Examples of Hate Speech

[Rootsie]

Reprinted from :  http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/palestinians.html

1. "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
2. "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

3. " [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.

4. "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

5. "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.

6. "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.

7. "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969

8. "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.

9. David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.

10. Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget."

11. "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.

12. "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio. (Certainly the FBI's cover-up of the Israeli spy ring/phone tap scandal suggests that Mr. Sharon may not have been joking.)

13. "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.

14. "We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return" David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.

15. "We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

16. "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum"

17. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.

18. "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

19. Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters" Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.

20. "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. I tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.

21. "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

22. "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism,colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.

23. "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.

24. "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." -- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]

25. "We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own." (You Gentiles, by Jewish Author Maurice Samuels, p. 155).

26. "We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent." (Jewish Banker Paul Warburg, February 17, 1950, as he testified before the U.S. Senate).

27. "We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." (Chaim Weizmann, Published in "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920)

"We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one - progressive, liberal - in Israel; and the other - cruel, injurious - in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day."
(Michael Ben-Yair, 3 March 2002)


"Accusations made by a well-established society about how a people it is oppressing is breaking rules to attain its rights do not have much credence."
(Shlomo Ben-Ami, 2000)


"We'll make a pastrami sandwich of them, ... we'll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years' time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 1973)


"People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust. Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment. We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God's dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers."
(Desmond Tutu, April 2002)


"[T]here is no single fixed method for murder and not even for genocide. The author Y. L. Peretz wrote about "the righteous cat" who does not spill blood, but only suffocates. The government of Israel, using the military and its instruments of destruction, is not only spilling blood, but it is also suffocating. ... Of course with our self-righteousness, with our self-adoration in our "Jewish ethics" we make sure to advertise how beautifully the doctors take care of Palestinian victims in the hospitals. We do not advertise how many of those are executed in cold blood in their own homes. So it's not yet genocide of the terrible and unique style of which we were past victims. And as one of the smart Generals told me, we do not have crematoria and gas chambers. Is anything less than that consistent with Jewish ethics? Did he ever hear how an entire people said that it did not know what was done in its name?"
(Shulamit Aloni, March 2003)

[Rootsie]

"The United States has an absolute, uncompromising commitment to Israel's security and an absolute conviction that Israel alone must decide the steps necessary to ensure that security. That is Israel's prerogative. We accept that. We endorse that. Whatever Israel decides cannot, will not, will never, not ever, alter our fundamental commitment to her security."
(Al Gore, 18 May 2000)

"I first visited Israel in 2000. I already then felt that I am returning home despite the fact that this was a place I never visited. I have a deep affinity with Israel. I have always admired the history of the State of Israel and the hardness and determination of the people that founded it. ... I am also the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and was brought up on the very moving stories of the Holy Land. They mean a lot to me. When I first visited Mt. Olives, Lake Kinneret, Jerusalem, I felt a very deep emotional experience."
(Condoleezza Rice, May 2003)

"Let there be no doubt -- the United States of America stands with the State of Israel also because it is in our national interests to stand with the State of Israel."
(Nancy Pelosi, April 1, 2003)

"I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism."
(Moshe Shertok, 1950s)

"Let us approach them [the Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories] and say that we have no solution, that you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wants to can leave -- and we will see where this process leads. In five years we may have 200,000 less people - and that is a matter of enormous importance."
(Moshe Dayan, September 1967)

"God bless you. God bless our men and women serving on the frontlines today. And God bless our special relationship between the United States of America and the State of Israel."
(Nancy Pelosi, April 1, 2003)

"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves .. politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. ... Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1938)

"… it's utterly hypocritical for Israelis to wonder aloud why Palestinians don't pursue a non-violent strategy. One obvious reason is that, whenever they have, Israel brutally represses it."
(Norman G. Finkelstein, 11 September 2003)

"The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates. It includes parts of Syria and Lebanon."
(Yehudah Leib Fischmann, 1947)

"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don’t grab will go to them."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 17 Bovember 1998)

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, ‘What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’"
(Yitzhak Rabin, July 1948)

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal Al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
(Moshe Dayan, 4 April 1969)

"Ours will be a brutal land of pens stretching between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean that will make South African apartheid pale."
(Yigal Bronner, 17 September 2003)

"Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French."
(Mahatma Gandhi, 26 November 1938)

"Sharon certainly does have a plan: to protect Eretz Yisrael, avoid returning any territories and make sure the settlements stay where they are. Everything else is tactics."
(Aluf Benn, 18 September 2003)

"Arabs in Israel ... have no right to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, to marry a Jew in Israel according to state law, or even to study in the language of the majority."
(Amnon Rubinstein, 18 September 2003)

" We live in a thunderously failed reality. ... A state lacking justice cannot survive. ... Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger for ever, it won't work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall."
(Avraham Burg, 15 September 2003)

"Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centres of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated."
(Avraham Burg, 15 September 2003)

"Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state"
(Avraham Burg, 15 September 2003)

"Do you want democracy? No problem. Either abandon the greater land of Israel, to the last settlement and outpost, or give full citizenship and voting rights to everyone, including Arabs. The result, of course, will be that those who did not want a Palestinian state alongside us will have one in our midst, via the ballot box. The prime minister should present the choices forthrightly: Jewish racism or democracy. Settlements, or hope for both peoples."
(Avraham Burg, 15 September 2003)

"The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes ['kushim'] and for those there is no value."
(Chaim Weizmann, around 1917)

"We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back."
(Theodore Herzl, 12 June 1895)

"Exploiting the genuine security related worries of the Israeli people and the majority's wish for a political parting from the Palestinians, the Sharon government is constructing a system of fences that will not achieve separation, that will not draw a border, and that will not, eventually, bring security. What we are facing in the "fence" is yet another typical, thoroughly calculated "Sharonic" act of deception. The real purpose of the walls is very different. They are intended as another layer--maybe the ultimate one--in the complex matrix of control which constitutes the Israeli occupation: the settlements, the roads, the roadblocks, the curfews, the closures, and the use of brute military force. The walls that Sharon is building now are intended to render Israel's hold over the land it captured in 1967 irreversible. They are the last nail in the coffin of the two-states solution. We shall wake up, in another year and a half from now, to a drastically different reality: a cruel state consisting of pens enclosures will stretch between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean."
(Yigal Bronner, 23 September 2003)

"Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
(Moshe Dayan, unknown date)

"Consider Jenin and Warsaw. In both cases, the world, Western democratic countries stood by and watched the slaughter. Horrified but unwilling to act. But today, in Jenin, unlike during the Nazi slaughter of the Jews in Warsaw, no one can say they didn't know."
(James Petras, April 2002)

"In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country ... The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."
(Arthur James Balfour, 11 August 1919)

"There is no terrible regime - Columbia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile during the time of the colonels, Burma, Taiwan, Zaire, Liberia, Congo, Sierra Leone - there is not one that does not have a major military connection to Israel. Israeli arms dealers are there [acting as] mercenaries - the guy behind Noriega was Michael Harari, an Israeli, who got out of Panama. Israeli mercenaries in Sierra Leone go around the UN boycotts of what are called blood diamonds, same in Angola. Israel was very involved in South Africa, of course, during the apartheid regime."
(Jeff Halper, 20 September 2003)

"Israel has also become the main subcontractor of American arms. Just last year, Israel signed a contract to train and equip the Chinese army. It signed another multi-billion dollar contract to train and equip the Indian army. What is it equipping them with? It is equipping them with American weapons."
(Jeff Halper, 20 September 2003)

"When AIPAC sells Israel to Congress, it doesn't go to Congressmen and ask them to support Israel because it is Judeo-Christian, or because it is the 'only democracy in the Middle East,' which it also does. It sells it on this basis: 'You are a member of Congress and it is your responsibility to support Israel, because this is how many industries in your state have business links to Israel, this is how many military research people are sitting in universities in your district, this is how many jobs in your district are dependent on the military and the defence industry,' and they translate it down to the extent to which your district is dependent on Israel. Therefore, if you are voting against Israel, you are voting against the goose that lays the golden egg. In most of the districts in the United States, members of Congress have a great dependence on the military. More than half of industrial employment in California is in one way or another connected to defence. Israel is right there, right in the middle of it all. And that is part of its strength."
(Jeff Halper, 20 September 2003)

"Israel is very important, because on the one hand it is a very sophisticated, high-tech, arms developer and dealer. But on the other hand, there are no ethical or moral constraints: there is no Congress, there are no human rights concerns, there are no laws against taking bribes - the Israeli government can do anything it wants to. So you have very sophisticated rogue state - not a Libyan rogue state, but a high tech, military-expert rogue state. Now that is tremendously useful, both for Europe and for the United States. For example, there are American Congressional constraints on selling arms to China because of China's human rights problems. So what Israel does is it tinkers with American arms just enough that they can be considered Israeli arms, and in that way bypasses Congress."
(Jeff Halper, 20 September 2003)

"I don't think we can dismantle the matrix of control. I think it has gone too far, and that the occupation is permanent. We are in a state of apartheid. But not everybody agrees with me - Uri Avnery doesn't agree with me, the people who are in favour of a two-state solution still think that we can end the occupation, or that we can roll it back enough that a Palestinian state will emerge. But the danger in being for a Palestinian state is that if you don't understand the control dimensions, then you are actually agitating for a Bantustan. I mean, Sharon also wants a Palestinian state; he wants a state that is completely controlled by Israel. So if you only look at territory and you don't look at the issue of control, you end up advocating a Bantustan."
(Jeff Halper, 20 September 2003)

"I was recently at a conference with John Dugard, who is now the Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights for the Occupations Palestinian Territories, and is originally from South Africa. He was (jokingly) offended that apartheid was being maligned [by its comparison the Israeli occupation]. In South Africa you didn’t have apartheid on the roads, you didn’t have walls being constructed…"
(Jessica Montell, September 21, 2003)

[Rootsie]

"We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. ... Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother." I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen, before Israel goes under."
(Martin van Creveld, 2003)

" We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should manoeuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise position. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism."
(Yehoshafat Harkabi, 2 November 1973)

"Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs' acts are legendary, the Israelites did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, they did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon, nor of the source of belief in the God of Israel. These facts have been known for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and nobody wants to hear about it."
(Ze'ev Herzog, 29 October 1999)

"All these events [in the biblical books of Exodus and Joshua] are practically contradicted by archaeology."
(Ze'ev Herzog, 23 December 1999)

"Even orders given by a government elected by a perfectly formal democratic process can be criminal orders. The French in their colonies and the Americans in Vietnam provided classic examples of war crimes perpetrated by democratic governments."
(Ze'ev (Zeev) Sternhell, 17 October 2003)

"In fact, I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in full view of nightly TV audiences, has performed such miracles of detailed sadism against an entire society and gotten away with it."
(Edward Said, September 25, 2003)

"The obvious intention of the Israeli government is to see that the reality of forced poverty and starvation, brought on by the imposition of the wall and the new “closed zones” become so unbearable for communities in the northern West Bank that people choose to leave in the hope of finding a better life. The village of Jubara is just one of many cases being fatally affected in this latest attempt by Israel and its military to cleanse the recently seized “closed zone” of all its Palestinian inhabitants and thus annex the land, and its existing illegal settlers to Israel proper."
(Mustafa (Mustapha) Barghouti, October 27, 2003)

"DiY media analysis: It is relatively easy to locate bias and imbalances in the media. An obvious way into it is to note the language used to describe news actors and assess whether the same words are used for similar actions or behaviours. Look for the language used to describe political stories. Who are the 'terrorists'?; and who the 'activists', 'fighters' or 'guerrillas'? Which governments are described in negative terms as 'extreme' or 'corrupt' and which in more positive terms? Check which side in a conflict are said to 'kill', 'murder' or commit 'massacres' and which are said simply to 'respond', 'strike' or commit actions which result in 'deaths'? Is it always the case that these descriptors are simply factual terms?"
(David Miller, 2003)

"It's been a long time since I've felt so small, uncomfortable and red-faced as during the show of whining and whimpering organized by Israel at The Hague. ... The Palestinians are fighting occupation and we want the world to stand by us as we pay the price for that occupation. Sooner or later, the fence will fall, just like the Berlin Wall. ... Exploiting bereavement and wallowing in self-pity is fitting for soap operas - not for the strongest country in the Middle East."
(Yoel Marcus, 27 February 2004)

"Is it conceivable that somebody on our side has decided that all of Palestinian society is the target? ... [Israel's] war without questions intensifies and broadens the circles of hatred for generations."
(Alex Fishman, October 2003)

"The depressing truth is that Israel's current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews."
(Tony Judt, 23 October 2003)

"While Israeli forces were engaged in what many termed a brutal — some even say criminal — campaign to crush Palestinian militants and terrorist cells in West Bank towns, U.S. military officials were in Israel seeing what they could learn from that urban fight."
(Christian Lowe, 10 June 2002)

"You have here in the United States the very powerful role played by the Israel lobby on Amnesty International USA. They are very powerful; they apply enormous pressure on Amnesty International USA, headquartered in New York. Amnesty International USA pretty much kowtows to them, and they use contributions to make sure that Amnesty International USA tows the line on Israel, and Amnesty International USA pays about 20% of the London budget. So that has an impact over in London too."
(Francis Boyle, Summer 2002)

"make their life so bitter that they will transfer themselves willingly"
(Binyamin (Benny) Elon, some date around 2003)

"[Some people believe] a mistaken claim holding that Zionism's main rationale was to create a sanctuary for persecuted Jews"
(David Breakstone, 5 November 2003)

"I am prepared, as an American and a Jew, to make the well being of Israel my primary concern"
(Gary Rosenblatt, 7 November 2003)

"The delusions, the self-righteousness, and the disassociation from a hostile world and the distancing from universal norms are symptoms of a society sinking into apartheid, as the South Africans who experienced that descent can attest. The hiding behind anti-Semitism may make an impression on the Europeans, but it will not be long before the ostracism will penetrate the walls of self-righteousness and bring them crashing down."
(Meron Benvenisti, 6 November 2003)

"The issue of Palestinian refugees resonated with me because I myself was a refugee. ... We came to the U.S. in August 1944 as part of a token group of about 1,000 mostly Jewish refugees ... In 1987, when I read Simha Flapan's The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, I was so shocked and disbelieving that it took me a second reading of his book to come to terms with what he wrote at the outset: that the 1948 war was as needless and unnecessary for the "security" of Israel as was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon of 1982. I learned that ... the 1948 war was not defensive, but a war to gain more territory than the U.N. had allotted for the Jewish state and to "cleanse" the area of Palestinian Arabs. I learned that even before the May 15 invasion by Arab armies, Jewish forces had succeeded in expelling some 300,000 Palestinians from their homes, but another 400,000 Palestinians remained in areas that the Jews coveted. Since the Jewish population of Palestine in 1948 was only about 600,000, the Ben-Gurion leadership required war in order to rid the new Jewish state of most of its Arab population."
(Ronald Bleier, November 1992)

"The guideline of our policy has always been the idea that a permanent situation of no peace and a latent war is the best situation for us, and that it must be maintained at all costs. ... we are becoming stronger year by year in a situation of impending conflict where it is possible that actual fighting may break out from time to time. SUch wars will usually be short and the results guaranteed in advance, since the gap between us and the Arabs is increasing. In this way we shall move on from occupation to further occupation. ... this criminally mischievous policy has led us into the crisis we are living through today"
(Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 30 November 1973)

"We have not been seeking peace for twenty-five years -- all declarations to that effect have been no more than coloured statements or deliberate lies. There is of course no assurance that we could have made peace with the Arabs if we had wanted to. However, it has to be heavily emphasized that we have not only made no attempts to seek peace, but have deliberately and with premeditation, sabotaged every possibility of doing so."
(Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 30 November 1973)

"I want the Arabs to see Jewish lights every night 500 meters from them."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 1980)

"We're involved here ... in a struggle for the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jews, as opposed to those who want to force us to be a state of all its citizens."
(Limor Livnat, 2002)

"Indeed, the most pernicious aspect of a political philosophy like Zionism that masquerades as democratic is that it requires an enemy in order to survive and, where an enemy does not already exist, it requires that one be created. In order to justify racist repression and dispossession, particularly in a system purporting to be democratic, those being repressed and displaced must be portrayed as murderous and predatory. And in order to keep its own population in line, to prevent a humane people from objecting to their own government's repressive policies, it requires that fear be instilled in the population: fear of "the other," fear of the terrorist, fear of the Jew-hater. The Jews of Israel must always be made to believe that they are the preyed-upon. This justifies having forced these enemies to leave, it justifies discriminating against those who remained, it justifies denying democratic rights to those who later came under Israel's control in the occupied territories."
(Kathleen Christison, 8 November 2003)

"I think that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this. It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the indigenous people of this land that drives us out of our minds."
(Haim Hanegbi, 8 August 2003)

"It would be quite astounding if Israel, the US’s most loyal ally, which we now know has at least one secret prison, wasn’t offering its services to the US. Israel has decades of expertise in torturing and interrogating Arab prisoners -- exactly the skills the Americans now need since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq."
(Dalia Kerstein, November 2003)

"Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."
(George H. W. Bush, September 1998)

"Our claim that Israel has fulfilled its side of the 'road map' is seen as lacking credibility because not only have we not evacuated the illegal outposts, we are working in every way to whitewash their existence and build more."
(Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Autumn 2003)

"We don't have unlimited time ... More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against 'occupation,' in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle - and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state."
(Ehud Olmert, November 2003)

"We don't have unlimited time ... More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution ... we may have to espouse unilateral separation. We won't need the Palestinians' support for that. What we would need is to pull ourselves together, to determine where the line should run. ... [The fence would] ultimately become part of [the unilateral plan]"
(Ehud Olmert, November 2003)

"The fear of the loss of the majority has already yielded plans for campaigns against the danger, such as the projects for increasing the Jewish birth rate, granting voting rights to expatriates or even to Jews wherever they may be."
(Meron Benvenisti, 20 November 2003)

"Israel and the Palestinians are sinking together into the mud of the "one state." The question is no longer whether it will be binational, but which model to choose."
(Meron Benvenisti, 20 November 2003)

"It's a unitary state controlled by one dominant national group, which leaves the other national group disenfranchised and subject to laws "for natives only," which for the purposes of respectability and international law are known as laws of "belligerent occupation." ... That's the situation nowadays."
(Meron Benvenisti, 20 November 2003)

"We should say we accept a two-state solution, but that it means going back to the 1967 borders, and a fully independent and sovereign Palestinian state. We should give them six months. If there is no decision, we should say Israel, by its own choice, doesn't want a two-state solution. If Israel wants a one-state solution we accept; but 20 years from now, we're going to ask for one person, one vote."
(Ali Jirbawi, November 2003)

"If you look at the drive for a two-state solution in the past, it was always to prevent conflict. What is becoming more prevalent is that people are saying we have to do it because if we don't we're going to end up with a bi-national state. ... If you look at all the surveys of public opinion, the one issue that unites the Jewish population of Israel is that more than 90 per cent say they want to retain a Jewish majority. The problem of the right wing is that they want a Greater Israel including the occupied territories, without any withdrawal. The irony is by doing that they invite a bi-national state."
(David Newman, November 2003)

"In progress in the occupied territories is a war of repression entirely subservient to the ideology of the settlement drive. The Palestinian population is being subjected to starvation, denial of medical treatment, demolition of homes and economic strangulation. I will take no part in these war crimes, nor will I serve as a fig leaf for them."
(Idan Landau, July 2001)

"Benny Morris used to be a "Young Turk", but now he's become an old jerk with a vengenace."
(Avi Shlaim, 8 November 2003)

"The trees grow back and ultimately we hope to harvest them in the place of the unwanted inhabitants of the area."
(Yossi Peli, 14 November 2003)

"The life of the Palestinians has indeed become hell. Most of them live below the poverty line, many on the threshold of hunger, some in an actual state of hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children suffer from malnutrition. Every village has become a prison camp, completely surrounded by roadblocks. Traffic is well-nigh impossible. Many Palestinians cannot reach their place of work, hospital, university or school or bring their produce to market. Israeli troops prowl in the towns and villages, demolishing homes, arresting or killing activists and, at the same time, women and children, too. The distant sound of an airplane engine is enough for the whole population to hold their breath."
(Uri Avnery, 14 November 2003)

"Palestine will be as Jewish as England is English."
(Chaim Weizmann, 1921)

"It was decided and carried out: they washed her, cut her hair, raped her and killed her."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1949)

"What answer do we have to the question: Why should Natasha from Kiev, whose ancestors had no connection to the Jewish people, be preferred to Ahmad, whose family tilled the land around Safed for centuries?"
(Jonathan (Jonathon) Rosenblum, 1999)

"The mass non-Jewish immigration undermines the very legitimacy of Israel. The spate of bills introduced by Arab Knesset members to amend the definition of Israel as a Jewish state and to recognize an Arab right of return derive their credibility from the non-Jewish immigration."
(Jonathan (Jonathon) Rosenblum, 1999)

"Mass immigration of non-Jews has the potential to trigger a social conflagration the likes of which we have never seen. Israelis of Middle Eastern descent, who had just begin to recover from the devastation of their own absorption in the country, feel they are being shunted aside in favor of those who are not even Jewish. The resentment aroused by this sense of being shoved back into the underclass has little to do with religion.
The pork shops and churches of the non-Jewish immigrants are merely the most potent symbols of the contempt in which the Middle Eastern population feels it is held. Even crucifix-wearing, pork-eating Russians are considered preferable to them."
(Jonathan (Jonathon) Rosenblum, 1999)

"The credibility issue is extremely important. On numerous occasions the IDF has put out lying accounts of incidents, and in the end the Palestinian version turned out to be true. This tradition of lying is very dangerous for the resilience of the society, especially if the lies are wrapped in a security cloak."
(Gideon Levy, 23 November 2003)

"Ben-Gurion gave the official version. He denied any IDF involvement [in the Qibya massacre] ... This was not Ben-Gurions first lie for what he saw as the good of his country, nor was it to be the last, but it was one of the most blatant."
(Avi Shlaim, 2000)

"it is permissible to lie for the sake of the Land of Israel"
(Yitzhak Yizernitzky, unknown date)

"Without lies, it would be impossible to talk about peace with the Palestinians for 36 years while at the same time seizing more and more Palestinian land. Without lies, it would be impossible to claim that there is no partner for the road map, while at the same time injecting more and more money into outposts that the road map calls for dismantling. Without lies, it would be impossible to promise "painful concessions" in exchange for peace, while at the same time terming people who concluded such an agreement "traitors.""
(Akiva Eldar, 24 November 2003)

"In Israel, lying has become the norm among the working levels of the army, the legal establishment and the diplomatic corps. Lying has become a way of life for commanders and soldiers, lawyers and clerks, most of whom are far from having right-wing views and many of whom loathe the occupation."
(Akiva Eldar, 24 November 2003)

"While the politicians lie in order to perpetuate the occupation, the workers learn to lie in order to justify it. Israel Defense Forces soldiers have become used to seeing settlers prepare a road to yet another outpost in the morning, and then hearing on the radio in the evening that the defense minister and the prime minister "vehemently deny" the existence of any new outposts. So what do they do? They say (perhaps even to themselves) that this is a "security road.""
(Akiva Eldar, 24 November 2003)

"Members of the Shin Bet security service know that not every Palestinian who was executed without trial was truly a "ticking bomb." They have become used to "cutting corners" and to living with the lie. Analysts understand that it is impossible to defeat a people fighting for its land and that there is no basis for the claim that there is no Palestinian partner for a fair division of the land. But they have learned that it does not pay to tell the leaders the truth."
(Akiva Eldar, 24 November 2003)

"The soldiers who harden their hearts at roadblocks, the pilots who loose bombs in the middle of cities, the attorneys who whitewash and the spokesmen who lie are not people who lack moral values. Most are merely victims of the situation created by the occupation."
(Akiva Eldar, 24 November 2003)

"Today there is no separation [between an anti-Semitism that should be condemned and a legitimate criticism toward Israel's policies]. We are talking about collective anti-Semitism."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 24 November 2003)

"Our sufferings have granted us immunity papers, as it were . . . After what all those dirty goyim have done to us, none of them is entitled to preach morality to us. We, on the other hand, have carte blanche, because we were victims and have suffered so much. Once a victim, always a victim, and victimhood entitles its owners to a moral exemption."
(Amos Oz (born Klausner), 1982)

"The failure to differentiate between civilians and terrorists turns all the Palestinians into potential suicide bombers."
(Yosef Paritzky, 2003)

