People From Jerusalem

"Thousands of people, young and old, had been torn from their loved ones during the Nazi occupation and never knew what had become of them -- in the ghettos, the deportations, the death camps, the forests. In Israel, they found one another purely by chance, or through advertisements in the papers or with the aid of the heartrending radio program Who Recognizes, Who Knows? "Aryeh Kantrowitz, now in Kibbutz Hazorea, is looking for his mother Fanya, nee Margolin," the announcements would run. "Bluma Langer, nee Wasserstein, formerly of Kovno, now in the immigrant hostel in Raanana, is looking for her husband, Aharon Langer. Leah Koren of Lublin, now in Israel, is looking for her sister Sheina Friedman, nee Koren." All were recent immigrants on the threshold of a new life."

"The communities in Judea and Samaria [referring to West Bank settlements] do not threaten our existence, they guarantee our existence."

"I whole-heartedly believe that the land of Israel is ours in its entirety."

"If the Nakba is a tragedy, then the establishment of the State of Israel is a tragedy. The Palestinians experienced a catastrophe that was brought on by their leaders, but the establishment of the State of Israel is not the reason for it."

"We will not apologize – not for conquering Katamon or Jaffa or Tzfat, nor for liberating Hebron, and not for building Jerusalem our capital."

"Terrorism is trying to paralyze and silence democracies fighting against it, exactly as was manifest in the world's reaction to Israel's counter-terrorist offensive Cast Lead in light of the Goldstone Report."

"There is no consensus in Israel regarding the two state formula. We will not, under any circumstances, allow the establishment of a neighbouring state that will be a genuine threat on our existence."

"Specifically, in these days when brutal and murderous terrorism seeks to drive us apart, we must reiterate to ourselves – here, in the Knesset, in schools, in academia and in the halls of Torah study – that to be Jewish is democratic and democracy is Jewish. Only in this way can we know that brutal terrorism will not break us physically, or our spirit."

"I have a vision that suddenly all the Jewish people [from around the world] will come to live here... And if there were 10 million Jews here, we wouldn't have to give up on anything."

"For some reason the settlement enterprise is being accused of being an obstacle to peace. Personally, I explain at each possible forum that the obstacle to peace is the objection by the Arabs to it and the fact that they do not want us here."

"Today, almost 20 years after Oslo, we can see clearly that the idea of separating the [Israeli and Palestinian] nations failed."

"We miss [Rehavam Ze'evi's] clear, ideological voice, his leadership, his larger than life presence."

"There are red lines that I as a democrat, say you cannot cross. I see it as defiance against Israel and Jerusalem as its capital as well as another protest against the historical narrative, a matter already pending before the High Court. (Responding to a MK Tibi-proposed bill recognising Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state)"

"Zionism from its outset was a settlement movement. If we stop going on this path, how can we justify the faith that all of Zion belongs to us?"

"[Israeli citizens who marry Palestinians need to move to] the other side."

"The residents here [in Migron settlement] are not thieves and are not trying to banish people from their land. They came here innocently, with the encouragement of the State of Israel."

"Dividing Jerusalem will bring disaster for the city. It cannot be that every time something is built in Jerusalem, the international community censures it. This constant criticism is a mark of disgrace for the international community."

"Hajj Amin el-Husseini, ex-mufti of Jerusalem, and Muslim jihadist, who became, additionally, a full-fledged Nazi collaborator and ideologue in his endeavors to abort a Jewish homeland and destroy world Jewry, was also a committed supporter of global jihad movements. Urging a “full struggle” against the Hindus of India (as well as the Jews of Israel) before delegates at the February 1951 World Muslim Congress, he stated: "We shall meet next with sword in hand on the soil of either Kashmir or Palestine.""

"Husseini is still regarded by many as 'the George Washington' of the Palestinian people, and if the Palestinians were to get a state of their own, he would be honored in the way our founding father is."

"Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time [of the meeting between the mufti and the Nazi leader]. He wanted to expel the Jews... And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, "If you expel them, they'll all come here [to mandatory Palestine],"... "So what should I do with them?" He [Hitler] asked. He [Husseini] said, "Burn them.""

