101 quotes found
"They started calling young men. "You, come here. You, come here. You, come here." My late brother sat near me. He stood up. He wore a tie, it was spotted. That was the last time we saw him... Enough. I don't want to talk."
"The end result of this was, in the end we know that 531 Palestinian villages were destroyed, 11 towns were destroyed, and more than three quarter of a million Palestinians became refugees."
"I hope God will bring peace to this land, and let the peoples live together — a good life. I hope there will be peace."
"It is good we are still sane. The agony, running Faradiya's slope, and carrying two children, while they were shooting at us."
"They killed each three in a different Location."
"The exodus of Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion. It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries."
"Throughout the made effective use of Arabic language broadcasts and loudspeaker vans. Haganah Radio announced that "the day of judgement had arrived" and called on inhabitants to "kick out the foreign criminals" and to "move away from every house and street, from every neighbourhood occupied by foreign criminals." The Haganah broadcasts called on the populace to "evacuate the women, the children and the old immediately, and send them to a safe haven." Jewish tactics in the battle were designed to stun and quickly overpower opposition; demoralisation was a primary aim. It was deemed just as important to the outcome as the physical destruction of the Arab units. The mortar barrages and the broadcasts and announcements, and the tactics employed by the infantry companies, advancing from house to house, were all geared to this goal. The orders of Carmeli's 22nd Battalion were "to kill every [adult male] Arab encountered" and to set alight with fire-bombs "all objectives that can be set alight. I am sending you posters in Arabic; disperse on route.""
"Undoubtedly, as was understood by IDF intelligence, the most important single factor in the exodus of April–June was Jewish attack. This is demonstrated clearly by the fact that each exodus occurred during or in the immediate wake of military assault. No town was abandoned by the bulk of its population before the Haganah/IZL assault. In the countryside, while many of the villages were abandoned during Haganah/IZL attacs and because of them, other villages were evacuated as result of Jewish attacks on neighbouring villages or towns; they feared that they would be next. In General, Haganah operational orders for attacks on towns did not call for the expulsion or eviction of the civilian population. But from early April, operational orders for attacks on villages and clusters of villages more often than not called for the destruction of villages and, implicitly or explicitly, expulsion. And, no doubt, the spectacle of panicky flight served to whet the appetites of Haganah commanders and, perhaps, the HGS as well. Like Ben Gurion, they realised that a transfer of the prospective large minority out of the emergent Jewish State had begun and that with very little extra effort and nudging it could be expanded. The temptation proved very strong, for solid military and political reasons."
"a thief's feeling of guilt lies deep in the Israeli psyche. Many of them know that they are guilty. The politicians and military cannot allow themselves to say or feel that they are in any way at fault, of course, but now and then a writer feels it. And they deal with this feeling in one of two ways: either they try to repress it, or they try to find a solution. Every so often, Israeli writers try to make contact and protest against the occupation. The problem is that they seldom talk about al-Nakba and their responsibility for what happened in 1948...That is the reason why they don't want to let the 1948 refugees back, because then they will have to admit that they have been lying the whole time. Because the official version has always been that the Palestinians left their homes voluntarily. It is a psychological and moral problem"
"Israeli vans with loudspeakers drove through the streets ordering all the inhabitants to evacuate immediately, and such as were reluctant to leave were forcibly ejected from their homes by the triumphant Israelis whose policy was now openly one of clearing out all the Arab civil population before them… From the surrounding villages and hamlets, during the next two or three days, all the inhabitants were uprooted and set off on the road to … No longer was there any "reasonable persuasion." Bluntly, the Arab inhabitants were ejected and forced to flee into Arab territory… Wherever the Israeli troops advanced into Arab country the Arab population was bulldozed out in front of them."
"The Court produced evidence that the Israeli armed forces had ample opportunity to identify LIBERTY correctly. The Court had insufficient information before it to make a judgment on the reasons for the decision by Israeli aircraft and motor torpedo boats to attack ... It was not the responsibility of the Court to rule on the culpability of the attackers, and no evidence was heard from the attacking nation."
"I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous."
"As the Liberty sat within eyeshot of El Arish, eavesdropping on surrounding communications, Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners... This and other war crimes were just some of the secrets Israel had sought to conceal... An essential element in the Israeli battle plan seemed to have been to hide much of the war behind a carefully constructed curtain of lies... Into this sea of deception and slaughter sailed the USS Liberty, an enormous spy factory loaded with the latest eavesdropping gear... the ship was a tired old second world war vessel crawling with antennae, and unthreatening to anyone - unless it was their secrets, not their lives, they wanted to protect. By then the Israeli navy and air force had conducted more than six hours of close surveillance of the Liberty off the Sinai and must have positively identified it as an American electronic spy ship. They knew she was the only military ship in the area. Nevertheless, the order was given to kill her and at 12.05 pm, three motor torpedo boats from the port of Ashdod, about 50 miles away, departed. Israeli air force fighters, loaded with 50mm cannon ammunition, rockets and napalm, followed. Without warning, the Israeli jets - swept-wing Dassault Mirage IIICs - struck. On board Liberty, Lieutenant Painter observed that the aircraft had "absolutely no markings", their identity unclear."
