villages themselves. The communal policy and the clan divisions in the villages prevented Arab unity. ... Martial law has ruled all this time with complete and total authority.'"
(Tom Segev, April 1998)

"[Agriculture Minister] Aaron Tsizling promulgated the Emergency Regulations regarding the Cultivation of Fallow Lands and Unexploited Water Sources in October 1948. This legislation was the first to legalize the seizure and reallocation of appropriated Arab land and served as a key component of the sophisticated mechanism that gradually turned temporary possession into unrestricted Jewish-Israeli ownership. The regulations were characteristic of most early legislation on the appropriated Arab land in that they legalized its past and future transfer to Jewish possession. They empowered the Agriculture Minister to authorize past seizure and reallocation retroactively. As for future acts, the regulations were employed in conjunction with Section 125 of the Defense Regulations of 1945, under which military commanders could close certain areas for security reasons. Closure prevented Arab cultivators from reaching their land, which would eventually be declared 'fallow' and transferred to Jewish possession. ... In 1952, Arab Affairs Advisor Yehoshua Palmon warned that Section 125 was all that prevented the owners of 250000 dunams of appropriated land from reclaiming their land in court."
(Geremy Forman, 2004)

"The 1929 anti-Jewish riots in Palestine taught me that we had only two alternatives before us: surrender or the sword. I chose the sword. I was not surprised that the Arabs fled. It was natural reaction. It was the best of them who fled---the leaders, the intelligentsia, the economic elite. Only the small fry remained. I behaved toward them as a wolf in sheep's clothing---harsh, but outwardly decent. I opposed the integration of Arabs into Israeli society. I preferred separate development. True, this prevented the Arabs from integrating into the Israeli democracy. Yet they had never had democracy before. Since they never had it, they never missed it. The separation made it possible to maintain a democratic regime within the Jewish population alone. I was not a member of the MAPAI, but I thought that if Ben-Gurion did not remain in power it would be a catastrophe for the state. My policy ... was not designed to provide votes for the MAPAI, but instead for Ben-Gurion's rule. At least, that was how I saw it at the time. ... The main problem was that of the infiltrators. We expelled a few thousand, but we failed to expel tens of thousands. In that sense we failed---the number of [Palestinian] Arabs in the country continued to rise steadily."
(Yehoshua (Josh) Palmon, 6 June 1983)

"[I am] horrified [to read in the newspaper that it is planned to bring to Israel the Falashas of Ethiopia]. I hope that this report is unfounded."
(Y. Meir, 8 June 1949)

"My investigation shows that the problem of the Falashas is not at all simple, because these people's ways are not much different from those of the Abyssinians, and that intermarriage is natural among them. There is also among them a large number of people with venereal diseases."
(Shlomo Schmidt, 13 may 1950)

"Why do we have to put an end to the Yemen Diaspora and bring over people who are more harm than use? By bringing Yemenites, 70% of whom are sick, we are doing no good to anybody. We are harming them by bringing them into an alien environment where they will degenerate. Can we withstand an immigration of which 70% are sick?"
(Yitzhak (Izaak) Greenbaum, July 1949)

"The [North African Jewish] population in the [immigrant absorption] camps is becoming a sort of a second nation, a rebellions nation which views us as plutocrats. This is incendiary material, eminently useful to Herut and the Communists. It's dynamite. ... The immigrants are in some ways taking the place of the Arabs. There is also a special attitude emerging on our part toward them; we are beginning to harbor an attitude of superiority.""
(David Horowitz (2), 12 April 1949)

"This is a race unlike any we have seen before. They say there are differences between people of the Tripoltania, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, but I can't say I have learned what those differences are, if they do, in fact, exist. The say, for example, that the Tripolitanians and Tunisians are better than the Moroccans, and Algerians, but it's the same problem with them all. (Incidentally, none of these immigrants will admit that he is (North) African - Je suis francais!---They are all Frenchmen from Paris and almost all were captains in the Maquis.)"
(Aryeh (Arieh) Gelblum, 22 April 1949)

[Rootsie]

"Omar [a Palestinian in Gaza] began working for his [Israeli settler] boss nine years ago for NIS 32 a day. In July 2005 his daily wages were NIS 50. His friend Khaled makes NIS 45 for an eight-hour day's work. The hourly minimum wage in Israel is NIS 17.93, or almost NIS 145 per day. Omar, who is active in an independent workers committee that was founded in the Gaza Strip this year, says the maximum paid to Palestinian workers there was NIS 60 per day. An Israeli who spent a lot of time in Gush Katif in recent months heard from employers that the daily wage is between NIS 40-80."
(Amira Hass, 14 August 2005)

"But the minimum wage requirement does apply to Israeli employers in the occupied territories with Palestinian workers. Back in 1982, a GOC Command order was issued in the territories stipulating that 'a person employed in a community [an Israeli settlement - A.H.] is entitled to receive wages from his employer that do not fall short of the minimum wage and will also be entitled to cost of living adjustment, all as updated in Israel from time to time.' The Civil Administration is supposed to oversee and enforce that order, but the office of the Government Coordinator in the Territories (to which the Civil Administration is subordinate) stated that 'so far, we know of no complaints filed about the lack of enforcement of this order.'"
(Amira Hass, 14 August 2005)

"Omar is troubled by a more pressing problem: he knows about a dozen laborers whose employers have already left, without paying them wages for the past week or two. Now they have no way of locating their bosses to get at least those few hundred shekels."
(Amira Hass, 14 August 2005)

"Many more people demand that some rabbi be put on trial for saying harsh things against the prime minister than a settler who has shot a child."
(Gideon Levy, 14 August 2005)

"It [the proposal to compulsorily expel all the Arab inhabitants of the Jewish state envisaged by the Peel Commission] is a just and reasonable plan, ethical and humane in all senses. ... If we oppose all rights to transfer, then we must oppose what we have achieved up to now - the transfers from Emek Hefer to the Bet Shean valley, from the Sharon to the mountains of Ephraim etc."
(Eliyahu (Eliahu) Lulu (Hacarmeli), 29 July 1937)

"I’m not willing to accept a single Arab, and not only an Arab but any gentile. I want the State of Israel to be entirely Jewish, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."
(Eliyahu (Eliahu) Lulu (Hacarmeli), 1)

"The proposal in the Labour Party's document that the Arabs might be 'encouraged' to transfer themselves elsewhere is a good example of the folly of believing that spectacular settlements are desirable and feasible. This is not the way to effect a reconciliation between Arabs and Jews which will enable them to live together in the same and in different states."
(Leonard Woolf, September 1944)

"It is no secret that I, like many others, believed and hoped that we could forever hold on to Netzarim and Kfar Darom. However, the changing reality in this country, in this region, and in the world, required another reassessment and changing of positions. Gaza cannot be held on to forever. Over 1 million Palestinians live there, and they double their numbers with every generation. They live in incredibly cramped refugee camps, in poverty and squalor, in hotbeds of ever-increasing hatred, with no hope whatsoever on the horizon. ... [The disengagement is the end of a] glorious chapter in the story of Israel."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 15 August 2005)

"We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography"
(Shimon Peres (Perez), August 2005)

"The desire to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel is seen by most Jewish Israelis as a liberal aspiration, rather than a racist one, as it would appear elsewhere. The disengagement from Gaza is considered a step in the right direction because it will cut off about 1.3 million Palestinians from Israel's responsibility, thus improving the demographic balance between Israelis and Palestinians in the territories that remain under Israeli control. All this, at the very low price of removing 8,000 of the 400,000 settlers in the occupied territories, and with the additional benefit of gaining easy popularity in the rest of the world and, most important, pleasing the US."
(Daphna Baram, 16 August 2005)

"Sharon fathered the idea of 'giving away' parts of Israel proper that are densely populated by Arab citizens to the Palestinian Authority. He has subsequently backed off from the idea, but it refuses to disappear and is now often heard from people who consider themselves liberals. The idea that people's citizenship can be stripped away if they belong to the 'wrong' ethnicity is clearly racist, but it has gained popularity in Israel."
(Daphna Baram, 16 August 2005)

"Dear Mark, ... I am rather disgusted with the manner in which the Jews are approaching the refugee problem. I told the President of Israel in the presence of his Ambassador just exactly what I thought about it. It may have some effect, I hope so."
(Harry S. Truman, April 1949)

"[If the Israeli government is not more forthcoming on the refugee issue] the US Govt. will regretfully be forced to the conclusion that a revision of its attitude toward Israel has become unavoidable."
(Harry S. Truman, April 1949)

"The Ambassador [Eliyahu Eilat] looked me straight in the eye and said, in essence, that I wouldn’t get by with this move, that he would stop it. There was other conversation, but I had got the point. Within an hour of my return to my office I received a message from the White House that the President [Harry Truman] wished to dissociate himself from any withholding of the Ex-Im Bank loan. I knew of the President’s sympathy for Israel, but I had never before realized how swiftly the supporters of Israel could act if challenged."
(George Crews McGhee, 1983)