"With every passing month after Stalingrad, the criteria for Waffen-SS membership grew more elastic, forcing Himmler to cite the multinational structure of the old Habsburg army as a precedent. Ukrainians were recruited; so were Hungarians, Bulgarians and Serbs. In February 1943 the first of three divisions was formed of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims, who wore fezes decorated with SS runes and were led in their prayers by regimental imams notionally under the supervision of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Out of all forty-seven Waffen-SS divisions, twenty were formed wholly or partly out of non-German recruits or conscripts and a further five out of Volksdeutsche. Towards the end of the war, in fact, there were more non-Germans than Germans serving in Himmler's army."

"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."

"For us Muslims, it is unworthy to utter the word Islam in the same breath with Judaism since Islam stands high over its perfidious adversary."

"The Arabs have a particular understanding for introducing forceful measures against Jews in Germany and for their expulsion from the country. After the [First] World War, England and America enabled the Jews to settle in Palestine and to establish a Jewish state there. Jewish excrement from all countries assembled there, rascally striving to seize the land from Arabs. And indeed, they succeeded in buying land from the poorest of the poor and from unscrupulous landlords. By doing so, they took poor widows' bread and stole food from children to fatten themselves. When the Arabs opposed the Jewish settlement, the Jews did not shun bloody murders. So they robbed many families of their livelihood and threw the families into misery and troubles. (God will punish them for those disgraceful deeds)."

"The Jewish struggle against Arabs is nothing new for us, except that as time passed, the location of the battlefield changed. Jews hate Muhammad and Islam, and they hate any man who wishes to advance the prosperity of his people and to fight against Jewish lust for possessions and Jewish corruption. We, the Muslims, must always bear in mind the Khaibar feast. If the Jews betrayed Muhammad in such a way, why wouldn't they treacherously persecute us today with the purpose of destroying us?!"

"As far as I'm concerned, they can strike for a day, a month, until death."

"In his actions was a crude trampling of the law and of proper administrative rules, politicization of the public service, and the use of public resources to advance personal and political interests."

""We have switched from defense to offense:"

"[Josephus] was a Jew who was commissioned by Rome in the late first century after the Jewish-Roman War to write a history of the Jewish people. Consequently, Josephus found himself in his various works trying to (1) appeal to gentiles who were interested in the Judean system—law, history, and culture, and (2) defend surviving Jews against widespread postwar animosity. And he had to accomplish all this under the auspices of Rome. These at least are the general conclusions of prominent Josephus scholars Steve Mason and Tessa Rajak."

"And when the book of Daniel was showed him [Alexander the Great] wherein Daniel declared that one of the Greeks should destroy the empire of the Persians, he supposed that he himself was the person intended."

"Now Antiochus was not satisfied either with his unexpected taking the city (Jerusalem), or with its pillage, or with the great slaughter he had made there; but being overcome with his violent passions, and remembering what he had suffered during the siege, he compelled the Jews to dissolve the laws of their country, and to keep their infants uncircumcised, and to sacrifice swine's flesh upon the altar; against which they all opposed themselves, and the most approved among them were put to death."

"Their exercises are unbloody battles, and their battles bloody exercises."

"I protest openly that I do not go over to the Romans as a deserter of the Jews, but as a minister from thee."

"Antipater, now undisputed heir, had called down on his head the utter loathing of the nation, for everyone knew that all the slanders directed against his brothers had originated with him."

"Its literary merits must be left to the judgment of its readers; as to its truth, I should not hesitate to make the confident assertion that from the first word to the last I have aimed at nothing else."

"Josephus failed to organize a strong stand against the Romans. The Jewish forces suffered setback after setback. Finally, Josephus and his men were forced to retreat to the fortress of Jotapata. After a siege of two months, Jotapata fell. The forty men who were left in the fortress killed themselves before the Romans entered it. Of all the brave fighters of Jotapata, only Josephus and his armor-bearer survived, and they were taken prisoners by the Romans. They had not joined the others who preferred death to dishonor."

"Titus had a strange companion in those days: Josephus, the descendant of the Maccabees. From the enemy camp, Josephus now called Josephus Flavius, after the family of Vespasian and Titus, watched the defeat of his people."

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction."