"According to NSA documents - classified top secret... some senior officials in Washington wanted above all to protect Israel from embarrassment. "Captain Vineyard had mentioned during this conversation," wrote Tordella, "that consideration was then being given by some unnamed Washington authorities to sink[ing] the Liberty in order that newspaper men would be unable to photograph her and thus inflame public opinion against the Israelis... ""
"It is... a national disgrace that in the immediate aftermath of Memorial Day there is scant remembrance of the 34 crew members comprising naval officers, seamen, two marines and a civilian who were killed in the attack along with the 171 crew members who were wounded. While the official inquiries by both nations found the attack to be a case of mistaken identity of the Liberty, to this day there is a long record of distinguished officers and journalists who take strong exception to this view believing that the attack was deliberate. Indeed the attack on the Liberty is the only maritime incident in U.S. history where our military forces were killed that was never investigated by the Congress. ... As we approach the anniversary of the attack on the Liberty, let us take a few minutes to reflect soberly on whether the time has not come to once again be a honest broker, to call our Israeli friends to account when necessary with sanctions that hurt and to make clear to one and all that acts such as the attack on the flotilla of humanitarian ships bound to alleviate the suffering of the men, women and children of Gaza will not occur with impunity."
"This week marks the 50th anniversary of the assault on the USS Liberty, and though it was among the worst attacks in history against a noncombatant U.S. naval vessel, the tragedy remains shrouded in secrecy. The question of if and when Israeli forces became aware they were killing Americans has proved a point of particular contention in the on-again, off-again public debate that has simmered over the last half a century. The Navy Court of Inquiry’s investigation proceedings following the incident were held in closed sessions, and the survivors who had been on board received gag orders forbidding them to ever talk about what they endured that day."
"In a statement to The Intercept, Ernie Gallo, who currently serves as the president of the Liberty Veterans Association, said, "We now know that the Navy Court of Inquiry was merely for show, as the officers were told to come to the conclusion the Liberty did [its] job and the attack was accidental." Bamford also references the magnitude and length of the attack as proof of its deliberateness: The ship was hit repeatedly, first by planes dropping thousand-pound bombs and napalm, and then by torpedo boats. Israeli forces also jammed the Liberty's antennas and communication channels, took out the four .50-caliber machine guns on board, and reportedly shot at life rafts and crew members as they attempted to evacuate the vessel. "It was an attack in broad daylight," said Bamford. "They were flying a large U.S. flag. [The ship] said USS Liberty on the back. … I mean, what do you need?""
"I have support for the Palestinians in general…the top priority in my international life has been to bring peace to Israel and its neighbors. I think the only way to do it is to treat the Palestinians fairly and let them have their own state alongside Israel."
"Since the mid-1970s, there's been an international consensus for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. [...] It's called a two-state settlement, and a two-state settlement is pretty straightforward, uncomplicated. Israel has to fully withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem, in accordance with the fundamental principle of international law, [...] that it's inadmissible to acquire territory by war. The West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, having been acquired by war, it's inadmissible for Israel to keep them. They have to be returned. On the Palestinian side and also the side of the neighboring Arab states, they have to recognize Israel's right to live in peace and security with its neighbors. That was the quid pro quo: recognition of Israel, Palestinian right to self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in Jerusalem. That's the international consensus. It's not complicated. It's also not controversial."
"And I have witnessed firsthand the ravages of a conflict that has gone on for far too long. I’ve seen Israeli children in Sderot whose playgrounds had been hit by Katyusha rockets. I’ve visited shelters next to schools in Kiryat Shmona that kids had 15 seconds to get to after a warning siren went off. I’ve also seen the devastation of war in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian girls in Izbet Abed Rabo played in the rubble of a bombed-out building. No children -- Israeli or Palestinian -- should have to live like that."
"Most troubling of all, Hamas continues to pursue an extremist agenda: they refuse to accept Israel’s very right to exist. They have a one-state vision of their own: all of the land is Palestine. Hamas and other radical factions are responsible for the most explicit forms of incitement to violence, and many of the images that they use are truly appalling. And they are willing to kill innocents in Israel and put the people of Gaza at risk in order to advance that agenda. Compounding this, the humanitarian situation in Gaza, exacerbated by the closings of the crossings, is dire. Gaza is home to one of the world’s densest concentrations of people enduring extreme hardships with few opportunities. 1.3 million people out of Gaza’s population of 1.8 million are in need of daily assistance -- food and shelter. Most have electricity less than half the time and only 5 percent of the water is safe to drink. And yet despite the urgency of these needs, Hamas and other militant groups continue to re-arm and divert reconstruction materials to build tunnels, threatening more attacks on Israeli civilians that no government can tolerate."
