Jews From Israel

"Thou shall not be a perpetrator, thou shall not be a victim, and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander."

"I achieved more than I could dream of in chess and in chess composing."

"Going through Yochanan's studies I got the impression that he is like a music composer who creates many lovely songs with charming melodies, but rarely composes operas."

"Palestinians! This is an unacceptable reference. Jews are also Palestinians. He must mean 'Palestinian Arabs'. Conquered territory! Gaza was also conquered by Egypt Sinai settlements! There is a national consensus in Israel that the settlements must stay!"

"The war in Lebanon cannot be interpreted, even by its most devoted proponents in Israel, as a war of survival. For this reason, the government has gone to extraordinary lengths to dehumanize the Palestinians. 'Begin described them in a speech at the Knesset as 'beasts walking on two legs'. Palestinians have often been calls 'bugs' while their refugee camps in Lebanon are referred to as 'tourist camps'. In order to rationalize the bombing of civilian populations, Begin emotively declared 'If Hitler was sitting in a house with 20 other people, would it be correct to blow up the house?""

"In the short run, the identity of victim does, indeed, pay off...In the longer run, the perpetuation of the victim identity causes complete severance from reality, utter dependence on the past and the past alone, and distortions of all proportions and emphases to the point of warping the personality. We do not lack examples...Mr. Begin tried to excuse the violent invasion of Lebanon in 1982 with symbols from the Holocaust. Every seizure of Arab property in the West Bank is made under the banner and in the name of the victim identity, which many of us abhor...Why? Because we are the victim. Even relative to the villagers whom we divested of land, we are victims."

"he (Shimon Peres) maintains an ongoing dialogue with the intellectual community. Now that is real change from, say, Menachem Begin-not to mention Golda Meir!"

"an agreement on the Sinai might come first, with a later accord on "Judea and Samaria." ('Begin always referred to the West Bank by the two biblical names - I presume to engender the notion that this was the promised land which God Himself had given to the Jews.)"

"The reason for raising this is that the Israeli position in the past was that they would withdraw from the West Bank, and I believe that Prime Minister Begin left the Cabinet over this issue. .. On the West Bank and Gaza, Prime Minister Begin put forward a proposal which could be the core around which an agreement could be reached."

"It is not true that the solutions proposed by the Zionists, of whatever shade, represented historical realism as against the inconsistent utopianism of the Bund. Certainly the prophets were not numerous, but they have to be given their due: Kurt Tucholsky, for example, who already in the mid-1920s sounded the alarm, in a Weimar Republic prey to the demons of order, nationalism, xenophobia and dreams of revanchism; Leon Trotsky, who in the late 1920s warned that the fate of Europe was being played out in Germany, and understood that the bankruptcy of German communism in the face of Hitler bore within it the inexorable unfurling of horror. At this time they were preaching in the desert, including the desert of Judaea. The rabbis who called for obedience to the temporal power in all circumstances, and the inspirers of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon who at the time paraded in black shirts, are not best placed to cast the first stone at these Jewish visionaries and militants who were struggling at this time for a better world."

"As a result of considerable effort, the Carter administration helped to arrange a peace settlement between Egypt and Israel, with the Camp David Accords of 17 September 1978 followed by the Egypt-Israel treaty of 26 March 1979. The Camp David Accords focused on ‘peace for land’, Israel withdrawing from its Sinai (although not Gaza) gains of 1967, and Egypt, in return, signing a formal peace treaty with Israel, and thereby giving recognition. Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian President, who had expelled Soviet advisers in 1972, wanted to include the Palestinians in the treaty, but Menachem Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister, was willing only to agree to an informal link to a temporary halt on new Israeli settlements on the West Bank. The peace process was condemned by the Soviet Union and the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation). Nevertheless, the peace agreement helped lessen tensions in the Middle East (not least by isolating Syria and the PLO), which was important as, from 1979, the Cold War was to become far more difficult in South Asia."

"Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid."

"Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves."

"Upon completion of the centennial of your birth – and this time only – we have come to address some remarks at your graveside. We report to you, Rosh Betar, that Jerusalem, the city that has become bound together, the eternal capital of Israel and of the Land of Israel, shall not be subjected to any division and is our liberated and indivisible capital and so it shall remain from generation to generation. The western part of the Land of Israel is entirely under our control and it shall not be partitioned anymore. No part of this land shall be given over to a foreign administration, to foreign sovereignty. We believe that a day will come when the two parts of the Land of Israel shall establish, peacefully, in agreement and understanding a covenant of alliance, a free confederation, for the purpose of join cooperation"

"In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him. This was a war of self-defence in the noblest sense of the term. The government of national unity then established decided unanimously: We will take the initiative and attack the enemy, drive him back, and thus assure the security of Israel and the future of the nation."

"The fate of… Jewish children has been different from all the children of the world throughout the generations. No more. We will defend our children. If the hand of any two-footed animal is raised against them, that hand will be cut off, and our children will grow up in joy in the homes of their parents."

"Israel is still the only country in the world against which there is a written document to the effect that it must disappear."

"Mr. President, I wish to tell you something personal - not about me, but about my generation. What you have just heard about the Jewish people's inherent rights to the Land of Israel may seem academic to you, theoretical, even moot. But not to my generation. To my generation of Jews these eternal bonds are indisputable and incontrovertible truths, as old as recorded time. They touch upon the very core of our national being. Ours is an almost biblical generation of suffering and courage. Ours is the generation of Destruction and Redemption. Ours is the generation that rose up from the bottomless pit of Hell. We were a helpless people, Mr. President. We were bled white, not once, not twice, but century after century, over and over again. We lost a third of our people in one generation - mine. One-and-a-half million of them were children - ours. No one came to our rescue. We were tertiated, Mr. President. ... Tertiated, not decimated. The origin of the word 'decimation' is one in 10. When a Roman legion was found guilty of insubordination one in 10 was put to the sword. In our case it was one in three - tertiated! ... Sir, I take an oath before you in the name of the Jewish people - this will never ever happen again."

"Israel will not transfer Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District to any foreign sovereign authority, [because] of the historic right of our nation to this land, [and] the needs of our national security, which demand a capability to defend our State and the lives of our citizens.""

"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever."

"Unperformed experiments have no results."

"Some authors state that the last stage in this chain of measurements involves "consciousness," or the "intellectual inner life" of the observer, by virtue of the "principle of psycho-physical parallelism." Other authors introduce a wave function for the entire universe. In this book, I shall refrain from using concepts that I do not understand."

"Quantum phenomena do not occur in a Hilbert space. They occur in a laboratory."

"I think it is necessary to state here – Zionism is above everything."

"Indeed, there were Jews, like Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the Polish Zionist leader, who sincerely hoped for a united front of German and Jewish minorities [in Central and Eastern Europe]. Yet far from uniting in their common adversity, insecure Germans turned against even more insecure Jews."

"I will not demand that the Jewish Agency allocate a sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Jewry. And I think that whoever demands such things is performing an anti-Zionist act."

"Math is perfect (in principle), but mathematicians are not (because they are humans), hence the mathematics that (human) mathematicians do is influenced by the weltanschauung of the people around them."

"Computer Algebra Systems are NOT the Devil but the new MESSIAH that will take us out of the current utterly trivial phase of human-made mathematics into the much deeper semi-trivial computer-generated phase of future mathematics. Even more important, Computer Algebra Systems will turn out to be much more than just a `tool', since the methodology of computer-assisted and computer-generated research will rule in the future, and will make past mathematics seem like alchemy and astrology, or, at best, theology."

"Conventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is continuous, and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer."

"Algorithms existed for at least five thousand years, but people did not know that they were algorithmizing. Then came Turing (and Post and Church and Markov and others) and formalized the notion."

"Regardless of whether or not God exists, God has no place in mathematics, at least in my book."

"Mathematics my foot! Algorithms are mathematics too, and often more interesting and definitely more useful."

"Programming is much much harder than doing mathematics."

"Mathematics is so useful because physical scientists and engineers have the good sense to largely ignore the "religious" fanaticism of professional mathematicians, and their insistence on so-called rigor, that in many cases is misplaced and hypocritical, since it is based on "axioms" that are completely fictional, i.e. those that involve the so-called infinity."

"Many of the successes of `fancy' mathematics are due to sociological and linguistic reasons. They are really high-school-algebra arguments in disguise. Once you strip the fancy verbiage off, what remains is a bare (and much prettier, in my eyes) argument in high-school mathematics, or at most, in Freshman linear-algebra and (formal!) Calculus. For example, I am (almost) sure that Wiles's proof would be expressible in simple language, and if not, there would be a much nicer proof that would."

"Let me also remind you that zero, like all of mathematics, is fictional and an idealization. It is impossible to reach absolute zero temperature or to get perfect vacuum. Luckily, mathematics is a fairyland where ideal and fictional objects are possible."

"The best way to learn a topic is by teaching it. Similarly the best way to understand a new proof is by writing an expository article about it."

"When a problem seems intractable, it is often a good idea to try to study "toy" versions of it in the hope that as the toys become increasingly larger and more sophisticated, they would metamorphose, in the limit, to the real thing."

"With the drums of the long war banging, Israel's line on Hamas has been well received. The US administration urged European and Arab countries to freeze direct aid to the Palestinian Authority,and on February 15, the U.S. congress started moves in the same direction. Israeli security officials had been involved for quite some time before in urging the U.S. administration to increase its operations in Iran, including covert acts of regime change - efforts that were yielding their fruits in 2006. As was disclosed by Seymour Hersh and others, during Israel's recent war on Lebanon, the U.S. administration has viewed this as preparation, and a "test" for the option of an attack on Iran."

"Israel should withdraw immediately from the territories occupied in 1967. The bulk of Israeli settlers (150,000 of them) are concentrated in the big settlement blocks in the center of the West bank. These areas cannot be evacuated over night. But the rest of the land (about 90%–96% of the West bank and the whole of the Gaza strip) can be evacuated immediately. Many of the residents of the isolated Israeli settlements that are scattered in these areas are speaking openly in the Israeli media about their wish to leave. It is only necessary to offer them reasonable compensation for the property they will be leaving behind. The rest — the hard-core "land redemptions" fanatics — are a negligible minority that will have to accept the will of the majority."

"Ísland er ekki lítið land. Ísland er stórasta land í heimi."

"It is clear today that a pediatrician must also be an educator. And surely there is joy in both tasks, as they are the most wonderful that can be imagined. We are entrusted with the care of the child, a fresh young creature who before our very eyes thrives and grows, one may even say flowers. It is given to us to accompany him from day to day and from hour to hour, from childhood to youth and adolescence along a shining and upward path. It is given to us to impart to him not only what is defined as the task as education - the culture passed down throughout the generations - but also health, strength and joy of life."

"Blathering away about how "we'll attack and destroy you" does not deter the decision-makers in Tehran, but it does drive the oil markets crazy... And who profits from that? Tehran."

"It is written that ‘All Jews are responsible for one another,’ and a Jew who lives in Siberia or in Kamchatka is just as good as a Jew who had the good fortune to be born in Jerusalem."

"We’re ashamed of what we are. That’s why we feel that we have to get rid of the values of our glorious history and run to learn from other, new nations. Don’t I look to you like a man of the world? Don’t I speak to the leading businessmen in the world? And it’s no problem that I’m a Jew, and a proud Jew who wears a skullcap everywhere. That’s my symbol and my identity."

"I’m a very big believer in the idea that if a Jew lives like a Jew and, as it is written, sets aside tithes or a fifth of his income — then the Holy One, blessed be he, pays him back. I know that from my personal experience. The more I give every year, the more I have."

"The moment you ask a child in Israel what Yom Kippur means to him, and he answers the Yom Kippur War, or a fun day on a bicycle — then I don’t know if that is Zionism or whatever you call it, but it has certainly become bankrupt"

"I come to eat with very important people in the world, and I say ‘only kosher’, and always with a skullcap. I don’t recall that my business ever suffered from that."

"Just as a Muslim studies Islam, the Jew has to study Judaism. Everyone has to learn the heritage of his family and the history that dates back thousands of years."

"There’s a big difference between education and knowledge. The moment that we don’t invest in educating Jewish children according to the roots that were the basis of our education for thousands of years, we are knowledge-givers rather than educators."