"The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday-school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond. According to the biblical scholar Raymund Schwager, the Hebrew Bible “contains over six hundred passages that explicitly talk about nations, kings, or individuals attacking, destroying, and killing others. . . . Aside from the approximately one thousand verses in which Yahweh himself appears as the direct executioner of violent punishments, and the many texts in which the Lord delivers the criminal to the punisher’s sword, in over one hundred other passages Yahweh expressly gives the command to kill people.” Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers the body count historically implausible.) The victims of the Noachian flood would add another 20 million or so to the total. The good news, of course, is that most of it never happened. Not only is there no evidence that Yahweh inundated the planet and incinerated its cities, but the patriarchs, exodus, conquest, and Jewish empire are almost certainly fictions. Historians have found no mention in Egyptian writings of the departure of a million slaves (which could hardly have escaped the Egyptians’ notice); nor have archaeologists found evidence in the ruins of Jericho or neighboring cities of a sacking around 1200 BCE. And if there was a Davidic empire stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea around the turn of the 1st millennium BCE, no one else at the time seemed to have noticed it."

"King Solomon is credited with fewer homicides than his predecessors and is remembered instead for building the Temple in Jerusalem and for writing the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs (though with a harem of seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines, he clearly didn’t spend all his time writing). Most of all he is remembered for his eponymous virtue, “the wisdom of Solomon.” Two prostitutes sharing a room give birth a few days apart. One of the babies dies, and each woman claims that the surviving boy is hers. The wise king adjudicates the dispute by pulling out a sword and threatening to butcher the baby and hand each woman a piece of the bloody corpse. One woman withdraws her claim, and Solomon awards the baby to her. “When all Israel heard of the verdict that the king had rendered, they stood in awe of the king, because they saw that he had divine wisdom in carrying out justice.” The distancing effect of a good story can make us forget the brutality of the world in which it was set. Just imagine a judge in family court today adjudicating a maternity dispute by pulling out a chain saw and threatening to butcher the baby before the disputants’ eyes. Solomon was confident that the more humane woman (we are never told that she was the mother) would reveal herself, and that the other woman was so spiteful that she would allow a baby to be slaughtered in front of her—and he was right! And he must have been prepared, in the event he was wrong, to carry out the butchery or else forfeit all credibility. The women, for their part, must have believed that their wise king was capable of carrying out this grisly murder."

"When King Solomon is dedicating the Temple, his prayer includes these words, addressed to the creator of the universe: “Behold, the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have builded.” Nowhere does Solomon exhibit his wisdom better than here. Let us never suppose that the structures of our human minds can contain God."

"Solomon was a 'copper king', and all along that Araba, on both sides, we found many copper mines and smelting stations, all attributable to Solomon and his immediate successors."

"The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with the men of this generation, and condemn them: for she came from the utmost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here."

"That one should not be wise above what is written is well demonstrated in the life of King Solomon. The Torah says that the king whom the Israelites should set over them should not multiply horses to himself, nor wives, in order that he might not cause the people to return to Egypt, and that his heart might not turn away (Deut. 17. 16, 17). 'Then,' argued Solomon, 'since the reason for the paucity of wives and horses is given, I am sure that I can stand proof against these; I can multiply horses and wives and shall not turn away and will not cause my people to return to Egypt.' Unfortunately he was not proof against the prohibitions, as it is recorded against him (in 1 Kings 2. 1-7). And one can also see the wisdom of the Torah in withholding any reason for many commandments it enjoins."

"And also to the alien, who is not of Thy people Israel, but comes from a distant land on account of Thy fame; for hearing of Thy great name and Thy strong hand, and Thine outstretched arm, he comes to this house to pray... do Thou listen in the heavens, the place where Thou dwellest, and perform all that the alien begs of Thee, so that all the peoples of the earth may know Thy name, to fear Thee like Thine own people Israel, and to know that Thy name is proclaimed over this house that I have built."

"Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil."

"Who is like the wise man? Who knows the solution to a problem? A man’s wisdom lights up his face and softens his stern appearance. I say: “Obey the king’s orders out of regard for the oath to God. Do not rush to depart from his presence. Do not take a stand for anything bad; for he can do whatever he pleases, because the word of the king is absolute; who can say to him, ‘What are you doing?"

"I set my mind to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all that has been done under heaven. It is a grievous task which God has given to the sons of men to be afflicted with."

"In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."

"It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter."