What Really Happenend

EXAMPLES OF HATE SPEECH
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 with the aim of
smashing Lebanon, Trans-jordan and Syria... The weak point in the Arab
coalition is Lebanon [for] the Moslem regime is artificial and easy to
undermine. A Christian state should be established... When we smash the
[Arab] Legions strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan,
too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb
Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo." " 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)
"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."
"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"
"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."
"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)
"[I]n 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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)
"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)
"[Y]ou 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]"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"[M]ass 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."
"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)
"[I]n 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."
"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.""
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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)
""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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 ..."
"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)
"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."
"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."
""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)
"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."
"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."
"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)
"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."
"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)
"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)
"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?"
"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."
"[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."
"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."
"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.'"
"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."
"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."
"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'."
"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."
"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)
"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."
"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."
"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]."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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)
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
(Harry Levin, 1950)
"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."
"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.""
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
(Teddy Kollek, 27 December 1987)
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"In the attempt to escape anti-Semitism, we built a colonialist reality in the Promised Land that
negates the humanity of the "natives.""
"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.""
"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."
"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)
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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)
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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.""
"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."
"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)
"During the 1970's and 1980's a very successful divestment campaign was waged in the US and
Europe which undoubtedly had an effect on the end of Apartheid. The Israeli occupation of
Palestine and destruction of human rights and democracy is at least as severe as that of the South
Africans. A similar moral and political response is in order at this time."
(Daniel Boyarin, some date around 2005)
"A tour of Gush Katif presents the disengagement in a different light. A group of 7,500 people
turned the life of the 1.3 million Arabs into a hell. They appropriated a large percentage of the
land and the water and cut off the residents of Khan Yunis from the sea. The roads are for Israelis
only; the local residents travel on twisting dirt roads strewn with roadblocks. The occupation has
caused an employment rate of 60 percent! One factory in the settlement of Kfar Darom (an
enclave inside the Dir al-Balah refugee camp) uses more water to wash bugs out of lettuce than
all the drinking water allotted for the residents of the refugee camp. Apartheid at its most
shameful."
(Nehemia Strasler, 22 April 2005)
"The farmers of Gush Katif are demanding an increase to the compensation offered them. They
have forgotten the generous government assistance they received when they came to the Gush:
Grants, loans and free land. Nor are they talking about what pains them the most: The cost of
labor. At present, they pay residents of Khan Yunis who work in their hothouses NIS 40 for a
long and hard day's work: Shameful exploitation in conditions of slavery. When they move
northward they will be forced to pay the minimum wage. Is such a scandal possible?
Therefore, before we pity them, we should pity the Jewish people, which has paid for this
superfluous adventure in blood and money, and only now, belatedly, has decided to put an end to
the disgraceful apartheid in the Gaza Strip."
(Nehemia Strasler, 22 April 2005)
"We, the (undersigned) professors and lecturers in British universities in consultation with the
Anti-Apartheid Movement:
1. Protest against the bans imposed on Professors Simons and Roux;

2. Protest against the practice of racial discrimination and its extension to higher education;
3. Pledge that we shall not apply for or accept academic posts in South African universities
which practise racial discrimination.
"
(Various British academics, 1965)
"I think that it [the academic boycott of South Africa] has certainly made a number of people sit
up and take notice, especially the so-called liberal universities. They thought that just as a matter
of right they would find acceptance because they were allowing blacks into their establishments.
I mustn't belittle them too much, I think that they did stand up for academic freedom and so forth,
but I don't think myself actually that they were sufficiently vigorous and the boycott helped to
knock sense into their heads, to realise that they did have a role in seeking to undermine that
vicious system [apartheid].
I would, I think, now still say that we maintain [the academic boycott] insofar as, if for instance
academics from here [Britain] want to go to South Africa then you want to look at who is inviting
them. Under whose auspices are they going? Are they going to institutions that have a good track
record in their opposition to apartheid? But I would say that as things begin to ease up, this ought
perhaps to be one of the first of the constraints that goes to give some of these people the reward.
But I would myself say it is important for academics outside of South Africa also to say they
want to reward places like UWC [University of the Western Cape] which stuck their necks out
and then let these others get the crumbs that remain from the table.
... [UWC has made] a quite deliberate political commitment [to support the liberation
struggle.] ... The present Vice-Chancellor, Professor [Jakes] Gerwel, at his installation ... said it
was going to become the intellectual home of the left, which obviously put many cats amongst
several pigeons. But what he was really saying was that too many of our ... institutions have
pretended that there is a kind of neutrality, which people claim is the right position for
intellectual educational institutions, whereas that neutrality or supposed neutrality is really a
support of the status quo. ... Jakes was saying, especially at a time when it was unpopular, 'We
are on the side of the downtrodden, we are going to work for the upliftment of our people.' We
[Tutu was Chancellor of the UWC] were the first university to give an honorary degree to
someone who in popular parlance amongst whites had been a terrorist, Mr Govan Mbeki. Now of
course other places are suddenly getting onto that particular bandwagon. One university has
decided that it is going to give an honorary degree to Nelson Mandela. But of course now it is
popular to do so."
(Desmond Tutu, June 1990)
"[Regarding the Palestinian rebel courts during the Great Revolt:] their justice and common sense
does not appear to me to be inferior and their expedition is demonstrably superior to that of
H.M.G."
(Elliot David Forster, some date in 1936-39)
"Another American, security coordinator William Ward, who is described as a "square general,"
is having a hard time understanding how the demand for Abu Mazen to make order in his house
fits in with the chaos that the Israeli political mechanism is encouraging in the Palestinian
security mechanisms."
(Akiva Eldar, 26 April 2005)
"Haim Yifrag is one of them [the settlers in Netzarim in the Gaza Strip]. He grows organic cherry
tomatoes for export to Marks & Spencer."
(Chris McGreal, 30 April 2005)
"I can understand and even support an academic boycott in the framework of a total and global
economic, political and cultural boycott till Israel will not withdrawal to the lines before the 1967
war. This is the real SA model that was indeed utile and succeeded."
(Baruch Kimmerling, 30 April 2005)
"I had to fight with my friends (in London), on the issue of Jewish socialism to defend the fact
that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadruth; to defend preaching to
housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to
prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there."
(David Hacohen, 15 November 1969)
"To buy dozens of dunams from an Arab is permitted but to sell, God forbid, one Jewish dunam
to an Arab is prohibited."
(David Hacohen, 15 November 1969)
"Stone-throwing by the undercover forces is part of the way in which they operate in such
instances [peaceful Palestinian demonstrations which the IDF wishes to disrupt]."
(Lieutenant-Colonel Tzahi, 28 April 2005)
"Military sources [Lieutenant Colonel Tzahi] . added that the undercover forces had only started
throwing stones after Palestinian youths had adopted such tactics. 'Stone-throwing by the
undercover forces is part of the way in which they operate in such instances,' the sources said."
(Arnon Regular, 29 April 2005)
"Someone up there in the occupation echelons must have studied Ben Kingsley's film long before
"the Gandhi Project" got started and reached the conclusion that nonviolent resistance is not in
Israel's interest. To thwart this threat, Israel employs soldiers whose task is to turn a peaceful
demonstration into a violent one, by infiltrating it undercover and throwing stones at Israeli
soldiers. During the demonstration, the army uses these stones as a pretext to break the
demonstration by force, using tear gas, salt, or rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition. In the
aftermath, this stone-throwing - pictured by army photographers who surely don't miss the stones
thrown by their own comrades - enters the world media as propaganda, depicting the peaceful
demonstrators as dangerous stone-throwers."
(Ran HaCohen, 2 May 2005)
"In a state that respects the law, this college [the College of Judea and Samaria] would never
have been founded in the first place. Its establishment constitutes a blatant violation of the
Geneva Convention, which Israel tries to ignore."
(Gideon Levy, 8 May 2005)
"Sharon cannot cancel the evacuation, lest he ignite George Bush's rage. But nor can he actually
go through with it. That's the perfect situation as far as he is concerned: an eternal limbo, an
evacuation that neither lives nor dies."
(Amir Oren, 10 May 2005)
"The taboo has been shattered at last. From now on it will be acceptable to compare Israel's
apartheid system to its South African predecessor."
(Omar Barghouti, 12 May 2005)
"I had the same, only greater, differences of opinion with Noam Chomsky, who is my personal
friend for quite a time, on the subject of AIPAC and the influence of the Jewish lobby in general
as you have. What is more, a number of mutual friends of Chomsky and me have also tried to
influence him, in vain, on that point.
I am afraid that he is, with all his wonderful qualities and the work he does, quite dogmatic on
many things. I have no doubt that his grievous mistake about the lack of importance of AIPAC,
which he repeats quite often, helps the Zionists very much as you so graphically described."
(Israel Shahak, May 2005)
"Over the years Congress has been at the ready to give Israel additional funding, even when
money has been unavailable for essential domestic programs, as happened in 2002 when the
Senate, after defeating a bill that would have provided $150 million for inner-city schools that
had been impacted by 9-11, turned around and tucked an additional $200 million for Israel into
the Homeland Security Bill as if Israel had been targeted that day and not New York and
Washington."
(Jeffrey Blankfort, May 2005)
"The settler associations in the Old City are partially supported by donors, but most of their
budgets come from public and government money, as when the St. John's Hostel was purchased
with funds provided by then-housing minister David Levy."
(Danny Rubinstein, 15 May 2005)
"We still need this truth today, the truth of the power of war, or at least we need to accept that
war is inescapable, because without this, the life of the individual has no purpose."
(Yitzhak Shamir, some date before 1996)
"What did bring down the racist regime in South Africa was the general boycott - economic,
political, military and cultural - a boycott of which the academic component was minuscule, and
not a separate element.
If we cannot rid ourselves of the affliction of the occupation itself - and by the way, in South
Africa an effective white anti-apartheid movement did crystalize, completing the external
pressure that brought down the system - it is better to initiate a widespread external form of
pressure, not a boycott that will further weaken Israeli civil society.
Ostensibly, a general boycott of the regime in Israel is not possible as long as the (almost) total
support of the U.S. in our self-destructive policy is assured.
Nevertheless, there are signs that even this situation might change gradually, especially if the
regime continues to commit systematic and systemic acts of stupidity like the upgrading of the
Ariel College. If so, there is a real chance for a change in internal public opinion as well, which
may make it worthwhile even for Israeli academe to suffer from the boycott until we purify
ourselves completely from the impurity of the occupation."
(Baruch Kimmerling, 17 May 2005)
"I do not admit. that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black
people of Australia. by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race. has come in and taken its
place."
(Winston S. Churchill, 1937)
"In other words, AP had video footage of an Israeli soldier specifically and intentionally shooting
a young Palestinian boy who was not attacking them, and they erased it. I don't know how often
they do this."
(Alison Weir, July 2005)
"we felt that it was highly misleading that stories with a Palestinian byline and West Bank
dateline were being written by Israeli and Jewish correspondents living in Israel-that one ethnic
group in the conflict actually wrote news stories purported to be by reporters from the other
ethnic group in the dispute."
(Alison Weir, July 2005)
"I'm a Jew before being a journalist, before someone pays me to write. If I find a negative thing
about Israel, I will not print it and I will sink into why did it happen and what can I do to change
it. ... [Even even if I eventually write about negative incidents that happen in Israel, I would try to
find the way] to shift the blame."
(Uzi Safanov, 2001)
"On campus there is already so much anti-Israeli sentiment that we have to be careful about any
additional criticism against Israel. This is our responsibility as Jews, which obviously contradicts
our responsibilities as journalists."
(Marita Gringaus, November 2001)
"As a journalist in the 1970s, I found that a rigid bias against objective reporting and in favor of
Israel was a prerequisite for employment with a daily newspaper in the Cox chain. I never
understood why, since I saw no evidence the major advertisers in the media market were
Zionists."
(John Wheat Gibson, 2005)
"They reinforce that, as Jews in the media, you have responsibly to help Israel. This is not
reporting; this is PR. I am Zionist, but it doesn't mean you can't be critical of what happens in
Israel."
(Deborah Meyers, November 2001)
"Freedom to produce and exchange knowledge and idea was deemed sacrosanct regardless of the
prevailing conditions. There are two key faults in this argument. It is inherently biased because it
only regards as worthy the academic freedom of Israelis. The fact that Palestinians are denied
basic rights as well as academic freedom due to Israel's military occupation is lost on those
parroting it."
"For decades, Israeli academic institutions have been complicit in Israel's colonial and racist
policies. Funded by the government, they have consistently and organically contributed to the
military-security establishment, and, therefore, to perpetuating its crimes, its abuse of Palestinian
human rights and its distinct system of apartheid."
"Not only do most Israeli academics defend or justify their state's colonial narrative, they play a
more active role in the process of oppression. Almost all of them obediently serve in the
occupation army's reserve forces every year, thereby participating in, or at least witnessing in
silence, crimes committed with impunity against Palestinian civilians. In the last 38 years of
Israel's illegal occupation, very few of them have conscientiously objected to military service in
the occupied territories. Those who have politically opposed the colonization of Palestinian land
in any public form have also remained in a depressingly tiny minority."
"I will be the first to admit that Israeli academic institutions are part and parcel of the oppressive
Israeli state that has . committed grave crimes against the Palestinian people."
(Baruch Kimmerling, 26 April 2005)
". the Israelis have just announced that they are going to destroy nearly 100 Palestinian
dwellings. This comes a couple months after they announced they were going to build 3500 new
dwellings on Palestinian land. What other government in the world is behaving this way with its
neighbors?"
(Juan Cole, 1 June 2005)
"As could be predicted, the reaction of the Israeli Right to Yavin's documentary was to demand
that he be fired. Cultists always want to intimidate people into silence. If they can't do that, they
want to make them careful what they say. If they can't do that, they try to deprive them of a place
to say it. If they can't do that, they demand that the person be fired. If that doesn't work, they
smear the person with all sorts of falsehoods in hopes of discrediting the critic with the media and
the thinking public. All cults use the same methods. Because they insist on being the only voice
heard on the issues of importance to them, and they are completely ruthless and single-minded in
accomplishing this goal of effective censorship."
(Juan Cole, 1 June 2005)
"In terms of the Zionist ethos, the best work was done in the south. If not for that work, Ahmed
and Mustafa would now be holding a discussion about us, and I prefer me holding a discussion
about Ahmed and Mustafa. ... Anyone who tells you that there was no ethnic cleansing here will
be lying, and anyone who tells you that without the ethnic cleansing Israel would have been
established will also be lying."
(Yair Farjun, 3 June 2005)
"In the present reality, I see difficulty in producing a stable situation of end-of-conflict within
that paradigm [the two-state solution]. [A two-state solution is] not relevant. It is a story that the
Western world tells with Western eyes. And that story does not comprehend the scale of the gap
and the scale of the problem. We, too, are sweeping it under the carpet."
(Moshe Ya'alon (Yaalon), 1 June 2005)
"Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin has decided that the legislature will not determine the
procedures to be used for returning real estate which belonged to Holocaust victims to their heirs
[because it] could lead to the creation of a precedent by which Palestinian refugees could demand
a return of property"
(Amiram Barkat, 7 June 2005)
"I don't care about occupying the land. I supported the Allon plan. I think Israel was entitled to
make border adjustments to secure its safety. I think the terrible mistake made in 1967 was to fail
to distinguish between the annexation of the land, mostly unoccupied land, and the occupation of
the cities."
(Alan Morton Dershowitz, 8 June 2005)
"Judea and Samaria [West Bank] and the Gaza area are lands seized during warfare, and are not
part of Israel."
(High Court of Justice (Bagatz), 8 June 2005)
"The international community cannot turn a blind eye to the continued discrimination against
Palestinians in their own homeland. What we witnessed on our trip this weekend is worse than
the apartheid regime in South Africa."
(John Gormley, 7 June 2005)
"You have to differentiate between Israelis [who are demonstrating against the fence]and
Palestinians [who are doing the same]. Where there are Israelis, you don't fire rubber [coated
bullets]."
(Tzachi Segev, 20 May 2005)
"Since 1967 we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people."
(Haim (Chaim/Hayim) Yavin, May 2005)
"Choosing not to cover an issue that is recognized by many as an important topic is actually
making a very strong statement on what is our collective identity. This is exactly the case when
the Israeli media decides not to cover the issue of the wall, though all the European media are
focused on it."
(Daniel Dor, June 2005)
"There is, in Israel, an acute sense of being blamed by the whole world for whatever is happening
in this part of the world. We, Israelis, think the whole world is blaming us for something that
never happened. And it never happened because we didn't receive any information about it. And
we didn't receive any information about it because if something sounds different from the
mainstream Israeli narrative, then it is immediately reframed."
"[Haim Yavin's public criticism of the occupation] is not the first time that a personality
representing the general Israeli consensus expresses sudden criticism of the Israeli occupation. ...
The most important element is what the public does with such a strong criticism of the Israeli
machine. Yavin's reports will not change the audience's perception of the conflict but only their
perception of Haim Yavin as a person. Now they know he is a leftist and this is where the public
discussion stops."
"Where were he [Haim Yavin] and his colleagues, the television broadcasters ... while the
outrage was created - the nightmare that Yavin is now discovering? ... By criticizing the
occupation, Yavin took one step to save his dignity. As a former director of Israel Television and
the head of its news department he was part of a system that is hiding the truth about the
territories from the Israeli public."
(Gideon Levy, June 2005)
"In Israel there is strong self-censorship on behalf of the media, which is much more dangerous
than any government or military censorship."
"[Israelis] half-truths and sometimes even lies. European citizens know better what is happening
in the Palestinian territories than most Israelis who live only a few kilometres away."
"Since that time [when Barak started lying about the Camp David negotiations in 2000] the
Palestinians have been constantly suffering and their agony has had no echo in the Israeli media.
On the Israeli side, the media only shows the suffering of its own people, ignoring the roots of
terror, which is the Israeli occupation. For this [state of affairs], every Israeli citizen is
responsible as these actions are taken in their name."
"Before anything changes in the Israeli media's coverage of the territories, we will have to go
through much more blood and many more lies."
"The Baer/Baron debate, then, revolved around issues of unity versus diversity of Jewish fates,
choices, and identities. Little, if any, residue of this debate still exists, unfortunately. This is due,
in part, to the Holocaust ..., but also thanks to a remarkable propaganda success of the Zionists,
who have made world Jewry align with their view. Question the singularity of the State of Israel
as the ultimate expression of Jewish nationalism, and you risk being accused of anti-Semitism; do
so as a Jew, and you should expect to be dubbed a self-hater."
(Yosef (Yosi) Grodzinsky, 7 June 2005)
"The Holocaust put an end to the intense debate regarding the relationship between the Jew and
the forming Zionist entity. In its shadow, it has often been said, Jews could no longer be safe
anywhere but in Eretz Yisrael, their homeland. Jews, on this view, should either live in the
Jewish national home in Palestine, or support it vigorously, because it is their fallback option,
should all hell break loose. I have been hearing the rhetoric about Israel's role as a "safe haven"
for Jews in danger since my childhood; rarely have I heard the opposite position, one that's in fact
valid today, to my mind: that the State of Israel and its actions actually put world Jewry at risk."
"It is important to see the utilitarian logic behind the Zionist stance: As the ultimate goal was to
populate Palestine with multitudes of Jews, they tried to target weak Jewish populations. Strong
communities were less interested in Palestine immigration: When things are good, as they were
in America (relatively speaking, of course), why move to a war zone? Thus a decision was made
to focus on the Jewish DP camps, and envoys were dispatched to Germany, driven by Ben-
Gurion's vision to bring 250,000 survivors from Germany to Palestine. If this is the goal, then a
Jew heading west is not an asset. This is why the Zionists objected to initiatives aimed at
evacuating Jewish child survivors from Germany right after the war. This is a shocking affair.
Several thousand sick, malnourished, and vulnerable orphans, still at great risk, were forced by
the Zionists to stay in the camps, even though arrangements were made for them to arrive to
safety in England and France."
"Serious manpower shortages led the Israelis to look for volunteers for the IDF in the DP camps.
Survivors were reluctant: "We have already smelled fire," said many "let others smell it now."
The failure to recruit volunteers led to a forced conscription, officially enacted on April 11th,
1948. It brought 7,800 new draftees to Palestine, a significant addition to the fighting army. I
recognize that the thought of a Zionist forced conscription in the U.S. controlled zone of
Germany sounds insane. Yet it actually happened, as massive documentation I discovered in the
Jewish DP archives in New York and Tel Aviv indicates: The American military government
quite generously let the DPs run their camps as almost fully autonomous localities; Zionist
survivors, together with envoys from Palestine, organized and took control of these camps early
on, as I detail in the book. When the time came, they could exercise this control, sending
holocaust survivors to fight in a land they had never seen, whose language they did not speak,
and most importantly, for a cause they did not necessarily support."
"As rabbi Michael Lerner, in his preface to my book, puts it "Zionist arrogance did not start with
the Palestinians". Primo Levi, in his book The Truce, tells about a post-war incident where
Zionists hooked up an extra car to a train he was riding on his long way home from Auschwitz.
They were focused, self-assured, confident, he writes. They did not ask anyone whether they
could connect their car to the train - they just did it. Many good things happen in this way. But
not always. Regarding Holocaust survivors, the Zionists were focused, clear headed, with a
coherent plan. That's no small matter. Yet this self-assurance - ever so familiar to many a reader
I'm sure - has also led to much suffering and destruction."
"The Palestinian people today have all the attributes of nationhood. They have national
consciousness. They have territorial continuity where most of the Palestinians live. They have a
Palestinian history of decades, marked by struggles and wars. They have a diaspora with a strong
affinity to their birthplace. They have national awareness of a common disaster, common victims,
sufferings and heroes. The nation has a vision, its own literature and poetry. The Arab Palestinian
nation is perhaps the nation with the most obvious signs of identity and the strongest national
unity, among the Arab nations. This nation consists of some two million Arabs, half of them in
the occupied territories on the western bank of the Jordan and the other half on the eastern bank
of the Jordan. Some of them are dispersed throughout the Arab world. ... [It is paradoxical] that
Zionism was the reason for the creation of the Palestinian nation, but the Palestinian nation must
be seen as a fait accompli. ... [In 1967, Israel went to war against neighbouring countries but] the
problem of our ties with the Palestinian Arabs now takes precedence in the complex of our ties
with the Arab world. It is more important than the problem of our ties with the Arab world and
therein lies the key to solving our problems with the countries of the region."
(Aryeh/Arie (Lova) Eliav, November 1968)
"As far as those refugees who remained inside the territory under Israeli control, we can do
something to solve the situation now. ... We have a moral obligation to do this since Israel's
independence was achieved at their expense and they paid with their bodies, their property and
their future... They are the victims of our independence."
(Amos Elon, 18 June 1967)
"Machsom Watch activists say they have seen the idea behind the checkpoints policy actually
written in a military document: Keeping the Palestinian population under permanent uncertainty.
Precisely the same principle, then, used to "break down" recruits during basic training, is applied
to an entire population, children and adults, women and men, sick and elderly."
(Ran HaCohen, 15 June 2005)
"There can be little doubt that if Palestine were overrun by the Nazis nothing less than complete
annihilation would be the lot of the Jews of this country."
(Moshe Shertok, 17 April 1942)
"On nearly every front and in nearly every battle, the Jewish side had the advantage over the
Arabs in terms of planning, organization, operation of equipment, and also in the number of
trained fighters who participated in the battle."
(Eyal Naveh, 1999)
"A senior Interior Ministry official said the difference between former Population Administration
director Herzl Gedge and current director [Sassi] Katzir is that Gedge considered preventing the
entry of non-Jews to be a matter of principle."
(Shahar Ilan, 4 July 2005)
"This is a good foundation for a discussion of the question of whether there ever was a 'true
Zionism' that did not dispossess the Arabs of this land."
(Tom Segev, 27 May 2005)
"I really don't like the plan to destroy everything... We wanted the disengagement to bear a
message of the budding of reconciliation. We didn't want a message of nakba; but here they are
going for a D-9 [bulldozer] solution. I find that appalling. It goes against history... We are going
to leave behind an area that will look like it has been hit with an atom bomb... In my opinion, it's
a nightmare. This is not what peace looks like; this is what war looks like."
(Yonatan Bassi, July 2005)
"The fence was born, first and foremost, to prevent them from continuing to murder us ... [It] also
makes [Jerusalem] more Jewish."
(Haim Ramon, 11 July 2005)
"The fence was born, first and foremost, to prevent them from continuing to murder us ... [It] also
makes it [Jerusalem] more Jewish. The safer and more Jewish Jerusalem will be, it can serve as a
true capital of the state of Israel."
(Haim Ramon, 11 July 2005)
"When I raised the issue of the alternative route [for the wall], [the head of the Civil
Administration, Brigadier General Ilan] Paz openly admitted that the alternative route was
irrelevant because the consideration in determining the route is demographic."
(Daniel (Danny) Seidemann (Zeidman), June 2005)
"At the end of June 1967, the committee of directors general for Jerusalem affairs decided that
the inhabitants of East Jerusalem would receive only services that had previously been provided
by the Jordanian authorities, at the same level and to the same extent."
(Akiva Eldar, 12 July 2005)
"Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the
Jewish soul stems from holiness."
(Menachem Mendel Schneerson, 1965)
"If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him?
The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value. There is something
infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life."
(Yitzhak Ginsburgh, 26 April 1996)
"The difference in the attitudes about non-Jews in the Halacha and the Cabbala is well illustrated
by the difference expressed specifically in regard to non-Jews who have converted to Judaism.
The Halacha, although discriminating against them in some ways, treats converts as new Jews.
The Cabbala is unable to adopt this approach because of its emphasis upon the cosmic difference
between Jews and non-Jews. The Cabbala explains that converts are really Jewish souls
consigned firstly to non-Jewish bodies as punishments and later redeemed by conversion to
Judaism either because the punishment ended or because a holy man interceded. This explanation
is part of cabbalistic belief in metempsychosis, which is absent in the Halacha. According to the
Cabbala, a satanic soul cannot be transformed into a divine soul by mere persuasion."
(Israel Shahak, 1999)
"The result may well be absurd and intolerable. While every Jew in America and the Ukraine
who has never lived in Israel will be able to immigrate with his non-Jewish spouse in accordance
with the Law of Return, an Israeli citizen, Jew or Arab, will be forced to emigrate from here if
he/she chooses to marry a non-Jew."
(Haaretz editorial writer, 15 July 2005)
"Israel will act in a very resolute manner in order to prevent terror attacks and [militant] fire
while the disengagement is being implemented. If pinpoint response proves insufficient, we may
have to use weaponry that causes major collateral damage, including helicopters and planes, with
mounting danger to surrounding people."
(Eival Giladi, 22 June 2005)
"Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements
in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be helped to leave the areas that have
been conquered."
(Moshe Carmel, 31 October 1948)
"There is a reason to believe that what is being done . . . is being done out of certain political
objectives and not only out of military necessities, as they claim sometimes. In fact, the transfer
of the [Palestinian] Arabs from the boundaries of the Jewish state is being implemented . . . the
evacuation/clearing out of [Palestinian] Arab villages is not always done out of military
necessity. The complete destruction of the villages is not always done only because there are no
sufficient forces to maintain a garrison."
(Aharon Cohen, 10 May 1948)
"Most of them [the Palestinians on the West Bank] can be driven out. If the numbers were
smaller it would be easier, but the problem can be solved in principle. It would not be a humane
move, but war in general is not a humane matter."
(Yitzhak Rabin, a week before he was appointed GOC Northern Command in 1956)
"The battle cannot end at this moment. If it stops now, before a decisive position is reached, we
must be aware that the casualties might be in vain, and that we have no way of being sure that the
war will not break out again, after a period of calm. Right now the objective is to see that the
Israeli army's historical victory will bring true peace."
(Uri Avnery, June 1967)
"This war cannot end without an action against the Syrians. We must either fight against them or
receive an immediate surrender as a clear and open admission of defeat of the policy of 'popular
war of liberation'."
(Uri Avnery, June 1967)
"At the beginning of last week, the government decided to speed up the construction of the
separation fence in the Jerusalem area, which will also surround and imprison the residents of
three East Jerusalem neighborhoods: the Shoafat refugee camp, and the Salaam and Dar Khamis
neighborhoods in Anata. For more than a year and a half from the time the route was set, the state
was in no hurry to build, and it delayed replying to the petitions filed by attorney Danny
Seideman on behalf of neighborhood residents. Now, when all the spotlights are on the incidents
surrounding the disengagement, the state is rushing to construct a concrete wall and watchtowers,
which have cut off the residents from their city and their entire way of life."
"One implication of this belief is that questions of borders automatically assume cosmic
proportions. The very discussion among Jews of the possibility of relinquishing land is abhorrent.
To express the intimate bonds they feel to the land, fundamentalists commonly invoke images of
the Land of Israel as a living being. Territorial concessions and the destruction of settlements
then become 'the severing of a limb from a living body,' as Rabbi Chaim Druckman, a member of
the Knesset and a disciple of Kook, said in 1982 in condemning Israel's withdrawal from the
Yamit district of the northeastern Sinai peninsula."
(Ian Lustick, Fall 1987)
"We Jews were driven away from the Holy Land and scattered all over the world because we had
fallen short of the task God conferred upon us. We had been chosen by Him to preach his word,
but in our stubborn pride, we began to believe that He had made us a chosen nation for our own
sake and thus we betrayed Him."
(Jacob Israel De Haan, 1922)
"And there is yet another abomination that even the Berlin Wall did not lay claim to: the
intention of ethnic dilution. It was not accidental that the line was chosen to leave on the other
side 130 thousand registered Jerusalemites. 55 thousand of them actually live inside the
Metropolitan area, 70 thousand in the periphery. It was not unintentional to increase the burden
on the Palestinians on both sides. And it was not unintentional that the government established a
'Community Administration' to treat this population, a decision that is a cynical and hypocritical
joke. 'Hospitals will be erected, travel will be organized, the border crossings will be made easier,
post office branches will be set up along with representative offices of the Ministry of Interior..'
Everything that has not been done over the last thirty years will now be done, to celebrate the
completion of the wall."
(B. Michael (pen name for Michael Barizon), 12 July 2005)
"The Jewish population [of Palestine] contains many persons at least as intelligent as the average
British official, while masses of the Arabs are entirely illiterate and little removed in intelligence
from the donkeys these gentle people habitualy accelerate with the aid of rusty nails."
(Frederick Hermann Kisch, 28 August 1929)
"I think that the Jewish people have a mission: to bring an example of culture to the world. By
culture I mean the example of living with your neighbor in peace. These teachings were started
with the Ten Commandments. In the beginning, Jewish law was an eye for an eye and a tooth for
a tooth. But in the later centuries you had the practice of forgiveness and all the ethics, which
eventually summarized in the Sermon on the Mount. In Jewish thinking, the mission of Zionism
was to live the Judaic law and to live in peace."
(Joseph William Abileah, early 1970s)
"Kibbutzes? They are colonial communities based on a fundamental lie."
(Ilan Halevi, 2000)
"If a man can satisfy four women at the same time, then good for him."
(Yaish ben Yahia, 2000)
"Israel, in fact, is no different than racist South Africa as long as it presents itself as Jewish state
instead of a state of all its citizens."
(Shulamit Aloni, July 2005)
"Since it is difficult for the refugees here to communicate with the outside world, we have an
obligation to convey what we can of their opinions and thinking at the present time...
Above all else, they desire to go home -- back to their lands and villages which, in many cases,
are very close. Apparently, they do not hesitate to go back to the changed culture which is
growing in Israel. This desire naturally continues to be the strongest demand they make; sixteen
months of exile has not diminished it. Without it, they would have nothing for which to live. It is
expressed in many ways and forms every day. 'Why keep us alive?' -- is one expression of it. It is
as genuine and deep as a man's longing for his home can be. In the minds of the refugees
resettlement is not even considered."
(AFSC Gaza Unit, 12 October 1949)
"It is important no to idealize Ahad Ha'am. ... Unlike [Martin] Buber, he did argue that the Jews
must be a majority in Palestine. He could be racist. He objected, for example, to the suggestion in
[Herzl's novel] Altneuland that a homeland for the Jews should lead to liberation and nationhood
for the 'negroes' of Africa."
(Jacqueline Rose, 30 April 2005)
"We owe it to ourselves to be cruel. Let us once master the situation and we will be able to say:
let the massacres happen, but we, we save the Yishuv before all else, we uphold its future
because today it is in the Yishuv, and only there, that the desriny of our people is alive."
(World Zionist Organization, 8 May 1922)
"I have accepted as mine the state of Israel, the form of the new Jewish community that has
arisen from the war. I have nothing in common with those Jews who imagine that they may
contest the factual shape which Jewish independence has taken."
(Martin Buber, 1963)
"Like Buber, one of my father's relatives (Leon Roth), was a professor of philosophy at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem at the time. He also witnessed the atrocities committed against
the Palestinian Arabs in the name of the 'Jewish State'. Unlike his colleague Buber, however, he
resigned his post and returned to Britain. Buber, on the other hand, sold out."
(Uri Davis, March-June 2002)
"Is it really necessary that the lives of two nations living together in one place depend on the
solely political concepts of majority and minority? Has not the time come to try to put the
concept in different terms? And isn't it possible that this particular location and our particular
situation may be just the circumstances in which to begin trying? True, it is very difficult, very,
very difficult; it demands tremendous daring, and in order to accomplish it courageous and
independent thinking is required, capable of formulating a new means to achieve new goals. But
whoever knows our situation thoroughly, knows that we have no other choice; only here, if
anywhere lies the true path--all other paths are deceptive."
"Our national desire to renew the life of the people of Israel in their ancient homeland however is
not aimed against any other people. As we enter the sphere of world history once more, and
become once more the standard bearers of our own fate, the Jewish people, who have constituted
a persecuted minority in all the countries of the world for two thousand years, reject with
abhorrence the methods of nationalistic domination, under which they themselves have so long
suffered. We do not aspire to return to the land of Israel with which we have inseparable
historical and spiritual ties in order to suppress another people or to dominate them."
"In an article he published in Ma'ariv on August 12, 1987, Mr. Sharon confirmed that as minister
of defense, he planned Operation Peace for Galilee such that it was intended from the outset to
bring the IDF to the outskirts of Beirut. As to the question of whether Mr. Sharon misled the
prime minister on this point, that can be answered by posing another question: Did prime
minister Menachem Begin know, when Operation Peace for Galilee was launched, that the IDF
intended to reach the outskirts of Beirut? Based on the above, the answer is that he did not. The
prime minister intended to carry out an operation of the scope that was authorized by the cabinet,
that is, up to 40 kilometers from the Israeli border, and with an estimated duration of two days."
(Benny Begin, 1996)
"Menachem Begin knew very well that he had been duped by Sharon."
(Uzi Benziman, 17 May 1991)
"In an affidavit submitted by Colonel (res.) Ilan Wechselbaum, the colonel testifies that he heard
Sharon order Major-General Avigdor Ben-Gal to attack the First Syrian Division and then
promise Prime Minister Begin on the phone that our forces would move carefully so as not to
provoke a clash with the Syrians."
(Moshe Negbi, 23 August 2002)
"To say that Arik Sharon doesn't tell the truth is about as necessary as saying the sun rises every
day."
(Yechiel Kadishai, 1991)
"Only then will the old and young in our land realise how great was our responsibility to those
miserable Arab refugees in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought from afar;
whose homes we have inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest; the fruits of whose
gardens, orchards and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we robbed, we put up houses
of education, charity and prayer while we babble and rave about being the 'people of the Book'
and the 'light of the nations!'"
(Martin Buber, January 1961)
"We need for this land as many Jews as it is possible economically to absorb, but not in order to
establish a majority against a minority."
"Sharon and the Israeli leadership always try to make Israelis believe the lie that the Palestinians
want to throw us to the sea. In fact, we are the ones who commit war crimes against humanity,
and I hope Sharon will face justice."
"I want to note that National Union Knesset Member Benny Elon recently said that settlers intend
to embitter the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank, until they emigrate from here. I see
testament to that in the existence of an IDF unit comprising radical religious soldiers, who are no
different than animals in their daily behavior."
(Shulamit Aloni, 29 July 2005)
"the terror utilized by Israel in the territories is worse than Palestinian terrorism"
"We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course the Arabs attacked us in August. Since they have
no armies, they could not obey the rules of war. We are obliged to look into the deeper causes of
this revolt. We have been in Palestine for twelve years without having even once made a serious
attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people. ... We have set
ourselves goals which by their very nature had to lead to conflict with the Arabs. We ought to
have recognized that these goals would be the cause, the just cause, of a national uprising against
us. [such as the fact that we have not] even once made a serious attempt at seeking through
negotiations the consent of the indigenous peoples."
(Hans Kohn, 1929)
"On hearing screams in a room I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of
cutting off a child's head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cut, but on
seeing me he tried to aim the stroke at me, but missed; he was practically on the muzzle of my
rifle. I shot him low in the groin. Behind him was a Jewish woman smothered in blood with a
man I recognized as a[n Arab] police constable named Issa Sherif from Jaffa in mufti. He was
standing over the woman with a dagger in his hand. He saw me and bolted into a room close by
and tried to shut me out-shouting in Arabic, "Your Honor, I am a policeman." ... I got into the
room and shot him."
(Raymond Oswald Cafferata, 1929)
"This government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine and
recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States
recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the State of Israel."
(Harry S. Truman, 15 May 1948)
"The Arab ladies ask Lord Allenby to remember and tell this to his government ... The mothers,
daughters, sisters of the Arab victims are gathered here to make the world witness the betrayal of
the British. We want all the Arabs to remember that the British are the cause of our suffering and
they should learn from the lesson."
(Tarab Abdul Hadi, 15 April 1933)
"The next massacre is brewing almost openly. .. it is clear to everyone that the [right-wing]
rioters are attempting to ignite a fire as the evacuation of settlements approaches"
(Haaretz editorial writer, 28 March 2005)
"An underground, which might be even ridiculous, doesn't need the masses for a spectacular act.
You can just put a gun in the hand of a young man, point out a target and he will execute the job.
The damage might be heavy, because the beginning of violent and murderous activities in the
state of Israel might be the beginning of a civil war."
(Nathan Yellin-Mor, 6 October 1978)
"I am not certain of the legal position, but what should be done - do it [the expulsion of the
residents of the Moroccan Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem] quickly, and let the God of Israel
be with you."
(Ya'akov (Ya'acov) Shimshon Shapira, June 1967)
"If Lord Shaftesbury was literally inexact in describing Palestine as a country without a people,
he was essentially correct, for there is no Arab people living in intimate fusion with the country,
utilising its resources and stamping it with a characteristic impress; there is at best an Arab
encampment."
"[The region is] a country without a nation [which should be matched to] a nation without a
country ... Is there such a thing? To be sure there is, The ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the
Jews!"
(Lord Shaftesbury, 30 July 1853)
"At present Palestine supports only six hundred thousand people, but, with proper cultivation it
can easily maintain two and half millions. You are a people without a country; there is a country
without a people. Be united. Fulfil the dreams of your old poets and patriarchs. Go back, - go
back to the land of Abraham."
(John Lawson Stoddard, 1891)
"Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country. The
regeneration of the soil would bring the regeneration of the people."
"In the power of my authority as Military of Jerusalem, immediately after the city was liberated
in 1967, I gave orders that Arab inhabitants be evacuated from the Western Wall area and from
the Jewish quarter in the Old City. They were given, in agreement, alternative housing in
Jerusalem and its environs."
(Shlomo Lahat, 26 July 2001)
"When James McDonald concluded his term as the first ambassador to Israel, a cynic remarked
that a diplomat less openly friendly to Zionism might prove more advantageous to Israel."
(Marie Syrkin, 10 November 1951)
"Regarding the Galilee, Mr. [Moshe] Sharett already told you that about 100,000 Arabs still now
live in the pocket of Galilee. Let us assume that a war breaks out. Then we will be able to cleanse
the entire area of Central Galilee, including all its refugees, in one stroke. In this context let me
mention some mediators who offered to give us the Galilee without war. What they meant was
the populated Galilee. They didn't offer us the empty Galilee, which we could have only by
means of a war. Therefore if a war is extended to cover the whole of Palestine, our greatest gain
will be the Galilee. It is because without any special military effort which might imperil other
fronts, only by using the troops already assigned for the task, we could accomplish our aim of
cleansing the Galilee."
"In this context let me mention the pioneering work of Erskin Childers [Irish journalist]. Childers
was first to show that the Zionist claim that Arab propaganda had called on the Palestinians to
run away from their homes was a gross lie. He inspected all broadcasts [the BBC recorded them
and kept transcripts as did the American government] of the Arab radios of the time to find that
no such call had ever been made."
(Israel Shahak, some date before 1999)
"the ideals of Hitler which I like: ethnic homogeneity, the possibility of exchange of ethnic
minorities; the transfers of ethnic groups for the sake of an international order which for me are a
particularly valuable feature."
(Yitzhak Tabenkin, some date before 1971)
"Our aim is the entire Land of Israel on both banks of the Jordan, whose borders are: from
Lebanon to Sinai, from the desert to the sea. All this should become a Jewish state, dedicated to
Jewish revival. ... [I hope] that some day the Arabs will be content to change their place of
residence and will depart from here to another place."
(Yitzhak Tabenkin, March 1944)
"This feeling of solitude which resulted from the threat of extermination was one of the 'secrets'
of our victory, and we must imprint it in our memories as a consideration in our decisions in the
future."
(Yitzhak Tabenkin, 1967)
"This is something that determines the character of the nation. Jews too have committed Nazi
acts."
(Aharon Zisling, December 1948)
"I only know that Sharett wrote in his diary, relating to the `stinking affair' in Egypt (in which
Israeli agents placed bombs in movie theaters in Cairo, to cause conflict between Egypt and
Britain), that `there was a similar case in Iraq.' He doesn't explain, but Sharett apparently
suspected that the Mossad had tossed the grenade [which was thrown into the central synagogue
in Baghdad in 1951]."
(Avi Shlaim, August 2005)
"For Ben-Gurion, the top priority was aliyah (immigration), and the large reservoir of Jews was
no longer in Europe, but in the Arab countries. We are not refugees, nobody expelled us from
Iraq, nobody told us that we were unwanted. But we are the victims of the Israeli-Arab conflict."
"I didn't feel shame, but I was astonished. I knew that in every country there's a gap between
rhetoric and practice, but I don't know of any country where the gap is as great as in Israel. All
the leaders speak about peace, Golda Meir used to say that she was willing to travel anywhere in
the world to make peace. But these were not truthful words. In the archive, in the Israeli papers, I
found that all the Arab leaders were practical people, people who wanted peace."
"Take, for example, Hosni Zaim [the Syrian chief of staff who took over the government in 1949
and was deposed a few months later]. He said that his ambition was to be the first Arab leader to
make peace with Israel. He proposed an exchange of ambassadors, agreed to absorb a quarter of a
million Palestinian refugees in Syria, but demanded that the border pass through the middle of
Lake Kinneret. He didn't issue any ultimatum about the rest of the refugees. I was astonished by
the Israeli reaction. Ben-Gurion said: First we'll sign a cease-fire agreement with Syria, then we'll
see. That destroyed my childhood version. It's not that Ben-Gurion didn't want peace, he wanted
peace, but on the basis of the status quo. Israel said at the time that there was nobody to talk to.
The truth is that Israel was actually saying that there was nothing to talk about."
"He [Benny Morris ]went off his rocker, and expressed racist views. That undermines him as a
scholar."
"According to Shlaim, the first 10 years of the State of Israel prove this argument. King Farouk
of Egypt wanted an agreement, and Israel rebuffed him. King Abdullah of Jordan wanted an
agreement, and Israel rebuffed him as well. We have already mentioned Zaim of Syria. Even the
archenemy Nasser, writes Shlaim in one of the surprising revelations of the book, sent emissaries
and even a personal letter to then-prime minister Sharett, to put out feelers for an agreement. He
was also turned down out of hand."
(Meron Rapoport, 11 August 2005)
"The book [Avi Shlaim's "Iron Wall"] gives a clear sense of a state that could not get enough.
Moshe Dayan, then chief of staff, pressed for war with Egypt to capture the Gaza Strip and
Sharm el-Sheikh, and "raised a suggestion" to capture the West Bank. Yigal Allon pressed for
remedying the "long-term mistake" made in 1948, by capturing and annexing the West Bank.
Ben-Gurion toyed with this idea and once with another idea; in 1956, a moment before the Sinai
Campaign, he explained his great dream to his new friends from France: Israel would occupy the
Sinai Peninsula, take over the West Bank and dismantle the Kingdom of Jordan, and reach the
Litani River in Lebanon, establishing a Maronite state in northern Lebanon. The entire Israeli
leadership (with the exception of Moshe Sharett), says Shlaim, adopted the idea of the "iron
wall." The only argument was about where to place it."
"Bar-On was active in Peace Now, and he does not really have any argument with Shlaim as to
the facts. He has a serious disagreement with him regarding Shlaim's interpretation of them. It's
true that Israel rejected all the Arab proposals, he says, and it's true that up until May 1967, the
Arabs had no real plan to attack Israel. But the Arab proposals were unacceptable, and the war
was unavoidable, because the Arabs could not forget what the Israelis had done to them in 1948."
"It's true that from 1955 on, Dayan pressed for war with Egypt. He begged the Old Man [Ben-
Gurion] to embark on `a war of deterrence,' and the Old Man didn't agree. In December 1955,
Dayan met with 50 officers and asked them who supported a war of deterrence. All of them, with
one exception, voted in favor. Dayan didn't receive permission from Ben-Gurion to embark on a
war of choice, but he did get permission to cause the situation to deteriorate. In one of the
retaliation operations in the demilitarized area in Nitzana, he wanted to leave the forces in place
until morning, in the hope that Egypt would attack."
(Mordechai (Moraleh) Bar-On, August 2005)
"Shlaim, on the other hand, considers Dayan and Ben-Gurion the source of all evil. Ben-Gurion
was a wicked man, Dayan thought in terms of a perpetual conflict. Sharett was the only one who
tried to fight them. He represented another school, a school that believed that dialogue with the
Arabs was possible, that what Israel did, and even what Israel said, affected the dynamics of the
conflict."
"Sharett thought that if we behaved nicely, the Arabs wouldn't make trouble. And if we didn't
behave nicely, Arab hatred would increase. I think that he was mistaken on two counts. There
were 750,000 Palestinian refugees in Israel, we screwed them in 1948, they had good reasons for
hatred, so what if we added another two or three kilos of hatred? If it was possible to carry out a
good operation, it had to be done. The basic situation in the Arab world was refusal to accept the
situation of 1948, and it was childish to think that anything would help."
"Israel did not want to get peace under the minimal conditions that the Arabs were willing to
discuss: the UN Partition Plan borders and the return of the refugees. Had we agreed to that, there
would be no State of Israel today."
"Shlaim told me when we were still in the cafe that since he was a child, Israel has looked to him
like an 'Ashkenazi trick' of which he doesn't feel a part. 'I'm not certain even now that I know
how that trick works.'"
"The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was 'given' by a foreign power to
another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of
innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers
increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is
abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven,
and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict."
(Bertrand Russell, February 1970)
"The extravagant physical variety in the streets of Israel suggests that the idea of "Zionist racism"
is quaint. But if that is a malicious accusation, there is a deeper problem for Israel. The truth is
that Zionism is not racism, it is colonialism. More than that, while it isn't ethnic nationalism
posing as civic, it is colonialism posing as anti-colonialism."
(Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 8 August 2001)
"Zionism was a product of the heyday of European nationalism and imperialism and emerged at a
time, it should be remembered, when those were both widely seen as progressive forces. Only in
the 20th century did imperialism and "Eurocentricity", come to be thought the gravest of evils -
and Zionism is inescapably Eurocentric."
(Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 8 August 2001)
"[My admiration for Israeli achievement is combined] with the strongest condemnation of her
crime against the original Arab population and the campaign of lies she has waged ever since."
(Herbert Bernard Levin, 1955)
"In the early days of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl was candid in private about the
possible need to remove the indigenous Arabs of Palestine but evasive in public, sometimes
claiming that the Arabs would welcome the Zionists, sometimes ignoring them completely."
(Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 18 October 1999)
"All of this crept up unawares on the left, which in my lifetime has changed its tune on Israel and
Palestine in a way that might even seem capricious. Anyone younger than 40 might not guess
how popular Israel and Zionism once were on the left. An adulatory profile of David Ben-Gurion
written in 1955 treated him as a noble hero, and reproached him only for having devoted his
military force to conquering the empty Negev desert in 1948, when he 'might have cleared the
hills of Samaria'. It also sympathised with Ben-Gurion's dread that Israelis might be
'Levantinised'. This did not appear in the Jewish Chronicle or a rabid Israeli publication, but in
the NS. That was the spirit of the age. If you wanted to read anti-Zionist polemics at that time
you had to turn to the far right, to a magazine such as the Mosleys' European."
(Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 18 October 1999)
"the Palestine issue is partly a colour issue [in which] an Indian nationalist, for example, would
probably side with the Arabs."
(George Orwell, 1945)
"Yet, the importance of Hebron is not only due to the history of the forefathers and mothers of
our nation. After Saul, the first king of Israel, fell on his sword during the war with the
Philistines,... David, who succeeded him as king, had asked G-d: "Shall I advance towards one of
the cities ofJudea?" G-d answered him: "Advance!" then David asked: "Where to shall I go?" and
G-d answered: "To Hebron." And David went upthere, and Judah's people came and anointed
David there as king of the House of Jehuda (II Samuel 2:4) ...So all the elders of Israel came to
the king, to Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord, and
they anointed David King of Israel" (II Samuel 5: 13),and in Hebron indeed was the greatest
kingdom Israel has had until this day. ...We shall make a terrible mistake if we are notgoing to
settle Hebron, the earlier forerunner and neighbour of Jerusalem, with an ever-growing Jewish
community in the shortest time! This will also bring a blessing to its Arab neighbours. Hebron is
worthy of being Jerusalem's sister."
"Yet, the importance of Hebron is not only due to the history of the forefathers and mothers of
our nation. After Saul, the first king of Israel, fell on his sword during the war with the
Philistines,... David, who succeeded him as king, had asked G-d: "Shall I advance towards one of
the cities ofJudea?" G-d answered him: "Advance!" then David asked: "Where to shall I go?" and
G-d answered: "To Hebron." And David went upthere, and Judah's people came and anointed
David there as king of the House of Jehuda (II Samuel 2:4) ...So all the elders of Israel came to
the king, to Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord, and
they anointed David King of Israel" (II Samuel 5: 13),and in Hebron indeed was the greatest
kingdom Israel has had until this day. ...We shall make a terrible mistake if we are notgoing to
settle Hebron, the earlier forerunner and neighbour of Jerusalem, with an ever-growing Jewish
community in the shortest time! This will also bring a blessing to its Arab neighbours. Hebron is
worthy of being Jerusalem's sister."
"One of the hallmarks of Ben-Gurion's greatness was that the man knew what to say and what not
to say in certain circumstances; what is allowed to be recorded on paper and what is preferable to
convey orally or in hint."
"There is no doubt that from the moment [the Peel proposal was submitted] ... the problem of the
Arab minority, supposed to reside in that [prospective Jewish] state, began to preoccupy the
Yishuv's leadership obsessively. They were justified in seeing the future minority as a great
danger to the prospective Jewish state - a fifth political, or even military, column. The transfer
idea ... was viewed by the majority of the Yishuv leaders in those days as the best solution to the
problem."
"In the absence of the European Jews, the state of Israel had to bring in Jews from Arab
countries. Ben Gurion compared them with the Africans who were brought in as slaves to
America."
(Tom Segev, April 1998)
"Hitler, more than he hurt the Jewish people, whom he knew and detested, hurt the Jewish State,
whose coming he did not foresee. He destroyed the substance, the main and essential building
force of the Jewish state. The state arose and did not find the nation which had waited for it."
"[The Jews of Europe were] the leading candidates for citizenship in the State of Israel."
"The Jews of Europe, in his [Ben-Gurion's] words, were: 'the leading candidates for citizenship in
the State of Israel'. This, to him, was the true significance of the Holocaust: 'Hitler, more than he
hurt the Jewish people, whom he knew and detested, hurt the Jewish State, whose coming he did
not foresee. He destroyed the substance, the main and essential building force of the Jewish state.
The state arose and did not find the nation which had waited for it.' In the absence of that
(European) 'nation', the State of Israel had to bring in Jews from Arab countries. Ben Gurion
compared them with the Africans who were brought in as slaves to America."
"There are countries---and I was referring to North Africa--- from which not all Jews need to
emigrate. It is not so much of quantity as of quality. Our role in Israel is a pioneering one, and we
need people with certain strength of fiber. We are very anxious to bring the Jews of Morocco
over and we are doing all we can to achieve this. But we cannot count on the Jews of Morocco
alone to build the country, because they have not been educated for this. We don't know what
may yet happen to us, what military and political defeats we may yet have to face. So we need
people who will remain steadfast in any hardship and who have a high degree of resistance. For
the purpose of building up our country, I would say that the Jews of Eastern Europe are the salt
of the earth."
(Moshe (Sharret/Sharet) Sharett, 12 December 1948)
"Moshe Sharett, in speaking with the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, put it differently:
'There are countries---and I was referring to North Africa--- from which not all Jews need to
emigrate. It is not so much of quantity as of quality. Our role in Israel is a pioneering one, and we
need people with certain strength of fiber. We are very anxious to bring the Jews of Morocco
over and we are doing all we can to achieve this. But we cannot count on the Jews of Morocco
alone to build the country, because they have not been educated for this. We don't know what
may yet happen to us, what military and political defeats we may yet have to face. So we need
people who will remain steadfast in any hardship and who have a high degree of resistance. For
the purpose of building up our country, I would say that the Jews of Eastern Europe are the salt
of the earth.'"
"At the first session of the first Knesset there were three Arab members out of the 120: the Arabs
of Israel had been allowed to vote and be elected. One of the Arab MKs appeared in the assembly
wearing a tarboosh, another wore a traditional keffieh and aqqal (all traditional Arabic
headdresses). Yosef Weitz, of the Jewish National Fund, who was among the guests, saw this as
a bitter insult. 'It chilled the heart and angered the soul,' he noted later in his diary. He asked
himself what those Arab MKs felt when they swore allegiance to the state. 'Isn't it filled with lies
and deceit? No. Nevertheless, I do not want there to be many of them. Perhaps they will integrate
into society. But it will take several generations before they become loyal to the state.'"
"The political aims of the martial rule [imposed on the Palestinian population of Israel] were
summed up in the following words, contained in a top secret memorandum: 'The government's
policy ... has sought to divide the Arab population into diverse communities and regions. ... The
municipal status of the Arab villages, and the competitive spirit of local elections, deepened the
divisions inside the villages themselves. The communal policy and the clan divisions in the
villages prevented Arab unity. ... Martial law has ruled all this time with complete and total
authority.'"
"[Agriculture Minister] Aaron Tsizling promulgated the Emergency Regulations regarding the
Cultivation of Fallow Lands and Unexploited Water Sources in October 1948. This legislation
was the first to legalize the seizure and reallocation of appropriated Arab land and served as a key
component of the sophisticated mechanism that gradually turned temporary possession into
unrestricted Jewish-Israeli ownership. The regulations were characteristic of most early
legislation on the appropriated Arab land in that they legalized its past and future transfer to
Jewish possession. They empowered the Agriculture Minister to authorize past seizure and
reallocation retroactively. As for future acts, the regulations were employed in conjunction with
Section 125 of the Defense Regulations of 1945, under which military commanders could close
certain areas for security reasons. Closure prevented Arab cultivators from reaching their land,
which would eventually be declared 'fallow' and transferred to Jewish possession. ... In 1952,
Arab Affairs Advisor Yehoshua Palmon warned that Section 125 was all that prevented the
owners of 250000 dunams of appropriated land from reclaiming their land in court."
(Geremy Forman, 2004)
"The 1929 anti-Jewish riots in Palestine taught me that we had only two alternatives before us:
surrender or the sword. I chose the sword. I was not surprised that the Arabs fled. It was natural
reaction. It was the best of them who fled---the leaders, the intelligentsia, the economic elite.
Only the small fry remained. I behaved toward them as a wolf in sheep's clothing---harsh, but
outwardly decent. I opposed the integration of Arabs into Israeli society. I preferred separate
development. True, this prevented the Arabs from integrating into the Israeli democracy. Yet
they had never had democracy before. Since they never had it, they never missed it. The
separation made it possible to maintain a democratic regime within the Jewish population alone. I
was not a member of the MAPAI, but I thought that if Ben-Gurion did not remain in power it
would be a catastrophe for the state. My policy ... was not designed to provide votes for the
MAPAI, but instead for Ben-Gurion's rule. At least, that was how I saw it at the time. ... The
main problem was that of the infiltrators. We expelled a few thousand, but we failed to expel tens
of thousands. In that sense we failed---the number of [Palestinian] Arabs in the country continued
to rise steadily."
(Yehoshua (Josh) Palmon, 6 June 1983)
"[I am] horrified [to read in the newspaper that it is planned to bring to Israel the Falashas of
Ethiopia]. I hope that this report is unfounded."
(Y. Meir, 8 June 1949)
"My investigation shows that the problem of the Falashas is not at all simple, because these
people's ways are not much different from those of the Abyssinians, and that intermarriage is
natural among them. There is also among them a large number of people with venereal diseases."
(Shlomo Schmidt, 13 may 1950)
"Why do we have to put an end to the Yemen Diaspora and bring over people who are more
harm than use? By bringing Yemenites, 70% of whom are sick, we are doing no good to
anybody. We are harming them by bringing them into an alien environment where they will
degenerate. Can we withstand an immigration of which 70% are sick?"
(Yitzhak (Izaak) Greenbaum, July 1949)
"The [North African Jewish] population in the [immigrant absorption] camps is becoming a sort
of a second nation, a rebellions nation which views us as plutocrats. This is incendiary material,
eminently useful to Herut and the Communists. It's dynamite. ... The immigrants are in some
ways taking the place of the Arabs. There is also a special attitude emerging on our part toward
them; we are beginning to harbor an attitude of superiority.""
(David Horowitz (2), 12 April 1949)
"This is a race unlike any we have seen before. They say there are differences between people of
the Tripoltania, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, but I can't say I have learned what those
differences are, if they do, in fact, exist. The say, for example, that the Tripolitanians and
Tunisians are better than the Moroccans, and Algerians, but it's the same problem with them all.
(Incidentally, none of these immigrants will admit that he is (North) African - Je suis francais!---
They are all Frenchmen from Paris and almost all were captains in the Maquis.)"
(Aryeh (Arieh) Gelblum, 22 April 1949)
"Omar [a Palestinian in Gaza] began working for his [Israeli settler] boss nine years ago for NIS
32 a day. In July 2005 his daily wages were NIS 50. His friend Khaled makes NIS 45 for an
eight-hour day's work. The hourly minimum wage in Israel is NIS 17.93, or almost NIS 145 per
day. Omar, who is active in an independent workers committee that was founded in the Gaza
Strip this year, says the maximum paid to Palestinian workers there was NIS 60 per day. An
Israeli who spent a lot of time in Gush Katif in recent months heard from employers that the daily
wage is between NIS 40-80."
(Amira Hass, 14 August 2005)
"But the minimum wage requirement does apply to Israeli employers in the occupied territories
with Palestinian workers. Back in 1982, a GOC Command order was issued in the territories
stipulating that 'a person employed in a community [an Israeli settlement - A.H.] is entitled to
receive wages from his employer that do not fall short of the minimum wage and will also be
entitled to cost of living adjustment, all as updated in Israel from time to time.' The Civil
Administration is supposed to oversee and enforce that order, but the office of the Government
Coordinator in the Territories (to which the Civil Administration is subordinate) stated that 'so
far, we know of no complaints filed about the lack of enforcement of this order.'"
"Omar is troubled by a more pressing problem: he knows about a dozen laborers whose
employers have already left, without paying them wages for the past week or two. Now they have
no way of locating their bosses to get at least those few hundred shekels."
"Many more people demand that some rabbi be put on trial for saying harsh things against the
prime minister than a settler who has shot a child."
(Gideon Levy, 14 August 2005)
"It [the proposal to compulsorily expel all the Arab inhabitants of the Jewish state envisaged by
the Peel Commission] is a just and reasonable plan, ethical and humane in all senses. ... If we
oppose all rights to transfer, then we must oppose what we have achieved up to now - the
transfers from Emek Hefer to the Bet Shean valley, from the Sharon to the mountains of Ephraim
etc."
(Eliyahu (Eliahu) Lulu (Hacarmeli), 29 July 1937)
"I'm not willing to accept a single Arab, and not only an Arab but any gentile. I want the State of
Israel to be entirely Jewish, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."
(Eliyahu (Eliahu) Lulu (Hacarmeli), 1)
"The proposal in the Labour Party's document that the Arabs might be 'encouraged' to transfer
themselves elsewhere is a good example of the folly of believing that spectacular settlements are
desirable and feasible. This is not the way to effect a reconciliation between Arabs and Jews
which will enable them to live together in the same and in different states."
(Leonard Woolf, September 1944)
"It is no secret that I, like many others, believed and hoped that we could forever hold on to
Netzarim and Kfar Darom. However, the changing reality in this country, in this region, and in
the world, required another reassessment and changing of positions. Gaza cannot be held on to
forever. Over 1 million Palestinians live there, and they double their numbers with every
generation. They live in incredibly cramped refugee camps, in poverty and squalor, in hotbeds of
ever-increasing hatred, with no hope whatsoever on the horizon. ... [The disengagement is the
end of a] glorious chapter in the story of Israel."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 15 August 2005)
"We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography"

(Shimon Peres (Perez), August 2005)
"The desire to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel is seen by most Jewish Israelis as a liberal
aspiration, rather than a racist one, as it would appear elsewhere. The disengagement from Gaza
is considered a step in the right direction because it will cut off about 1.3 million Palestinians
from Israel's responsibility, thus improving the demographic balance between Israelis and
Palestinians in the territories that remain under Israeli control. All this, at the very low price of
removing 8,000 of the 400,000 settlers in the occupied territories, and with the additional benefit
of gaining easy popularity in the rest of the world and, most important, pleasing the US."
(Daphna Baram, 16 August 2005)
"Sharon fathered the idea of 'giving away' parts of Israel proper that are densely populated by
Arab citizens to the Palestinian Authority. He has subsequently backed off from the idea, but it
refuses to disappear and is now often heard from people who consider themselves liberals. The
idea that people's citizenship can be stripped away if they belong to the 'wrong' ethnicity is
clearly racist, but it has gained popularity in Israel."
(Daphna Baram, 16 August 2005)
"Dear Mark, ... I am rather disgusted with the manner in which the Jews are approaching the
refugee problem. I told the President of Israel in the presence of his Ambassador just exactly
what I thought about it. It may have some effect, I hope so."
(Harry S. Truman, April 1949)
"[If the Israeli government is not more forthcoming on the refugee issue] the US Govt. will
regretfully be forced to the conclusion that a revision of its attitude toward Israel has become
unavoidable."
(Harry S. Truman, April 1949)
"The Ambassador [Eliyahu Eilat] looked me straight in the eye and said, in essence, that I
wouldn't get by with this move, that he would stop it. There was other conversation, but I had got
the point. Within an hour of my return to my office I received a message from the White House
that the President [Harry Truman] wished to dissociate himself from any withholding of the Ex-
Im Bank loan. I knew of the President's sympathy for Israel, but I had never before realized how
swiftly the supporters of Israel could act if challenged."
(George Crews McGhee, 1983)
"[On 15 September 1947] I pointed out that the establishment with our support of a Jewish State
in Palestine, unless such a State would be acceptable to the Arab world, would cause much
bloodshed and suffering, would alienate the people of that world who have been placing much
trust in the United States, might result in the loss to the free world of the use of the great
resources of the Middle East, and that the continued existence of such a State could cause
suffering, expense, bickering, and damage to the United States internally and internationally for
many years to come."
(Loy Wesley Henderson, 14 June 1973)
"I can quite imagine a Jewish state of ten million. ... I doubt it [that this number of Jews could
live in the area allocated by the UN to the Jewish state]. We would not have taken on this war
merely for the purpose of enjoying this tiny state."
(David Ben-Gurion, August 1948)
"The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was 'given' by a foreign power to
another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of
innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers
increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is
abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven,
and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the
world would accept being expelled en masse from their country; how can anyone require the
people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just
settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement
in the Middle East."
(Bertrand Russell, 23 February 1970)
"Fahima's allegiance is not to the state of Israel, a fact which makes her a source of danger. This
reinforces the need to continue her prison sentence."
(Devora (Dvora) Berliner, 28 July 2005)
"That scenario [an Israeli attack on Gaza in the period leading up to the projected disengagement]
is a scenario that none of us would like to see. There is a deep realization on the part of the Israeli
leadership, including the military, about the consequences of that type of scenario."
(William E. Ward, August 2005)
"It is unjust to speak of such an offer of land in Transjordania as expatriation of the Arabs [of
Palestine], as Transjordania is distinctly Arab territory."
(Felix Warburg, November 1930)
"but after all Palestine would absorb only a part of the three or four millions [of Jews] whom this
Conference has been discussing as needing relief. This could be accomplished only by moving
the Arab population to some other quarter."
(Herbert Hoover, July 1943)
"Most of the broadcasts [about the August 2005 removal of settlers from the Gaza Strip] were
captives of the emotional manipulation created by the settlers."
"Sharon said that we cannot hold onto Gaza forever, contrary to what he once believed. Because
of the population explosion there. That's true, but when Sharon said that, it sounded like an
admission of surrender, not like something that is proper and moral after so many years of
occupation and oppression, or even a step on the way to an agreement with the Palestinians. Had
he been able to, he would have remained in the Gaza Strip.
The hilltop youth can learn only one thing from his words: that he is too old and too weak to
fulfill the true Zionist dream. They will learn from the speech that we simply have to empty the
Gaza Strip of its inhabitants, just as Levi Eshkol thought in his time: He believed that they could
be transferred to Iraq. That is the danger of the evacuation from Gush Katif: It is liable to serve as
a precedent for the expulsion of Arabs."
"General Matti Peled once told me that before that war [the 1967 War], when he was commander
of the Jerusalem area, he one day encountered on his staff two officers who were unfamiliar to
him. When he interrogated them, they disclosed that they belonged to a secret unit that was
preparing mass expulsion for some future opportunity."
(Uri Avnery, 15 March 2003)
"In his excellent book, "Wars don't just happen" the historian Motti Golani describes e.g., how
the June war of 1967 evolved out of an Israeli provocation on the Syrian border (I can confirm
his description with my limited perspective as a simple soldier at that time). Through a
misinterpretation of the Israeli steps, the Arab countries were convinced that Israel intended to
attack Syria. In order to neutralize this threat the Egyptian president Gamal Abd al-Nasser closed
the Strait of Sharem El Sheikh and kicked the UN forces out of the Sinai Peninsula. There are
many proofs that the Egyptian army in Sinai, notwithstanding the aggressive Nasser's rhetorics,
was in a defensive set up and was not going to attack Israel."
(Shraga Elam, 14 February 2003)
"I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been
sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it."
(Yitzhak Rabin, 28 February 1968)
"In June, 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai did not
prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to
attack him."
(Menachem Begin, 8 August 1982)
"Motti Golani argues convincingly that prior to the attack of June 1967, the Israeli High
Command organized a 'silent' putsch, blocked up all political solutions for the crisis and launched
the war in order to expand."
(Shraga Elam, 14 February 2003)
"[Gaza will] never be returned to Egypt."

(Levi Eshkol, June 1967)
"
And of course, from my little Baghdad eyrie I've been watching the eviction of Israelis from their
illegal settlements in the Palestinian Gaza Strip. The word "illegal" doesn't pop up on the BBC,
of course; nor the notion that the settlers - for which read colonisers - were not being evicted
from their land but from land they originally took from others. Nor is much attention paid to the
continued building in the equally illegal colonies within the Palestinian West Bank which will -
inevitably - make a "viable" (Lord Blair's favourite word) Palestine impossible.
In Gaza, everyone waited for Israeli settler and Israeli soldier to open fire on each other. But
when a settler did open fire, he did so to murder four Palestinian workers on the West Bank. The
story passed through the television coverage like a brief, dark, embarrassing cloud and was
forgotten. Settlements dismantled. Evacuation from Gaza. Peace in our time.
"
(Robert Fisk, 20 August 2005)
"I really think this is the forefront of Zionism today, realising that there is a land war going on.
And whoever wins that land war, Jews or Arabs, is going to be able to take control of the eastern
side of the city."
(Uri Bank, April 2005)
"It is quite essential vividly to grasp the unique conditions of the struggle in Palestine. We have
witnessed many wars in this century, in which one country seeks to impose its power on others.
But in no war, I think, for many centuries past, has the objective been to remove a nation from its
country and to introduce another and evidently different race to occupy its lands, houses and
cities and live there. This peculiarity lends to the Palestinian struggle a desparate quality which
bears no resemblance to any other war in modern history."
(Sir John Bagot Glubb, 1967)
"Sadness, pain and tears mixed with more than a little racism in Atzmona: one resident
approaches the brigade commander, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, and requests in a whisper
that only a Jewish officer, "God forbid a non-Jew," be allowed to evacuate him from his home.
Kochavi does not respond. Atzmona's residents never made such demands when Druze and
Bedouin soldiers and officers guarded them. But today, everything is revealed and everything is
permitted."
"the government of Israel is going to have to address the demographic issue with the utmost
seriousness and resolve. This issue above all others will dictate the solution that we must adopt.
In the absence of a negotiated agreement... we need to implement a unilateral alternative."
(Ehud Olmert, 13 November 2003)
"There is no doubt in my mind that very soon the government of Israel is going to have to
address the demographic issue with the utmost seriousness and resolve. This issue above all
others will dictate the solution that we must adopt. In the absence of a negotiated agreement - and
I do not believe in the realistic prospect of an agreement - we need to implement a unilateral
alternative."
"Because we are going to sign a peace treaty between Jewish Israel and the PLO."
(Yitzhak Rabin, September 1993)
"I know how at least 80% of the incidents began there. In my opinion, more than 80%, but lets
talk about 80%. It would happen like this: We would send a tractor to plow someplace of no
value, in the demilitarized zone, knowing ahead of time that the Syrians would begin to shoot. If
they did not start shooting, we would tell the tractor to keep going forward, until the Syrians in
the end would get nervous and start shooting. And then we would start firing artillery, and later
also the airforce and this was the way it was. I did this and Laskov and Tzur (two previous
commander-in-chiefs) did it, Yitzhak Rabin did it when he was there (as commander of the
northern district at the beginning of the sixties), but it seems to me that it was Dado, more than
anyone else, enjoyed these games."
(Moshe Dayan, 22 November 1976)
"In a series of interviews that Dayan gave journalist Rami Tal in the mid-1970s, and which were
recently published in the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot, Dayan stated that the years of cross-
border violence between Israel and Syria that preceded the war were largely a result of Israeli
provocations. According to Dayan, some 80 percent of the pre-war border incidents were the
result of Israeli initiatives."
(David Landau, 6 June 1997)
"The reaction of the multitudes, those located in the space between the immolator and the
victims, is characterized by indifference, conformity, and opportunism. The Jews, too, in the
circumstances of time and place, do not go beyond this banality, with several exceptions. In
Israeli society, there are many people who would prefer not to know about the genocide of the
Armenians and the genocide of the Gypsies. ... In Israeli historical consciousness, the Holocaust
plays a central role--becoming increasingly stronger over the years. This consciousness stresses
the singularity of the Holocaust. It contains, in my opinion, an extreme and almost utter focus on
the Jews as victims, and a disregard--consciously or not, intentionally or not--of acts of genocide
that have taken place in the twentieth century, among them the murder of the Armenians and the
extermination of the Gypsies"
(Yair Auron, 1 January 2002)
"[I]t must be said, to the credit of the Turks, that their rulers behaved toward the conquered with
a degree of tolerance and generosity which is unparalleled in the history of the Christian peoples
of the period"
"Jamal Pasha [the Turkish military ruler in World War I Palestine] planned from the outset to
destroy the entire Hebrew settlement in Eretz Yisrael, exactly as they did the Armenians in
Armenia"
"We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations.
Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through, but
not a genocide."
(Shimon Peres (Perez), April 2001)
"I am aware of the fact that Israel does not officially acknowledge the horrible massacre [of the
Armenians by Ottoman Turkey] out of concern for the unique place of the Holocaust in the
chronicles of human history."
(Shimon Peres (Perez), 15 August 1995)
"Something exciting did happen several weeks ago to a Palestinian, but this too went virtually
unnoticed in the media. A group of teenage Israeli settlers from the West Bank, come to Gaza to
protest the impending disengagement, nearly beat to death a Palestinian teenager as he lay
unconscious on the ground, in full view of a group of Israeli soldiers who did nothing and an
international press contingent. Newspapers throughout Israel had the grace to be horrified and
termed the event a lynching, but the U.S. media ignored it. One has to wonder if the old puzzle
about whether a tree falling in the forest makes any noise if there's no one there to hear it can be
applied to the Palestinians: do Palestinians suffering oppression under Israeli occupation really
suffer if the media fail to report it?"
(Kathleen Christison, 26 August 2005)
"Everyone takes the easy way. Antiwar activists focus on the war where Americans are dying,
not where Palestinians are dying and believe that for tactical reasons they should avoid
introducing disunity by talking about this issue. Far too many moviemakers who turn out anti-
Bush films ignore the Palestinian issue and Israel's role in U.S. politics altogether. Tikkun and its
leader Rabbi Michael Lerner, who for years put themselves forward as the progressive religious
voice opposing the occupation, have apparently concluded that they were getting nowhere with
their effort to strike a balance between Israel and the Palestinians - always a futile effort in this
most unbalanced of conflicts - and have now turned away almost completely, concentrating
instead on a campaign to inject spirituality into U.S. politics."
"Although the media in the U.S. and in Europe have gone silent about Palestine's death throes,
they seldom miss an opportunity to lecture the Palestinians: Israel is taking a step of surpassing
courage in Gaza ("the most significant and painful steps toward peace ever made in the Middle
East" trumpeted one newspaper with spectacular hyperbole), and the future now depends entirely
on whether the Palestinians behave. "Behaving" means not disturbing the Israelis, not disturbing
the media's sense that peace is just around the corner if only the Palestinians cooperate.
"Behaving" means not mentioning, certainly not complaining about, Israel's massive
consolidation and expansion across the West Bank while the world watches Gaza."
"Palestinians themselves will not disappear, despite Israel's best efforts, and they will not give up
their struggle -- not now, after successfully fighting for sixty years against a concerted
multinational attempt to make them disappear. But Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, this
Israeli violence, is destroying any possibility of Palestinian nationhood, while the media ignore
the occupation, politicians ignore Israeli violence, and western publics know and care little about
any of it. Palestine and Palestinians are terrorized and murdered in darkness. No one helps them,
few note their dying. They are helpless, facing the power of a massive Israeli military machine
and a propaganda machine abetted by the major western media."
"Very little of what was seen on television was real. It is hard to believe how non-credible a live
broadcast from the scene of an event can be. The reporters knew there was not going to be any
violence, that the army had reached a prior agreement with the rabbis about what every minute
would look like, when they would take out the handcuffs, when Rabbi Dov Lior would be
evacuated in a container everything was staged down the last detail. The settlers wanted to come
out of it big-time, evacuated by force but without violence, and that is just what they did. TV,
which constantly seeks new faces, new stars, was thrilled by the ecstatic chanters of prayers, by
the charismatic bearded men who dominated the cameras as though they had been trained for that
their whole life, projecting love and security in their way and having their every request fulfilled
immediately. Now we will pray and only afterward we will leave. Now we will sing together
with you. Now we will sit with hands interwoven tightly and you will remove us with restrained
force. Now a break. Cut. Action. We will talk only to Yinon Magal from Channel 10. We will be
evacuated only by soldiers and under no circumstances by the police. It's true that just two weeks
ago we demanded the opposite, but in the meantime we discovered the potential latent in
embracing soldiers."
(Orit Shohat, 26 August 2005)
"I found myself treating Palestinians with an outward contempt that contradicted every instinct
my upbringing had instilled in me. I broke into homes after midnight and held women and
children under guard in one room while my comrades searched the house for terrorists or
explosives. I rounded up passers-by and organized them into labor details to remove improvised
roadblocks. I screamed at old men and bullied teenagers. ... A majority of my buddies saw
nothing wrong with Israel having built a Jewish town in the middle of the West Bank."
(Haim Watzman, 20 May 2005)
"For it was precisely the unignorable plight and suffering of the Palestinian Arabs during April-
May of that year that forced the hand of the reluctant Arab political and military leaders to take
the plunge and invade Palestine on 15-16 May."
(Benny Morris, March-April 1998)
"A party without a leader seeks a leader without a party. This is the current political reality, and
there is only one correct answer: Labor, a party without a leader, will merge with Sharon, a
leader without a party. This is the best proposal in the depressing political reality."
"Maybe we killed Eichmann for no reason, because he was also just following orders."
(Zvi Hendel, July 2005)
"[T]here is no difference between the treatment meted out to Elai Sinai residents by the Israeli
government and the way Jews were treated by the Nazi regime in the 1940s."
(Yitzhak Gabai, July 2005)
"This whole episode, including the verdict, is a serious indictment of the IDF. In the end the
army, which inducted el-Heyb into its ranks and did not bother to look after his needs and help
him resolve his problems, turned him into a scapegoat, so that the military establishment as a
whole could come out clean in the eyes of the world. The prosecutor in the trial told the court that
`the whole world' was watching the trial. I said in response that it can only be hoped that the war
of perception that the state of Israel is waging at Taysir el-Heyb's expense would not turn his trial
into a show trial."
(Ilan Bombach, August 2005)
"Everyone has forgotten that the disengagement plan was, and still is, a unilateral move aimed at
shortening Israel's lines of defense on its southern border and subtracting 1.3 million Arabs from
the demographic balance."