"[On 15 September 1947] I pointed out that the establishment with our support of a Jewish State in Palestine, unless such a State would be acceptable to the Arab world, would cause much bloodshed and suffering, would alienate the people of that world who have been placing much trust in the United States, might result in the loss to the free world of the use of the great resources of the Middle East, and that the continued existence of such a State could cause suffering, expense, bickering, and damage to the United States internally and internationally for many years to come."
(Loy Wesley Henderson, 14 June 1973)

"I can quite imagine a Jewish state of ten million. ... I doubt it [that this number of Jews could live in the area allocated by the UN to the Jewish state]. We would not have taken on this war merely for the purpose of enjoying this tiny state."
(David Ben-Gurion, August 1948)

"The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was ‘given’ by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East."
(Bertrand Russell, 23 February 1970)

"Fahima's allegiance is not to the state of Israel, a fact which makes her a source of danger. This reinforces the need to continue her prison sentence."
(Devora (Dvora) Berliner, 28 July 2005)

"That scenario [an Israeli attack on Gaza in the period leading up to the projected disengagement] is a scenario that none of us would like to see. There is a deep realization on the part of the Israeli leadership, including the military, about the consequences of that type of scenario."
(William E. Ward, August 2005)

"It is unjust to speak of such an offer of land in Transjordania as expatriation of the Arabs [of Palestine], as Transjordania is distinctly Arab territory."
(Felix Warburg, November 1930)

"but after all Palestine would absorb only a part of the three or four millions [of Jews] whom this Conference has been discussing as needing relief. This could be accomplished only by moving the Arab population to some other quarter."
(Herbert Hoover, July 1943)

"Most of the broadcasts [about the August 2005 removal of settlers from the Gaza Strip] were captives of the emotional manipulation created by the settlers."
(Tom Segev, 18 August 2005)

"Sharon said that we cannot hold onto Gaza forever, contrary to what he once believed. Because of the population explosion there. That's true, but when Sharon said that, it sounded like an admission of surrender, not like something that is proper and moral after so many years of occupation and oppression, or even a step on the way to an agreement with the Palestinians. Had he been able to, he would have remained in the Gaza Strip.

The hilltop youth can learn only one thing from his words: that he is too old and too weak to fulfill the true Zionist dream. They will learn from the speech that we simply have to empty the Gaza Strip of its inhabitants, just as Levi Eshkol thought in his time: He believed that they could be transferred to Iraq. That is the danger of the evacuation from Gush Katif: It is liable to serve as a precedent for the expulsion of Arabs."
(Tom Segev, 18 August 2005)

"General Matti Peled once told me that before that war [the 1967 War], when he was commander of the Jerusalem area, he one day encountered on his staff two officers who were unfamiliar to him. When he interrogated them, they disclosed that they belonged to a secret unit that was preparing mass expulsion for some future opportunity."
(Uri Avnery, 15 March 2003)

"In his excellent book, “Wars don’t just happen” the historian Motti Golani describes e.g., how the June war of 1967 evolved out of an Israeli provocation on the Syrian border (I can confirm his description with my limited perspective as a simple soldier at that time). Through a misinterpretation of the Israeli steps, the Arab countries were convinced that Israel intended to attack Syria. In order to neutralize this threat the Egyptian president Gamal Abd al-Nasser closed the Strait of Sharem El Sheikh and kicked the UN forces out of the Sinai Peninsula. There are many proofs that the Egyptian army in Sinai, notwithstanding the aggressive Nasser’s rhetorics, was in a defensive set up and was not going to attack Israel."
(Shraga Elam, 14 February 2003)

"I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it."
(Yitzhak Rabin, 28 February 1968)

"In June, 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."
(Menachem Begin, 8 August 1982)

"Motti Golani argues convincingly that prior to the attack of June 1967, the Israeli High Command organized a 'silent' putsch, blocked up all political solutions for the crisis and launched the war in order to expand."
(Shraga Elam, 14 February 2003)

"[Gaza will] never be returned to Egypt."
(Levi Eshkol, June 1967)

"And of course, from my little Baghdad eyrie I’ve been watching the eviction of Israelis from their illegal settlements in the Palestinian Gaza Strip. The word "illegal" doesn’t pop up on the BBC, of course; nor the notion that the settlers – for which read colonisers – were not being evicted from their land but from land they originally took from others. Nor is much attention paid to the continued building in the equally illegal colonies within the Palestinian West Bank which will – inevitably – make a "viable" (Lord Blair’s favourite word) Palestine impossible.