"The world is rightly horrified at the cruel and bloody deaths of Israeli civilians, including babies and small children, inflicted by terrorist suicide bombers. Grievous though every one of these deaths most certainly is, it cannot be denied that during the three years of the Second Intifada the Israelis have killed three times as many Palestinians, some of them terrorists (in illegal targeted assassinations) but most of them innocent civilians, including babies and pregnant women."
(Gerald Kaufman, 22 November 2003)

"The prime minister has a plan. First he has to complete the eastern security fence. Then he will declare an enclave consisting of 52 percent of the West Bank "a temporary Palestinian state." The working premise of this plan is that 300,000 or more Palestinians will find themselves imprisoned between the fence and the Green Line, cut off from the mainstream of West Bank life, and will migrate slowly to the enclave."
(Akiva Eldar, 25 November 2003)

"Better Sharm-el-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm-el-Sheikh."
(Moshe Dayan, 1967)

"The most valuable part of the Jewish nation is already in Palestine, and those Jews living outside Palestine are not too important."
(Chaim Weizmann, 1942)

"One Cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland."
(Yitzhak (Izaak) Greenbaum, 18 February 1943)

[Rootsie]

"“The Sharon government sometimes apologizes after it kills an innocent civilian, but it does not apologize for raping the cities and for going in and carrying out terrorist actions, going house to house much like the Nazis did in World War II, tearing holes through the walls, roughing up people, killing people, assassinating people. This is a terrorist government funded, by the way, by the United States government to the tune of $3 billion a year in U.S. military aid. These are American helicopters and tanks and F-16s doing this damage to the Palestinian people.”"
(Adam Shapiro, March 29, 2002)

"The Zionist movement was a partner to this crime [of abandoning European Jews to the Holocaust]. Its policy was to settle Palestine with Jews and those Jews they could not use were as good as dead."
(Yossi Schwartz, June 2003)

"If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1938)

"It may interest you to know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the leading Jewish organizations met in conference. ... It was decided that no Jewish organization would, at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the immigration laws."
(Stephen S. Wise, 1938)

"The hopes of Europe's six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked: 'Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?' I replied, 'No.'... From the depths of the tragedy I want to save... young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world... Two millions, and perhaps less; “Scheerith Hapleta” – only a branch will survive. They had to accept it. The rest they must leave to the future – to their youth. If they feel and suffer, they will find the way, “Beacharith Hajamin” [at the end of times]."
(Stephen S. Wise, 1938)

"When they come to us with two plans - the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land - I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land. The more said about the slaughter of our people, the greater the minimization of our efforts to strengthen and promote the Hebraisation of the land. If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the Karen Hayesod [United Jewish Appeal] to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No. And once again no!"
(Yitzhak (Izaak) Greenbaum, 1943)

"In principle I support Zionism, but there are difficulties with solving the Jewish question. Our experiment in Birobidzan failed, because the Jews prefer to live in cities."
(Stalin, 11 February 1945)

"How did we get to the point where Israeli soldiers are preventing women in labor from reaching a hospital? ... this is also the other side of terrorism - Israeli terrorism. A roadblock that doesn't let pregnant women in labor pass is a lethal roadblock. It attacks innocent civilians, just as in a suicide bombing attack."
(Gideon Levy, 23 January 2002)

"The whole system is systematically biased ... Twenty years ago I sat one of these tests at Tel Aviv university. I was asked who Einstein was. I said he was the biggest scientist in the world. But they said no, we gave a different first name. We are speaking of a singer from Tel Aviv."
(Hassan Jabareen, 1 December 2003)

"Fear of being slandered as 'anti-Semites' means we are abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East."
(Robert Fisk, 17 April 2001)

"On October 29, 1956, soldiers of the Israeli Border Police murdered 43 civilians, including women and children, and wounded many others because they were outside their homes after curfew was imposed on the Israeli Arab village of Kafr Qassem at the beginning of the Sinai War. The perpetrators knew that they were killing villagers who were returning from work in the fields without knowing anything about the existence of a curfew."
(Aviv Lavie, 31 October 2003)

"Without an internationally recognized provocation, an Israeli invasion of Lebanon would have a devastating effect on the United States."
(Alexander Haig, 1982)

"But there are Arabs in Palestine. I did not know."
(Max Nordau, 1897)

"By establishing the State of Israel in the traditionally Arab land of Palestine and by forcibly displacing its original inhabitants, the Zionists did not provide their adherents with a peaceful refuge, but placed them astride a volcano."
(Henry Cattan, 1976)

"The land without people -— for the people without land."
(Israel Zangwill, 1901)

"My step on the road to reality was not taken until 1904, when I appear to have become fully aware of the Arab peril."
(Israel Zangwill, 1904)

"Today...we are located in the Palestinian areas, we are violating international agreements, and no one is saying anything. So we talk Palestinian state, Palestinian state, but in the meantime not even Area A exists any longer. And there is no Orient House, no Palestinian representation in Jerusalem, and Palestinians are afraid to walk around with weapons in their own cities. Obviously we all want peace, who doesn't want peace. But [my father's] statement about a Palestinian state is a very remote statement."
(Omri Sharon, 12 December 2002)

"[The Jewish immigrants from Arab countries are] human dust lacking language, education, roots, tradition or national dreams."
(David Ben-Gurion, unknown date)

"Mizrahim now comprise about 45 percent of Israel's population. ... Their culture was disparaged by the country's historic leaders. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, referred to them as "human dust." Golda Meir said they were not "real Jews" because they don't speak Yiddish."
(Joel Beinin, 19 June 2000)

"If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country."
(David Ben-Gurion, unknown date)

"The United Nations is under no more of a legal obligation to maintain Zionism in Israel than it is to maintain apartheid in South Africa."
(William Thomas Mallison, 1986)

"Question: Is anti-Semitism on the increase?
Chomsky: In the West, fortunately, it scarcely exists now, though it did in the past. There is, of course, what the Anti-Defamation League calls "the real anti-Semitism", more dangerous than the old-fashioned kind: criticism of policies of the state of Israel and US support for them, opposition to a vast US military budget, etc. In contrast, anti-Arab racism is rampant. The manifestations are shocking, in elite intellectual circles as well, but arouse little concern because they are considered legitimate: the most extreme form of racism."
(Noam Chomsky, December 4, 2003)

"The penalty for succumbing to the settlers' single-minded pursuit of Greater Israel is the dissolution of the Jewish state. ... Many Israelis, and other Jews, will argue that historic justice demands a Jewish state. They will insist that, particularly after centuries of horrendous Jewish suffering culminating in the Holocaust, there should be one place on Earth where the Jews can exercise their natural right to sovereignty. They are absolutely right, but, unfortunately, given the choice between sovereignty and land, we chose land. We have manifestly preferred settlement in the whole Land of Israel to a state of Israel in part of the land. It is irrelevant that the settlers are a small minority. The rest of us have permitted them to do what they wanted."
(Daniel Gavron, December 2003)

"Concerning the name, we gave this law the name Basic Law: Israel-Lands. There were a number of proposals about the name. MK Harari proposed to name it "The People's Lands". On the face of it, I do not see any great difference between the two names. I admit that neither name hits the target. What is it that we want? What we want is difficult to define. We want to make it clear that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel. The "people of Israel" is a concept that is broader than that of the "people resident in Zion", because the people of Israel live throughout the world. On the other hand, every law that is passed is for the benefit of all the residents of the state, and all the residents of the state include also people who do not belong to the people of Israel, the worldwide people of Israel."
(Zerah (Zerach or Zorah) Warhaftig, 19 July 1960)

"Ben-Gurion said that anyone who approaches the Zionist problem from a moral aspect, he is not a Zionist."
(Moshe Dayan, September 1967)

"I do not deny the Palestinians any place or stand or opinion on every matter. But certainly I am not prepared to consider them as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner."
(Chaim (Haim) Herzog, 1972)

"My job was to take..... [each Palestinian's] thumb and immerse its edge in ink and fingerprint them on the departure statement....Every day tens of buses arrived. There were days on which it seemed to me that thousands were departing ......there were also not a few people who were simply expelled....We forced them to sign. I will tell you how exactly this was conducted: [for instance] a bus [carrying men] was arriving and only men were getting off,...--only men, aged 20 to 70, accompanied by borderguard soldiers. We were told that these were saboteurs, fedayeen, and it would be better that they would be outside the state.......[The Palestinian men] did not want to leave, and were dragged from the buses while being kicked and hit by revolver butts. By the time they arrived to my [signing] stall, they were usually already completely blurred [as a result of beatings] at this stage and did not care much about the signing. It seemed to them part of the process. In many cases the violence used against them was producing desirable results from our point of view. The distance between the border point and the [Allenby] Bridge was about 100 metres and out of fear they were crossing to the other side running; the borderguard men and the paratroopers were all the time in the vicinity. When someone refused to give me his hand [for finger printing] they came and beat him badly. Then I was forcibly taking his thumb, immersing it in ink and finger printing him. This way the refuseniks were removed....I have no doubt that tens of thousands of men were removed against their will."
(Former Israeli soldier inverviewed by Kol Ha'ir in 1991, November 1991)

"I remember that 5 days after the..... War I was in Jericho. It was empty there and we were told that the [refugees of ‘Ayn Sultan, Nu’aymah and ‘Aqbat Jabir camps outside Jericho] fled. It is more likely that ... [the Israeli army] drove them away. In [1948] ... [Israeli commanders] volunteered to carry out [transfer] on their own initiative. In the Six Day War there were similar situations. Many thought that we had not completed the job in [1948] ... It is known that there was a plan to conquer Qalqilyah and destroy it. There was also a plan to carry out transfer in Hebron as a revenge for the massacre [of Jews] in [19]29."
(Uri Milstein, unknown date)

"Is this the way to occupy Hebron? A couple of artillery bombardments on Hebron and not a single ‘Hebronite’ would have remained there. Is this the way to occupy [East] Jerusalem [without driving most of the Arabs out]."
(Yigal Allon, November 1967)

"Our plans for large-scale immigration offered Germany an additional advantage in that they would fulfil one of her avowed aims, namely, to rid Europe of the Jews."
(Nathan (Natan) Friedman-Yellin, 1978)

"[The] formula for the parameters of a unilateral solution are: To maximize the number of Jews; to minimize the number of Palestinians; not to withdraw to the 1967 border and not to divide Jerusalem."
(Ehud Olmert, November 2003)

"the impression is that all of Israel is turning into one big settlement in the territories."
(Lily Galili, 18 December 2003)

"If Rabbi Kaplan really wanted to know what happened, we old Jewish settlers in Palestine who witnessed the fight could tell him how and in what manner we, Jews, forced the Arabs to leave cities and villages ... some of them were driven out by force of arms; others were made to leave by deceit, lying and false promises. It is enough to cite the cities of Jaffa, Lydda, Ramleh, Beersheba, Acre from among numberless others."
(Nathan Chofshi, 9 February 1959)

"We came and turned the native Arabs into tragic refugees. And still we dare to slander and malign them, to besmirch their name. Instead of being deeply ashamed of what we did and trying to undo some of the evil we committed ... we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them."
(Nathan Chofshi, 9 February 1959)

"I dislike the coercive methods of Zionists who in this country have not hesitated to use economic means to silence persons who have different views. I object to the attempts at character assassination of those who do not agree with them."
(Arthur Hays Sulzberger, 1946)

"I cannot rid myself of the feeling that the unfortunate Jews of Europe's DP camps are helpless hostages for whom statehood has been made the only ransom."
(Arthur Hays Sulzberger, 1946)

"It is often said that the Arabs fled, that they left the country voluntarily, and that they therefore bear the responsibility for losing their property and their land. It is true that in history there are some instances - in Rome and in France during the Revolutions when enemies of the state were proscribed and their property confiscated. But in general international law, the principle holds true that no citizen loses his property or his rights of citizenship; and the citizenship right is de facto a right to which the Arabs in Israel have much more legitimacy than the Jews. Just because the Arabs fled? Since when is that punishable by confiscation of property and by being barred from returning to the land on which a people's forefathers have lived for generations? Thus, the claim of the Jews to the land of Israel cannot be a realistic political claim. If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers had lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse. ... there is only one solution for Israel, namely, the unilateral acknowledgement of the obligation of the state toward the Arabs - not to use it as a bargaining point, but to acknowledge the complete moral obligation of the Israeli state to its former inhabitants of Palestine."
(Erich Fromm, 19 May 1958)

"Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements ... The residents should be helped to leave [these] areas."
(Moshe Carmel, 31 October 1948)

"As it turns out, even in a hospital - a place where human compassion is supposed to be the sole operating norm - a Palestinian is still not on the same footing as other human beings. This process of dehumanizing the Palestinians has spread to every sector of Israeli society. What started in the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet security service, and spread to other branches of power and to the media (which has, for years, deliberately emphasized the violent side of Palestinian reality) has now permeated every part of Israel's social fabric. That's apparently the only way a state can continue with a conquest and oppression without being overly concerned about what it means to the conquered."
(Gideon Levy, 21 December 2003)

"Former IDF soldier Ron Porer, author of the book "The Roadblock Syndrome," relates how soldiers he knew were furious whenever Palestinians dared wish them "good morning" at checkpoints. That's no accident: Such courteous residents of the territories might have put a crack in the soldiers' wall of rage and contempt."
(Gideon Levy, 21 December 2003)

"What we wanted to escape in Vilna we found here. ... There, hatred was directed against Jews, here against Arabs. The class struggles were the same, with homeless sleeping in the street."
(Meir Vilner, 1998)

"[Israel should implement a stringent policy of family planning in relation to its Muslim population] ... the delivery rooms in Soroka Hospital in Be'er Sheva have turned into a factory for the production of a backward population."
(Yitzhak Ravid, 18 December 2003)

"We don’t differentiate between ordinary Palestinians and Palestinians who claim to be journalists."
(Daniel Seaman, 2003)

"The root cause of terrorism is its success and its support. It is a case of advantaged people using disadvantaged people as cannon fodder. As we all know, Palestinian terror has been supported by the UN, by the Vatican and several other institutions."
(Alan Morton Dershowitz, December 2003)

"Pre-emption is the other primary method of reducing the scourge of terrorism. Pre-emption, although Israel has praciticed it, generally falls outside the rule of law. Terrorists put democracies in a tragic dilemma by hiding among civilians."
(Alan Morton Dershowitz, December 2003)

"We have a joint project between Israel and the US, which lawyers must lead. Our project is to propose new rules of international law. Israelis are obliged to follow the rules of law in the democracy called Israel, as I am within the US. Your moral obligation to comply with international law is voluntary. You are not represented in the making or implementing of those laws. International law lives or dies by its credibility, not by the democracy by which it has been constructed. I am suggesting the change of the rule of law. Democracy should not have to justify its actions and show how the rule of human rights has become a weapon in promoting human wrongs... You are the lab for that process. You are contributing greatly. Do not allow the world to bully you into believing that you are the human rights violators ..."
(Alan Morton Dershowitz, December 2003)

"One of the most important changes that the Oslo process brought about was the de facto transformation, indeed the ultimate corruption, of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, from a liberation movement representing the entire Palestinian people, into a vassal regime called the Palestinian Authority (PA), representing only one third of the Palestinian people. What is quite insidious in this process is how the PA, conscious of this transformation, continues to speak of the "Palestinian people", which had been reduced through the Oslo Accords to those West Bank and Gaza Palestinians it now represents. Diaspora Palestinians are simply referred to, in accordance with US and Israeli parlance, as "refugees", and Israeli Palestinians are referred to by Israeli diktat as "Israeli Arabs". In doing so, not only has the scope of the Palestinian leadership and its representative status of the whole Palestinian people (achieved in international fora in 1974 after a strenuous struggle) been substantially reduced, but the Palestinian people themselves were diminished demographically by the PA's appropriation of the designation "Palestinian people" to refer to a mere third of Palestinians."
(Joseph Massad, 25 December 2003)

"There were some fellows who refused to take part in the expulsion action [of the Palestinian population from the towns of Lydda and Ramla in July 1948] ... Prolonged propaganda activities were required after the action, to remove the bitterness of these [soldiers] and explain why we were obliged to undertake such a harsh and cruel action."
(Yitzhak Rabin, 1979)

"Israel counted “81 days of quiet” without terrorist attacks. But there is no greater lie than this. The quiet was only here. During this “quiet,” dozens of Palestinians were killed, and almost no one bothered to report it. That is how it becomes possible to speak of quiet and then claim that the Palestinians disturbed it. The fact that the media does not speak of Palestinian deaths does not mean that they did not happen."
(Gideon Levy, December 28, 2003)

"I ran toward them and punched the Arab right in the face, never before did I do such a thing, he collapsed on the road … I dragged him over behind the jeep, pushed him in … We sat in the back seat … Our Arab lay down there and just wept quietly to himself … and he bled and made a puddle of blood and saliva, which angered and disgusted me, so I grabbed him by the hair and twisted his head to the side. He cried out loud … He didn't stop crying and someone said his hands hurt from the handcuffs. One of the soldiers approached him and punched him in the stomach. The Arab suffered from pain and grunted, we all giggled, it was funny … I kicked him real hard in the bottom and he whirled inside, just as I planned. They shouted that I am crazy and laughed – and I felt great."
(Liran Ron-Forer, December 2003)

"Washington and Jerusalem have an understanding dating back to 1969 that as long as Israel maintains "ambiguity" and does not openly declare itself a nuclear power, the U.S. will not force it to join the NPT (which would mean destroying its nuclear capabilities)."
(Aluf Benn, 26 December 2003)

"I am sure, the soldier didn’t know he was shooting at a Jew. ... the army deals differently with the Palestinians. Soldiers feel threatened by Palestinians and open fire when they feel threatened. This is not the same when soldiers deal with Jews."
(Moshe Ya'alon (Yaalon), December 2003)

"I am sorry, I never thought I was shooting at Jews, I would never shoot a Jew."
(Israeli soldier who shot Gil Naamati, December 2003)

"[The shooting of Gil Na'amati at Mas'ha] also supplies the answer to the question that Ze'ev Schiff posed in this paper on August 8, when he examined the official numbers of the enemy killed. Until that date, 2,341 Palestinians had been killed and another 14,000 wounded. "According to the calculations of the Shin Bet, 551 of those killed were terrorists, Who, then, were the others?" Schiff asked. The incident at the fence provides the definitive answer."
(Ze'ev (Zeev) Sternhell, 2 January 2004)

"The Israeli government is not the first to be elected democratically and to order its security forces to perform actions that conscience can barely abide. France of the Fourth Republic and the United States in the period of the Vietnam War were democracies that forced their soldiers to commit war crimes or that ignored the perpetration of such crimes."
(Ze'ev (Zeev) Sternhell, 2 January 2004)

"Therefore, there must be a wall. I would prefer a wall built through negotiations. However, in the absence of that option, you [the Israelis] must take steps towards the creation of two states. The wall will provide a solution to both the security and population questions. It should be built in the western, not the eastern, portion of the West Bank. If you want a two state solution, you must have a wall."
(Dennis B. Ross, December 2003)

"The goal [of the December 2003 Israeli plan to double the number of settlers on the Golan] is for Assad to see from the windows of his home the Israeli Golan thriving and flourishing. ... The government resolution is a response to the initiative posed by Syria, which on one hand announces that it is interested in peace, and on the other hand openly supports Palestinian terror."
(Yisrael Katz, December 2003)

"Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north."
(Oded Yinon, February 1982)

"I deeply believe in launching preventive war against the Arab States without further hesitation. By doing so we will achieve two targets: firstly, the annihilation of Arab power; and secondly, the expansion of our territory."
(Menachem Begin, 12 October 1955)

"We must review the fence's routing ... There is a very serious risk the World Court will rule against us ... and this is liable to prompt the General Assembly into imposing all sorts of sanctions against us ... There is a danger that we will be exposed to an international boycott as was the case before the fall of the regime in South Africa."
(Yosef (Tommy) Lapid, 4 January 2004)

"We have to reserve the right to bomb the niggers."
(David Lloyd George, mid-1920s)

[Rootsie]

"A partial Jewish State is not the end, but only the beginning ... We shall bring into the state all the Jews it is possible to bring ... We shall establish a multi-faceted Jewish economy - agricultural, industrial, and maritime. We shall organize a modern defense force, a select army ... and then I am certain that we will not be prevented from settling in the other parts of the country, either by mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or by some other means. Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if there is a state."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1937)

"Why are there so many Arabs? Why didn't you expel them?"
(David Ben-Gurion, July 1948)

"[Ariel Sharon has a strong tendency] to not tell the truth."
(David Ben-Gurion, some date in the early 1950s)

"Since Ben Gurion first remarked in his diary 50 years ago that the young officer had a strong tendency "to not tell the truth," Sharon has improved his art form."
(Gideon Samet, 7 January 2004)

"Later, the Zionist organisation organised a debate and asked me to support the Balfour Declaration. I asked them for material on the Declaration before I would speak. After reading, I came to the conclusion that the Balfour Declaration would not solve the Jewish problem, that the Jews are all over the world, and Israel, which was then Palestina, cannot absorb all the Jews and what would happen to the Palestinians?"
(Rachel (Ray) Alexander Simons, 1996)

"Just as Israel has claimed many times that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat is not a partner for peace, the Syrians can claim, and indeed are so doing, that the Israeli government is not a true partner for peace talks. Although there are glimmers of willingness to conduct negotiations, on the whole the Syrians are right. The Israeli leadership recoils from the price involved in negotiations with Syria."
(Ze'ev Schiff, 7 January 2004)

"it is clear that the present government of Israel simply does not tell the truth."
(Arthur Hertzberg, 7 January 2004)

"One of my own proudest moments was the day some thirty years ago when Abba Eban and I, who were both suspected, correctly, of being "doves," were described in an article by one of the neoconservatives as "functional anti-Semites." To disagree with the then dominant line of Menachem Begin's government, that it was Israel's destiny to hold on to the West Bank, was not to be discussed as an argument about policy; such views were to be defamed as "Jewish anti-Semitism.""
(Arthur Hertzberg, 7 January 2004)

"There is, of course, a moral problem with the expectation that the rules of engagement should be different for Israelis and Palestinians, even when the situations are similar. It appears to be racial discrimination."
(Amos Harel, 7 January 2004)

"The attitude you [Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, and Coby Benatoff, head of the European Jewish Congress] have shown in your letter ... forces me to suspend the preparations. ... [I am ] both surprised and shocked. I could not believe you were signing such an article."
(Romano Prodi, 6 January 2004)

"Zionist colonialism inhabits the space between two extinct models -- those provided by South Africa and French practice in Algeria. It is not a blend of the two, but rather a distillation of the worst in each."
(Azmi Bishara, 8 January 2004)

"Moshe Dayan and his aides adopted a policy of open bridges after the 1967 War [because they] wanted the Palestinians to have an economic and demographic outlet to Jordan, the Gulf countries, and other parts of the region, so as to free Israel from the economic and other responsibilities commonly assumed by occupying authorities. These open bridges helped the occupation endure, and helped the people endure it."
(Azmi Bishara, 8 January 2004)

"In Jerusalem, when you see an Arab you don't know whether he’s with you or against you," she said, "but here [Gaza] if you see an Arab you know he’s dangerous and you shoot him.
— Adi Dana-Picard, settler in Kfar Darom, Gaza."
(Various citizens of Israel, January 15, 2004)

"Lately, I've been wondering what I would do if the International Court in The Hague, on its own initiative, asked for my opinion on the separation fence. I find these thoughts oppressive. Without a doubt, on the basis of the concepts that I know and accept, Sharon's fence is a crime against humanity. There is no other way to define it."
(Yossi Sarid, 21 January 2004)

"[Lebanese property law forbids the acquisition of real estate by non-Lebanese persons] “who do not possess citizenship issued by a state recognised by Lebanon.”"
(Lebanese Parliament, 2002)

"[Regarding the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in Gaza] You are almost getting a situation like the Warsaw ghetto - people can't get in or out. They can't work, they can't sell anything. There is this gradual squeeze."
(Jenny Tonge, June 2003)

"This particular brand of terrorism, the suicide bomber, is truly born out of desperation. Many many people criticise, many many people say it is just another form of terrorism, but I can understand and I am a fairly emotional person and I am a mother and a grand mother, I think if I had to live in that situation, and I say this advisedly, I might just consider becoming one myself. And that is a terrible thing to say.""
(Jenny Tonge, 21 January 2004)

"In most cases a leak relates to the start of contacts with some Arabs, and after the leak, the contacts are usually broken. There is scarcely any doubt that the leak is aimed at thwarting the contacts and even smearing those Israelis trying to nurture connections with the Arab side. ... In many cases, this has succeeded. The Arab side is put off."
(Ze'ev Schiff, 16 January 2004)