"The second flawed explanation for the longstanding conflict between Israel and the Palestinian[s] which has gained popularity is that the root of the problem is [the] so-called "occupation," the settlements in Judea and Samaria, and the settlers themselves. Only the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, so the argument goes, will ensure peace in the region. It is sufficient to state a number of well-known facts in order to refute this claim. Firstly, all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza were under Arab control for 19 years, between '48 and '67. During these 19 years, no one tried to create a Palestinian state. Peace agreements -- Peace agreements were achieved with Egypt and Jordan despite the presence of settlements. And the opposite is also true: We evacuated 21 flourishing settlements in Gush Katif, and we transferred more than 10,000 Jews, and in return we have Hamas in power and thousands of missiles on Sderot and southern Israel."
"Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed -- more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories, while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve. On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people -- Muslims and Christians -- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations large and small that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable."
"Mr. Speaker, Perhaps the greatest challenge Israel and the United States face at this time together is the Iranian nuclear program. Let there be no doubt: Iran does not strive to attain nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Iran -- Iran is building nuclear capabilities that pose a threat to the stability of the Middle East and beyond. Every country or region controlled or infiltrated by Iran has experienced utter havoc. We have seen this in Yemen, in Gaza, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq. In fact, we have seen this in Iran itself, where the regime has lost its people and is suppressing them brutally. Iran has spread hatred, terror, and suffering throughout the Middle East and beyond, adding fuel to the disastrous fire and suffering in Ukraine."
"Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime."
"The International Criminal Court (ICC's) mandate to investigate war crimes has thus been hampered by the unwillingness of the world’s sole superpower to commit to the organization.... Recent statements...suggest that the United States is now preparing to go to war against the ICC itself, motivated largely by an effort to silence investigations into alleged American war crimes committed in Afghanistan, as well as alleged crimes committed by Israel during the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip....The unwillingness or inability of U.S. courts to seriously investigate war crimes carried out by American citizens is part of why the ICC mandate in Afghanistan has been viewed as an important effort to bring a minimum level of accountability over the conflict."
"We have negotiated one of the most complicated issues of the last hundred years. We are grateful to the United States for its support and leadership. We are grateful to both President Clinton and Secretary Christopher for their crucial role. We appreciate the Egyptian role and the Norwegian encouragement, the European involvement and serious contribution [for] the Asian support and blessing. May we now have the right to say to other people in conflict: "Don't give up. Do not surrender to old obsessions and do not take fresh disappointments at face value." What we did others can do as well. Mr. President, we are determined to make the agreement with the Palestinians into a permanent success. Israel would consider an economic success of the Palestinians as though it were its own; and I believe that a newly-achieved security will serve the aspirations of the Israelis and the necessities of the Palestinians. Gaza, after 7,000 years of suffering, can emancipate itself from want. Jericho, without her fallen walls, can see her gardens blossom again."
"The U.S. corporate media usually report on Israeli military assaults in occupied Palestine as if the United States is an innocent neutral party to the conflict. In fact, large majorities of Americans have told pollsters for decades that they want the United States to be neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But U.S. media and politicians betray their own lack of neutrality by blaming Palestinians for nearly all the violence and framing flagrantly disproportionate, indiscriminate and therefore illegal Israeli attacks as a justifiable response to Palestinian actions."
"Anziska quotes the Israeli intellectual Amos Oz: “After Lebanon, we can no longer ignore the monster, even when it is dormant, or half-asleep, or when it peers out from behind the lunatic fringe … It dwells, drowsing, virtually everywhere...” ... Anziska reminds us that America has always shared responsibility for the lopsided competition between Israel and the Palestinians... The US has been complicit in far too many of...[Israel's] useless “victories”."
"Amid all the din about normalization, I have noticed one startling absence, namely, the current status of the Palestinian refugees living in every major Arab country, whose condition everywhere—there are no exceptions—is unacceptably miserable. Wherever there are Palestinians in the Arab world, there are rules and regulations forbidding them full status as residents, forbidding them work and travel, requiring them to register with the police on a monthly basis, and so on. It’s not only Israel that treats Palestinians badly, it is the Arab countries who do so also. Now see if there is a sustained campaign by Arab intellectuals against this invidious local treatment of the Palestinian refugees: you won’t see or hear one. What excuse is there for the horrible refugee camps in which so many of them live, even in places like Gaza and the West Bank; what right do local mokhabarat forces have to harass them and generally make their lives miserable? And why is there no protracted press campaign to end this appalling state of affairs? Why, because it is much easier (and less risky) to rail against normalization and Hebrew translations than it is to dramatize the unacceptable condition of Palestinian refugees in the Arab world, who are always being told that they cannot be “normalized” because it would implement Israel’s design. What rubbish!"
"Israel is now waging a war against civilians, pure and simple, although you will never hear it put that way in the United States. This is a racist war and, in its strategy and tactics, a colonial one as well. People are being killed and made to suffer disproportionately because they are not Jews. What an irony! Yet CNN never refers to “occupied” territories (always rather to “violence in Israel,” as if the main battlefields were the concert halls and cafés of Tel Aviv and not in fact the ghettos and besieged refugee camps of Palestine that have already been surrounded by no less than 150 illegal Israeli settlements). For the past ten years, the great fraud of Oslo was foisted on the world by the United States, with hardly an awareness that only 18 percent of the West Bank was given up, and 60 percent of Gaza. No one knows geography, and it’s better not to know, since the reality on the ground is so astonishing, considering the verbal hoopla and self-congratulation. And that pseudo-pundit—the insufferably conceited Thomas Friedman—still has the gall to say that “Arab TV” shows one-sided pictures, as if “Arab TV” should be showing things from Israel’s point of view the way CNN does, with “Mideast violence” the catchall word for the ethnic cleansing that Israel is wreaking on the Palestinians in their ghettos and camps. Has Friedman (or CNN, for that matter) ever tried to point out the difference between an attacking army fighting a colonial war on the territory of the people it has occupied for thirty-five years, and the people defending against that butchery? Of course not, for indeed why should Friedman ever bother to say honestly that there is no Palestinian occupation, there are no Palestinian F-16s, no Apache helicopters, no gunboats, no Merkava tanks, in short, no Palestinian occupation of Israel. So much for Friedman’s credentials as an honest commentator and reporter, who has utterly failed in unadorned terms both to explain the U.S. view and to understand the Arab and Palestinian cause. Can he not see that he and his writings are part of the problem, that in their maundering selfjustifications and their dishonesty, showing no sign of the self-criticism he keeps hectoringly expecting of others, he actually aggravates the ignorance and the misperceptions rather than reducing them? Poor journalist and educator, he."
"If you want to see the picture, you have to see whole picture, if you talked about violence, let's talk about 4000 Palestinians killed during the last five years while from Israeli side a few hundreds killed, So if you want to talk about the violence and you called this violence "terrorism" Israel kills more, more Palestinian than Palestinian kills on Israel, Second, You have to see both sides. You talk about Hamas, what they did in Israel but don't talk about Israel and what they did in Palestinian Territories."
"Not there's no Holocaust, let say they exaggerated the Holocaust. We don't say many people...but they say there's Holocaust but they are exaggerating, so there's such perception of this event of this title, the Holocaust, in our region...It's not the matter how many were killed, six million or one million, or half...killing is killing, I mean how many Soviets were killed? eight million, so why didn't we talk about them? the problem is not how many were killed. How do they do use it? what do the Palestinians have to do to the Holocaust to pay the price? This is one question we asked...We know that there was massacre against Jewish and against others...what's going on in Palestine we see it the same way, but you don't see it the same way..."
"Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse the aggression, but to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is united....I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation."
"This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
"The state of Israel will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture; will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of shrines and holy places of all religions; and will dedicate itself to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."
"In the midst of wanton aggression we call upon the Arab inhabitants of the state of Israel to return to the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the state, with full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions, provisional or permanent."
"We offer peace and amity to all neighboring states and their peoples, and invite them to co-operate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all. The state of Israel is ready to contribute its full share to the peaceful progress and reconstitution of the Middle East."
"Jews strove throughout the centuries to go back to the land of their fathers and regain statehood. In recent decades, they returned in their masses. They reclaimed a wilderness, revived their language, built cities and villages, and established a vigorous and ever-growing community, with its own economic end cultural life. They sought peace, yet were ever prepared to defend themselves. They brought blessings of progress to all inhabitants of the country."
"We do not believe in might; we believe in right, only in right. And that is why our aspiration, from the depths of our hearts, from time immemorial until this very day, is peace."
"Peace is the beauty of life. It is sunshine. It is the smile of a child, the love of a mother, the joy of a father, the togetherness of a family. It is the advancement of man, the victory of a just cause, the triumph of truth. Peace is all of these and more and more."
"And so reborn Israel always strove for peace, yearned for it, made endless endeavors to achieve it. My colleagues and I have gone in the footsteps of our predecessors since the very first day we were called by our people to care for their future. We went any place, we looked for any avenue, we made any effort to bring about negotiations between Israel and its neighbors, negotiations without which peace remains an abstract desire."
"His Majesty's Government have thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles. There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews. For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine."
"We are working with our allies to prevent conflict in the Middle East. The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel is a notable achievement which represents a strategic asset for America and which also enhances prospects for regional and world peace. We are now engaged in further negotiations to provide full autonomy for the people of the West Bank and Gaza, to resolve the Palestinian issue in all its aspects, and to preserve the peace and security of Israel."