In Gaza, everyone waited for Israeli settler and Israeli soldier to open fire on each other. But when a settler did open fire, he did so to murder four Palestinian workers on the West Bank. The story passed through the television coverage like a brief, dark, embarrassing cloud and was forgotten. Settlements dismantled. Evacuation from Gaza. Peace in our time.
"(Robert Fisk, 20 August 2005)

"I really think this is the forefront of Zionism today, realising that there is a land war going on. And whoever wins that land war, Jews or Arabs, is going to be able to take control of the eastern side of the city."
(Uri Bank, April 2005)

"It is quite essential vividly to grasp the unique conditions of the struggle in Palestine. We have witnessed many wars in this century, in which one country seeks to impose its power on others. But in no war, I think, for many centuries past, has the objective been to remove a nation from its country and to introduce another and evidently different race to occupy its lands, houses and cities and live there. This peculiarity lends to the Palestinian struggle a desparate quality which bears no resemblance to any other war in modern history."
(Sir John Bagot Glubb, 1967)

"Sadness, pain and tears mixed with more than a little racism in Atzmona: one resident approaches the brigade commander, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, and requests in a whisper that only a Jewish officer, "God forbid a non-Jew," be allowed to evacuate him from his home. Kochavi does not respond. Atzmona's residents never made such demands when Druze and Bedouin soldiers and officers guarded them. But today, everything is revealed and everything is permitted."
(Gideon Levy, 22 August 2005)

"the government of Israel is going to have to address the demographic issue with the utmost seriousness and resolve. This issue above all others will dictate the solution that we must adopt. In the absence of a negotiated agreement... we need to implement a unilateral alternative."
(Ehud Olmert, 13 November 2003)

"There is no doubt in my mind that very soon the government of Israel is going to have to address the demographic issue with the utmost seriousness and resolve. This issue above all others will dictate the solution that we must adopt. In the absence of a negotiated agreement - and I do not believe in the realistic prospect of an agreement - we need to implement a unilateral alternative."
(Ehud Olmert, November 2003)

"Because we are going to sign a peace treaty between Jewish Israel and the PLO."
(Yitzhak Rabin, September 1993)

"I know how at least 80% of the incidents began there. In my opinion, more than 80%, but lets talk about 80%. It would happen like this: We would send a tractor to plow someplace of no value, in the demilitarized zone, knowing ahead of time that the Syrians would begin to shoot. If they did not start shooting, we would tell the tractor to keep going forward, until the Syrians in the end would get nervous and start shooting. And then we would start firing artillery, and later also the airforce and this was the way it was. I did this and Laskov and Tzur (two previous commander-in-chiefs) did it, Yitzhak Rabin did it when he was there (as commander of the northern district at the beginning of the sixties), but it seems to me that it was Dado, more than anyone else, enjoyed these games."
(Moshe Dayan, 22 November 1976)

"In a series of interviews that Dayan gave journalist Rami Tal in the mid-1970s, and which were recently published in the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot, Dayan stated that the years of cross-border violence between Israel and Syria that preceded the war were largely a result of Israeli provocations. According to Dayan, some 80 percent of the pre-war border incidents were the result of Israeli initiatives."
(David Landau, 6 June 1997)

"The reaction of the multitudes, those located in the space between the immolator and the victims, is characterized by indifference, conformity, and opportunism. The Jews, too, in the circumstances of time and place, do not go beyond this banality, with several exceptions. In Israeli society, there are many people who would prefer not to know about the genocide of the Armenians and the genocide of the Gypsies. ... In Israeli historical consciousness, the Holocaust plays a central role--becoming increasingly stronger over the years. This consciousness stresses the singularity of the Holocaust. It contains, in my opinion, an extreme and almost utter focus on the Jews as victims, and a disregard--consciously or not, intentionally or not--of acts of genocide that have taken place in the twentieth century, among them the murder of the Armenians and the extermination of the Gypsies"
(Yair Auron, 1 January 2002)

"It must be said, to the credit of the Turks, that their rulers behaved toward the conquered with a degree of tolerance and generosity which is unparalleled in the history of the Christian peoples of the period"
(David Ben-Gurion, 1918)

"Jamal Pasha [the Turkish military ruler in World War I Palestine] planned from the outset to destroy the entire Hebrew settlement in Eretz Yisrael, exactly as they did the Armenians in Armenia"
(David Ben-Gurion, 1919)

"We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through, but not a genocide."
(Shimon Peres (Perez), April 2001)

"I am aware of the fact that Israel does not officially acknowledge the horrible massacre [of the Armenians by Ottoman Turkey] out of concern for the unique place of the Holocaust in the chronicles of human history."
(Shimon Peres (Perez), 15 August 1995)

"Something exciting did happen several weeks ago to a Palestinian, but this too went virtually unnoticed in the media. A group of teenage Israeli settlers from the West Bank, come to Gaza to protest the impending disengagement, nearly beat to death a Palestinian teenager as he lay unconscious on the ground, in full view of a group of Israeli soldiers who did nothing and an international press contingent. Newspapers throughout Israel had the grace to be horrified and termed the event a lynching, but the U.S. media ignored it. One has to wonder if the old puzzle about whether a tree falling in the forest makes any noise if there's no one there to hear it can be applied to the Palestinians: do Palestinians suffering oppression under Israeli occupation really suffer if the media fail to report it?"
(Kathleen Christison, 26 August 2005)

[Rootsie]

"Everyone takes the easy way. Antiwar activists focus on the war where Americans are dying, not where Palestinians are dying and believe that for tactical reasons they should avoid introducing disunity by talking about this issue. Far too many moviemakers who turn out anti-Bush films ignore the Palestinian issue and Israel's role in U.S. politics altogether.  Tikkun and its leader Rabbi Michael Lerner, who for years put themselves forward as the progressive religious voice opposing the occupation, have apparently concluded that they were getting nowhere with their effort to strike a balance between Israel and the Palestinians – always a futile effort in this most unbalanced of conflicts – and have now turned away almost completely, concentrating instead on a campaign to inject spirituality into U.S. politics."
(Kathleen Christison, 26 August 2005)

"Although the media in the U.S. and in Europe have gone silent about Palestine's death throes, they seldom miss an opportunity to lecture the Palestinians: Israel is taking a step of surpassing courage in Gaza ("the most significant and painful steps toward peace ever made in the Middle East" trumpeted one newspaper with spectacular hyperbole), and the future now depends entirely on whether the Palestinians behave. "Behaving" means not disturbing the Israelis, not disturbing the media's sense that peace is just around the corner if only the Palestinians cooperate. "Behaving" means not mentioning, certainly not complaining about, Israel's massive consolidation and expansion across the West Bank while the world watches Gaza."
(Kathleen Christison, 26 August 2005)

"Palestinians themselves will not disappear, despite Israel's best efforts, and they will not give up their struggle -- not now, after successfully fighting for sixty years against a concerted multinational attempt to make them disappear. But Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, this Israeli violence, is destroying any possibility of Palestinian nationhood, while the media ignore the occupation, politicians ignore Israeli violence, and western publics know and care little about any of it. Palestine and Palestinians are terrorized and murdered in darkness. No one helps them, few note their dying. They are helpless, facing the power of a massive Israeli military machine and a propaganda machine abetted by the major western media."
(Kathleen Christison, 26 August 2005)

"Very little of what was seen on television was real. It is hard to believe how non-credible a live broadcast from the scene of an event can be. The reporters knew there was not going to be any violence, that the army had reached a prior agreement with the rabbis about what every minute would look like, when they would take out the handcuffs, when Rabbi Dov Lior would be evacuated in a container everything was staged down the last detail. The settlers wanted to come out of it big-time, evacuated by force but without violence, and that is just what they did. TV, which constantly seeks new faces, new stars, was thrilled by the ecstatic chanters of prayers, by the charismatic bearded men who dominated the cameras as though they had been trained for that their whole life, projecting love and security in their way and having their every request fulfilled immediately. Now we will pray and only afterward we will leave. Now we will sing together with you. Now we will sit with hands interwoven tightly and you will remove us with restrained force. Now a break. Cut. Action. We will talk only to Yinon Magal from Channel 10. We will be evacuated only by soldiers and under no circumstances by the police. It's true that just two weeks ago we demanded the opposite, but in the meantime we discovered the potential latent in embracing soldiers."
(Orit Shohat, 26 August 2005)

"I found myself treating Palestinians with an outward contempt that contradicted every instinct my upbringing had instilled in me. I broke into homes after midnight and held women and children under guard in one room while my comrades searched the house for terrorists or explosives. I rounded up passers-by and organized them into labor details to remove improvised roadblocks. I screamed at old men and bullied teenagers. ... A majority of my buddies saw nothing wrong with Israel having built a Jewish town in the middle of the West Bank."
(Haim Watzman, 20 May 2005)

"For it was precisely the unignorable plight and suffering of the Palestinian Arabs during April-May of that year that forced the hand of the reluctant Arab political and military leaders to take the plunge and invade Palestine on 15-16 May."
(Benny Morris, March-April 1998)

"A party without a leader seeks a leader without a party. This is the current political reality, and there is only one correct answer: Labor, a party without a leader, will merge with Sharon, a leader without a party. This is the best proposal in the depressing political reality."
(Gideon Levy, 28 August 2005)

"Maybe we killed Eichmann for no reason, because he was also just following orders."
(Zvi Hendel, July 2005)

"[T]here is no difference between the treatment meted out to Elai Sinai residents by the Israeli government and the way Jews were treated by the Nazi regime in the 1940s."
(Yitzhak Gabai, July 2005)

"This whole episode, including the verdict, is a serious indictment of the IDF. In the end the army, which inducted el-Heyb into its ranks and did not bother to look after his needs and help him resolve his problems, turned him into a scapegoat, so that the military establishment as a whole could come out clean in the eyes of the world. The prosecutor in the trial told the court that `the whole world' was watching the trial. I said in response that it can only be hoped that the war of perception that the state of Israel is waging at Taysir el-Heyb's expense would not turn his trial into a show trial."
(Ilan Bombach, August 2005)

"Everyone has forgotten that the disengagement plan was, and still is, a unilateral move aimed at shortening Israel's lines of defense on its southern border and subtracting 1.3 million Arabs from the demographic balance."
(Akiva Eldar, 29 August 2005)

"Israel's strategy of escalation on the Syrian front was probably the single most important factor in dragging the Middle East to war in June 1967, despite the conventional wsidom on the subject that singles out Syrian aggression as the principal cause of war."
(Avi Shlaim, 2000)

"Oh, sorry - wrong evacuation. That was demolition of a Palestinian home, not a settler outpost. 'We can't use these methods against Jews,' explains an officer with all the bland and blatant racism of a Mississippi redneck sheriff saying, 'We can't use these methods against white folks.'"
(Thomas O'Dwyer, 4 July 2003)

"The killing of five Palestinians in Tul Karm last week shows how quickly the government and army are reverting to their routine of violent oppression, death and destruction."
(Tamar Gozansky, 30 August 2005)

"The tens of thousands of new immigrants who arrived in Israel from Arab countries in the 1950s did not have this choice. Many of them were literally thrown into Jewish Agency apartments much smaller than a caravilla. Sometimes they were unloaded from a truck in the middle of the night so that they wouldn't notice the desert sands all around, and would not be able to protest."
(Ran Cohen, 31 August 2005)

"[T]he absence of any immediate reaction of the Arabs [to the UNSCOP report] can be attributed to their incredulity."
(Henry Gurney, 8 September 1947)

"It is important for Sharon that the U.S. administration recognize Israel's departure from the Gaza Strip as the official end of the occupation in that area. From there it is just a short way to a UN declaration that Israel no longer bears responsibility for what happens in the Gaza Strip."
(Akiva Eldar, 30 August 2005)

"Between the hugs and pats he has been sending Ariel Sharon since the pullout from the Gaza Strip, behind the scenes, President Bush is twisting the prime minister's arm. More than all the compliments, it is important for Sharon that the U.S. administration recognize Israel's departure from the Gaza Strip as the official end of the occupation in that area. From there it is just a short way to a UN declaration that Israel no longer bears responsibility for what happens in the Gaza Strip. So long as the international community, led by the U.S., does not recognize the withdrawal as the end of the occupation, it means Israel lost the communities there, ceded military control there and still continues to be seen as the occupier, with all the legal and political ramifications of that status. Bush, with all his friendship for Sharon, is not offering any free lunches; the price for recognizing the end of the occupation in Gaza will be allowing freedom of movement in the West Bank and free passage between it and Gaza."
(Akiva Eldar, 30 August 2005)

"The concert was not for the Palestinian people. A cynic might argue that it was for the international press, or the French satellite company (indeed, the speeches made at the concert were given in English rather than Arabic because it was being broadcast in Europe)."
(Maureen Clare Murphy, 31 August 2005)

"In mid-October [1948], in contravention of the truce, the Israelis launched an offensive against the Egyptian forces in order to take the Negev before the UN could decide that they could not have it. Substantial gains were made in the south and the Israelis resisted all the UN injunctions, mostly sponsored by Britain, to withdraw. In a second offensive at the end of the month the IDF ejected all Arab forces from the Galilee and in doing so finally defeated the [Bernadotte] plan for exchanging the Galilee for the Negev."
(Avi Shlaim, Summer 1987)

"Sharett knew that we had agreed with ‘Abdullah that he will take and annex the Arab part of Palestine and Sharett could not support this ludicrous, impotent, and abortive attempt made by the Egyptians against ‘Abdullah. This attempt had nothing to do with us. It was a tactical move by ‘Abdullah's enemies to interject something against his creeping annexation. At that time there was no annexation. Formal annexation only occurred in April 1950. But he had started taking and preparing for annexation. So they tried, without any success, to build a countervailing force.