"Since 1948, Arab hostility has served Israel's interests and the price of achieving peace - in territory, refugee return and the return of property - has been considered steeper than the cost of peace's absence, including the loss of Israeli lives, both soldiers and civilians."
(Meron Benvenisti, 29 January 2004)

"Apparently the [Israeli] public is accepting a situation in which military activity in Palestinian towns is accompanied by indiscriminate killing."
(Haaretz editorial writer, 29 January 2004)

"Whoever [Arab stopped at a checkpoint] does not act nicely gets beaten. ... We have clubs for that. ... Sometimes I might just not like his face. ... And then he gets one too. Just a way of passing the time."
(An Israeli policewoman, 16 January 2004)

"Before we turn to the old catch-all labels of the past, we need to take a good look at the singer as well as the song. “The best solution to anti-Semitism,” Sharon said in Rome last week, “is immigration to Israel.” ...
There has always been a debate among Jews about the importance of anti-Semitism in Europe, and Zionists for obvious reasons have tended to emphasise the threat it poses. But today Israel itself looks more like a source of danger for Jews worldwide than a refuge, and even Israelis — though the emigration statistics remain a closely guarded official secret — are voting with their feet.
If Sharon is seriously concerned about anti-Semitism, there is no one better placed than he to do something about it by changing his Government’s policies towards the Palestinians."
(Mark Mazower, 27 November 2003)

"the postmodern state needs to get used to the idea of double standards. [Among themselves, EU member-states can afford openness and transparency. But, when it comes to relations with the Third World,] Europeans need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary ..."
(Robert Cooper, 17 October 2003)

"The Jews have become accustomed to being victims. This is a perception that is being inculcated in children in Israel by hundreds of different methods, from the national holidays to visits to Auschwitz. ... Those in our country who talk about a “Jewish state” – as opposed to an “Israeli state” – mean this, too. The commander of an armored division reveals that he is the son of Holocaust survivors, but continues to enforce the oppressive occupation. ... Non-conformists may argue that we have long since become a nation of occupiers, that the appellation “nation of victims” now belongs to our neighbors. Such talking revolts the national psyche, it is upsetting and infuriating. It hurts the sense of belonging. There is only one nation of victims. If somebody else wants to claim this crown of thorns for himself, we will bash in his head."
(Uri Avnery, 31 January 2004)

""The people [the Palestinians] who own this land don’t think they [the settlers] should be on this land. ... [After all] there’s no place in the world where, just because I want to go and live there, I can take my caravan and park it on a hilltop.""
(Simon McDonald, 9 February 2004)

"Many agree that the moment there is an Arab majority west of the Jordan, without a [peace] settlement, it will be very difficult for Israel. ... We urge Israel to act before that moment."
(Simon McDonald, 9 February 2004)

"The right to be married is a humanitarian right recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but not in the State of Israel, which has committed to uphold this declaration."
(Naomi Chazan, 4 February 2004)

"[Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a Gush Emunim leader] explains that while God requires other, normal nations to abide by abstract codes of "justice and righteousness," such laws do not apply to Jews."
(Ian Lustick, 1988)

"Ours is not an autonomous scale of values, the product of human reason, but rather an heteronomous or, more correctly, theonomous scale rooted in the will of the Divine architect of the universe and its moral order. From the point of view of mankind's humanistic morality we were in the wrong in (taking the land) from the Canaanites. There is only one catch. The command of God ordered us to be the people of the Land of Israel."
(Shlomo Aviner, 1982)

"in a debate setting, it takes 30 seconds to create a lie, to spin a lie, and then five minutes to disprove it. So in a debate setting, lies win. I feel like that's something you see in the media."
(Wendy Pearlman, 11 February 2004)

"I remember the first time I realised how dishonest this promise [that the US-uk would bring democracy to Iraq] was. It was when Paul Bremer, America's failed proconsul in Iraq, stopped talking about democracy and started referring to "representative government" - which is not the same thing at all. That was when folk like Daniel Pipes, a right-wing cousin of those neo-cons we can no longer mention, started advocating not "democracy" for Iraq but a "democratically-minded autocrat"."
(Robert Fisk, 13 February 2004)

"Will this remote village become a milestone in the struggle over the fence? Will the residents of Budrus herald a change to nonviolence in the Palestinian struggle against the occupation? Or, in a week or two, will the separation fence cut off life in this village, too, and show that nonviolence doesn't pay, with the scene in Budrus soon becoming a forgotten episode?"
(Gideon Levy, 11 February 2004)

"In this difficult time we must again reaffirm we are enlisted for the duration–and reaffirm our belief that the cause of Israel must be the cause of America–and the cause of people of conscience everywhere."
(John Kerry, 17 February 2004)

"I am Jewish born. Since Israel purports to speak and act in the name of Jews everywhere... we are saying: No, not in my name. Never. ... People are saying that there should be boycotts, there should be sanctions... I support the call now for the isolation and the boycott of Israel. I support sanctions ... That is actually in the interests of all the people – Muslims, Jews and Christians – in the Middle East because the sooner we can stop this conflict... the sooner we can get to negotiations, to a settlement for peace and a recognition of the Palesinian people’s national rights. ... It’s something that I am raising, that I certainly will be raising, in the cabinet now... I think the leadership of our country will have to deal with this issue."
(Ronnie Kasrils, 23 April 2002)

"the separation fence is inching further into the territory of the West Bank, in such a degree that the cantonisation of Palestinian territory begins to raise question about the viability of a Palestinian state."
(Pat Cox, 24 February 2004)

"I've been very influenced by what's called the neo-con movement. They're not conservatives. They define themselves famously as - and this is exactly how I would define myself - as liberals who have been mugged by reality."
(Melanie Phillips, cited on 7 March 2003)

"It is just a horrible thought that such people are working for the Americans in Iraq."
(Richard Goldstone, February 2004)

"where a person makes anti-Israeli statements that challenge the legitimacy of the existence of the state of Israel, that to me is concealed anti-Semitism."
(Michael Brecher, November 2003)

"The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature - though not its extent - to the Warsaw ghetto."
(Oona King, 12 June 2003)

"The early [Israeli[ textbooks tended to describe acts of Arabs as hostile, deviant, cruel, immoral, unfair, with the intention to hurt Jews and to annihilate the State of Israel. Within this frame of reference, Arabs were delegitimized by the use of such labels as ‘robbers,’ ‘bloodthirsty,’ and ‘killers’. ... [Israeli textbooks continue to present Jews as] improving the country in ways they believe the Arabs are incapable of. ... This attitude served to justify the return of the Jews, implying that they care enough about the country to turn the swamps and deserts into blossoming farmland; this effectively delegitimizes the Arab claim to the same land. ... The message was that the Palestinians were primitive and neglected the country and did not cultivate the land. ... [The texts featured Arabs as] unenlightened, inferior, fatalistic, unproductive and apathetic, ..., tribal, vengeful, exotic, poor, sick, dirty, noisy, colored [claiming that] they burn, murder, destroy, and are easily inflamed.”"
(Daniel Bar-Tal, September 1999)

"The Mapai [Israeli Labour Party] old guard ... put so much store by Israel’s claim to moral rectitude that they cannot face up to the evidence of cynical Israeli double-dealings or brutal dispersal and dispossession of the Palestinians. It is an axiom of their narrative that Israel is the innocent victim. Not content with the thirty pieces of silver, these people insist on retaining for Israel the crown of thorns."
(Avi Shlaim, 2004)

"If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel."
(David Ben-Gurion, 7 December 1938)

"If Jews will have to choose between the refugees, saving Jews from concentration camps, and assisting a national museum in Palestine, mercy will have the upper hand and the whole energy of the people will be channelled into saving Jews from various countries. Zionism will be struck off the agenda not only in world public opinion, in Britain and the United States, but elsewhere in Jewish public opinion. If we allow a separation between the refugee problem and the Palestinian problem, we are risking the existence of Zionism."
(David Ben-Gurion, 17 December 1938)

""The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews...is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.""
(Abraham Isaac (Avraham Yitzhak) Hacohen Kook, some date before 1935)

[Rootsie]

"The Talmud states that...two contrary types of souls exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from the Satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness...Rabbi Kook, the Elder, the revered father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism said, "The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews...is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.""
(Israel Shahak, 1999)

"We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. Having so declared himself, he will never be capable of faulty loyalty towards a state. The state cannot want other Jews but such as declare themselves as belonging to their nation. It will not want Jewish flatterers and crawlers. It must demand of us faith and loyalty to our own interest. For only he who honors his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honor towards the national will of other nations."
(Joachim Prinz, 1934)

"The political Zionist school of thought and practice is committed to the normative statement that it is a good idea to establish and consolidate in the country of Palestine a sovereign state, a Jewish state, that attempts to guarantee in law ... and in practice ... a demographic majority of the Jewish tribes in the territories under its control. In other words, another form of apartheid."
(Uri Davis, December 2003)

"What is this Wall but a fitting monument for Ariel Sharon, the final stone that will be his gravestone etched with the names of all the Palestinians he has ever slaughtered since he was 23 years of age and began his march of destruction into history. This is Sharon's Vietnam Memorial, and, thank God, it is 400 miles long because he has far more than 58,000 names to carve on its hideous surface; no glowing black marble here, rather a gray, dull cement color appropriate to its purpose as a memorial for the enslaved that must live in its shadow and contemplate how a civilized world could allow the erection of such a tomb."
(William A. Cook, 20 March 2004)

"The Israeli government seemingly cultivates this fear of existential threat."
(Amira Hass, 24 March 2004)

"the targeted killing of [PFLP] general secretary Abu Ali Mustafa ... was the direct motivation for the decision to go after Ze'evi."
(Uzi Benziman, 26 March 2004)

"You must stop the massacres. They are obscene. I have an officer in the camp counting the bodies. You ought to be ashamed. The situation is rotten and terrible. They are killing children. You are in absolute control of the area, and therefore responsible for the area."
(Morris Draper, September 1982)

"The Israeli army blocks all options of non-violent resistance from the Palestinians. With the arrogant elimination of a leader and a symbol, as he was leaving a mosque, the army knowingly created a new wave of violence and terror. It is hard not to get the impression that terror is convenient for Sharon and the army. It enables them to convince the world that the Geneva protections do not apply to the Palestinians, because they have terrorists in their midst, and that, therefore, it is permitted to do anything to them."
(Tanya Reinhart, 30 March 2004)

"The prime minister should present the choices forthrightly: Jewish racism or democracy. Settlements, or hope for both peoples. False visions of barbed wire and suicide bombers, or a recognised international border between two states and a shared capital in Jerusalem."
(Avraham Burg, 28 March 2004)

"Nobody is more expert than Israelis at emotional extortion. That's why every condemnation of the killing of Palestinian children, even by friends, is immediately interpreted as an expression of anti-Semitism."
(Ze'ev (Zeev) Sternhell, 2 April 2004)

"the upper levels of the [Israeli] establishment believe that since the U.S. rules unchallenged in the region, there is no reason not to continue consolidating Israel's position of hegemony, by constantly and calculatedly raising the threshold of violence."
(Ze'ev (Zeev) Sternhell, 2 April 2004)

"Most of the public doesn't seem to care what you call it - separation, unilateral withdrawal, you name it; let's just get out of there, kit and caboodle. And no wonder. What are we doing there in the first place? ... A few hundred Israeli settlers making a living by employing Palestinian and foreign workers; is this Zionism? Wedged in among over more than one and a quarter million Palestinians who are living in poverty and squalor in one of the most densely populated areas of the world. And why burden the Israel Defense Forces with providing protection for these isolated settlements? Should we not have left there a long time ago?"
(Moshe Arens, 17 February 2004)

"Within the Palestinian territories that were occupied 1967, there is a reality of rigorous, elaborate long-term master planning that disguises itself as confusion. This is a reality of evicting as many Palestinians as possible from their lands, concentrating them in crowded residential enclaves, and thwarting their desire to establish a state that will enable them to live with respect."
(Amira Hass, 7 April 2004)

"the Likud rank and file, in their internal party democratic process, won't be asking if it is democratic for some 7,000 people to dictate the living conditions of nearly 1.5 million people. From that perspective, the referendum [on Sharon's 2004 proposal to unilaterally withdraw Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip] is a brief history of Israeli democracy since 1967. It's a democracy in which the citizenry, through their votes, decide on the living conditions of another 3.7 million people who are not allowed to take part in the democratic vote so are not allowed to determine how their lives will be led. This is a democracy that obliges its youth to obey democratic decisions and serve in the army, which is in charge of implementing the decisions by those same citizens to effectively annex most of the available Palestinian land. This is a democracy that learned to regard as naturally self-evident that in the same piece of land, between the sea and the river, two unequal legal systems of unequal rights be in place: one for the citizens who vote and decide, and the second for the residents who don't vote and whose fates are determined by those who do have the right to vote. Like the Likud rank and file."
(Amira Hass, 14 April 2004)

"The British Government has made it repeatedly clear that so-called "targeted assassinations" of this kind are unlawful, unjustified and counter-productive."
(Jack Straw, 17 April 2004)

"Everybody is somebody's Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis."
(Primo Levi, 1982)

"Every Jew, man or woman, citizen of any country in the world, has potentially more rights in Israel than any Arab native citizen in the state. The Jew will have more chances to find a job, respectable housing, financial aid for higher education, personal advancement. Every foreign Jew has, de facto, more rights in the West Bank and Gaza (depending on what the Likud referendum decides) than Palestinians."
(Amira Hass, 21 April 2004)

"This issue has no connection to religion. The Falash Mura are black, and race is the defining category here. ... In the early '90s, Yair Tsban, then Minister of Absorption, formed a committee to determine the authenticity of the Falash Mura. But no committees were set up to investigate the Russian Jews. And now everyone knows that at least half of the so-called 'Russian Jews' are not Jews. There is a double standard operating here because the Falash Mura are black. This issue reveals the contradiction existing within Zionism. Fundamentally, however, this issue is not about Jewishness, mythologies of origin or identity, but a simple First World-Third World dynamic -- it's about people from the Third World trying to migrate to the First World."
(Moshe Behar, 20 April 2000)

"For years it has been my belief that the ideal US president for Middle East peace would be one who had the ethics of a Carter, the popularity of a Reagan and the strategic audacity of a Nixon. Alas, we have a president who has the ethics of a Nixon, the popularity of a Carter and the intellectual agility of a Reagan."
(Afif Safieh, 19 April 2004)

"My heart sings. There were 200 Arab villages here, which no longer exist. It was necessary to demolish them, otherwise here, too, as in Galilee, there would be another million Arabs in our midst. After 2,000 years of exile, it's impossible to establish a state with kid gloves."
(Yitzhak Pundak, 23 April 2004)

"After the withdrawals from Sinai and Lebanon, and ahead of the withdrawals from Gaza and the West Bank, the IDF got the message ... There will yet be operations over the borders, air and naval raids and special forces missions. But the era of conquests and occupations is over. Israel might raid, but it won't expand."
(Amir Oren, 25 April 2004)

"Just because Bush is for it [Sharon's unilateral plan] doesn't mean we have to be against it ... As long as it is good for the security of Israel and helps bring down the level of violence, then Kerry is for it."
(Nathan Guttman, 25 April 2004)

"I believe that when Jews behave and act like Nazis, they should be compared to Nazis. This wouldn't be a sweeping condemnation of Jews, but rather a rejection of evil actions, behaviour and dogmas."
(Mahmud Nammura, 29 April 2004)

"In dealing with the Palestinians, Israel stops acting as a law-abiding country. That is the crux of the matter."
(Ada Ravon, 22 February 2004)

"I have a 100 percent record – not a 99, a 100 percent record – of sustaining the special relationship and friendship that we have with Israel."
(John Kerry, 19 April 2004)

"And Raging Bull celebrated his diplomatic victory by ordering up a Saturday night hit on Abdel Rantisi, the Hamas leader who replaced Sheik Yassin, whom Sharon had assassinated by Apache gunship in March as the crippled sheik was being wheeled out of a mosque after dawn prayers. As he surely intended, Sharon left the Arab world with the clear impression that the Americans had given a green light to his "extrajudicial" killings. Sharon seeks to make his war on the Palestinians America’s war. If Bush lets him succeed, we are finished in the Middle East."
(Patrick J. Buchanan, 24 April 2004)

"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern."
(George W. Bush, 30 April 2004)

"And we stood on the edge [of the cliff at Massada] and we yelled `Am Yisrael chai!' And boom, across came the echo, the most eerie and unbelievable sound. And we sort of looked at each other and we felt as if we were hearing the souls of those who had died there, speaking to us."
(John Kerry, 3 May 2004)

"The real objective in giving Sharon the blank check [support for his unilateral plan] he left with was to shore up his political support at home. We paid a very high price and got nothing in return."
(Senior State Department official quoted in the Washington Post, 3 May 2004)

"Israel is special, it is a place to be guarded and to be cherished by all. And I want you to know that as president, my promise to people of Israel is this: I will never force Israel to make concessions that cost or compromise any of Israel's security. The security of Israel is paramount. We are an ally, we are a friend, we have a special relationship, and we must remember that. We will also never expect Israel to negotiate peace without a credible partner. And it is up to the United States, in my judgment, to do a better job to help the Arab world to help that partner to evolve, and to develop. And we should be engaged in that effort. And we will always work to provide the political, the military, and the economic help, for the fight against terror because it is our fight."
(John Kerry, 3 May 2004)

"The Americans do not understand the first thing about the Middle East and the Arabs. ... Israel is now reaping the benefits of this ignorance. But the benevolent hour is waning."
(Aluf Benn, 13 May 2004)

"Israel must ... release the only reserves of land [in the Gaza Strip, one of the most crowded places on the planet], which are in Israeli hands."
(Ze'ev Schiff, 21 May 2004)

"The residents of Lod must be expelled quickly, without classifying them according to age ... implement immediately."
(Yitzhak Rabin, 12 July 1948)

"The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz Israel from the sea to the Jordan River for future generations, for the mass Aliya (immigration), for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country."
(Yitzhak Shamir, 1990)

"Before the Palestinians turned to the use of firearms, in the current round of bloodshed, they tried the weapon of mass protest. From time to time, they try to return to this weapon - primarily along the separation fence. But the Israel Defense Forces prove to them time and time again that mass protests will result in deaths, injuries and arrests. And most of the Israeli public proves that the mass protest message does not reach them."
(Amira Hass, 16 June 2004)

"Everyone should take action, should run, should grab more hills... We'll expand the area Whatever is seized will be ours. Whatever isn't seized will end up in their hands. That's the way it will be; That's what must be done now."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 16 November 1998)

[Rootsie]

"Every mother should know that, however cute their son was before he went into the army, he will emerge very different after three years – not knowing right from wrong."
(Various Israeli soliders, 24 June 2004)

"The intifada is the Palestinian people's war of national liberation. We enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities… we established an apartheid regime."
(Michael Ben-Yair, 31 March 2002)

"By all means let Jews criticise Israel, but let them do it privately, write to the Israeli Ambassador, let them write to the Jewish Chronicle, which is a Jewish press. I’m saying that it’s unnecessary and counter-productive to publicly, for Jews publicly to criticise Israel, because it then gives the non-Jews a justification for even criticising more extremely. I’m just nonplussed by it."
(Sidney Brichto, 22 February 2004)

"If victimhood is central to you, you are going to be looking for opportunities to have it confirmed. Building the walls around Israel is recreating a concentration camp. It’s literally confirming the setting of the major sites of victimhood, but espousing victimhood as one’s own identity carries its own rewards, because it seems to guarantee a kind of moral infallibility and that’s true, whether you’re talking about some radical feminism, whether you’re talking about some Jewish people, whether you’re talking about radical black movements, and so on, there’s a feeling that if you centre your identity within that kind of ‘I am the victim’ the rest of you can all sod off because ‘You can’t tell me, I know’, and of course it’s true for Palestinians. So it’s true for everybody who decides to identify themselves as a victim."
(Graham Richards, 22 February 2004)

"the honour of Jews throughout the world demands the renunciation of political Zionism"
(Sir Isaac Isaacs, 1946)

"Israelis still use the convenient and misleading term "fence" to describe the system of fortifications that is currently being erected on Palestinian lands in the West Bank. Even "wall," the term more commonly used in foreign-language reports, is insufficient to describe what is really being built at this very moment: A concrete wall eight meters high, wire fences and electronic sensors, ditches four meters deep on either side, a dirt path to reveal footprints, an area into which entry is forbidden, a two-lane road for army patrols, and watchtowers and firing posts every 200 meters along the entire length. These are the components of the "fence"."
(Amira Hass, 16 July 2003)

"Over the past 20 years I've learned there's a quick way of figuring just how badly Israel is behaving. There's a brisk uptick in the number of articles here accusing "the left" of anti-Semitism."
(Alexander Cockburn, 16 May 2002)

"What has been happening over the years is a predictable routine from the head of the Israeli government. The Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington. The Israeli puppeteer meets with the puppet in the White House, and then moves down Pennsylvania Avenue and meets with the puppets in Congress, and then takes back billions of taxpayer dollars. It is time for the Washington puppet show to be replaced by the Washington peace show. In that, we will enhance the freedom and security of both Palestinian and Israeli people, peoples around the world, and the American people here and abroad."
(Ralph Nader, 28 June 2004)

"This is what we have been saying all along that this is not about Israeli security but rather about Israel's terrorising the Palestinian people for the purpose of arrogating their land and rights. Israel is now admitting that. The question is what the international community is going to do about it… From the very inception, the Israeli army goal was to bully the Palestinians into submission and coerce them into signing any piece of paper Israel would throw on to them. It was as simple as that."
(Michael Tarazi, June 2004)

"America and Americans are the best allies of the Zionist movement and of the State of Israel since it was established, and we have to listen very carefully to the voices coming from the different American administrations.
This is a major factor in the decision-making process of every government in Israel. But Israel still has to keep its independence and to make sure that its important interests – especially defense ones – will not be compromised.
To the best of my knowledge, as far as the disengagement plan is concerned, the Bush administration never pressed Israel at any point to adopt this idea. On the contrary, it's Prime Minister Sharon who imposed this plan on President Bush at one of the less convenient moments for the American administration – in an election year."
(Effi Eitam, 8 July 2004)

"As a Palestinian Jew (person of Jewish parents born in Palestine at the time of the British Mandate), I have at times been flabbergasted by the pro-Israel bias of the BBC and its reluctance to deal with Israeli policies of outright racial discrimination (as defined in international human rights treaties) and with the racist nature of Zionism as the state ideology permeating Israeli legislation and practice. I have not the financial capacity to undertake an assessment of BBC coverage but wish to urge the BBC not to let itself be bullied by the oppressors of my Palestinian brothers and sisters, whom the world should regard as the "Jews of the Jews". I urge the BBC to give voice to those courageous Israelis and Palestinians who work together on the basis of equality against the occupation and for the right of return of Palestinian refugees, for justice and peace in their common homeland."
(Elias Davidsson, 30 September 2002)

"Jews of the Diaspora must ask themselves if they should support a political system they would never have accepted in their own country. How many Jews would accept a "Christian-Democratic" state, in which they would be discriminated against on account of being Jewish? How many Jews would accept a "democracy" in which Jews are not permitted to purchase state land?"
(Oren Medicks, 7 July 2004)

"The separation fence is marketed to the Israeli public as a reasonable security measure meant to separate Palestinians from Israelis; in reality, the only separation it offers is between Palestinians and their land."
(Oren Medicks, 30 May 2003)

"The anti-Semites will become our most loyal friends, the anti-Semites nations will become our allies."
(Theodore Herzl, 1901)

"I have no intention to wear the uniform of the organisation called the Israeli Defence Force because it fires artillery shells on innocent civilians, including women and children. It is an organisation that erects racist walls that separate people from their livelihood, farms, groves and graveyards… It is an organisation that defends fascist settlers who routinely violate the law and uproot the olive trees of their neighbours… I am not willing to join such a criminal organisation"
(Chaem Fildman, 12 July 2004)

"Nowadays, one can hear from army commanders that the excessive use of force since September 2000 was a mistake: it was unnecessary to bring tanks into Bethlehem, bomb police stations in Ramallah, clamp extended curfews on Nablus, suffocate the villages and cities of the West Bank with closures. There are those who admit that the heavy use of force only led to escalations. But when the missiles were flying and the curfews imposed and the tanks bulldozed, everything was presented as the only logical step to take. That's how the killing of armed men in civilian neighborhoods by soldiers the same age as them is presented nowadays as the only logical course."
(Amira Hass, 28 July 2004)

"Meantime among those who still deny Zionist power in US foreign policy, one only has to read the accounts of the AIPAC conference in Washington in May 2004. At a time when Israel was killing children in the streets of Rafah and destroying hundreds of homes under the horrified eyes of the entire civilized world, when an indignant UN Security Council finally rose to its feet and unanimously condemned Israel, US Congressional leaders and the two major Presidential candidates pledged unconditional support to Israel, evoking the bloodthirsty cheers of investment brokers, dentists, doctors, lawyers — the cream of the cream of American Jewish society. “The cause of Israel is the cause of America” rings out from the mouth of every candidate as the Israelis bulldoze homes and snipers shoot small girls on their way to buy candy. Its almost as if Sharon wanted to demonstrate the power of the Zionists in the US, timing the vile destruction of Rafah to coincide with the AIPAC convention and the disgusting appearance of the spineless American politicians supporting ongoing crimes against humanity. Not one voice was raised in even meek protest. To those who claim that the Zionist are just one of a number of “influential lobbies” – try explaining the unconditional support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people by the most powerful politicians in the US.
It is almost a perverse pleasure to watch Sharon smear the muck and gore of Rafah on the groveling faces of US politicians – they deserve each other. But for those of us who support a democratic anti-imperialist foreign policy this is one of the most humiliating moments in US history…"
(James Petras, 25 May 2004)

"We must recognize that the world agreed to the creation of a Jewish state only on the condition of a partition of the land; he who holds fast to the slogan "not one foot shall be given back" is both strengthening our enemies and alienating friends."
(Walter Gross, September 1991)

"Ha'aretz warned that even if Shamir succeeds in obtaining the loan guarantees he wants without making any change in his policies on the West Bank and Gaza, those who support him should "remember that a Shamir victory means the founding of a bi-national state in place of a Jewish state, Israel." That is, holding onto the territories means that Israel would have an Arab population of 40 percent, and nearly two million Arabs could not be held in permanent subjection and denied political rights without destroying Israel's claims to be a democratic state."
(Arthur Hertzberg, September 1991)

"How will the region look the day after unilateral separation?

The Palestinians will bombard us with artillery fire – and we will have to retaliate. But at least the war will be at the fence – not in kindergartens in Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Will Israel be prepared to fight this war?

First of all, the fence is not built like the Berlin Wall. It’s a fence that we will be guarding on either side. Instead of entering Gaza, the way we did last week, we will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won’t allow their husbands to shoot Kassams, because they will know what’s waiting for them.

Second of all, when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.

While CNN has its cameras at the wall?

If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.

What will the end result of all this killing be?

The Palestinians will be forced to realize that demography is no longer significant, because we’re here and they’re there. And then they will begin to ask for “conflict management” talks – not that dirty word “peace.” Peace is a word for believers, and I have no tolerance for believers – neither those who wear yarmulkes nor those who pray to the God of peace. There are those who make pilgrimages to the Baba Sali and the tombs in Hebron, and those who make pilgrimages to Kikar Rabin in Tel Aviv. Both are dangerous.

Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee “peace” – it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews; it guarantees the kind of safety that will return tourists to the country; and it guarantees one other important thing. Between 1948 and 1967, the fence was a fence, and 400,000 people left the West Bank voluntarily. This is what will happen after separation. If a Palestinian cannot come into Tel Aviv for work, he will look in Iraq, or Kuwait, or London. I believe that there will be movement out of the area."
(Arnon (Soffer) Sofer, 10 May 2004)

"I consider the comparison between the Nazi atrocities and the Israeli crimes, despite the many differences, not only historically justified, but mainly politically necessary. As this is one of the important tools to prevent Israel from misusing the Nazi Judeocide as a free license to kill, to abuse, to dispossess and to expel the Palestinians. This is one of the means to show that Israel has no moral right and actually never had to induce guilt feelings for example in Europe. Guilt feelings among non-Jews, that are the result of the long history of persecutions suffered by the Jews and that Israel and its affiliates know perfectly how to play upon and manipulate them."
(Shraga Elam, 4 August 2004)

"Christian Zionism has become the most powerful and destructive force at work in America today. Influential in shaping Western foreign policy on the Middle East, they are not only inciting hatred between Jews and Muslims but are also the greatest roadblock to lasting peace in the Middle East."
(Stephen Sizer, 6 August 2004)

[Rootsie]

"When we thought that a village was harbouring rebels, we´d go there and mark one of the large houses. Then, if an incident was traced to that village, we´d blow up the house we´d marked."
(Hugh Foot, uncertain date after 1938)

"Such practices are possible because Israel has two systems of laws, both equally in force. One comprises various "emergency regulations" which are hardly ever applied against the Jews, and the other relatively liberal laws applied whenever the Jews are concerned."
(Israel Shahak, July 1995)

"Hamas was also established under Israel's aegis and with its encouragement."
(Reuven Pedatzur, 16 August 2004)

"The plaque itself, which officially declares that one of the dead is a second-class victim because she is not Jewish, is far more shameful and ugly. This is not a matter of an act by extremists. The hand hesitates to write this, but the truth must be told: The municipality of Jerusalem decided to degrade the woman who was killed out of consideration for the feelings of the public."
(Alexander Yakobson, 16 August 2004)

"The question is whether the ultra-Orthodox public in Israel, including its leaders and its spokesmen, is prepared to rid itself entirely of the view that non-Jews are not really human beings."
(Alexander Yakobson, 16 August 2004)

"It is clear and simple that according to the Torah handing over the land of our holy land to infidels, including parts of Gush Katif, is a sin and a crime. Therefore, any thought or idea or decision, and any semblance of actions, of any kind, to evacuate residents from Gush Katif and hand the land to the infidels, is opposed to the halakha, and any action must be taken to prevent it, and not assist in any action that will evict [the settlers] from their homes and land."
(Avraham Shapira, 27 June 2004)

"Let’s take a look at the record, Mr. Speaker, and see what happened in the UN Assembly meeting prior to the vote on partition. A two-thirds vote was required to pass the resolution. On two occasions the Assembly was to vote and twice it was postponed. It was obvious that the delay was necessary because the proponents (the USA and the USSR) did not have the necessary votes. In the meantime, it is reliably reported that intense pressure was applied to the delegates of three small nations by the United States member and by officials ‘at the highest levels in Washington.’ Now that is a serious charge. When the matter was finally considered on the 29th, what happened? The decisive votes for partition were cast by Haiti, Liberia and the Philippines. These votes were sufficient to make the two-thirds majority. Previously, these countries opposed the move…the pressure by our delegates, by our officials, and by the private citizens of the USA constitutes reprehensible conduct against them and against us."
(Lawrence H. Smith, 18 December 1947)

"A lot of people used their influence to whip voters into line. Harvey Firestone, who owns rubber plantations in Liberia, got busy with the Liberian Government; Adolphe Berle, Advisor to the President of Haiti, swan that vote. ... Few know it, but President Truman cracked down harder on his State Department than ever before to swing the UN vote for the partition of Palestine. Truman called Acting Secretary Lovett over to the White House on Wednesday and again on Friday warning him he would demand a full explanation of nations which usually line up with the United States failed to do so on Palestine."
(Drew Pearson, 9 February 1948)

"The method that had been used ... to bring coercion and duress on other nations in the General Assembly bordered closely on scandal."
(James Forrestal, before May 1949)

"The decimation of the agriculture industry could in turn also have serious repercussions for final status negotiations over water. The Palestinian side will find it harder to justify its claim over water resources if its need has declined along with the industry. Its hand will be weakened. The wall will leave the Palestinian areas dry and thirsty, and it is designed for that purpose."
(Abdel Rahman Tamimi, 17 August 2004)

"Only a few acknowledged that the father’s story of return, redemption and liberation was also a story of conquest, displacement, oppression and death."
(Yaron Ezrahi, December 1997)

"All the pressure that was exerted on Golda Meir to withdraw Israeli forces from Egyptian territory was futile. On the eve of the Yom Kippur War, Israel's prime minister declared: 'If Sadat wants war, that is exactly what he will get; and we will defeat them again.'

And sure enough, the war came. We paid for that war with thousands of dead and wounded soldiers, and we can no longer sing 'Sharm al-Sheikh, we have returned to you' or chant songs about 'A Nahal army outpost in the Sinai.'"
(Shulamit Aloni, 15 May 2001)

"The settlement [in Hebron] may be authorised, but no one who is not a member or a friend of Gush Emunim can reach it without a permit of the GOC Central Command. (The separation of people into the categories of authorised and unauthorised is outlined in the GOC's written order.)"
(Shulamit Aloni, 14 August 2004)

"There are many who are unaware that the 1929 riots [in Hebron] were sparked, like the Al Aqsa Intifada, by the actions of a gang of right-wing extremists that called itself Brit Habirionim, named after the Roman era Birionim (Religious extremists who terrorised both the Roman occupiers and moderate Jews). The Birionim broke into the Western Wall area in the days leading to Yom Kippur and blew the shofar. Word then got around that the Jews want to get to the Temple Mount and destroy the Al Aqsa mosque. That's the way the riots and massacres started."
(Shulamit Aloni, 14 August 2004)

"It is difficult to overestimate the negative ramifications that the ICJ's decision will have on the State of Israel in various spheres, even on issues beyond the separation fence. ... The decision could gradually have an effect on rulings by Israeli courts about the administration of military authority in the territories and about the building of the fence. ... The decision creates a political reality for Israel on the international level, that may be used to expedite actions against Israel in international forums, to the point where they may result in sanctions."
(Menachem (Meni) Mazuz, 20 August 2004)

"At some stage, we will have to deal with the ruling of the ICJ at The Hague. ... [However, the] ICJ regards East Jerusalem as occupied territory, while we do not. The relevant approach should be toward the villages and not Jerusalem. But we will have to say something on the subject ... and to announce whether or not we accept the opinion of the ICJ."
(Aharon Barak, 20 August 2004)

"Anyone who doesn't believe in a Jewish majority is not a Zionist - at least not according to the accepted Israeli definition of Zionism."
(Tom Segev, 20 August 2004)

"The silence of the organized scholarly community on the pronouncements of scholars justifying ethnic cleansing and extreme measures by the army is remarkable. Aside from condemnations and critiques from a handful of critical scholars, I know of no position adopted by an academic body, university senate, or other representative or professional group criticizing or censuring academic work in the service of colonial or racist policies. In short, it is clear that the Israeli academy – as an institution – has failed miserably in upholding the ethical principles which the status of its members as scholars and intellectuals demands of them."
(Lisa Taraki, 20 August 2004)

"I had my ups and downs during four years as prisoner of war in Germany, but the Germans never treated me as harshly as the Israelis are treating the Arabs of Gaza Strip, the majority of whom are women and children."
(Michael Adams, 26 January 1968)

"The result - and it is difficult to believe that it is not the result intended - is to terrorise the local population, especially those who have small children or elderly dependents, and to encourage them to leave the area and make the sad pilgrimage to safety beyond the Jordan."
(Michael Adams, 19 February 1968)

"The crime against the Palestinian people is being committed by a Jewish state with Jewish soldiers using weapons with Jewish religious symbols all over them, and with the full support and complicity of the overwhelming mass of organised Jews worldwide. But to name Jews as responsible for this crime seems impossible to do. The past is just too terrible. All of us know of the hatred and violence to which accusations against Jews have led in the past. Also, if we were to examine critically the role of Jews in this conflict, what would become of us and of our struggle? Would we be labelled anti-Semites and lose much of the support that we have worked so hard to gain?"
(Paul Eisen, 19 August 2004)

"Each national narrative is in a way based on a fundamental negation of the other’s. For the Israelis, to accept the central piece of the Palestinian narrative that Palestine was indeed populated by indigenous people who were gradually and systematically dispossessed and replaced by newcomers means that the Jewish state was born in sin. Thus, the Israeli narrative denies this Palestinian account. For the Palestinians, to accept the central part of the Zionist narrative that the Jews are not to be seen as newcomers but a people returning to their own homeland – albeit after 2,000 years – means that Palestinians were aliens in their own land, a view that they by definition reject. Thus, both Israeli and Palestinian narratives emphasize different aspects of the conflict, provide divergent interpretations to the same events, and produce a coherent narrative that supports its own claims and is fully supported by the public"
(Nadim Rouhana, July 1998)

"Consider this analogy: a group of well-meaning activists in late 1850’s America hope to bring an end to the horrors of slavery without war. They propose that the two sides strive for reconciliation, that slaves sit down at the negotiating table with slave owners and attempt to work out their differences through negotiation. The activists believe that the institution of slavery is oppressive, a violation of human rights, and that it must end, but they also recognize the property rights of owners to their slaves, as well as the owners’ right to their lives and their livelihoodstheir right to exist and not be murdered in a slave uprising. The activists propose a middle way between the two sides, recognizing that both are responsible for the conflict (slaves have shown a propensity to rebel, causing the slave owners to tighten their oppressive grip) but believing that both slaves and owners have a right to free, peaceful, and secure lives and that the only way to achieve this is to avoid blaming either side. Do we think this is absurd? Imagine a similar scenario involving an attempt to mediate in a balanced, blame-free atmosphere between Catholic priests and the children they have sexually abused. The absurdity of neutrality is equally obvious in this situation. What is most absurd in these scenarios and what links them is the notion of treading a middle or supposedly neutral path between two sides when there exists a total imbalance of power. Could anyone seriously suggest that slaves, utterly powerless except for the ability occasionally to rebel, should seek some kind of equitable solution between themselves and their overlords? Could anyone seriously suggest that abused children, utterly powerless except for the ability to kick and scream, should negotiate with their abusers?"
(Kathleen Christison, 10 July 2004)

"There is, then, no occupation. There never was an occupation. If there had been an occupation, and the Israelis had the slightest intention of ending it they would have done so years ago. The fact is, that no Israeli government, either of the left or the right, has ever shown any intention of fully withdrawing back to the 1967 border. No Israeli government, left or right, has shown the slightest inclination to permit anything even remotely resembling a real Palestinian state to be established on the West Bank and Gaza. Any state that could emerge would be tiny, fragmented and weak, being simply a legitimisation of Palestinian surrender. The occupation, in fact, has been a fig-leaf to conceal the reality of the final conquest of Palestine."
(Paul Eisen, March 2004)

"Deir Yassin is as important a part of Jewish as it is of Palestinian history. Deir Yassin, coming in April 1948, just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945, marks a Jewish transition from enslavement to empowerment and from abused to abuser. Can there ever have been such a remarkable shift, over such a short period, in the history of a people?
Deir Yassin also signalled the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians leading to their eventual dispossession and exile and was just one example of a conscious and premeditated plan to destroy the Palestinians as a people in their own homeland. For the fifty-odd years since the establishment of the state of Israel, successive Israeli governments whether Labour or Likud, and whether by force as at Deir Yassin, or by chicanery as at Oslo and Camp David, have followed the same policy of oppressing and dispossessing Palestinians to make way for an exclusively Jewish state. Even now, when Israel could have peace and security for the asking, Israeli governments persist in their original intention of conquering the whole of Palestine for the use of the Jewish people alone. And all this was done, and is still being done, by Jews, for Jews and in the name of Jews."
(Paul Eisen, January 2003)

"My commitment to a safe and secure Jewish state is unwavering. For 19 years, this is a pledge I have kept in the United States Senate — whether through my votes on economic aid, military security or the location of the U.S. Embassy. And it is one I will continue to keep as I lead a bold new effort to enhance regional security throughout the Middle East."
(John Kerry, 27 August 2004)

[Rootsie]

"But as a result, there are those who delude themselves that, if there is correct education, it will be possible to make the checkpoints humane. This is the same type of illusion as that held by those who in the 1970s believed that the settlements in the territories were indeed set up for security purposes. Those who delude themselves today like to forget that the checkpoints are not located on the border of a sovereign state, but rather deep in the occupied territory of the West Bank. How much military manpower – which would be able to protect the civilian hinterland much better from the actual border – is required for these roadblocks? Those who prefer to delude themselves that a checkpoint can be humane ignore its role in maintaining the settlement enterprise."
(Amira Hass, 2 September 2004)

"The soldiers can study appropriate behavior at dozens of seminars, but their objective will not change: to ensure the regime of excessive rights for the Jews – basically the sole right of the Jews to move from Tel Aviv and to live in the West Bank while the Palestinians are not permitted to move and live in Tel Aviv. In order to challenge the immoral principles of this reality, the soldiers have to deal with the conventions, explanations and excuses of Israeli society. This is a difficult task for 50-year-olds, so why should it be possible for those who were born 17 years after the occupation of the territories? If the soldiers were to treat those passing through the roadblocks like equal human beings, they might be forced to ask questions about their own service."
(Amira Hass, 2 September 2004)

"The anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism argument amounts to this: If you do not agree with the right of Jews to go to Palestine, settle there en masse against the wishes of the indigenous population, expel this population from 75% of their land and then, for the next fifty years and more, continue this assault on the remaining land and population, then you are an anti-Semite. Similarly, if you do not support the existence of an ethnically based state which defines itself as being for Jews only and discriminates officially both inside and outside its borders against non-Jews, then, again, you are an anti-Semite.

This would be laughable if it came from any other group of people, yet coming from Jews, even though not always agreed with, it is still seen as legitimate. So how do they get away with it? No-one else does, so what’s special about Jews?"
(Paul Eisen, March 2004)

"Jewish suffering is held to be mysterious and beyond explanation. Context is rarely examined. The place and role of Jews in society – their historical relationships with Church and state, landlords and peasantry – is hardly ever subject to scrutiny, and, whilst non-Jewish attitudes to Jews are the subject of intense interest, Jewish attitudes to non-Jews are rarely mentioned. Attempts to confront these issues are met with suspicion, and sometimes hostility, because of a fear that explanation may lead to rationalization, which may lead to exculpation, and then even to justification."
(Paul Eisen, March 2004)

"[E]very complexity and ambiguity of Jewish identity and history, every example of Jewish suffering, every instance of anti-Jewish prejudice, however inconsequential, is used to justify the crimes of Israel and Zionism. Every possible interpretation or misinterpretation of language, and every kind of intellectual sophistry is used by Zionists to muddy the waters and label the critic of Israel and Zionism an anti-Semite. Words and phrases become loaded with hidden meanings, so that even the most honest critic of Israel has to twist and turn and jump through hoops to ensure that he or she is not perceived as anti-Semitic."
(Paul Eisen, March 2004)

"What need not be debated is this: that every complexity and ambiguity of Jewish identity and history, every example of Jewish suffering, every instance of anti-Jewish prejudice, however inconsequential, is used to justify the crimes of Israel and Zionism. Every possible interpretation or misinterpretation of language, and every kind of intellectual sophistry is used by Zionists to muddy the waters and label the critic of Israel and Zionism an anti-Semite. Words and phrases become loaded with hidden meanings, so that even the most honest critic of Israel has to twist and turn and jump through hoops to ensure that he or she is not perceived as anti-Semitic."
(Paul Eisen, March 2004)

"It's possible that Syria had a part in the Be'er Sheva attack, but, as the director of Military Intelligence, Major General Aharon Ze'evi-Farkash, said at week's end - contrary to Ya'alon's remarks - Israel has no proof of any such involvement. ... Colonial regimes have always accused external sources of intervening in the liberation struggles waged against them, in order to undermine the justice of the struggles. ... This is also Israel's aim in blaming Syria: to blur the justified aspect of the goals of the Palestinian struggle."
(Gideon Levy, 5 September 2004)

"Marc Ellis’s ‘ecumenical deal’ which translates also into a political deal, says it all. It goes like this: To the Christian and to the entire non-Jewish world, Jews say this: ‘You will apologise for Jewish suffering again and again and again. And, when you have finished apologising, you will then apologise some more. When you have apologised sufficiently we will forgive you, provided you let us do what we want in Palestine.’"
(Paul Eisen, March 2004)

"When I go into churches in the 4th District, there are only two countries I pray for: Israel and the United States."
(Robert Aderholt, 5 September 2004)

"in France today, as in the rest of the Muslim world, there is an anti-semitic discourse that seeks legitimacy from certain texts that are part of the Muslim tradition, and is confirmed in its beliefs by the situation in Palestine. This discourse is also peddled by intellectuals and imams who blame every setback or political defeat on the hidden hand of the Jewish lobby. The situation is too serious for conventional expressions of sympathy to be enough. In the name of conscience and their religion, Muslims must take a clear stand. Nothing in Islam can justify xenophobia . . . What needs to be said forcefully and resolutely is that anti-semitism is unacceptable and indefensible."
(Tariq Ramadan, 20 December 2001)

"Our lives come first."
(Rabbi Akiba (Akiva) ben Joseph, uttered around AD 132, but cited as justification for killing Palestinian civilians by Zionist rabbis in 2004)

"Possibly we are too sensitive about all forms of anti-Semitism."
(Reuven Rivlin, 7 September 2004)

"What good is freedom of speech if we don't use it?"
(Juan Cole, 9 September 2004)

"Sharon says terrorism is an epidemic that "has no borders, no fences", but this is not the case. Terrorism thrives within the illegitimate borders of occupation and dictatorship; it festers behind security walls put up by imperial powers; it crosses those borders and climbs those fences to explode inside the countries responsible for, or complicit in, occupation and domination.

If we want to see where the Likud doctrine leads, we need only follow the guru home, to Israel, a country paralysed by fear, embracing policies of extrajudicial assassination and illegal settlement, and in denial about the brutality it commits daily. It is a nation surrounded by enemies and desperate for friends – a category it narrowly defines as those who ask no questions, while offering the same moral amnesty in return. That glimpse of our collective future is the only lesson the world needs to learn from Sharon."
(Naomi Klein, 10 September 2004)

"Zionism is in essence the Zionism of transfer. The transfer of the Jewish nation from the diaspora to Zion and the transfer of the Arabs [out of all of Palestine]."
(Rehavam ('Gandhi') Ze'evi, before 2001)

"There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. I tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:… the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish... with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary."
(Joseph Weitz, 1950)

"we are all obligated to carry out genocide"
(Israel Hess, 1980)

"When I discover that my freedom comes at the expense of the Palestinians in Jenin, I can't accept it. I don't want freedom at someone else's expense."
(Tali Fahima, 17 September 2004)

"I am sure that most Americans are not even aware that Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation and that every day Palestinian territory shrinks as it is stolen by fanatical Israeli colonists. These fanatics do not differ in any obvious way from the French colonists in Algeria, which the French also proclaimed "French soil." But colonialism is just another word for grand larceny."
(Juan Cole, 17 September 2004)

"Closure is not easy to explain: it is a terrible thing; it is illegal and it has been a fact of life for Palestinians for two generations. It has nothing to do with the pretext of ‘security’ and it is not an action in response to Resistance – it is a strategic instrument whose purpose is to fragment the Palestinian society. The intent is to dislocate people from their land, from their family, and from their jobs. It dislocates children and students from their education, doctors and patients from their hospitals, and the devout from their mosques. Thus its purpose is to destroy all coherence – social coherence, health coherence, political coherence, economic coherence."
(Anne Gwynne, 13 September 2004)

"Whenever there is sealing off of Palestine, the sadistic violence from the soldiers increases exponentially. More doctors and medical staff will be beaten and humiliated by being stripped of every stitch of clothing and then forced either to unload the ambulance before dozens of people, bark like dogs, insult Islam, sing songs glorifying Israel or crawl through the checkpoint while the Israeli thugs laugh uproariously and dance around waving their guns above their heads.
This is a professional army? This is security? No, all this is just to cruelly cause death and compromised health as part of the long-term plan of genocide."
(Anne Gwynne, 13 September 2004)

"Under the horrific lockdown which is now announced, many more mothers with a new-born baby on one arm and a bag on the other, will have to walk home from hospital only to be told at Beit Fouriq to 'go back to Nablus' which is not home. Farmers with panniers of Palestinian Olive Oil on their little donkey, will have to stand by helplessly and watch the precious, life-giving oil cascade down into the soil after an IOF soldier shoots holes in the panniers, and grandparents with small children and animals will be refused entry to their villages and have nowhere else to go at nightfall with marauding, trigger-happy soldiers everywhere."
(Anne Gwynne, 13 September 2004)

"In Palestine, curfew is a matter of life and death, especially for children, who don't carry a radio or a mobile phone to receive news of the curfew. This is the penalty here: anyone seen by soldiers on the street during curfew will be shot. This has happened to dozens of children and it was particularly poignant in Beit Lahim (Bethlehem) at Christmas when several children were murdered this way. You can be watching children running to safety, and in a moment they are bleeding on the road. What is extraordinary is that the military can justify this murder on the grounds that there is curfew. A child is killed because he is on the street at a forbidden moment. Can anyone feel that this penalty is proportionate?
The response to any protest at their actions is rote-learned – a shrug, a sneer and a snarled – ‘Not my problem’."
(Anne Gwynne, 13 September 2004)

"If you are looking for what I believe you are looking for [material in the IDF archives about Israeli massacres of Palestinians in the 1948 War], then you can forget it. In any case, just keep in mind that we are reading over any documents before you are allowed to see them and we cull out material that you should not see"
(Miki Kaufman, 6 May 1992)

"For many Israelis it was easier to find consolation in the lie, that the Arabs left the country under orders from their leaders. This is an absolute fabrication. The fundamental cause of their flight was their fear from Israeli retribution and this fear was not at all imaginary. From almost each report in the IDF archives concerning the conquest of Arab villages between May and July 1948 - when clashes with Arab villagers were the fiercest - a smell of massacre emanates. Sometimes the report tells about blatant massacres which were committed after the battle, sometimes the massacres are committed in the heat of battle and while the villages are "cleansed". Some of my colleagues, such as Me'ir Pa'il, don't consider such acts as massacres. In my opinion there is no other term for such acts than massacres. This was at the time the rule of the game. It was a dirty war on both sides. This phenomenon spread out in the field; there were no explicit orders to exterminate. In the first phase a village was usually subjected to heavy artillery from distance. Then soldiers would assault the village. After giving up resistance, the Arab fighters would withdraw while attempting to snipe at the advancing forces. Some would not flee and would remain in the village, mainly women and old people. In the course of cleansing we used to hit them. One was 'tailing the fugitives', as it used to be called ('mezanvim baborchim'). There was no established battle procedure as today, namely that when blowing up a house, one has first to check whether civilians are still inside. In a typical battle report about the conquest of a village we find: 'We cleansed a village, shot in any direction where resistance was noticed. After the resistance ended, we also had to shoot people so that they would leave or who looked dangerous."
(Aryeh Yitzhaki, 6 May 1992)

"I maintain that even before the establishment of the State, each battle ended with a massacre. In all Israel's wars massacres were committed but I have no doubt that the War of Independence was the dirtiest of them all. ... In the War of Independence everybody massacred everybody, but most of the action happened between Jews and Palestinians. ... 'In my opinion, the regular armies of Arab states were less barbaric than the Jews and the Palestinians. Until the entry into the battle of the Arab armies, the concept of taking prisoners was unknown. The regular armies, especially that of Jordan and Egypt, were the first in the region who did not kill prisoners, as a matter of principle. Not that they were exceptional, but they killed the least of all, relatively speaking. The Jordanian Legion even succeeded to stop Palestinians of massacring Jews in Gush Etzion, at least in a part of this area. The education in the Yishuv at that time had it that the Arabs would do anything to kill us and therefore we had to massacre them. A substantial part of the Jewish public was convinced that the most cherished wish of say, a nine-year old Arab child, was to exterminate us. This belief bordered on paranoia."
(Aryeh Yitzhaki, 6 May 1992)

"'The Archivist refused to let me see the report and I went then to the Supreme Court. According to the [State] Archives Law (1953), access is open to documents concerning [government] policies and political matters after 30 years and documents related to security matters after 50 years. As the report by the Shapira committee [on killings in the 1948 War] is a political document issued by the Ministry of Justice, it was to be accessible by the public. But after I entered my request to the State Archivist and to the courts, the State Prosecutor and the Archivist made me a trick. It appeared that by convening a special meeting of at least two Cabinet members - in this case Arens and Sharir - it was possible to extend indefinitely the classified status of any archived document by arguing that disclosure might endanger state security. The meeting was duly convened and the document was reclassified"
(Benny Morris, 6 May 1992)

"He [an Israeli intelligence officer whom Ben Yehuda saw torturing Arab prisoners with a hoe until they bled to death] beat these wounded men, burnt men who had not slept for days with their lips swollen from lack of water. ... [He complained about me and my fellow Palmachniks who were also disgusted by the sight of blood and splattered brains, saying, as he murdered the helpless prisoners] 'These Palmachniks! Weaklings, what do they think? They escaped! Did they think we can maintain a state without such things? And is this the first time? So where are we to get men with guts to do things for us? Maybe we should hire people? Or hire some British? Free some Nazis!'"
(Netiva Ben Yehuda, 27 February 1985)

"There is ... a difficulty from which the Zionist dares not avert his eyes, though he rarely likes to face it. Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having 52 souls to every square mile, and not 25 percent of them Jews; so we must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan. ... This is an infinitely graver difficulty than the stock anti-Zionist taunt that nobody would go to Palestine if we got it."
(Israel Zangwill, 1904)

"If the Intifada doesn’t end soon, Israel is liable to lose its preferential standing in American public opinion. At this point, America is pro-Israel. But other currents are bubbling below the surface and telling Americans that Israel is an occupier and an oppressor. This idea isn’t fully rooted yet, but another five years of graphic images from the territories, and we’ll start feeling it… as American Jews."
(Brian Lurie, November 2003)

"The question of terrorism and the casualties inflicted by terrorism on an innocent civilian population is a very serious question, but the wall is not there to alleviate this crisis of terrorism - the wall is there in the first instance as an attempt to Bantustanize Palestine and to isolate the indigenous population in what are effectively huge concentration camps. Terrorism and targeting civilian population is a serious crisis, but anyone approaching the crisis in decent terms ought to recognize that the first terrorist actor in this awful equation is not the Palestinian suicide bomber, but the Israeli army and the government of the State of Israel."
(Uri Davis, 19 September 2004)

[Rootsie]

"We executed Bernadotte because he ...endangered the status of Jerusalem by his declared intention of turning her into an international city."
(Yehoshua Zeitler, some date after 1948)

"[The Deir Yassin massacre was a deliberate and unprovoked attack."
(Dov Joseph, 1962)

"Through the High Court of Justice, the Supreme Court has determined that 'Judea and Samaria are being held by Israel in a military occupation or belligerent occupation. A military government - headed by a military commander - has been established in the region. The powers and authorities of the military commander derive from the principles of public international law as they relate to military occupation.'"
(Naama Carmi, 30 June 2003)

"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."
(George F. Kennan, 1987)

"I’d say give Falluja 48 hours notice. Every civilian must leave because we are turning Falluja into a free-fire zone to eliminate the people that are engaged in terror. After that I would use the 500-pound bombs."
(Ed Koch, 28 September 2004)

"In my childhood I have suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I passed from the Warsaw Ghetto, through labour camps, to Buchenwald. Today, as a citizen of Israel, I cannot accept the systematic destruction of cities, towns and refugee camps. I cannot accept the technocratic cruelty of the bombing, destroying and killing of human beings.

I hear too many familiar sounds today, sounds which are being amplified by the war. I hear “dirty Arabs” and I remember “dirty Jews”. I hear about “closed areas” and I remember ghettos and camps. I hear “two-legged beasts” and I remember “Untermenschen” (subhumans). I hear about tightening the siege, clearing the area, pounding the city into submission and I remember suffering, destruction, death, blood and murder… Too many things in Israel remind me of too many things from my childhood."
(Shlomo Shmelzman, August 1982)

"In our country there is room only for the Jews. We shall say to the Arabs: Get out! If they don’t agree, if they resist, we shall drive them out by force."
(Ben-Zion Dinur, 1972)

"[The court decision to free Yehoshua Elitzur after killing Sael Jabara means that] it is possible to kill a Palestinian and then go home to rest."
(Ahmed Tibi, 30 September 2004)

"Are we terrorists for resisting when they come and destroy our homes and kill us? They say it is to stop the Qassams. How many rockets have they fired at our homes?"
(Palestinian resistance, 1 October 2004)

"When the army is instructed by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz 'to collect a price' from the Palestinians, it means hitting armed units, but also, incidentally, killing civilians and widespread demolition of buildings and cultivated lands. By last night the Palestinian fatalities exceeded 30 in 48 hours."
(Amos Harel, 1 October 2004)

"At the time of the issue of this (Palestine) mandate, His Majesty's Government were too busy setting up a civil administration in Palestine proper, west of the river Jordan, to be bothered about the remote and undeveloped areas which lay to the east of the river and which were intended to serve as a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the National Home for the Jews in Palestine, which they were pledged to support, became an accomplished fact."
(Alec Kirkbride, 1956)

"Only an internal revolution can have the power to heal our people of their murderous sickness of causeless hatred. It is bound to bring complete ruin upon us. Only then will the old and young in our land realize 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 fruit 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)

"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress."
(Dov Weisglass, 6 October 2004)

"God says, ‘I’m going to judge those who carve up the West Bank and Gaza Strip; It’s my land and keep your hands off it.’"
(Pat Robertson, 5 October 2004)

"The significance of our disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. It supplies the formaldehyde necessary so there is no political process with the Palestinians."
(Dov Weisglass, 6 October 2004)

"What I effectively agreed to with the Americans [in talks leading to Bush's endorsement of Sharon's disengagement plan] was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns."
(Dov Weisglass, 6 October 2004)

"This just creates death, destruction and rage. When the army went into Beit Hanoun, it created many more suicide bombers."
(Raji Sourani, 8 October 2004)

"Yet some people still think of taking part in the future management of Gaza, of acting as policemen in this big Israeli prison. What is taking place in Gaza is not withdrawal, or the preparation for a withdrawal. It is not even redeployment. What is happening in Gaza is the reinstatement of full occupation, of apartheid and racial discrimination. It is an attempt to reconfigure occupation and make it less costly to Israel. This is why Sharon wants to get the settlers out, all of 6,000 of them. That gives him the freehand he needs to act with utmost brutality in Gaza."
(Mustafa (Mustapha) Barghouti, 8 October 2004)

"Sharon wants to destroy UNRWA, the special United Nations Relief and Works Agency that moderates the misery of the four millions of Palestinian refugees. It is a big organization with some 25 thousand employees, including teachers, social workers and physicians, almost all of them, of course, Palestinians. It provides the refugees with food, education, health services and, in case of need, a roof over their head. Without it, the refugees would long ago have descended into an abyss of hunger and despair. At present, while our army is destroying whole Gaza neighborhoods and their infrastructure, UNRWA is providing food, tents and medical care to needy Palestinians who are not refugees. The very existence of this organization disturbs Sharon and his generals, who want to break the resistance of the Palestinians by turning their life into hell. After working systematically to smash the Palestinian National Authority, they are now trying to crush UNRWA. As reported in the media, Sharon ordered his generals to supply the Foreign Office’s propaganda department with secret army photos, in order to prove that UNRWA cooperates with the “terror organizations”."
(Uri Avnery, 9 October 2004)

"No Palestinian organization would have thought of provoking the Egyptian government. Therefore, it appears that something new has happened. We have warned many times that the young Arab and Muslim generation in the world will not stand aside forever while the TV brings reports every day that show how the Arab nation is humiliated. The apathy of the Arab and Muslim governments towards the events in the occupied Palestinian territories looks to them like humiliating cowardice or rank treason. The mistreatment of the Palestinian people by Sharon and his predecessors has created an explosive situation. The invasion of Iraq by Bush has provided the spark. An Arab-Muslim resistance movement is coming into being, a resistance that sees no difference between Iraq and Palestine, between Israel, the US and the Arab governments. That, it seems, is the message of Taba [bombings]."
(Uri Avnery, 9 October 2004)

"One case of killing caused by “certain identification” this week should have shocked the world. Iman Alhamas, a 13-year old girl from Rafah, was on her way to school, following the same route she took every day. Suddenly deadly fire enveloped her. The doctors extracted 20 bullets from her body. Since not every bullet hits its target and some pass right through, it may be assumed that at least 100 bullets were fired at her from several army positions – one hundred bullets for one little girl. In her bag, only schoolbooks were found.
The army spokesmen issued the standard mendacious statement: the girl had entered a “forbidden zone”, the soldiers took her for a “terrorist”, the bag looked as if it contained explosives, etc. etc."
(Uri Avnery, 9 October 2004)

"After decades of ever-solidifying ties, Israel is now so closely linked to the United States in concrete ways that it is actually a part of the U.S. military-industrial complex. Israel sells military equipment, with our knowledge, to countries to which the U.S. is restricted by law from selling – for instance, to China. So many arms and types of arms are produced in the U.S. for Israel that it has become quite easy for Israel’s lobbyists in Washington to go to individual congressmen and point out to them how many jobs in a given district depend on this arms industry and on  not withholding arms from Israel. In this way, Israel becomes a direct factor in sustaining the U.S. military-industrial complex, in maintaining jobs in the U.S., and in keeping congressmen and other politicians in office."
(Bill Christison, 12 October 2004)

"In fact, the U.S.-Israeli relationship has grown so very close over the years that it is almost impossible to distinguish whose policy, Israel’s or ours, is being pursued in the Middle East, and this is a reality that puts the United States in grave danger."
(Bill Christison, 12 October 2004)

"With the kind of pro-Israeli activists who people the policymaking ranks of the Bush administration, it has come to the point that the U.S. gears much of its foreign policy to furthering Israel's interests as much or more than to furthering our own interests. Bush policymakers have as little interest in actually resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as the voters in the Council on Foreign Relations poll whom they are supposed to be leading; their interest is in dealing with the conflict in whatever way Israeli sees fit. One of the primary reasons we went to war in Iraq was to benefit Israel. This reality is so frightening that it needs to be trumpeted whenever motivations for the war are discussed. The United States' own pursuit of global hegemony was obviously another major motivation, as was oil, but U.S. and Israeli goals in the Middle East are so intertwined that it is impossible to determine where a policymaker like Paul Wolfowitz, for instance, or Donald Rumsfeld or the many neo-conservatives in the Defense Department stop thinking of Israeli interests and begin to think exclusively of U.S. interests. Policy and policymakers are so closely interlinked that there probably is no such point. This needs to be discussed loudly and often."
(Bill Christison, 12 October 2004)

"One problem with treating Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians as a sideshow, with no direct impact on U.S. interests, is that the more Israel is ignored as a factor, as an ingredient in U.S. empire-building, the stronger Israel becomes, the stronger its ties to the military-industrial complex, the more it is able to stand up to the United States and resist any U.S. demands – in the peace process for instance – the more it is able to kill Palestinians, pursue its territorial aggrandizement, and ultimately endanger the United States. Everything Israel does in the Middle East is perceived throughout the world, and accurately so, as having been condoned, encouraged, and enabled by the United States, with the result that any terrorists able to concoct an attack like September 11 will target us before they will target Israel."
(Bill Christison, 12 October 2004)

"How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government? They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?"
(Seymour M. Hersh, 11 October 2004)

"It is an obscene comparison - you know I am not sure I like it - but you know there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tyres around people's necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tyre of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions. ... It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself. It carries through with a certain knowledge that the country as a whole - and for all the right reasons - felt and continues to feel this surge of patriotism within themselves. And one finds oneself saying: 'I know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it.'"
(Dan Rather, 16 May 2002)

"Israelis are deluding themselves if they believe that a "one state, one reservation" solution can be repackaged and sold to the Palestinians as a "two state solution"."
(Michael Tarazi, 20 October 2004)

"It is Israeli military tactics that the US now apes in places like Falluja and Najaf."
(Simon Tisdall, 20 October 2004)

"Whether at the checkpoints, in their classrooms, in their living rooms or in the streets, Palestinian children have long lost any immunity they might have enjoyed under an occupation that used to be particularly sensitive to its image in the western public opinion. Alas, that was before 9/11. Since then, however, with the effective Israelization of US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, Israelis felt they had a “windfall”, as Netanyahu called the 9/11 crimes in his first public reaction. Indeed, Israel has steadily moved close to a combination of the French colonial model in Algeria and the apartheid model in South Africa, while enjoying unwavering protection from the new empire and a hypocritical, subservient attitude from most European governments which continue to treat Israel as a preferred partner and as a western outpost in the near east. Thanks to this shameful collusion, Palestinian children are no longer spared Israel's worst crimes, committed with revolting impunity."
(Omar Barghouti, 25 October 2004)

"I know the majority of readers of these lines will raise an enormous outcry regarding the extent of racism dripping from my statements about the danger to democracy inherent in the slaughter of the holiest cow. I would answer them, `The survival of the people of Israel in the entire world depends on the continued strength, security and perpetuity of the Jewish State of Israel.' ... National insurance benefits will be given only to citizens who respect government and municipal tax laws ... Every citizen who does not appear for mandatory service in the IDF will be eligible to vote only in municipal elections ... Every Arab citizen or non-Jewish immigrant who was convicted in a court of law of engaging in activity against the state or inciting others to do so will be deported following the completion of his sentence. In less severe cases, their status will be changed from that of full citizenship to foreign residence without the right to vote in Knesset elections. If these recommendations are adopted, it will be possible to improve civic rights with the purpose of achieving full and real equality in all aspects related to living conditions and quality of life, in regard to the minorities that present a demographic danger."
(Yitzhak Caspit, Spring 2003)

"[In Gaza] there used to be 600,000 Arabs. Now there are 1.4 million people there … in a few more years what happened to South Africa will happen to us. The UN will decide that either we give the right to vote to everyone or we will be outcasts from the family of nations. Absurdly, the greatest danger that could befall us … is that the intifada would end – because then we would fall asleep and wake up to a binational state."
(Yonatan Bassi, 29 July 2004)

"What do the young soldiers and the petty officers internalize today? They leave the army with the knowledge that human life, when the life is not a Jewish one, is extremely cheap. The death of a Jew by the hands of a Palestinian is a tragedy, the death of a Palestinian by the hands of a Jew is no big deal. They learn that the killing of Palestinian children, women and old people, the destruction of their homes and their property, is permitted not only in cases of self-defense, but even for the sake of operational convenience. They learn that the Palestinian population is of no interest to anyone and force can be used against it unrestrainedly, even when the only real purpose is revenge and scare tactics. From the affair of the commander of the Gaza Division and the company commander from the Girit outpost, they have learned the lesson that might makes right. Because the only sin lies not in committing crimes but in failing to conceal them."
(Ze'ev (Zeev) Sternhell, 12 November 2004)

[Rootsie]

"There can be no lasting settlement of the conflict without the consent of the Palestinian majority in the diaspora and no leader likely to emerge from the current power struggle in the occupied territories can speak for that constituency. In that case, some argue, it may be better to concentrate on maintaining Palestinian unity, postpone serious negotiations, continue legitimate resistance and rebuild political organisation in the Palestinian diaspora for the longer term."
(Seumas Milne, 18 November 2004)

"it is simply an affront to common sense to claim that the Palestinians' plight - or, for that matter, Israel's problems with the Palestinians - stems from a lack of democracy. The Palestinians have a tradition of political pluralism stretching back decades, while the Palestinian authority in the occupied territories barely has the powers of a proper local authority, let alone those of a state - and the scope for meaningful democracy under military occupation is severely limited. The authority's failures arose largely from the weaknesses of the Oslo peace process, which gave it the role of middleman and security contractor for Israel, while closures and settlement expansion made Palestinians' lives ever more grim. The Palestinian problem is instead primarily one of colonisation and occupation - and the denial of self-determination and refugee rights."
(Seumas Milne, 18 November 2004)

"the crimes [against the Palestinians] stretch back more than half a century - and the US and Britain have been complicit at every stage, from their original dispossession and ethnic cleansing in 1948 to the acquiescence in Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, from the blind eye turned to 37 years of illegal Israeli settlements to the pressure to replace the elected Palestinian leader with somebody more pliant."
(Seumas Milne, 18 November 2004)

"When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle."
(Rafael ('Raful') Eitan, 14 April 1983)

"We have to do everything to make [Palestinians] so miserable they will leave."
(Rafael ('Raful') Eitan, 1980)

"the Phalange [Israel's Christian allies in Lebanon] will organize tiny little houses for the Palestinians"
(Rafael ('Raful') Eitan, September 1982)

"It's a pleasure to see how the Arabs are killing one another."
(Rafael ('Raful') Eitan, some date before the mid 1980s)

"To punish parents for their sons' deeds works well with Arabs."
(Rafael ('Raful') Eitan, some date before the mid 1980s)

"What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. We need precision in time, place, and casualties. If we know the family, we must strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise, the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1 January 1948)

"Under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them. Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement, should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1920)

"The assets of the Jewish National Home must be created exclusively through our own work, for only the product of the Hebrew labor can serve as the national estate."
(David Ben-Gurion, some date before 1948)

"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population."
(David Ben-Gurion, May 1948)

"We accepted the UN resolution, but the Arabs did not. They are preparing to make war on us. If we defeat them and capture western Galilee or territory on both sides of the road to Jerusalem, these areas will become part of the state. Why should we obligate ourselves to accept boundaries that in any case the Arabs don't accept?"
(David Ben-Gurion, May 1948)

"Well done, now give it back to them."
(David Ben-Gurion, June 1967)

"First of all, the fence is not built like the Berlin Wall. It’s a fence that we will be guarding on either side. Instead of entering Gaza, the way we did last week, we will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won’t allow their husbands to shoot Kassams, because they will know what’s waiting for them. Second of all, when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. ... If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings. ... The Palestinians will be forced to realize that demography is no longer significant, because we’re here and they’re there. And then they will begin to ask for “conflict management” talks – not that dirty word “peace.” Peace is a word for believers, and I have no tolerance for believers – neither those who wear yarmulkes nor those who pray to the God of peace. ... Both are dangerous. Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee “peace” – it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews; it guarantees the kind of safety that will return tourists to the country; and it guarantees one other important thing. Between 1948 and 1967, the fence was a fence, and 400,000 people left the West Bank voluntarily. This is what will happen after separation. If a Palestinian cannot come into Tel Aviv for work, he will look in Iraq, or Kuwait, or London. I believe that there will be movement out of the area."
(Arnon Soffer, 10 May 2004)

"I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over. ... This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over."
(Captain R, 5 October 2004)

"In the West Bank, there is a clear separation between Jews and Palestinians regarding traffic laws. Jewish settlers receive a purple-colored report and are tried in traffic courts within the Green Line, by civilian judges."
(David Ratner, 5 December 2004)

"The peace that began with the Oslo Accords promised [the average] Palestinian woman that a day after the signing, the Israeli Border Police would disappear from the view out her kitchen window, that her son would come home from prison and that her husband would no longer have to make his way at three in the morning through humiliating checkpoints to make a living. None of that happened. ... It must be admitted that over the last 10 years there was not a single stage where the Palestinian society had something to lose."
(Moshe Elad, 8 December 2004)

"If it could happen in the country of Kant and Beethoven, it can happen everywhere. If we don’t defend democracy, democracy will not defend us!"
(Aharon Barak, some date before 2004)

"the Arabs are worms, everywhere they are worms. Under the ground, above the ground, and everywhere else."
(Yehiel Hazan, 13 December 2004)

"You would like me to look at it objectively. Objectively, I agree: we are only breeding more hatred and violence. You want me to imagine how I would feel if I were a Palestinian. I suppose that if I were, I might want to kill Israelis myself. But I am not objective and I am not a Palestinian. It's not that the lives of Palestinians don't matter to me. But Israeli lives matter more."
(Hillel Halkin, 15 November 2002)

"Israel is a close ally and friend of the United States, and we should defend it from its enemies. But when Ariel Sharon sends American-made helicopter gunships and F-16s to fire missiles into civilian residences or crowds in streets, as he has done more than once, then he makes the United States complicit in his war crimes and makes the United States hated among friends of the Palestinians. And this aggression and disregard of Arab life on the part of the proto-fascist Israeli Right has gotten more than one American killed, including American soldiers."
(Juan Cole, 14 December 2004)

"For him [Moshe Ya'alon], in fact, it [the Al-Aqsa Intifada] is the second half of 1948."
(Amir Oren, 17 November 2000)

"‘You are actually, by the language you are using, encouraging people to oppose you and to find Israel more militant. I don't understand why the army spokespeople in this country appear in uniform, when it only emphasizes the fact that Israel is a military power,’ he said. ‘Language is everything,’ according to Luntz, who called on the government to strike the word ‘incitement’ from its vocabulary. ‘What the heck is the problem with Israel, with Israelis and spokespeople who use words that Americans do not understand, do not comprehend, and they don't internalize?’ He suggested using the term ‘culture of hatred’ instead, and that the disengagement plan be referred to as ‘voluntary’ or a ‘first step’ instead of unilateral."
(Frank Luntz, 16 December 2004)

"The Israelis argue that the Arabs will never receive all the rights they deserve as long as they do not serve in the IDF. The Druze in Isfiya and in Daliat al-Carmel serve in the IDF and they don't get their rights."
(Nimr Nimr, Spring 2004)

"I am not willing to be part of the military terrorism practiced by the army against the Palestinians. I also have relatives in Syria and Lebanon ... I am part of them ... I never thought twice, I handed myself to the nearest Police Station, and was imprisoned five times for a total of 84 days in six months. ... Israel is a racist state, it does not give us equal rights with Jewish residents. Prison made me stronger."
(Saqer Naffa’, 2 June 2004)

"There is an invented tradition, and they accept it. It happened to the Druze just like it happened to many other minorities in the world."
(Kais M. Firro, 23 December 2004)

""[The Israeli Arabs are a fifth column] that sucks on the udders of the country.""
(Raphael (Rafi) Israeli, 2002)

""[The Israeli Arab mentality is made of] a sense of being a victim, ... pathological anti-Semitism [and] a tendency to live in a world of illusions. ... Most of the Arab villages are dirtier, physically - it's a fact. ... [They are] a burden on the state.""
(Raphael (Rafi) Israeli, 22 December 2004)

"It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country...The Zionist enterprise so far...has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with 'land buying' - but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all; except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe."
(Joseph Weitz, 19 December 1940)

"The nation whose civilians are killed or maimed should, by "targeted assassinations" or other means, be free promptly to execute the immediate relatives of the suicide bombers. This consequence would, I believe, deter most suicide killers"
(Nathan Lewin, May 2002)

"In Huwara checkpoint the soldiers are going up and down with a mega-phone saying "vote for Abu Mazin and then you won’t have any checkpoints"!"
(Anne Gwynne, 5 January 2005)

"From one perspective at least - from the White House, from the Knesset, and from some of the Arab capitals, Mahmoud Abbas represents Hope – the hope of signing away the rights of the Palestinian people...and the only question will be, "how much is the payment?""
(Hatem Bazian, 5 January 2005)

"In the long run, there will be no two-state solution in the Land of Israel. The solution is to transfer the Palestinians to Jordan and northern Sinai, and it would be best for this to be done in an orderly way, under international auspices. But if not, it could be accomplished through a big war, like 1948. Then, we expelled 600,000 people and destroyed 450 villages and cities. It can be done again."
(Aryeh Yitzhaki, quoted in January 2005 article)

"The population of Palestine was basically composed of Moslem and Christian Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinians had lived in the country since the dawn of history. They did not come to Palestine with the Moslem Arab invasion of the seventh century as is sometimes erroneously thought. They are the earliest and the original inhabitants of Palestine. The Palestinians of today are the descendants of the Canaanites, the Philistines, and the other early tribes which inhabited the country. Professor Maxime Rodinson points out that the Arab population of Palestine was native in all senses of that word. There were infusions of other racial elements into the Palestinian stock, mainly from the Greeks, the Romans, the Moslem Arabs and the Crusaders. But this Palestinian stock, which comprises both Moslems and Christians, continued to constitute the main element of the population until the majority of the original inhabitants of Palestine were displaced by the Israelis in 1948."
(Henry Cattan, 1973)

"If the views of the advanced Zionists prevail there is trouble ahead. Many, very many, intelligent and informed Jews admit this. It is conceded that the present inhabitants of Palestine have occupied their lands for centuries; indeed, some of the Syrian communities claim descent from the Hittites who were in possession at the dawn of history.
Be this as it may, all who know the situation from actual contact and not merely from propaganda leaflets admit that these people have dwelt in their present homes for two thousand years, that the occupancy of the Jews does not go back to immemorial times, and that their sojourn before the Dispersion was brief. Why should these "old settlers" be expelled, they ask, to make room for newcomers who are ill informed as to the way of life that would be imposed upon them in the promised land of dreams, which in actual experience would prove a great disappointment?"
(Stephen Bonsal, January 1919)

"If the views of the advanced Zionists prevail there is trouble ahead. Many, very many, intelligent and informed Jews admit this. It is conceded that the present inhabitants of Palestine have occupied their lands for centuries; indeed, some of the Syrian communities claim descent from the Hittites who were in possession at the dawn of history.

Be this as it may, all who know the situation from actual contact and not merely from propaganda leaflets admit that these people have dwelt in their present homes for two thousand years, that the occupancy of the Jews does not go back to immemorial times, and that their sojourn before the Dispersion was brief. Why should these "old settlers" be expelled, they ask, to make room for newcomers who are ill informed as to the way of life that would be imposed upon them in the promised land of dreams, which in actual experience would prove a great disappointment?"
(Stephen Bonsal, January 1919)

"Palestine is not the original home of the Jews. It was acquired by them after a ruthless conquest, and they have never occupied the whole of it, which they now openly demand. They have no more valid claim to Palestine than the descendants of the ancient Romans have to this country. The Romans occupied Britain as long as the Israelites occupied Palestine, and they left behind them in this country far more valuable and useful work. If we are going to admit claims based on conquest thousands of years ago, the whole world will have to be turned upside down."
(Lord Sydenham, 21 June 1922)

"Golda Meir struck me as a very impressive and persuasive personality, though she has shown little or no understanding for the Arabs of Palestine or for the justice of their demands. She has always talked a great deal about the 'historical and spiritual rights of the Jews', but it is difficult to accept the validity of 'historic rights' which can only be achieved at the expense of people who have been living in the same place for 2,000 years. The principle which she applies on behalf of the Jews, and by which she justifies the expulsion of the Palestinians, would, if applied elsewhere, reduce the world to a state of total chaos."
(Odd Bull, 1976)

"I believe it was the intention of the Zionists, right from the beginning, to dispossess the Palestinians from their homes, and I believe the British Government was aware of this."
(Arnold J. Toynbee, 22 May 1971)

"I gathered all of the Jewish mukhtars, who have contact with Arabs in different villages and asked them to whisper in the ears of some Arabs that a great Jewish reinforcement has arrived in Galilée and that it is going to burn all of the villages of the Huleh. They should suggest to these Arabs, as their friends, to escape while there is still time... The tactic reached its goal completely. The building of the police station at Halsa fell into our hands without a shot. The wide areas were cleaned..."
(Yigal Allon, 1948)

"[Regarding the prisoners taken at Deir Yassin, I saw] three trucks going down King George street, back and forth, loaded with men, women and children, with their hands over their heads, guarded by Jews armed with rifles and Stens."

[Rootsie]

"Far worse than the more celebrated King David Hotel attack, which only killed 95 British and Arabs, and which led to the garroting of two British sergeants at Nathanya, was the attack on the small Arab village of Deir Yassin, in which 254 women, children, and old men were killed and their bodies thrown down a well on April 9, 1948. This particular village... west of Jerusalem, had managed to keep out of the fighting until that moment when the Haganah Commander David Shaltiti noted that Deir Yassin had been quiet since the beginning of the disturbances... not mentioned in any attacks on Jews, and one of the few places which had not given a foothold to terrorist bands.

Deir Yassin had done nothing to provoke an Israeli attack and had lived in peace with it's Israeli neighbors. They had even cooperated with the Jewish Agency and was said by Jerusalem newspapers to have driven out some Arab militants.

No warning was given of an impending attack, although Begin said, 'the villagers had been warned beforehand.' The initial resistance of Deir Yassin was easily overcome, and all the inhabitants were ordered into the village square. Here they were lined up against a wall and shot, one eye witness said her sister who was 9 months pregnant was shot in the back of the neck. Her assailants then cut open her stomach with a butcher knife and extracted the unborn baby. When an Arab woman tried to take the baby, she was shot. According to eye witnesses, female members of this Jewish gang, matched the savagery of their male counterparts. Women were raped before the eyes of their children, before being murdered and dumped down the well and even representatives of the International Red Cross who were inured to scenes of violence became nauseated by what they saw."
(Harry Levin, 1950)

"Nearby, a loudspeaker burst out in Arabic. Haganah broadcasting to civilian Arabs, urging them to leave the district before 5:15 a.m.: "Take pity on your wives and children and get out of this blood bath," it said. "Surrender to us your arms. No harm will come to you. Or get out by the Jericho road, that is still open to you. If you stay, you invite disaster."
(Harry Levin, 1950)

"As uncontrolled panic spread throughout all Arab quarters [in 1948], the Israelis brought jeeps with loudspeakers which broadcast recorded 'horror sounds'. These included shrieks, wails and anguished moans of Arab women, the wail of sirens and the clang of fire alarm bells, interrupted by a sepulchral voice calling out in Arabic: "Save your souls all ye faithful; the Jews are using poison gas and atomic weapons. Run for your lives in the name of Allah.""
(Leo Heiman, 1964)

"Consider the question of the Soviet Jews. It does not seem to be understood in the West the Jews are not discriminated against as Jews in the allocation of exit permits. Not only comparatively but absolutely, very many more Jews have been allowed to emigrate than have members of any other group. Last year 33,000 arrived in Israel (not to mention others who set out in that direction and switched destination en route).

The rate is now running at 3,000 a month. But it would not be possible to find even one hundredth of that number who were granted visas among Tartars or Ukrainians or Armenians. Or even plain Russians.

When ordinary Soviet citizens are told that a vital trade agreement awarding their country most-favoured-nation status with the US is being blocked in Congress because Soviet Jews are demanding as an absolute right something few other inhabitants can expect as a special privilege - then the result is likely to be spontaneous outbreaks of anti-Semitism."
(Alan Brien, 9 September 1973)

"The last thing on earth that interested the Zionist leaders was humanitarian work, saving victims and refugees."
(Moshe Menuhin, 1965)

"During the last 100 years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road."
(Moshe Dayan, 7 July 1968)

"To maintain the status quo will not do. We have to set up a dynamic state bent upon expansion."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1954)

"We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return!"
(David Ben-Gurion, 18 July 1948)

"Take the American Declaration of Independence for instance. It contains no mention of the territorial limits. We are not obliged to state the limits of our State."
(David Ben-Gurion, 14 May 1948)

"The Achilles heel of the Arab coalition is the Lebanon. Muslim supremacy in this country is artificial and can easily be overthrown. A Christian State ought to be set up there, with its southern frontier on the river Litani. We would sign a treaty of alliance with this State. Thus when we have broken the strength of the Arab Legion and bombed Amman, we could wipe out Transjordan; after that Syria would fall. And if Egypt still dared to make war on us, we would bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo. We should thus end the war and would have but paid to Egypt, Assyria and Chaldea on behalf of our ancestors."
(David Ben-Gurion, 21 May 1948)

"the basic story here is not one of two national movements that are confronting each other; the basic story is that of natives and settlers. It's the story of natives who feel that people who came from across the sea infiltrated their natural habitat and dispossessed them.

The result is that the conquering immigrants are victorious in every battle because they utilize the technological and cultural advantages that Western civilization has made available to them. But these settler immigrants are unable to enjoy the fruits of their victory. They take over the land but fail to achieve tranquillity, fail to entrench peace for themselves."
(Meron Benvenisti, 8 August 2003)

"Nine-eleven would not have occurred if the U.S. government had refused to help Israel humiliate and destroy Palestinian society. Few express this conclusion publicly, but many believe it is the truth. I believe the catastrophe could have been prevented if any U.S. president during the past 35 years had had the courage and wisdom to suspend all U.S. aid until Israel withdrew from the Arab land seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war."
(Paul Findley, 15 September 2002)

"In family therapy there is an accepted principle that unless serious injustices are addressed, there cannot be real peace. Families that protect dark secrets always pay a heavy price. I watched Israeli intellectuals on TV engage in genuine discussion trying to analyse and understand why things are so bad in Israel. They raised every possible reason for the situation other than the most obvious one - Israel`s history. It was excruciating to watch but also familiar. I have never seen a society so steeped in denial as Israeli society."
(Avigail Abarbanel, 19 January 2005)

"Only a bi-national state and a right of return for the Palestinian refugees will come close enough to rectifying some of the injustices committed in 1948 and since. Having been ethnically cleansed, this is also what the Palestinians are entitled to under international law and common human decency. This could be Israel`s atonement. It will also be Israel`s opportunity to free itself from carrying this burden of guilt that I believe is making their lives and the lives of the Palestinians a nightmare. Yes, it will be a challenge. But it will offer a possibility of real and sustainable peace both for Israelis and for Palestinians, possibly for the entire region. Continuing with the mentality and policy of denial will lead nowhere, and will continue to cost the lives and wellbeing of many more people and communities."
(Avigail Abarbanel, 19 January 2005)

"I oppose the lachrymose conception of Jewish history that treats Judaism as a sheer succession of miseries and persecutions."
(Salo Wittmayer Baron, before 1985)

"The amendment to the Citizenship Law withholding residency status and citizenship from the Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens isn't "pretty," and is a matter of concern for civil rights advocates. But considering the demographic threat, civil rights and liberal considerations must be suspended"
(Avraham Tal, 24 January 2005)

"Strengthening Israel helps the Western powers to maintain equilibrium and stability in the Middle East. Israel is to become the watchdog. There is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive Policy towards the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes of the US and Britain. But if for any reasons the Western powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied upon to punish one or several neighbouring states whose discourtesy to the West went beyond the bounds of the permissible."
(Gershom Schocken, 30 September 1951)

"Senior treasury officials, some say the finance minister himself, were anonymously proud this week that the cut in child allowances not only saved a lot of money, but also, they said, caused a 3.4 percent decline in the birthrate among Israeli Arab citizens."
(Ruth Sinai, 27 January 2005)

"After all, we Jews are also interested, for example, that fundamentalist Islam's plans to destroy us be described in Nazi terms, as they should be, to elicit the necessary horrified response."
(Yair Sheleg, 29 April 2003)

"What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. We need precision in time, place, and casualties. If we know the family, we must strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise, the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent.""
(David Ben-Gurion, 1 January 1948)

"There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only subjects."
(Mohammed V, of Morocco, 1941)

"I am afraid to utter the statement and to locate the fascist potential in Zionism. But the facts are against me. At this stage of my life I still aspire to see what ought to be rather than what actually is, and that is not a recommended trait for an historian."
(David Ohana, 28 January 2005)

"[I have no interest in] your state of the Judenrats and Kastners"
(Rudolf Vrba, some date after 1987)

"The story of the Negev Bedouin is the story of a cruel battle, a battle declared by the state almost from the day of its inception, against the tribes that lived in the south. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, the Arabs who were citizens, including the Bedouin, were kept under a military administration. The Bedouin were forcibly transferred from all parts of the Negev to an area defined as "the barrier region," which stretched over the area between Be'er Sheva, Arad, Dimona and Yeruham. In 1965, the Planning and Construction Law was passed, and a national master plan was set. The Bedouin were in the area, but not in the plan. Thus they became "unrecognized." The state began to concentrate them into urban communities. Between 1968 (when Tel Sheva was established) and 1980, seven towns were built, which the Bedouin call "concentration towns" or "ghettos." Those who moved to them were mainly Bedouin who in any case had been uprooted from their lands and had been transferred to the barrier region during the first years of the state. Most of the others stuck with their lands. The state didn't like that."
(Aviv Lavie, 30 January 2004)

"We'll know for sure real freedom has dawned in Iraq when Baghdad orders U.S. troops out, raises oil prices, rebuilds its armed forces, and renews support for the Palestinian cause."
(Eric Margolis, 30 January 2005)

"The grand strategy that Paul Wolfowitz framed in the wake of 9/11 entailed a plan ... for attacking not only Iraq but Syria and southern Lebanon. The United States ... would inaugurate a new order in the Middle East. The plan was built conceptually and geographically around the centrality of Israe. ... States surrounding Israel, states which presented a threat to Israel, would be attacked - pre-emptively. ... This strategy could be understood as advancing American interests and security only if one saw those as identical to the interests and security of the state of Israel."
(Anne Norton, October 2004)

"The conclusion is that the seemingly rational solution of two states for two nations can't work here. The model of a division into two nation-states is inapplicable. It doesn't reflect the depth of the conflict and doesn't sit with the scale of the entanglement that exists in large parts of the country. You can erect all the walls in the world here but you won't be able to overcome the fact that there is only one aquifer here and the same air and that all the streams run into the same sea. You won't be able to overcome the fact that this country will not tolerate a border in its midst. In the past year, then, I reached the conclusion that there is no choice but to think in new terms. There is no choice but to think about western Palestine [the land between the River Jordan and the Sea] as one geopolitical unit."
(Meron Benvenisti, 8 August 2003)

"Just as the South African rulers understood, at a certain point, that there was no choice but to dismantle their regime, so the Israeli establishment has to understand that it is not capable of imposing its hegemonic conceptions on 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and 1.2 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. What we have to do is try to reach a situation of personal and collective equality within the framework of one overall regime throughout the country."
(Meron Benvenisti, 8 August 2003)

"This is where I am different from my friends in the left: because I am truly a native son of immigrants, who is drawn to the Arab culture and the Arabic language because it is here. It is the land. And I really am a neo-Canaanite. I love everything that springs from this soil. Whereas the right, certainly, but the left, too, hates Arabs. The Arabs bother them - they complicate things. The subject generates moral questions and that generates cultural unease.

That's why the left wants this terrible wall, which in my view is anti-geography, anti-history and anti-human. That's why the left wants to hide behind this wall, which in my view is the rape of the land. That's why they are fleeing from Jerusalem and fleeing from the landscape and the soil and huddling in Tel Aviv and concentrating only on how to screw Vicki Knafo, how to lord it over the Moroccans."
(Meron Benvenisti, 8 August 2003)

"Even within the boundaries of 1967, Israel is on the way to becoming a binational state. In another decade, when the Arabs constitute 25 percent of the population, it will be a binational state. The attempt to drag more and more new immigrants from every remote corner on earth is becoming inane. These new immigrants are liable to cause the implosion of the Israeli society."
(Meron Benvenisti, 8 August 2003)

"So I think the time has come to declare that the Zionist revolution is over. Maybe it should even be done officially, along with setting a date for the repeal of the Law of Return. We should start to think differently, talk differently. Not to seize on this ridiculous belief in a Palestinian state or in the fence. Because in the end we are going to be a Jewish minority here. And the problems that your children and my grandchildren are going to have to cope with are the same ones that de Klerk faced in South Africa. The paradigm, therefore, is the binational one. That's the direction. That's the conceptual universe we have to get used to."
(Meron Benvenisti, 8 August 2003)

"The Zionist idea was maimed from the outset. It didn't take into account the presence here of another national group. Therefore, from the moment the Zionist movement decided that it was not going to exterminate the Arabs, its dream became unattainable. Because this land cannot tolerate two sovereignties. So the options are terribly simple: either one nation will not be or the other nation will not be, or one nation will subjugate the other and condemn itself to perpetual enmity, or both nations will forgo their demand for full sovereignty. That is what Sharon is now demanding of the Palestinians. That is what I am now proposing to both the Jews and the Palestinians on an equal basis."
(Meron Benvenisti, 8 August 2003)

"In 1948, Zionism was truly victorious. It succeeded in consolidating itself in 78 percent of historic Palestine. But in 1967, Zionism won one victory too many, and in the 20 years that followed it sealed its fate by implementing the settlements project. Paradoxically, the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan only exacerbated the situation, because they determined the outer limit of the borders of western Palestine. They sealed us into the binational reality of a territory that cannot be divided. The result is that now Zionism really can't realize its dream. It is the victim of its victories, the victim of a terrible history of missed opportunities."
(Meron Benvenisti, 8 August 2003)

"It is an extraordinary thing that the British civil administration should have succeeded in such a short time in alienating the whole country [Iraq] to such an extent that the Arabs have laid aside the blood feuds they have nursed for centuries and that the Sunni and Shia tribes are working together."
(Winston S. Churchill, 31 August 1920)

"If, in the course of many years, they [the Jews] become a majority in the country they virtually would take it over."
(Winston S. Churchill, 22 June 1921)

"The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant of the League of Nations and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For, in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right. What I have never been able to understand is how it can be harmonised with the Anglo-French declaration, the Covenant, or the instructions to the commission of Enquiry... In fact, so far as Palestine is concerned, the powers have made no statement of fact that is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate."
(Arthur James Balfour, August 1919)

"There arises the further question, what is to become of the people of this country [Palestine], assuming the Turk to be expelled, and the inhabitants not to have been exterminated by the War? There are over half a million of these, Syrian Arabs - a mixed community with Arab, Hebrew, Canaanite, Greek, Egyptian, and possibly Crusaders' blood. They and their forefathers have occupied the country for the best part of 1500 years. They own the soil, which belongs either to individual landowners or to village communities. They profess the Mohammedan faith. They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants, or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter. Further, there are other settlers who will have to be reckoned with. There are 100,000 Christians, who will not wish to be disturbed; east of the Jordan are large colonies of Circassian Mohammedans, firmly established; there are also settlements of Druses and Moslems from Algeria, Bulgaria, and Egypt."
(George Nathaniel Curzon, around 1919)

"The Pan-Islamic danger is a real and permanent one. ... We cannot get rid of it altogether, but we have the opportunity now [that the Ottoman Empire has entered the war on Germany's side]... of immensely diminishing it by reducing to impotence the only existing organised government that can further the pan-Islamic idea; and when we see the progress which that idea has made in India, under Turkish influence, in the last 10 years, does not common prudence require that we should do so? ... It is on Mesopotamia and not on Europe that attention is fixed in the Persian Gulf... a merely diplomatic defeat of Turkey will not count in Arabia. ... In India itself the vernacular press loses no opportunity of admiring the feats of Turkish arms. With all these people we shall have to deal after the war, and to live with them on terms of moral supremacy. We shall have to govern India itself - where, besides the Moslem problem, the fact has to be reckoned with that the educated Hindus... are not averse to seeing British pride humbled, and humbled by an Asiatic Power - and to convince the peoples of India that a handful of white men can still control them."
(Frederick Arthur Hirtzel, 23 May 1916)

"The fact that an average salary in the Gaza Strip amounts to only 20% of an average Israeli salary is pregnant with political consequences. But it should be also noted that the salaries of agricultural workers are even lower than that average. According to my sources, the Gazan workers employed by Jewish settlers in the Strip tend to earn less than 10% of the average Israeli salary. Other categories of workers can also be worse-off than the statistics would indicate. Cases are known, for example, in which Gazan workers who had lost their work in Israel, were subsequently offered work in Gaza for a salary of 12-15% of what they had been earning before. There can be no doubt that profits from exploiting cheap Gazan labor are one of the reasons of the stubborn opposition of Rabin and of the majority of Israeli ministers to withdrawal from the Strip in any form."
(Israel Shahak, 9 March 1993)

"The economic conditions created by Israel in the Gaza Strip, especially in recent years, are exploitative to the point of cruelty. Qualitatively, however, they don’t differ from the patterns set up at the onset of the Israeli conquests elsewhere. There is no reason to expect any fundamental change in those patterns as long as the Israeli rule lasts. In this respect, one shouldn’t be deluded by the talk, nowadays fashionable, about Israeli gestures intended "to encourage economic development in the Territories"."
(Israel Shahak, 9 March 1993)

"I am looking after the Jewish majority… the majority in Jerusalem. That is why we are here, to take care of that."
(Teddy Kollek, 24 January 1982)

"I don’t want to give them [Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem] a feeling of equality. I know that we cannot give them a feeling of equality. But I want, here and there, where it doesn’t cost too much, and where it is only an investment of money or something, to give them nevertheless a feeling that they can live here. If I do not give them this feeling, we will suffer."

[Rootsie]

"We didn’t carry out what we said. We spoke repeatedly of equal rights — empty words. [The Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem] were and remain second- and third-class citizens. For Israeli Jerusalem, I did something in the last 25 years. For East Jerusalem? Nothing."
(Teddy Kollek, 10 October 1990)

"The planning and building laws in East Jerusalem rest on a policy that calls for placing obstacles in the way of planning in the Arab sector — this is done in order to preserve the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs in the city, which is presently in a ratio of 72 percent Jews versus 28 percent non-Jews."
(Amir Cheshin, 9 December 1994)

"Jerusalem will not be on the negotiating table with the Palestinians at any time in the future. Jerusalem was in the past only the capital for the Jews and it is first-class nonsense to create something like Berlin… Israel’s agreement to the Oslo Accords was intended to remove Jerusalem from any negotiations. Other compromises are necessary in order to avoid the need for compromises over Jerusalem."
(Shimon Peres (Perez), 13 February 1996)

"Jerusalem is the focus of all [our] fears, memories, prayers and hopes… Balance in Jerusalem can in no way be based on any denial of Jewish sovereignty over all Jerusalem, as was formulated since the liberation and reunification of the city in 1967."
(Ehud Olmert, 3 December 1999)

"Yet we have continued to steal the Strip’s water, even though its quality deteriorated from year to year. We have continued to steal the Strip’s tiny land resources, in order to found there more and more [Jewish] settlements as if we deliberately wanted to make the inhabitants despair and in their despair think in terms of having nothing to lose. It is of our own doing that the Strip’s workers must now spend for travelling to their workplaces almost as much time as the whole day of work. From the military point of view, we have kept controlling no more than a half of the Strip’s area at an increasingly exorbitant price in expenditure of resources and energy by the Israeli army. About a year before Moshe Arens left [the Defense ministry], I already heard him saying that we should withdraw from the Strip, irrespective of its being a part of the Land of Israel. His argument was that Israel sinks into the Strip ever deeper and deeper. He told me he had made a motion to this effect to Yitzhak Shamir but the latter rejected it."
(Ze'ev Schiff, 5 March 1993)

"Although opinions among the Revisionists varied, in general, they sympathized with Fascism. ... He [Wolfgang von Weisl, financial director of Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionist movement], personally was a supporter of Fascism, and he rejoiced at the victory of Fascist Italy in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) as a triumph of the White races against the Black."
(World Jewry staff, 12 June 1936)

"Yes, we entertain great respect for Hitler. Hitler has saved Germany. Without him, it would have perished four years ago. And we would have gone along with Hitler if he had only given up his anti-Semitism."
(follower of Jabotinsky, 31 May 1932)

"Regarding the pure security consideration, there is no question that the presence of communities in occupied territory – even “civilian” communities – makes a significant contribution to security in that area, and facilitates the army’s role."
(Alfred Vitkon, 1979)

"The solution of withdrawal from the territories is no longer enough for the angry prophets of demography, professors Arnon Sofer and Sergio Della Pergola. They recommend surgery in which Israel also gets rid of the residents of Wadi Ara and the Triangle, lest the Arabs of those districts multiply and start demanding their national rights. The idea is now shared by Avigdor Lieberman on the right, many on the left, and Henry Kissinger."
(Aluf Benn, 2 February 2005)

"The entire discussion is disgusting and misses the point. Assuming that there were only a million Arabs in the Triangle and territories, with the birthrates of Finland and Luxembourg, would that make the occupation right, just, correct? If the occupation and settlements and discrimination against Israeli Arabs are morally flawed, damage Israel's stature internationally and harm its social resiliency, then it should be stopped irrespective of the number of Arabs."
(Aluf Benn, 2 February 2005)

"The disciples of the "demographic rationale" enjoy all possible worlds. They support withdrawal from the territories like the left, and appear to be Arab haters like the right. The "security" left turned into the "demographic" left during the intifada. Between the suicide bombings and Arafat's speeches about millions more marching to Jerusalem, it was difficult to talk about the moral burden of the occupation and much easier to hope the Arabs simply would disappear. One can only hope that the calmer atmosphere Mahmoud Abbas has brought will also moderate the domestic debate in Israel and at least prevent its deterioration into even worse forms of racism."
(Aluf Benn, 2 February 2005)

"the establishment of the State of Israel, which the Jewish people celebrated as the fulfillment of a dream held for generations, also involved the most traumatic collective historical memory in the history of the Arab citizens - the Nakba."
(Or Commission, 1 September 2003)

"[Considerations in my decision to halt the application of the Absentees' Property Law to East Jerusalem include] the grave international ramifications regarding the separation fence in the various aspects for which Israel has been severely criticized by The International Court in The Hague. ... This is a clear-cut case of Israel's interests being to avoid opening new fronts in the international arena in general, and in particular in the arena of international law."
(Menachem (Meni) Mazuz, 1 February 2005)

"Take the American declaration of Independence. It contains no mention of territorial limits. We are not obliged to fix the limits of the State."
(Moshe Dayan, 10 August 1967)

"My family arrived in Morocco before Islam. So I am not a stranger; I am not a Jew serving strangers ... so I come out of this more determined, and I don't want anyone to take away my Morocco."
(André Azoulay, October 2003)

"We don't need [the Jewish Agency for Israel] to tell us we have to go ... We are the only Arab country with a vibrant Jewish community, and we believe we have to preserve that small Chanukah light. Many people would like us to leave, but we are asking our Jewish friends around the world to understand we are attached to Morocco."
(Serge Berdugo, October 2003)

"A mighty State stretches across almost all the countries of Europe, hostile in intent and engaged in constant strife with everyone else…this is Jewry. ... In order to protect ourselves in front of them, I cannot see any other way, except by conquering their destined country and to deport them all there."
(Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1791)

"Our patience boiled over long ago. ... There is a breaking point and a time when the government must take off its gloves and present the other side with a flat ultimatum: For every indiscriminate round of fire on a civilian target, we will retaliate in kind on the closest and most populated Palestinian city. We will give it to them good. An eye for an eye."
(Yoel Marcus, 18 January 2005)

"The settlers want the evacuation to be engraved into public memory as a great and impossible struggle, to prevent any further attempts to withdraw. The government outwardly wants to present a picture of a difficult and violent struggle in order to be able to exact a high diplomatic price for the withdrawal. And the media is serving both sides, because the fiercer the struggle, the better the story."
(Michael Feige, 8 February 2005)

"One of the moments in which they [the Gush Katif settlers] lost my sympathy was when, during one of their meetings with the commander of the Southern Command, the officer asked them rhetorically, 'What do you want? Do you want me to bomb Gaza into the Stone Age?' And then they all, unanimously, answered with a thunderous 'Yes!' In addition, I never saw any sympathy on their part when the homes of Arabs were bombed or when the peace camp felt terrible distress during the war in Lebanon."
(Michael Feige, 8 February 2005)

"In Yamit, there was a huge gap between those who did the actual resisting - the members of Gush Emunim - and those they were fighting for, the people who actually lived in Yamit. The actual residents fought mainly to increase their compensation payments. The Gush Emunim activists went down to Yamit and fought against the withdrawal itself. From the moment an arrangement over the compensation payments was reached, most of the residents left the rest of the struggle to Gush Emunim."
(Michael Feige, 8 February 2005)

"The Sharm el-Sheikh summit today [8 February 2005] will be a show of strength for the realists. Mubarak, who is approaching a fifth term as president, convened the meeting as a response to Bush's State of the Union challenge to Egypt: "And the great and proud nation of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East."

The deal is simple: Sharon grants legitimacy to the Egyptian regime and the existing regional order, against the "tsunami" of elections in Iraq and the American call for democratization. In exchange, Sharon will receive public recognition in the Arab world, where he was rejected until now as an oppressor of the Palestinians."
(Aluf Benn, 8 February 2005)

"I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, a description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could describe events in South Africa."
(Desmond Tutu, 1989)

"Various campaigns against the apartheid regime had contributed to creating a climate of international awareness of the nature of the racist and oppressive system of apartheid and had led to general outrage and a demand for its international isolations. Something similar should happen in the case of the Palestinian struggle."
(Dennis Brutus, 2004)

"insistence on the dream of the Greater Land of Israel could, because of the absence of Palestinian emigration eastward and the impossibility of separation on demographic grounds that exist nowadays, be turned into a nightmare where the State of Israel maintains an apartheid regime, with the Jews rejecting the demand by a majority of the Arabs for equal civil rights.

The international excommunication and pressure to change the situation could lead to a binational state led by an Arab majority in the Knesset that hurries to cancel the Law of Return and open the gates of the country to Palestinians from the world over. The economic fate of a state of Palestine-Israel, which would still be better than its neighbors, would turn into a magnet for the poor in the region, something that would motivate that Jewish population that could afford it to emigrate. The Zionist dream would turn into a 100-year-old episode in the 1,500 year history of Muslim rule in the Land of Israel."
(Shaul Arielli, 9 February 2005)

"That is the power of the Yesha Council and the messianic zealots in the public debate, despite their numerical weakness: the agreement between "doves" and "hawks" that the Land belongs to "us," the Jews, and the only relevant nation to decide on the fate of the Land is the Jewish nation. According to that approach, the Palestinian residents of Gaza need not be asked what the fate of Gaza will be. It's up to the "nation in Zion," Israelis living inside the 1967 borders and the Jews living in Gaza and the West Bank, to decide. That is the approach of a "master nation": The Jews will decide what is best for the Palestinians. The consensus between the Yesha zealots and the "dovish left" is called "a democratic Jewish state." See the Kinneret Covenant for proof.

That is not a democratic state with a Jewish character and culture, but a discriminatory regime that grants more rights to Jews, and denies equal rights to Arabs. No democracy in the world has one nation deciding what is good for another nation. Such a regime has been called by Prof. Oren Yiftahel an "Ethnocracy" and it is the wish of "the nation in Zion": to be the masters of the entire land."
(Lev Greenberg, 9 February 2005)

"Every discussion of the Palestinians as equal human beings born in the image of God is termed "treasonous," the language of "Arab lovers." Therefore, there is no language or democratic discourse that supports disengagement and rejects a referendum.

The racist view that ignores the existence of occupied peoples or represents them as inferior, wild and dangerous emerged in Europe of past centuries to justify the white man's takeover of land and natural resources he did not own in Africa, America and Asia. That's how they sought to legitimize their acts of plunder, looting, repression and killing. In Europe, that racist approach was applied to "the Semitic" nations "invading" Europe, starting with the Jews. We were the victims of that racism, and history - or divine intervention - has now given us a difficult test."
(Lev Greenberg, 9 February 2005)

"In the attempt to escape anti-Semitism, we built a colonialist reality in the Promised Land that negates the humanity of the "natives.""
(Lev Greenberg, 9 February 2005)

"I am aware that it is difficult to change a discourse, especially when its protectors are so violent. Yitzhak Rabin (may he rest in peace) paid for it with his life. A week before the murder he was asked on TV how he would conduct the withdrawal if he did not have a Jewish majority. The question infuriated him, and he termed it a racist question. The delegitimization of Oslo was based on the argument that it was based on "Arab votes.""
(Lev Greenberg, 9 February 2005)

"In our battalion, we had a lot of arguments about the ethics of warfare. We had a hard time dealing with the reality in which Shmutznikim [members of Hashomer Hatzair] like us found themselves between a rock and a hard place. We believed in the brotherhood of nations, and our Shmutznik sensibilities gave us no rest. But whenever these questions were raised, the answer we got would be: 'these are the orders from above.' I'm not trying to justify it, but we didn't argue with that answer. We were young soldiers."
(Israel Singer Zamir, 11 February 2005)

"We'll kick you [the IDF] out of here like we did in Yitzhar."
(Itamar settlers, 11 February 2005)

"The Green Line is not a border line; the `border' can take on a different shape, changes can be made."
(Avraham Halleli, 17 February 2005)

"[Himnuta is] the Sayeret Matkal [an elite IDF commando unit] of the JNF in the realm of land purchase."
(Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar, 17 February 2005)

"Jewish Israeli society liked to see the Druze as a nice folkloristic group, a kind of "Arab-lite," whose delicacies and shops one could enjoy, and whose friendship one could boast of. The uniform-wearing Druze, who even have reached officer ranks, broadcast a false image of integration. But the alliance already assumed an ugly face during the first intifada: The harsh policing jobs that were given to the Druze pushed them into the twilight zone between the Jews, who try hard to boast of their purity of arms, and the Palestinians, for whom the friction with the Druze has given rise to insult and a burning and focused hatred of the group."
(Avirama Golan, 17 February 2005)

"The recent cases of Col. Zaher Ataf (who is suspected of rape), R. (who was suspended, because of the affair, of the killing of the Palestinian girl Iman al Hamas in Gaza), and Col. Imad Faras, former commander in the Givati Brigade who was indicted for conduct unbecoming, reinforce the feeling among the Druze that they are a scapegoat for a confused army and society."
(Avirama Golan, 17 February 2005)

"In 1938 a thirty-one nation conference was held in Evian, France, on resettlement of the victims of Nazism. The World Zionist Organization refused to participate, fearing that resettlement of Jews in other states would reduce the number available for Palestine."
(John Quigley, March 1990)

"At the same time, acceptance of the resolution [UNGA Resolution 181] in no way diminished the belief of all the Zionist parties in their right to the whole of the country. Their responses provide an instructive background against which subsequent events can be measured. ... As for those parts of the resolution less favorable to Zionist interests, Ben-Gurion unhesitatingly rejected them -— beginning with the projected borders of the Jewish state and the transition period for the implementation of the various stages of partition (designed to ensure a proper transfer of vital services from the British to the two new states), and ending with the establishment of the proposed Arab state.

By some twist of vision, historians have generally taken Ben-Gurion's acceptance of the idea of a Jewish state in less than the whole of Palestine as the equivalent of an acceptance of the entire UN resolution. Yet, as we have seen, Ben-Gurion had always viewed partition as the first step toward a Jewish state in the whole of Palestine, including Transjordan, the Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon."
(Simha Flapan, August 1987)

"In the area allotted to the Jewish state there are not more than 520,000 Jews and about 350,000 non-Jews, mostly Arabs (apart from the Jews of Jerusalem, who will also be citizens of the state). The Jewish state, at the time of its establishment, will be about a million people, almost 40 percent non-Jews. Such a composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish state. This fact must be seen in all of its clarity and acuteness. Such a composition does not even give us absolute assurance that control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority."
(David Ben-Gurion, 3 December 1947)

"In its harsh relations with the Palestinian people, the Israeli government has always cited security reasons as justification. “But with migrant workers, it is nothing to do with security. It is about people who are weak – and not Jewish,” says Zohar. “You cannot behave in an ugly way to only one group of people. You start with one population but tomorrow it is another.”"
(Hanna Zohar, 21 February 2005)

"Every so often there is a bold crew of Israeli journalists who will film something. One such crew had heard that some of the Israeli soldiers at the Erez checkpoint (Erez is the highly militarized checkpoint which is the sole entry and exit point to the Gaza strip) were playing a game of roulette with the lives of Palestinians. This was a time when a very small number of Palestinians were being allowed to enter Israel through the checkpoint in order to go to work. The gate at the Erez checkpoint is an electric fence, with interlocking ‘teeth’ that make a complete seal, controlled by remote control. The soldiers would play a game to see if they could catch a Palestinian worker in the gate. One worker had died this way. The film crew investigated and filmed the game being played in secret. When the film was broadcast, the studio got hundreds of letters – protesting that the crew should not have filmed this, that it was helping the enemy and sapping the morale of our soldiers when they need support! This is another way of denial, of not facing the barbarization of society. This is very similar to the American public reaction to what happened in Abu Ghraib."
(Ilan Pappe, 20 February 2005)

"There is a music show that is on Israeli television, called Taverna. It is Israeli music, which means it is Greek music with Hebrew lyrics. After the Israeli Army committed the massacre in Jenin in April 2002, the producer – another ‘leftist’ from the ‘peace camp’ – wanted to do a music show in order to give some comfort to the troops in this trying time. So the producers set up a stage in the zone of total destruction in Jenin. If you have been to Jenin or seen films about it, you know there was a hole in the middle of the camp – everything had been destroyed and reduced to rubble, people had been killed, people were buried in the rubble. They set up a stage in the midst of that rubble and had their music show. I talked to the producer afterwards, I asked him – ‘don’t you see a problem with having the stage in the middle of the hole’? He said: ‘no, the stage worked fine’ – as if my question had been about the technical aspects of the stage rather than the macabre scene."
(Ilan Pappe, 20 February 2005)

"It is irrational to give up defending yourself when the other side continues its aggression. Were there a complete settlement freeze, at least time would not daily make even the occupied territories, the rump of Palestine, less and less a place where Palestinians can hope to build a society.
It is rational to continue resistance, to continue making the settlers uncomfortable, to continue the pressure that brought Israeli concessions in the first place. Unless that pressure is maintained, the settlers will burrow ever deeper into Palestine, leaving ever less land and hope for the Palestinians.
This is not to say that keeping up the attacks is the best policy. Perhaps the best policy is to march peacefully with flowers in one's hair--anything is possible. But keeping up the attacks is a rational policy, one with at least as much chance of succeeding as any other.
To understand this response, it is not necessary to understand anything about Islam or Islamic fundamentalism or any special features of Palestinian culture, much less the psychology of hate. It is necessary only to see the Palestinians as rational human beings."
(Michael Neumann, 21 February 2005)

"I criticised the hype of Holocaust commemoration. The Zionists have a kind of impunity. For them, if a child at school is called a dirty Jew, they are up in arms. To me, Zionism is the Aids of Judaism. For people like me, it is different. We feel the Zionist lobby has claimed a monopoly of suffering."
(Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala, 22 February 2005)

[Rootsie]

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."
(Samuel P. Huntington, 1996)

"The thing that really bothers me is not the well-known Israeli position, but the helplessness of the Palestinians and their failure to cope with Israeli logic and arguments. The absurdity is that there is Palestinian consensus with regard to the need to release all the veteran prisoners first, while in Israel there are certain differences of opinion on the same matter. The Palestinian leadership continues to ignore the lessons of the past. Abu Mazen and his people are continuing to pass on secretly the name of this or the other prisoner whose release they require. This list of individuals undermines a human and political principle – the principle of equality in freedom. How can the Israelis respect the Palestinian leadership when it doesn’t respect itself and its prisoners? How can we expect the Israelis to act in keeping with the principle of justice when our leadership does not? My heart fills with anger for our negotiators and Abu Mazen."
(Palestinian prisoner, 2005)

"A state on scattered territories will not work"
(George W. Bush, 21 February 2005)

"These operative's push for an invasion of Iraq in 2002/03 is now being renewed against Syria and Iran, while a new formula for a Lebanon minus Hizbullah is being geared up. Such a formula would enable Israel to achieve two of the strategic goals of its 1982 invasion, which had been foiled by the Lebanese resistance. That is why Lebanon without Syrian troops and impotent Hizbullah is now a US and Israeli declared objective. A greatly weakened Syria is crucial as long as both Israel and the US are determined to see a nuclear-free Iran. We are a great distance away from Bush and Baker's "Dual Containment" of Iran and Iraq. Washington's various operatives make no secret about the need to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. President Bush himself pledged to back Israel in the event it launched an aerial strike against Iran. Thus a liquidation of Hizbullah is seen as a necessary step for subduing Iran as well as Syria.

Hariri's death, no matter who arranged it, is the perfect opportunity to implement the Israeli/US strategy, and revisit Israel's frustrated plans of 1982. What better circumstances could enable Israel to reap the benefits of Hariri's murder? Unlike 1982, Maronites, Druze, and Sunnis are all lined up against Syria, and once Syria is weakened, they would line up against Hizbullah too."
(Naseer Aruri, 22 February 2005)

"As progress is made toward peace, settlement activity in the occupied territories must end."
(George W. Bush, 26 February 2003)

"Hours after the early morning massacre [of Palestinians], Israeli reporter Yigal Sarna visited the killing field, universally known as the “slave market,” except to the New York Times, where this revealing fact was suppressed. Sarna witnessed an Israeli man get out of his car and jubilantly dance on the blood-stained ground, asking rhetorically, “Why only seven?” The question was a common one in Israel, as Sarna and other Israeli reporters discovered. On a visit to the gunman's neighborhood, located only a short walk from the scene of the massacre, Sarna found Popper's friends were in agreement that he “had made only two mistakes: One, he didn't kill all [of the Arabs] who were there; and two, he turned himself in instead of making a run for it.”"
(Nabeel Abraham, August 1990)

"The pressure on the Israelis, evident in the decision to pull out of Gaza and dismantle the settlements there, is demographic and political. Israel cannot remain both a democracy and a Jewish state if it chooses to rule over an area in which resides a non-Jewish majority. So it must withdraw or it must become a new apartheid state."
(David Aaronovitch, 27 February 2005)

"I wish all of Gaza would fall into the sea. ... since that won't happen, a solution must be found for the problem"
(Yitzhak Rabin, 2 September 1992)

"Last Sunday the Israeli government decided for the second time to implement the disengagement plan, a decision that was hailed by the media as 'historic'. With all the hullabaloo, hardly any attention was paid to a second resolution adopted at the same meeting: to continue building the wall in the West Bank."
(Uri Avnery, 26 February 2005)

"Yes, there is a cycle and the violence is disproportionate, but what is missing is the context. Why is there violence at all? The standard refrain, when it is rarely mentioned, is there is "hatred" on both sides. But since Israelis are like us (fun loving and child hugging) and we don't think of ourselves as hate-filled, then it must be the other side, the Arabs, who are hateful. Add the history of persecution of Jews into the mix, and what you have is a cycle of violence based on Arab hatred of the Jews. Presto, we arrive at the Israeli propaganda line."
(Nabeel Abraham, 12 September 2002)

"Your sect by its sufferings has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance inherent in every sect, disclaimed by all while feeble, and practiced by all when in power. Our laws have applied the only antidote to this vice, protecting our religious, as they do our civil rights, by putting all on an equal footing. But more remains to be done, for although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice."
(Thomas Jefferson, 28 May 1818)

"Israel usurped the lands of the Israeli Arabs and gave them to Jews, deprived the Arabs access to lands defined as state lands, and banished Palestinian residents of the West Bank from lands that have become synonymous with lands for Jewish settlers. In the same way, it is fatally damaging the private and public Palestinian lands along the fence. The process of construction and uprooting trees and saplings and demolishing greenhouses and water wells combines arrogance with contempt toward anyone who is not Jewish, and toward the international position. It does so as part of a basic, both open and concealed, master plan of usurpation."
(Amira Hass, 9 March 2005)

"While engaging in the honey-sweet military jargon of "humanitarian passes," Israel is turning blooming Palestinian territories into wasteland, in a cynical reversal of the ancient lie. While talking incessantly of temporality, the fence is demarcating the border between Israel and the state of prison compounds, and between the compounds and the settlements.
The constructed fence is continuing in its energetic destruction, but the fence will never be completed. because even after its construction is finished, it will perpetuate the policy of annexation, usurpation and severance. It will continue to cause disasters all around it. And again, especially during the talks of IDF pullout from this town or another, the Palestinians sometimes give the impression that they have grown accustomed to their disinheritance and have accepted it. But after a period of adjustment, the prolonged banishment will beget a new period of rebellion, which will lead to even more condescending Israeli "solutions" that will drive any chance of a just peace agreement further and further away."
(Amira Hass, 9 March 2005)

"The construction of the separation fence is being carried out in the language of control that has evolved here since 1947, and has not been altered even in the years of the political negotiations at the end of the 20th century. In Israeli propaganda, Israel is the attacked victim, and therefore may do anything to protect itself. There is no correlation between the subjective feeling of the victim and Israel's objective - military - power and strong international status. The fence's route - with or without the High Court's kashrut stamp - clearly promotes the intentions to annex Palestinian land. These intentions were not stopped in 1994, with the Oslo Accords, but accelerated. Israel usurped the lands of the Israeli Arabs and gave them to Jews, deprived the Arabs access to lands defined as state lands, and banished Palestinian residents of the West Bank from lands that have become synonymous with lands for Jewish settlers. In the same way, it is fatally damaging the private and public Palestinian lands along the fence. The process of construction and uprooting trees and saplings and demolishing greenhouses and water wells combines arrogance with contempt toward anyone who is not Jewish, and toward the international position. It does so as part of a basic, both open and concealed, master plan of usurpation."
(Amira Hass, 9 March 2005)

"She [Thatcher] said, if the northern [Catholic] population want to be in the south, well why don't they move over there? After all, there was a big movement of population in Ireland, wasn't there?

Nobody could think what it was. So finally I said, are you talking about Cromwell, prime minister? She said, that's right, Cromwell."
(David Goodall, 2001)

"if the northern [Catholic] population want to be in the south, well why don't they move over there? After all, there was a big movement of population in Ireland, wasn't there?"
(Margaret Thatcher, 1985)

"In almost all the cities that the Israel Defense Force has occupied, there has been severe damage to the water infrastructure through systematic targeting and sabotage. The destruction is done either by digging up the water pipes or by destroying the electrical lines to the water pumps. Most attempts to repair the infrastructure or to deliver water to the curfewed residents are blocked. Just a few hours ago, I attempted to deliver a truckload of bottled water into Nablus and I was turned away at an IDF checkpoint. Municipal workers who try to repair the damage are often either arrested or shot at by the IDF. In one case, a tank rolled over the repair truck with the municipal worker still inside the truck; in another case seven municipal workers were arrested while trying to repair the pipes. Some people had on-and-off access to running water but we estimate that 50,000 people have been continuously without access -- this includes hospitals. Just yesterday in Bethlehem, the sewer lines backed up. This creates the danger of cross-contamination from the backed-up sewer lines into the damaged water pipes. This is a disaster."
(Mark Zeitoun, 17 April 2002)

"Someone would sit with Sharon and tell him, 'This point is strategic and important.' Sharon would get back to him a few days later and say, 'You're right, this is an important point. It must be seized.' The ministers knew about them. Even [Benjamin] Ben Eliezer, as Sharon's defence minister toed the line and instructed his people to co-operate. At a certain stage Sharon turned his back and made an about-face. We are not lawbreakers. We are not the villain in this tale."
(Adi Mintz, 10 March 2005)

"Distinguishing between a discussion of the outposts and the settlement effort in general is nothing more than another success by the settlement-right to make people think that it is normal for hundreds of thousands of Israelis to continue living outside the sovereign territory of the state, in an area where the population around them has been denied the most basic human rights for generations. Moreover, a separate discussion of the outposts serves as a line of defense protecting the settlers, while anyone who wants to cross that line through politics and the media will one day wake up to find that "the legal settlements" meanwhile managed to triple and quadruple in size."
(Dror Etkes, 8 March 2005)

"Vandalizing art exhibitions is one manifestation of a disturbing cowboy-style trend on the part of Israeli officials abroad. In Montreal, the Israeli Consul General, Marc Attali, recently disrupted a ceremony in honour of Martin Luther King. The speaker [Yahya Abdul Rahman] compared King to non-violence activist Tom Hurndall, who was shot last April by an Israeli soldier in Gaza. Attali forced himself onto the platform, grabbed the microphone and furiously demanded an apology from the speaker."
(Edeet Ravel, January 2004)

"We are dealing with people whose primitivism is at a peak, whose level of knowledge is visibly one of absolute ignorance, and worse, who have little talent for understanding anything intellectual. Generally, they are only slightly better than the general level of the Arabs, Negroes, and Berbers in the same regions. In any case, they are at an even lower level than what we knew with regard to the former Arabs of Eretz Israel ... These Jews also lack roots in Judaism, as they are totally subordinated to the play of savage and primitive instincts ... Chronic laziness and hatred for work, there is nothing safe about this asocial element ... the Kibbutzim will not hear of their absorption among them."
(Aryeh (Arieh) Gelblum, 22 April 1949)

"Now there is no fear that IDF officers will be judged for war crimes, because [the Court] does not have authority to judge a citizen from a state that did not sign the Convention."
(Penina (Pnina) Sharvit-Baruch, 8 March 2005)

"It is very difficult to find an IDF officer who would claim the settlements contribute to the State of Israel's "security interests," and as far as their contribution to the "interests of the local population," the less said the better."
(Akiva Eldar, 14 March 2005)

"Israel established 'legal' settlements in 'Judea and Samaria' on 'state lands' (in addition to assistance, both in deed and in misdeed, to the outright theft of private land), on the basis of Ottoman law."
(Akiva Eldar, 14 March 2005)

"To circumvent the prohibition about moving civilian populations into occupied territory, Israel claims that the settlements are not "a permanent change." In 1979, Supreme Court Justice Miriam Ben-Porat accepted that argument, in a case over the expropriation of private Palestinian property for the purpose of establishing the settlement of Beit El."
(Akiva Eldar, 14 March 2005)

"The Supreme Court has always been the settlements' loyal babysitter - starting with the question of land expropriation when the court automatically accepted the `security needs' argument - Elon Moreh was an exception - and ending with the rejection of petitions against the settlements because of `lack of status' - words that, in any other context, are utterly meaningless."
(Avigdor Feldman, some date before 26 September 2003)

"Before the High Court, I represented an Arab who had traveled to Norway after he married a Norwegian woman. He subsequently divorced her and expressed the desire to return to his village in the West Bank. The army barred his entry, claiming he had lost his residence status. I recall Supreme Court Justice Miriam Ben-Porat cynically remarking that my client was really a `Norwegian.' Here was a flagrant example of the court collaborating with the army. If you are a Jew who was born in Alaska and who lived there all your life, you can receive Israeli citizenship within minutes. If you are an Arab and have lived here all your life, you can lose your resident status because of a few years you spent abroad.""
(Avigdor Feldman, some date before 26 September 2003)

"I live beyond the Green Line, but my home is not registered with the Israel Lands Administration, which is the case for all the settlements. Instead, I have a long-term rental agreement that is contingent on any future peace agreement. This is the condition by which all settlers must abide. Whether or not they are aware of or agree to this situation, they have no permanent resident status and are powerless to change their status or the land's ownership."
(Alan Baker, 2003)

"When the Likud came to power in 1977, this policy [of claiming that the establishment of settlements was subject to military needs] underwent a dramatic change. The Likud's approach was that, on the one hand, Jewish settlements should be founded to settle the Land of Israel, and that, on the other hand, the rights of individuals to their assets must be protected. This policy, established by then prime minister Menachem Begin, was firmly consolidated and backed by then attorney general Aharon Barak and was precisely implemented in hundreds of statements of professional opinion written by Barak and by the undersigned."
(Plia Albek, some date before 2004)

"In my opinion, the transfer of a population to a hostile territory is a serious danger in long-range terms because it perpetuates the dispute and destroys any true chances for the dispute's resolution. A classic example is the Protestant settlement in Catholic Ireland that has created perpetual tensions and hostility."
(Yoram Shahar, 2003)

"The Dawikat [the surname of the Palestinian petitioner in the 1979 Elon Moreh case] verdict is the only court decision in Israeli judicial history where an Israeli court of law ordered the destruction of a Jewish settlement."
(Plia Albek, some date before 2004)

"To describe a situation where two populations, in this case one Jewish and the other Arab, share the same territory but are governed by two separate legal systems, the international community customarily uses the term 'apartheid.' Prof. Amnon Rubinstein has coined an alternative phrase, 'enclave-based justice.'"
(Moshe Gorali, 26 September 2003)

"In its policy of establishing settlements in the territories, irrespective of the policy's political wisdom or absence thereof, Israel has clearly violated international law: It has violated the prohibitions concerning an occupying power's transferring nationals to the territory it occupies and concerning the expropriation of land for purposes unrelated to the local population's well-being. Regarding these two categories of violation, Israel's High Court of Justice has been unable to restrain the executive branch of Israeli government - perhaps because of the court's awareness of the issue's political nature."
(Amnon Rubinstein, 1997)

"The International Criminal Court obtains its authority in three ways. The first two do not `threaten' Israel. The first is the authority to indict citizens of a state that has signed the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and Israel is not a signatory. The second is an indictment for crimes committed on the territory of a state that has signed the statute, and the Palestinian Authority is not yet a state. The third way is the lodging of a complaint against a state and its leaders by the United Nations Security Council. Such a complaint will not be lodged as long as the United States exercises its veto. However, if the U.S. should become angry with us and withdraw its veto, all our leaders run the risk of being indicted."
(Yoram Shahar, 2003)

"'Joe,' [my mother said], 'there are two kinds of Jews. One kind has reacted to the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust by vowing that they will do anything to make sure it doesn't happen to our people again. While the other kind of Jews took as their lesson from the same terrible event that they must do whatever they can to make sure it doesn't happen again to any people anywhere. Joe', [she went on], 'I want you to promise me that you will always be the second kind of Jew.'"
(Joseph S. Murphy, some date before 1998) 

[Rootsie]

"This widely covered event shows that Israel has turned the liquidation of Europe's Jews into an asset. Our murdered relatives are being enlisted to enable Israel to continue not giving a damn about international decisions against the occupation. The suffering our parents endured in the ghettoes and concentration camps that filled Europe, the physical and mental anguish and torment that our parents were subjected to every single day since the “liberation,” are used as weapons to thwart any international criticism of the society we are creating here. This is a society with built-in discrimination on the basis of nationality, and the discrimination is spreading on either side of the Green Line. This is a society that is systematically continuing to banish the Palestinian nation from its land and usurp its rights as a nation and its chances for a humane future."
(Amira Hass, 16 March 2005)

"Amnesty International is primarily motivated not by human rights but by publicity. Second comes money. Third comes getting more members. Fourth, internal turf battles. And then finally, human rights, genuine human rights concerns. To be sure, if you are dealing with a human rights situation in a country that is at odds with the United States or Britain, it gets an awful lot of attention, resources, man and womanpower, publicity, you name it, they can throw whatever they want at that. But if it's dealing with violations of human rights by the United States, Britain, Israel, then it's like pulling teeth to get them to really do something on the situation. They might, very reluctantly and after an enormous amount of internal fightings and battles and pressures, you name it."
(Francis Boyle, Summer 2002)

"A state cannot be Jewish, just as a chair or a bus cannot be Jewish...The state is no more than a tool, a tool that is efficient or a tool that is defective, a tool that is suitable or a tool that is undesirable. And this tool must belong to all its citizens -- Jews, Moslems, Christians ... The concept of a 'Jewish State' is nothing other than a snare."
(Amos Oz (born Klausner), 1997)

"Recently, I've heard a lot of talk about the Jews of North Africa immigrating to Israel as refugees. That's a bunch of nonsense. No one forced them to leave North Africa. If they went to Israel it was because they were Zionists. I've been telling my son stories about Jewish-Muslim co-existence in Tunisia and he's amazed. On Yom Kippur we used to walk down the main street in Tunis wearing prayer shawls and skullcaps. Today you can't walk around that way in Paris."
(Pierre Besnainou (Besnainnou), 18 March 2005)

"There seems to be no connection between Israeli policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. While we hear that Israel is evacuating Gaza, what we see on the West Bank is a continuation of building new houses, in addition to the expansion of the outposts."
(Yariv Oppenheimer, March 2005)

"The area of Judea and Samaria and the area of the Gaza region are held by Israel under `combative takeover,' which is necessarily limited in time. The status of the Israeli communities established in these areas derives from the status of the territory, which is held under `combative takeover. ... When the settlers settled in the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria, they did so knowing they were settling on territory held by the state under combative takeover. They were aware the Israel Defense Forces is sovereign over the area, and that all contacts regarding their routine life were conducted in accordance with it. The status of the territory, and the status of the Israeli communities within it obligated the settlers to anticipate the possibility of their evacuation someday."
(Israeli State Prosecutor Office, 21 March 2005)

"The President [Franklin Roosevelt] asked His Majesty [Ibn Saud] for his advice regarding the problem of Jewish refugees driven from their homes in Europe. His majesty replied that in his opinion the Jews should return to live in the lands from which they were driven. The Jews whose homes were completely destroyed and who have no chance of livelihood in their homelands should be given living space in the Axis countries which oppressed them. 'Make the enemy and the oppressor pay; that is how we Arabs wage war" [said the King] 'Amends should be made by the criminal, not by the innocent bystander. What injury have Arabs done to the Jews of Europe? It is the Christian Germans who stole their homes and lives. Let the Germans pay.'"
(William A. Eddy, 1945)

"His Majesty [Ibn Saud] stated that the hope of the Arabs is based upon the word of honor of the Allies and upon the well-known love of justice of the United States and upon the expectation the United States will support them. The President [Franklin Roosevelt] replied that he wished to assure His Majesty that he would do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and would make no move hostile to the Arab people [and his government] would make no change in its basic policy in Palestine without full and prior consultation with both Jews and Arabs."
(William A. Eddy, 1945)

"[I will] take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government, which might prove hostile to the Arab people."
(Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 5 April 1945)

"Mr. Churchill opened the subject confidently wielding the big stick. Great Britain had supported and subsidized me for twenty years, and had made possible the stability of my reign by fending off potential enemies on my frontiers. Since Britain had seen me through difficult days, she is entitled now to request my assistance in the problem of Palestine where a strong Arab leader can restrain fanatical Arab elements, insist on moderation in Arab councils, and effect a realistic compromise with Zionism. Both sides must be prepared to make concessions and he looks to me to help prepare the Arab concessions. I replied that, as he well knows, I have made no secret of my friendship and gratitude to Great Britain, a friend I have always been ready to help and I shall always help her and the Allies against their enemies. I told him, however, that what he proposes is not help to Britain or the Allies, but an act of treachery to the Prophet and all believing Muslims which would wipe out my honor and destroy my soul. I could not acquiesce in a compromise with Zionism much less take any initiative. Furthermore, I pointed out, that even in the preposterous event that I were willing to do so, it would not be a favor to Britain, since promotion of Zionism from any quarter must indubitably bring bloodshed, wide-spread disorder in the Arab lands, with certainly no benefit to Britain or anyone else. By this time Mr. Churchill had laid the big stick down. In turn I requested assurance that Jewish immigration to Palestine would be stopped. This Mr. Churchill refused to promise, though he assured me that he would oppose any plan of immigration which would drive the Arabs out of Palestine or deprive them of the means of livelihood there. I reminded him that the British and their Allies would be making their own choice between (1) a friendly and peaceful Arab world, and (2) a struggle to the death between Arab and Jew if unreasonable immigration of Jews to Palestine is renewed. In any case, the formula must be one arrived at by and with Arab consent."
(Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, February 1945)

"In other words, the Israelis once again expect the occupied to protect the occupier. In exchange, they have made extremely vague and partial promises."
(Amira Hass, 23 March 2005)

"And he [Vanunu] is charged with an attempt to leave Israel's borders, because he tried to attend a Christmas mass in Bethlehem."
(Yossi Melman, 23 March 2005)

"I want to argue that now, 60 years after the end of the Holocaust, it is time to grow out of all this. The time has come to turn the memory of the Holocaust from an exclusively Jewish property into a world-wide human possession. The mourning, the anger and the shame must be turned into a universal message against all forms of genocide. The struggle against anti-Semitism must become a part of the fight against all kinds of racism, whether directed against Muslims in Europe or Blacks in America, Kurds in Turkey or Palestinians in Israel, or foreign workers everywhere. The Jews’ long history as the victims of murderous persecution must not cause us to wrap ourselves in a cult of self-pity, but, on the contrary, should encourage us to take the lead in the world-wide struggle against racism, prejudice and stereotypes that begin with incitement by vile demagogues and can end in genocide."
(Uri Avnery, 20 March 2005)

"News items about the continuing construction of the fence, the construction expansion in the settlements, and argument by Palestinians that nothing has really changed are all played down. It will take some really dramatic event to break through the curtain of illusions, but such an eventuality is not expected: The fifth round of the Israeli-Palestinian war ended once again with a Palestinian defeat, and, until the next round, the Israelis can do what they want in the territories. Sharon and Mofaz know how to exploit the optimistic atmosphere and continue advancing their strategic plans to draw the permanent map of the West Bank."
(Meron Benvenisti, 24 March 2005)

"Connecting Ma'aleh Adumim to Jerusalem creates one urban space, which covers a huge area inside the West Bank, from the watershed area to the plains of Jericho. It finally cuts off the northern West Bank from the southern part, and turns the Arab neighborhoods and villages of Jerusalem into isolated islands. Sharon and Mofaz know exactly what the plan they authorized means, and understand that there is no way to make it fit into the road map or any other political process. But they are counting on the American administration, for whom the illusion of the "political process" is much more important than the facts on the ground."
(Meron Benvenisti, 24 March 2005)

"The minute the administration in Washington accepts the Israeli claim that the construction freeze does not cover "planning procedures," it will accept the argument when the planning is over that the construction in Ma'aleh Adumim is only meant "to strengthen the Jewish settlement blocs," as President Bush has already affirmed."
(Meron Benvenisti, 24 March 2005)

"Since no serious Palestinian will accept a plan for a state without territorial contiguity, it is clear that the plan to link Ma'aleh Adumim to Jerusalem will torpedo any chance for the establishment of a Palestinian state as laid out by the road map."
(Meron Benvenisti, 24 March 2005)

"The Labor Party will not be able to raise any appeals because the plan [to build more settlement housing in order to link Ma'aleh Adumim to Jerusalem] was originally approved in principle by Yitzhak Rabin's government, though never implemented, and, in general, "Ma'aleh Adumim is in the consensus.""
(Meron Benvenisti, 24 March 2005)

"There is no doubt that when the "peace camp" calls for a demonstration against the tying of Ma'aleh Adumim and Jerusalem and the strangulation of the Palestinian state, even fewer demonstrators will show up than showed up for last Saturday night's rally. Sharon has already tamed them."
(Meron Benvenisti, 24 March 2005)

"Panic and confusion are filling the world of the Israeli center-left nowadays. Everything, but everything, must be done to protect Sharon's rule. After the "dizzying success" of the deliberate blindness that accompanied the waning period of Oslo, which allowed turning a blind eye from the continuing construction and development of the settlements and what was being done to the Palestinians, an entire culture is now being enlisted to ignore everything just to avoid getting in Sharon's way. Shh. Sharon's in power."
(Sefi Rachelevsky, 24 March 2005)

"Israel is creating a new crime - of talking to journalists. It is a shocking betrayal of democratic principles in what is a vindictive campaign of bullying and intimidation against a man [Mordechai Vanunu] who has served his time. ... He is being persecuted simply for talking to journalists. These restrictions are shameful when imposed in a democratic country and they create a dangerous atmosphere in which the personal safety of Vanunu can be compromised. ... This man has paid a heavy price for his original offence, which itself was punitive and unjustified. Israel has got to come to terms with the reality that its secret is out. The authorities need to get over it and allow Vanunu to go free."
(Aidan White, 18 March 2005)

"I combine my Arab nationality, my Christianity, my Muslim culture and Marxism."
(George Habash, some date before 2005)

"This is the time for Israel to make a decision. We are not going anywhere. In the end, if this process does not advance, we will go back to the one-state solution."
(Nasser Yussef (Yousef), 22 March 2005)

"The fact that Israel's Arab citizens do not serve in the military has been one of the tools for constructing the political claim that Arab Israelis are less patriotic than Jews. This claim, of course, failed to consider that it was the Israeli state that excluded the Arabs from collective military service in the first place; yet this did not prevent it from buttressing the supposedly 'justified' discrimination of Arab citizens. Patriotism laid the ground not only for the discrimination, but for the delegitimization and ostracism of certain groups, and from there it does not take much for non-patriots to become scapegoats, blamed for troubles that they did not cause."
(Yoram Peri, 25 March 2005)

"Amal Jamal ... shows that the State of Israel was actually responsible for preventing the emergence of civic patriotism among the Arab citizenry."
(Yoram Peri, 25 March 2005)

"That the Columbia University administration acted as a collaborator with the witch-hunters instead of defending me and offering itself as a refuge from rightwing McCarthyism has been a cause of grave personal and professional disappointment to me. I am utterly disillusioned with a university administration that treats its faculty with such contempt and am hoping against hope that the faculty will rise to the task before them and force President Bollinger to reverse this perilous course on which he has taken Columbia’s faculty and students. The major goal of the witch-hunters is to destroy the institution of the university in general. I am merely the entry point for their political project. As the university is the last bastion of free-thinking that has not yet fallen under the authority of extreme rightwing forces, it has become their main target. The challenge before us is therefore to be steadfast in fighting for academic freedom."
(Joseph Massad, 14 March 2005)

"There's no need to hide behind security arguments [when justifying this law preventing Palestinian spouses of Israelis from becoming Israeli citizens] ... There is a need for the existence of a Jewish state."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 4 April 2005)

"Meanwhile, an 'emergency regulation' passed in 2003 limits the right of Arab citizens of Israel - a right that belongs to not only every Jew in Israel but every Jew in the world - to have their spouse and children naturalized. That distinction is expressed in the classifications of the Central Bureau of Statistics, which formally divides the citizens of Israel into two categories: 'Jews and others' (Jews, Christians who are not Arabs, and people without religious classification); and 'the Arab population' (Muslims, Druze, Christian Arabs). That is the language of the separation."
(Yitzhak Laor, 7 April 2005)

"Perhaps there is a need for a special plan for Arabs? Maybe cuts in the welfare budgets, the education budgets, the budgets for local authorities? Perhaps tougher sentences for criminal offenses? Perhaps prohibition of the establishment of new communities, or construction beyond the limits of their villages since 1948? All that already exists. According to the racist logic of the campaign against the natural growth, we will also reach limits on childbirths."
(Yitzhak LaorYitzhak Laor, 7 April 2005)

"You [Zionists] are regarded as a threat to Arab national life. [Please stay away]."
(Yitzhak LaorMenahem Daniel, 1922)

"On the whole, Islamic tolerance has enabled Baghdadi Jews to flourish as a centre of learning and commerce. They and their kind would like to stay."
(writer in Jewish Chronicle in 1949, 1949)

"Someone might even get the idea that Israel is conducting negotiations about the refugee problem - a subject, as is known, that is reserved for the final status agreement, may it rest in peace."
(Akiva Eldar, 11 April 2005)

"Betar Jerusalem's fans screaming their 'death to Arabs' slogans are less dangerous than Eiland and Gavison."
(Yitzhak Laor, 7 April 2005)

"The entire issue of the Strip's border with Egypt is being discussed by Israel and Egypt - without the Palestinians."
(Danny Rubinstein, 11 April 2005)

"The disregard for the Palestinians with respect to the withdrawal from Gaza does not stem only from the fact that the disengagement is perceived as a unilateral plan, but also from the fact that in keeping with the official announcement about the pullout, Israel will continue to maintain the current arrangements with regard to the borders and crossings. This is what it says in the decisions of the government and the Knesset. This means that all the land, air and sea exit and entry points in Gaza remain under full Israeli control."
(Danny Rubinstein, 11 April 2005)

"When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff."
(Marcus Tullius Cicero, some date before 43 BC.)

"We said things without meaning them, and we didn’t carry them out, we said over and over that we would equalize the rights of the Arabs to the rights of the Jews in the city—empty talk. ... Never have we given them a feeling of being equal before the law. [As mayor of Jerusalem, I] nurtured nothing and built nothing [for the Arabs]. For Jewish Jerusalem I did something in the past 25 years. For [Arab] East Jerusalem? Nothing! What did I do? Nothing! Sidewalks? Nothing. Cultural Institutions? Not one. Yes, we installed a sewage system for them and improved the water supply. Do you know why? Do you think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! There were some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid that they would catch it, so we installed [a] sewage and a water system against cholera."
(Teddy Kollek, 10 October 1990)

"By transfering the evacuees from Gush Katif to a brand new neighborhood built especially for them along the beautiful strip of Nitzanim transmits a problematic implicit message. This is a message that says (once again) to the Jewish settlers in the territories: You are a chosen group, unique of its kind. You will not be like all the other Israelis, or the new immigrants, who went with their children and their possessions to find a home for themselves, to locate a neighborhood for themselves, to make friends with the new neighbors, to become a part of a new environment. You are Israel's chosen sons, the state will look after you and again shut you in a community settlement all of your own."
(Avirama Golan, 15 April 2005)

"Contrary to claims being made in the West ... There was no significant famine in the Jewish area ... Nor did they leave because they were in a war zone ... No Jewish villagers had been caught in military crossfire ... Their Christian neighbors did not drive them out ... They did not leave because of illness, either."
(Stephen Spector, February 2005)

"Why was Operation Solomon, a costly, dangerous endeavor, needed at all? The answer, according to Spector, pulls another skeleton out of our communal Jewish closet: because well-intentioned North American Jewish advocacy groups removed Ethiopian Jews from their villages, exposing them to health risks and refugee life that resulted ultimately in an emergency airlift. Was the danger in the Beta Israel villages so compelling that it justified moving an entire population? In his meticulous forensic style, Spector destroys, one by one, each argument given at the time for the exodus of Ethiopian Jews from their villages"
(Amir Shaviv, 15 April 2005)

"'Transfer' is associated in the collective memory with trucks arriving at night to take Palestinians across the border, as occurred in some places in 1948. But behind the smoke screen of disengagement, a process of slow and hidden transfer is being carried out in the West Bank today. It is not easy to judge which method of 'transferring' people from their land is crueler. Nearly 400,000 people, about half the number of Palestinians who were forced to leave their land in 1948, are now candidates for 'voluntary emigration' to refugee camps in the West Bank. And all this is currently being passed over in silence because maybe Sharon will disengage."
(Tanya Reinhart, 14 April 2005)

"[F]or now the disengagement the Gaza pullout - exists only on paper. ... [T]hree and a half months before the projected date of evacuation, it is still not clear where the evacuees will be housed until the discussions regarding their final relocation destination are concluded. Contrary to the prevailing impression, no infrastructure has been set up even for their temporary dwellings. ... If Sharon intends to evacuate the Gaza settlements, he is doing so with outrageous inefficiency. He is far more efficient in the West Bank. There, plans are carried out precisely as scheduled. Right from the start, during the first agreements between Sharon and Netanyahu one year ago about the disengagement plan, it was agreed that the disengagement would not be put into effect before the “separation fence” was completed on the western side of the West Bank. Indeed, the construction of the wall is moving towards completion. In July the announced date for the beginning of the Gaza evacuation the wall surrounding East Jerusalem and cutting it off from the West Bank will be in place. The Palestinians who live there will be able to leave only with permits. The centre of life in the West Bank will become an enclosed prison."
(Tanya Reinhart, 14 April 2005)

"Divestment can speak out loudly against Israel's invasions, illegal settlements, and systematic destruction of Palestinian civil society, and send a strong message for peace and an independent Palestinian state. Money talks loudly, against the Bush administration's military and economic support of Israel, and to Israel which depends on U.S. support. It helped end apartheid; ... it can help bring peace and justice to the Middle East."
(Karen Brodkin, some date around 2005)