"There are two interrelated obstacles to permanent peace in the Middle East: 1. Some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinian; and 2. Some Palestinians react by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories."
"Israel will never find peace until it is willing to withdraw from its neighbors’ land and to permit the Palestinians to exercise their basic human and political rights ... The current policies are leading toward an immoral outcome that is undermining Israel’s standing in the world and is not bringing security to the people of Israel."
"I killed myself trying to give the Palestinians a state. I had a deal they turned down that would have given them all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank. You name it. They turned it all down."
"Israelis and Palestinians live on the same piece of land namely; Palestine that is located between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. This is a disputed land. In 1948 the majority of the population, three quarters of the population were Palestinians. Less than a quarter of the population were Israelis. They managed to expel the Palestinians from their homes and unilaterally declared a state called Israel. This is inadmissible under international law. No one can legally declare a state on a disputed territory."
"The Arabs had lost Palestine, it was a catastrophe, a nakba, as it became known. Several hundred thousand Palestinians had to flee, within the country or into neighboring countries. Palestinians felt they were being made to atone for Europe’s sin of the Holocaust by sacrificing their own land. They took the keys to their houses with them and never gave up on the idea of returning home one day. But in 1967, during six days of war, the Arabs lost more land: Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, including the walled old city that is home to Al-Aqsa mosque, as well as Egypt’s Sinai and Syria’s Golan Heights. Jerusalem was under Jewish rule again for the first time in two millennia. Across the Arab and Muslim world, there was disbelief, shock, and tears. Arabs had put their faith in nationalism and in Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Just a few years prior, in 1956, Nasser had emerged victorious from a war for control over Egypt’s Suez Canal, staring down not only the French and the British but also Israel. The charismatic nationalist had become a hero for millions across the Arab world. How could he have lost this time? Perhaps, some people thought, God had forsaken Muslims; perhaps a return to religion was the answer."
"There are monsters among us. Every day I read about an American “plan” to either invade some place new or to otherwise inflict pain to convince a “non-compliant” foreign government how to behave. [...] Just as often, one learns about a new atrocity by Israelis inflicted on the defenseless Arabs just because they have the power to do so. Last Friday in Gaza the Israeli army shot and killed four unarmed demonstrators and injured 300 more while the Jewish state’s police invaded a Palestinian orphanage school in occupied Jerusalem and shut it down because the students were celebrating a “Yes to peace, no to war” poetry festival. Peace is not in the Israeli authorized curriculum."
"I know the difference between the world as we wish it to be and the world as it is. The world as it is, is a divided Palestinian people, a place that allows rockets to be launched from apartment buildings, a place for a mosques are weapon storage sites, a place where school children are taught hate -- that's the world as it is."
"I urge the Israeli authorities to abide by the laws governing armed conflict, including the proportionate use of force. I call on them to exercise maximum restraint in the conduct of military operations. I likewise urge Hamas and other militant groups to stop the indiscriminate launching of rockets and mortars from highly populated civilian neighbourhoods into civilian population centres in Israel, also in clear violation of international humanitarian law. Densely populated civilian areas must not be used for military purposes."
"The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the history of two societies in extreme distress: anyone who speaks only of the anguish of the Israelis is not telling the whole truth, nor is anyone who speaks only of the misery of the Palestinians...More than anything, we must understand that this was not a battle of strength against strength, but of weakness against weakness; throughout the whole Arab-Israeli conflict, each side has felt itself to be far weaker than its opponent, and acted accordingly. We must understand that there was no "Jewish justice," as Golda Meir said in one of her less sterling moments, nor was there "Arab justice," a claim that also has proponents; rather, there were two deep traumas, on which a completely new life, a different world, new hope must be built."
"I find that no other question so much reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his aphorism about the necessity of living with flat-out contradiction. Do I sometimes wish that Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann had never persuaded either the Jews or the gentiles to create a quasi-utopian farmer-and-worker state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean? Yes. Do I wish that the Israeli air force could find and destroy all the arsenals of Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad? Yes. Do I think it ridiculous that Viennese and Russian and German scholars and doctors should have vibrated to the mad rhythms of ancient so-called prophecies rather than helping to secularize and reform their own societies? Definitely. Do I feel horror and disgust at the thought that a whole new generation of Arab Palestinians is being born into the dispossession and/or occupation already suffered by their grandparents and even great-grandparents? Absolutely, I do."
"Make no mistake, this is a science: with every violent victory of the Zionist occupation army over the Palestinian resistance, the Zionists take one step closer to their own annihilation. The Palestinians, by following the example which the West has proudly placed before the world, of the much-celebrated terrorism against German occupation in World War II on the part of the French Resistance, and the "partisans" of eastern Europe, have brought untold grief and misery to their people."
"No one ever thought that 140,000,000 Americans would become the hands of the Jews. ... How would the Americans dare to Judaize Palestine while the Arabs are still alive? ... The wicked American intentions toward the Arabs are now clear, and there remain no doubts that they are endeavoring to establish a Jewish empire in the Arab world. More than 400,000,000 Arabs [?] oppose this criminal American movement. ... Arabs! Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you."
"I declare a holy war, my Muslim brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!"
"We salute the Palestinian people of heroic mujahideen as well as every hero and heroine amongst the champions of self-sacrifice who confront the Zionist aggression with their lives and thus foil the wrong ideas of the American administrations which have acted in alliance with their artificial Zionist creation in the crimes they perpetrate and the shame they reap."
"I've been to Palestine. It exists, right next to Israel. The problem is not that Palestine threatens or erases Israel. The problem is that there are Israeli soldiers all over Palestine."
"Jews outside and inside Israel might be a little safer if there was a campaign to distinguish between diverse Jewish positions and the actions of the Israeli state. This is where an international movement can play a crucial role. Already, alliances are being made between globalization activists and Israeli "refuseniks," soldiers who refuse to serve their mandatory duty in the occupied territories. And the most powerful images from Saturday’s protests were rabbis walking alongside Palestinians. But more needs to be done. It’s easy for social justice activists to tell themselves that since Jews already have such powerful defenders in Washington and Jerusalem, anti-Semitism is one battle they don’t need to fight. This is a deadly error. It is precisely because anti-Semitism is used by the likes of Mr. Sharon that the fight against it must be reclaimed. When anti-Semitism is no longer treated as Jewish business, to be taken care of by Israel and the Zionist lobby, Mr. Sharon is robbed of his most effective weapon in the indefensible and increasingly brutal occupation. And as an extra bonus, whenever hatred of Jews diminishes, the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen shrink right down with it."
"What dishonors my relatives is the fact of checkpoints in their names, of mass arrests, collective punishment, home demolitions, the theft of territory and resources, to rid the land of Palestinian people, so it can be farmed and built on by Israeli Jewish settlers. I am one of many Jews who believe only justice will bring peace, and who face tremendous pressure and personal attacks for saying so. Today, my Jewish kin who believe repression is the price of survival are acting on old fears of standing alone against terrible threats."
"I want to see a flowering of Arab and Jewish cultures in a country without racism or anti-Semitism, without rich or poor or spat-upon: everyone beneath the vine and fig tree living in peace and unafraid. A homeland for each and every one of us between the mountains and the sea. A multilingual, multireligious, many-colored and peopled land where the orange tree blooms for all. I will not surrender this vision for any lesser compromise. No separate-but-equal armed camps turning their backs on each other across a pitted buffer zone. No Palestinian exile burning with dreams of return, injustice embittering generations of children who yearn always for the place of their ancestors: next year in the Galilee. No graveyard the size of a nation, Palestinian blood burning the ground and steaming up each morning, reeking of death. No fortress-state of Jews against all the rest of the world, generations of children growing up soldiers, believing themselves holy, believing there is no one outside the walls, believing fear is the only force that binds people together. I will accept nothing less than freedom."
"The relationship of Israel with the Palestinian territories vividly illustrates how the capitalist wealth of developed nations is built on the subjugation of weaker economies. Some mechanisms of this subjugation appear impersonal, like the imposition of free market policies or fiscal austerity; others are overtly personal, like the colonial confiscation of land. Historically, the two have gone hand in hand. In the case of Israel, the inherent violence of capital accumulation has morphed into something extreme."
"We owe a responsibility not only to those who are in Israel but also to those generations that are no more, to those millions who have died within our lifetime, to Jews all over the world, and to generations of Jews to come. We hate war. We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown, and when strawberries bloom in Israel."
"We will not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand. We will enter it with its soil saturated in blood."
"The truth is that if Israel were to put down its arms there would be no more Israel. If the Arabs were to put down their arms there would be no more war."
"We are destined to live together, on the same soil in the same land. We, the soldiers who have returned from battle stained with blood, we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes, we who have attended their funerals and cannot look into the eyes of their parents, we who have come from a land where parents bury their children, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians. We say to you today in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough. We have no desire for revenge. We harbor no hatred towards you. We, like you, are people who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, live side by side with you in dignity, in empathy, as human beings, as free men. We are today giving peace a chance and again saying to you in a clear voice: Enough."
"Here we stand before you, men who fate and history have sent on a mission of peace to end once and for all 100 years of bloodshed. Our dream is also your dream -- King Hussein, President Mubarak, Chairman Arafat, all the others, and, above [all], assisting us, President Bill Clinton -- a President who is working in the service of peace. We all love the same children, weep the same tears, hate the same enmity, and pray for reconciliation. Peace has no borders. ... My brother Jews speak through the media to you [of] thousands of years of exile. And the dream of generations have returned us to our historic home in the land of Israel -- the land of the Prophets. Etched on every vineyard, every field, every olive tree, every flower is the deep imprint of the Jewish history; of the Book of the books that we have bequeathed to the entire world; of the values of morality and of justice. Every place in the land of the Prophets, every name is an integral part of our heritage of thousands of years of the divine promise to us and to our descendants. Here, is where we were born. Here, is where we created a nation. Here, we forged a haven for the persecuted and built a model of a democratic country. But we are not alone here on this soil, in this land. And so we are sharing this good earth today with the Palestinian people in order to choose life. Starting today, an agreement on paper will be translated into reality on the ground. We are not retreating. We are not leaving. We are building -- and we are doing so for the sake of peace. Our neighbors, the Palestinian people, we who have seen you in your difficulties, we saw you for generations; we who have killed and have been killed are walking beside you now toward a common future, and we want you as a good neighbors."
"Like all Israelis, I yearn for peace. I see the utmost importance in taking all possible steps that will lead to a solution of the conflict with the Palestinians"
"There will be no Jewish survivors in the holy war for liberating Palestine"
"The Palestinian Authority is a burden and Hamas is an asset."
"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."
"After the withdrawal of the UNEF, the Voice of the Arabs radio station proclaimed (May 18 1967): "As of today, there no longer exists an international emergency force to protect Israel. We shall exercise patience no more. We shall not complain any more to the UN about Israel. The sole method we shall apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence.""
"In 1947, the U.N. formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55 per cent of Palestine’s land to the Zionists. Within a year, they had captured 76 per cent. On the 14th of May 1948 the State of Israel was declared. Minutes after the declaration, the United States recognized Israel. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. The Gaza strip came under Egyptian military control, and formally Palestine ceased to exist except in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees."
"By 1947, as the colonial powers made their way out of the Middle East and the horrors of the Holocaust came to light, the call for a Jewish homeland, a safe haven, took on a new urgency. Tens of thousands of Jewish survivors from the Nazi death camps were refugees in Europe; their former communities had been destroyed, and third countries had closed the door to Jewish immigration during the Holocaust. A new iteration of a partition plan first put out in 1937 was put forward at the UN, creating two states: one Arab and one Jewish. A new UN census determined that the Jewish population of Palestine had grown to one-third, with the other two-thirds a mix of Muslim and Christian Arabs, but the plan divided the land in half between Jews and Arabs. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved the Partition Plan. On May 14, 1948, as the last British troops departed, Jewish leaders declared the creation of the State of Israel on the land apportioned to them by the UN plan. But Arab countries had rejected the Partition Plan, declaring they would continue to fight for an undivided Palestine. On May 15, they went to war, sending thousands of troops and tanks across the border. The new nation of Israel was already mobilized. Within a year, Israel controlled 78 percent of former British Mandate Palestine, including West Jerusalem, while Jordan now administered the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and its walled old city, and Egypt had control of the Gaza Strip."
"I urge Israel to cease demolitions and evictions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, in line with its obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law. All settlement activities, including evictions and demolitions, are illegal under international law. A revitalized peace process is the only route to a just and lasting solution...Only through renewing our commitment and redoubling our efforts towards a negotiated solution can we bring this cruel violence and hatred to a definitive end."
"Israel's occupation of the West Bank is illegal under international law...Because the occupation is illegal, the consequences should be the immediate, unconditional complete withdrawal of Israel's military forces, the withdrawal of colonial settlers, the repeal of all discriminatory laws and dismantling of the military administrative regime."
"Israel’s occupation is illegal and indistinguishable from a “settler-colonial” situation, which must end, as a pre-condition for Palestinians to exercise their right to self-determination, the UN’s independent expert on the occupied Palestinian territory said on Thursday. “For over 55 years, the Israeli military occupation has prevented the realisation of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, violating each component of that right and wilfully pursuing the ‘de-Palestinianisation’ of the occupied territory,” said Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, in her report to the UN General Assembly."
"As we have repeatedly said, forced evictions of Palestinians in east Jerusalem are part of Israel’s apartheid machinery at work, designed to consolidate Jewish ownership of Jerusalem and racially dominate the city’s population. ... Israel’s transfer of its own population into the occupied territory is a gross violation of international humanitarian law and a war crime."
"The UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process on Wednesday expressed deep concern over the relentless expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. During the last three months, more than 10,000 housing units were advanced... “Settlements further entrench the occupation, fuel violence, impede Palestinian access to their land and resources, and systematically erode the viability of a Palestinian State as part of a two-State solution”, the senior envoy said. “I call on the Government of Israel to cease all settlement activity and dismantle outposts immediately, in line with its obligations under international law,” he added."
"There is no such thing as a West Bank."
"A permanent occupation is a legal oxymoron."
"No influence, direct or indirect, over the Holy Places of Islam will ever be tolerated by Indian Mussulmans. It follows, therefore, that even Palestine must be under Mussulman control. So far as I am aware, there never has been any difficulty put in the way of Jews and Christians visiting Palestine and performing all their religious rites. No canon, however, of ethics or war can possibly justify the gift by the Allies of Palestine to Jews. It would be a breach of implied faith with Indian Mussulmans in particular and the whole of India in general."
"Adjoining Syria is Palestine, for which the British Government holds a mandate from the League of Nations. This is an even smaller country, with a total population of less than a million, but it attracts a greal deal of attention because of its old history and associations. For it is a holy land for the Jews as well as Christians and, to some extent, even the Muslims. The people inhabiting it are predominantly Muslim Arabs, and they demand freedom and unity with their fellow-Arabs of Syria. But British policy has created a special minority problem here—that of the Jews—and the Jews side with the British and oppose the freedom of Palestine, as they fear that this would mean Arab rule. The two pull different ways, and conflicts necessarily occur. On the Arab side are numbers, on the other side great financial resources and the world-wide organization of Jewry. So England pits Jewish religious nationalism against Arab nationalism, and makes it appear that her presence is necessary to act as an arbitrator and to keep the peace between the two. It is the same old game which we have seen in other countries under imperialist domination; it is curious how often it is repeated."
"I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds."
"During the [First] World War the British armies invaded Palestine and, as they were marching on Jerusalem, the British Government made a declaration in November 1917, called the Balfour Declaration. They declared that it was their intention to establish a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine. This declaration was made to win the good will of international Jewry, and this was important from the money point of view. It was welcomed by most Jews. But there was one little drawback, one not unimportant fact seems to have been overlooked. Palestine was not a wilderness, or an empty, uninhabited place. It was already somebody else's home. So that this generous gesture of the British Government was really at the expense of the people who already lived in Palestine, and these people, including Arabs, non-Arabs, Muslims, Christians, and, in fact, everybody who was not a Jew, protested vigorously at the declaration. These people felt that the Jews would compete with them in all activities and, with the great wealth behind them, would become the economic masters of the country ; they were afraid that the Jews would take the bread out of their mouths and the land from the peasantry."
"It appears that the available certificates for immigration to Palestine will be exhausted in the near future. It is suggested that the granting of an additional one hundred thousand of such certificates would contribute greatly to a sound solution for the future of Jews still in Germany and Austria, and for other Jewish refugees who do not wish to remain where they are or who for understandable reasons do not desire to return to their countries of origin. On the basis of this and other information which has come to me I concur in the belief that no other single matter is so important for those who have known the horrors of concentration camps for over a decade as is the future of immigration possibilities into Palestine. The number of such persons who wish immigration to Palestine or who would qualify for admission there is, unfortunately, no longer as large as it was before the Nazis began their extermination program. As I said to you in Potsdam, the American people, as a whole, firmly believe that immigration into Palestine should not be closed and that a reasonable number of Europe's persecuted Jews should, in accordance with their wishes, be permitted to resettle there."
"On the 11th of September 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration which imperial Britain issued, with its army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European Zionists a national home for Jewish people. (At the time, the Empire on which the Sun Never Set was free to snatch and bequeath national homes like a school bully distributes marbles.)"
"There were three possible responses to such discrimination. The first was to leave. Yet despite the importance of Zionism in Polish-Jewish politics, only a small proportion of Polish Jews drew the conclusion that they would be better off trying to find a Jewish state in the new 'home' their people had been granted in what was now the British 'mandate' in Palestine. Even in the 1930s just 82,000 Polish Jews emigrated there, though as we shall see this also reflected British nervousness about the effect of continued Jewish immigration on Palestine's internal stability. In fact, only a minority of Polish Zionists were committed to systematic colonization of the Holy Land; the majority were just as interested in what could be achieved in Poland itself. It was easier in more ways than one for a West Prussian to leave Poland for neighbouring Germany than for a Jew to leave Poland for the more distant Holy Land."
"Millions of Arabs are … preparing to blow up all of America’s interests, all of America’s installations, and your entire existence, America."
"As of today, there no longer exists an international emergency force to protect Israel. We shall exercise patience no more. We shall not complain any more to the UN about Israel. The sole method we shall apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence."
"[Promosing to] turn the Mediterranean red with Jewish blood."
"We will not accept any…coexistence with Israel…Today the issue is not the establishment of peace between the Arab states and Israel…The war with Israel [has been] in effect since 1948"
"Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight"
"We are ready for war, our armed forces and all our people are ready for war, we have built a strong national army and achieved our objectives."
"You are the victims of aggression."
"Arab masses, this is your day. Rush to the battlefield.... Let them know that we shall hang the last imperialist soldier with the entrails of the last Zionist"
"Israel on her part will not initiate hostile acts, but she is firmly resolved to defend her territory and her international rights. Our decision is that if Egypt will not attack us, we will not take action against Egyptian forces at Sharm el-Sheikh—until or unless they close the Straits of Tiran to free navigation by Israel"