The second point is that at that time Sharett and our men knew what the powerful State of Israel has forgotten in recent years. He understood the meaning of diplomacy and knew how to conduct it. Sharett was definitely aware that publicly we were obliged to accept the Palestinian Arab state and could not say that we were opposed to the establishment of such a state. In the first place, we had accepted the UN resolution which included a Palestinian Arab state. Secondly, this was the right, fair, and decent course and we were obliged to agree to it. The fact that below the surface, behind the curtain, by diplomatic efforts, we reached an agreement with ‘Abdullah--an agreement which had not been uncovered but was kept secret at that time--was entirely legitimate but we did not have to talk about it. Sharett knew that our official line had to be in favour of a Palestinian state if the Palestinians could create it. We could not create it for them. But if they could create it, certainly, by all means, we would agree. The fact that he made a deal with ‘Abdullah on the side to prevent the creation of such a state, that is diplomacy, that is alright. Sharett behaved in accordance with the rules of diplomacy and politics that are accepted throughout the world."
(Yaacov (Yaakov) Shimoni (Shim'oni), some date after 1948)

"An impressive example of Arab-Palestinian entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century was the production and export of Jaffa oranges. The export of oranges to Europe began in earnest in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in the last twenty-five years of the Ottoman era it seems to have reached a frenzied pace. Orange groves expanded enormously, and would have done so even more quickly were it not for a bottleneck in the form of a water shortage. To overcome this problem, Jaffa orange growers, most of them Muslims, adopted the most sophisticated water technology available at the time, introducing some 500 European water pumps in a sort of miniindustrial revolution."
(Haim Gerber, Fall 2003)

"Another interesting case of economic development at the time could be observed in Gaza. Farmers and Bedouins in the region started in the last quarter century or so of the Ottoman era to grow large quantities of barley destined for the beer breweries of Europe. By the end of the period, about 40,000 tons of barley were shipped annually from the virtually nonexistent port of Gaza to Europe."
(Haim Gerber, Fall 2003)

"There are now about ten [Jewish] colonies standing for some years, and no one of them is able to support itself . . . wherever I strived to look, I did not manage to see even one man living solely from the fruit of his land. . . . In Palestine, as in all lands, the tiller of the land will eat its fruit . . . the traveler can see on both sides of the road fertile fields and valleys covered with grains. The Arabs are working and eating. . . . Grief has engulfed us alone. Why then? The real answer, that any clever man in Palestine knows, is that the first colonists brought with them substantial idealism, but they all lack the qualifications necessary for agriculture and cannot be simple farmers."
(Asher Ginsburg, 1891)

"Nor did they [the British in Palestine] have any problems forcing Arab civilians to drive at the head of their convoys to prevent terrorists from mining the roads or railway tracks; they would even seat them in special cars attached to the train engines."
(Tom Segev, October 2001)

"It is interesting to compare the way Britain suppressed the two revolts that took place in Mandatory Palestine, the Arab revolt of 1936–39 and the Jewish revolt following World War II. The suppression of the Arab revolt was brutal and cruel, and was suppressed in ways that even some British officials described as not shaming the Nazis. These methods included the indiscriminate killing of villagers near where British soldiers had been the victims of terrorist acts, the stripping of women to make sure that they were not men in disguise, and tying village leaders on trains as human shields. Such acts against Jews would have been inconceivable. Indeed, the suppression of the Jewish revolt was almost a Boy Scout affair. The worst moment of this suppression was the so-called Black Saturday of June 1946, in which the British army searched for hidden weapons and arrested some second-rank Zionist leaders, who were held for a number of months and never brought to trial. Compare to this large numbers of executions of the leaders of the Arab revolt and the forced exile of countless others for years on end."
(Haim Gerber, Fall 2003)

"Britain’s differential treatment of the two communities in that domain is important both symbolically and practically, and it helps explain the collapse of Palestinian society in 1948. Whereas the education for the Palestinians was provided in the manner of a conquering power, the Jewish-Zionist community was given special treatment: it was accorded complete autonomy to handle its educational affairs as it saw fit. This obviously had some ideological background, insofar as the Jews were seen not as being under occupation so much as partners. This differential treatment had grave consequences for the nation-building processes in the two communities: while the Palestinians received a traditional and conservative education that stamped out any nationalist and anti-imperial overtones, Jewish education was characterized by an ultra-nationalism that put the nation above the individual and inculcated in students self-sacrifice as the highest value. Hatred and contempt for the British and complete discursive obliteration of the Palestinians were part and parcel of this educational system. Thus, the educational system under the Mandate superbly prepared the Jews for the day of reckoning, while it effectively tied the (cultural) hands of the Palestinians behind their backs in preparing for 1948."
(Haim Gerber, Fall 2003)

"There was no talk of a usual parliament based on representation. The Palestinians were supposed to agree to parity between themselves and the Zionists, who by the end of the Mandate constituted only about a third of the population. No nation on earth would have acquiesced to such an offer."
(Haim Gerber, Fall 2003)

"Show no pity to anyone, even if it causes traffic holdups and anger"
(Shaul Mofaz, 6 September 2005)

[Rootsie]

"Some ministers ... who objected to the cabinet decision to destroy the synagogues in Gush Katif ... see leaving the synagogues intact as an opening to the Jews' return to Gaza."
(Meron Benvenisti, 8 September 2005)

"But in addition to wishing to preserve the synagogues [left behind when Israel withdrew its settlers from Gush Katif], the practicable-utilitarian consideration comes into strong play. This consideration is also better from the public relations' aspect. If the synagogues are doomed to be destroyed, let the Palestinians do it rather than the Israelis, to make them look bad in the eyes of the world."
(Meron Benvenisti, 8 September 2005)

"Contrary to recent claims by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a top official of the pro-Israel lobby knew of the use of classified government information in its work, The Jewish Week has learned. Thomas Dine, a former executive director of AIPAC, confirmed this week that during his tenure Steven Rosen, the lobby’s foreign policy director until April, informed him of his success in gaining access to a highly classified document."
(Larry Cohler-Esses, 19 August 2005)

"If we had been in Gaza, it would have decreased the number of refugees."
(Yigal Allon, some date after 1948)

"Residents of Gaza, today we end a glorious chapter in Israel's history, a central episode in your lives as pioneers, as realisers of the dream of those who bore the security and settlement burden for all of us. Your pain and your tears are an inextricable part of the history of our country."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 15 August 2005)

"The cabinet decision of 6 June 2004 to raze the synagogues was designed to prevent any possibility of vandalism. The Chief Rabbinate even instructed the government on how to strip the buildings of their sanctity... Everything was expected, and even the High Court gave its approval. But, at the last minute, the decision-makers abandoned reason... Most of the members of the cabinet were afraid to be seen by the public as having gone against the rabbis. They preferred to blame the Palestinians for the destruction of the synagogues rather than carry some of the blame themselves."
(Haaretz editorial writer, September 2005)

"The government's zigzagging, the scores of synagogues that were demolished inside Israel, the hundreds of mosques that were destroyed here, the clarity of the halacha [religious law] that never banned the destruction of buildings destined for prayers and at times even obliged this - all these clouded the chances of the success of this exercise... Politicians and the media jumped on the Palestinian "looting" and began to compete over the strength of their denunciations of the "terrible" scenes... Official and unofficial representatives of Israeli society also protested at those vulgar shows of covetousness and lack of manners... It is possible to crown those remarks as the "highest chutzpah" but chutzpah records are broken here at dazzling speed."
(B. Michael (pen name for Michael Barizon), September 2005)

"The Jewish synagogues, the military outposts, infantry patrols and settlements are all symbols of Israeli military occupation ... The settlements [in the West Bank] will become a flame burning the dreams of peace ... There will be no peace with the wall and settlements."
(Yusof al-Qazaz, September 2005)

"We have to make sure that Gaza remains free from occupation and block the way for the possibility of Israel's despicable attempt to return."
(Rajab Abu-Sirriyah, September 2005)

"Article 77 of the Fourth Geneva convention obligates the occupying power that withdraws from a given territory to transfer all incarcerated residents of that territory to the entity that receives control of the area. Yet despite Israel's obligation under this clause, it does not plan to transfer to the PA the "ordinary" prisoners and detainees who are Gaza residents."
(Yuval Yoaz, 14 September 2005)

"According to Article 76 of the Geneva Convention, a resident of an occupied territory who has been charged with a crime or sentenced by a military court must be held in the occupied territory itself. If, as Israel claims, the occupation in Gaza has indeed ended, then Article 77 of that same convention stipulates a basic duty to hand those charged and convicted in Israeli military courts over to the Palestinian Authority."
(Association for Civil Rights in Israel, 13 September 2005)

What Really Happened