(Akiva Eldar, 29 August 2005)
"Israel's strategy of escalation on the Syrian front was probably the single most important factor
in dragging the Middle East to war in June 1967, despite the conventional wsidom on the subject
that singles out Syrian aggression as the principal cause of war."
(Avi Shlaim, 2000)
"Oh, sorry - wrong evacuation. That was demolition of a Palestinian home, not a settler outpost.
'We can't use these methods against Jews,' explains an officer with all the bland and blatant
racism of a Mississippi redneck sheriff saying, 'We can't use these methods against white folks.'"
(Thomas O'Dwyer, 4 July 2003)
"The killing of five Palestinians in Tul Karm last week shows how quickly the government and
army are reverting to their routine of violent oppression, death and destruction."
(Tamar Gozansky, 30 August 2005)
"The tens of thousands of new immigrants who arrived in Israel from Arab countries in the 1950s
did not have this choice. Many of them were literally thrown into Jewish Agency apartments
much smaller than a caravilla. Sometimes they were unloaded from a truck in the middle of the
night so that they wouldn't notice the desert sands all around, and would not be able to protest."
(Ran Cohen, 31 August 2005)
"[T]he absence of any immediate reaction of the Arabs [to the UNSCOP report] can be attributed
to their incredulity."
(Henry Gurney, 8 September 1947)
"[I]t is important for Sharon that the U.S. administration recognize Israel's departure from the
Gaza Strip as the official end of the occupation in that area. From there it is just a short way to a
UN declaration that Israel no longer bears responsibility for what happens in the Gaza Strip."
"Between the hugs and pats he has been sending Ariel Sharon since the pullout from the Gaza
Strip, behind the scenes, President Bush is twisting the prime minister's arm. More than all the
compliments, it is important for Sharon that the U.S. administration recognize Israel's departure
from the Gaza Strip as the official end of the occupation in that area. From there it is just a short
way to a UN declaration that Israel no longer bears responsibility for what happens in the Gaza
Strip. So long as the international community, led by the U.S., does not recognize the withdrawal
as the end of the occupation, it means Israel lost the communities there, ceded military control
there and still continues to be seen as the occupier, with all the legal and political ramifications of
that status. Bush, with all his friendship for Sharon, is not offering any free lunches; the price for
recognizing the end of the occupation in Gaza will be allowing freedom of movement in the West
Bank and free passage between it and Gaza."
"The concert was not for the Palestinian people. A cynic might argue that it was for the
international press, or the French satellite company (indeed, the speeches made at the concert
were given in English rather than Arabic because it was being broadcast in Europe)."
(Maureen Clare Murphy, 31 August 2005)
"In mid-October [1948], in contravention of the truce, the Israelis launched an offensive against
the Egyptian forces in order to take the Negev before the UN could decide that they could not
have it. Substantial gains were made in the south and the Israelis resisted all the UN injunctions,
mostly sponsored by Britain, to withdraw. In a second offensive at the end of the month the IDF
ejected all Arab forces from the Galilee and in doing so finally defeated the [Bernadotte] plan for
exchanging the Galilee for the Negev."
(Avi Shlaim, Summer 1987)
"Sharett knew that we had agreed with 'Abdullah that he will take and annex the Arab part of
Palestine and Sharett could not support this ludicrous, impotent, and abortive attempt made by
the Egyptians against 'Abdullah. This attempt had nothing to do with us. It was a tactical move
by 'Abdullah's enemies to interject something against his creeping annexation. At that time there
was no annexation. Formal annexation only occurred in April 1950. But he had started taking and
preparing for annexation. So they tried, without any success, to build a countervailing force.
The second point is that at that time Sharett and our men knew what the powerful State of Israel
has forgotten in recent years. He understood the meaning of diplomacy and knew how to conduct
it. Sharett was definitely aware that publicly we were obliged to accept the Palestinian Arab state
and could not say that we were opposed to the establishment of such a state. In the first place, we
had accepted the UN resolution which included a Palestinian Arab state. Secondly, this was the
right, fair, and decent course and we were obliged to agree to it. The fact that below the surface,
behind the curtain, by diplomatic efforts, we reached an agreement with 'Abdullah--an agreement
which had not been uncovered but was kept secret at that time--was entirely legitimate but we did
not have to talk about it. Sharett knew that our official line had to be in favour of a Palestinian
state if the Palestinians could create it. We could not create it for them. But if they could create it,
certainly, by all means, we would agree. The fact that he made a deal with 'Abdullah on the side
to prevent the creation of such a state, that is diplomacy, that is alright. Sharett behaved in
accordance with the rules of diplomacy and politics that are accepted throughout the world."
(Yaacov (Yaakov) Shimoni (Shim'oni), some date after 1948)
"An impressive example of Arab-Palestinian entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century was the
production and export of Jaffa oranges. The export of oranges to Europe began in earnest in the
second half of the nineteenth century, and in the last twenty-five years of the Ottoman era it
seems to have reached a frenzied pace. Orange groves expanded enormously, and would have
done so even more quickly were it not for a bottleneck in the form of a water shortage. To
overcome this problem, Jaffa orange growers, most of them Muslims, adopted the most
sophisticated water technology available at the time, introducing some 500 European water
pumps in a sort of miniindustrial revolution."
(Haim Gerber, Fall 2003)
"Another interesting case of economic development at the time could be observed in Gaza.
Farmers and Bedouins in the region started in the last quarter century or so of the Ottoman era to
grow large quantities of barley destined for the beer breweries of Europe. By the end of the
period, about 40,000 tons of barley were shipped annually from the virtually nonexistent port of
Gaza to Europe."
"There are now about ten [Jewish] colonies standing for some years, and no one of them is able
to support itself . . . wherever I strived to look, I did not manage to see even one man living
solely from the fruit of his land. . . . In Palestine, as in all lands, the tiller of the land will eat its
fruit . . . the traveler can see on both sides of the road fertile fields and valleys covered with
grains. The Arabs are working and eating. . . . Grief has engulfed us alone. Why then? The real
answer, that any clever man in Palestine knows, is that the first colonists brought with them
substantial idealism, but they all lack the qualifications necessary for agriculture and cannot be
simple farmers."
(Asher Ginsburg, 1891)
"Nor did they [the British in Palestine] have any problems forcing Arab civilians to drive at the
head of their convoys to prevent terrorists from mining the roads or railway tracks; they would
even seat them in special cars attached to the train engines."
(Tom Segev, October 2001)
"It is interesting to compare the way Britain suppressed the two revolts that took place in
Mandatory Palestine, the Arab revolt of 1936-39 and the Jewish revolt following World War II.
The suppression of the Arab revolt was brutal and cruel, and was suppressed in ways that even
some British officials described as not shaming the Nazis. These methods included the
indiscriminate killing of villagers near where British soldiers had been the victims of terrorist
acts, the stripping of women to make sure that they were not men in disguise, and tying village
leaders on trains as human shields. Such acts against Jews would have been inconceivable.
Indeed, the suppression of the Jewish revolt was almost a Boy Scout affair. The worst moment of
this suppression was the so-called Black Saturday of June 1946, in which the British army
searched for hidden weapons and arrested some second-rank Zionist leaders, who were held for a
number of months and never brought to trial. Compare to this large numbers of executions of the
leaders of the Arab revolt and the forced exile of countless others for years on end."
"Britain's differential treatment of the two communities in that domain is important both
symbolically and practically, and it helps explain the collapse of Palestinian society in 1948.
Whereas the education for the Palestinians was provided in the manner of a conquering power,
the Jewish-Zionist community was given special treatment: it was accorded complete autonomy
to handle its educational affairs as it saw fit. This obviously had some ideological background,
insofar as the Jews were seen not as being under occupation so much as partners. This differential
treatment had grave consequences for the nation-building processes in the two communities:
while the Palestinians received a traditional and conservative education that stamped out any
nationalist and anti-imperial overtones, Jewish education was characterized by an ultra-
nationalism that put the nation above the individual and inculcated in students self-sacrifice as
the highest value. Hatred and contempt for the British and complete discursive obliteration of the
Palestinians were part and parcel of this educational system. Thus, the educational system under
the Mandate superbly prepared the Jews for the day of reckoning, while it effectively tied the
(cultural) hands of the Palestinians behind their backs in preparing for 1948."
"There was no talk of a usual parliament based on representation. The Palestinians were
supposed to agree to parity between themselves and the Zionists, who by the end of the Mandate
constituted only about a third of the population. No nation on earth would have acquiesced to
such an offer."
"Show no pity to anyone, even if it causes traffic holdups and anger"

(Shaul Mofaz, 6 September 2005)
"Some ministers ... who objected to the cabinet decision to destroy the synagogues in Gush
Katif ... see leaving the synagogues intact as an opening to the Jews' return to Gaza."
(Meron Benvenisti, 8 September 2005)
"But in addition to wishing to preserve the synagogues [left behind when Israel withdrew its
settlers from Gush Katif], the practicable-utilitarian consideration comes into strong play. This
consideration is also better from the public relations' aspect. If the synagogues are doomed to be
destroyed, let the Palestinians do it rather than the Israelis, to make them look bad in the eyes of
the world."
(Meron Benvenisti, 8 September 2005)
"Contrary to recent claims by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a top official of the
pro-Israel lobby knew of the use of classified government information in its work, The Jewish
Week has learned. Thomas Dine, a former executive director of AIPAC, confirmed this week that
during his tenure Steven Rosen, the lobby's foreign policy director until April, informed him of
his success in gaining access to a highly classified document."
(Larry Cohler-Esses, 19 August 2005)
"If we had been in Gaza, it would have decreased the number of refugees."
(Yigal Allon, some date after 1948)
"Residents of Gaza, today we end a glorious chapter in Israel's history, a central episode in your
lives as pioneers, as realisers of the dream of those who bore the security and settlement burden
for all of us. Your pain and your tears are an inextricable part of the history of our country."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 15 August 2005)
"The cabinet decision of 6 June 2004 to raze the synagogues was designed to prevent any
possibility of vandalism. The Chief Rabbinate even instructed the government on how to strip the
buildings of their sanctity... Everything was expected, and even the High Court gave its approval.
But, at the last minute, the decision-makers abandoned reason... Most of the members of the
cabinet were afraid to be seen by the public as having gone against the rabbis. They preferred to
blame the Palestinians for the destruction of the synagogues rather than carry some of the blame
themselves."
(Haaretz editorial writer, September 2005)
"The government's zigzagging, the scores of synagogues that were demolished inside Israel, the
hundreds of mosques that were destroyed here, the clarity of the halacha [religious law] that
never banned the destruction of buildings destined for prayers and at times even obliged this - all
these clouded the chances of the success of this exercise... Politicians and the media jumped on
the Palestinian "looting" and began to compete over the strength of their denunciations of the
"terrible" scenes... Official and unofficial representatives of Israeli society also protested at those
vulgar shows of covetousness and lack of manners... It is possible to crown those remarks as the
"highest chutzpah" but chutzpah records are broken here at dazzling speed."
(B. Michael (pen name for Michael Barizon), September 2005)
"The Jewish synagogues, the military outposts, infantry patrols and settlements are all symbols of
Israeli military occupation ... The settlements [in the West Bank] will become a flame burning
the dreams of peace ... There will be no peace with the wall and settlements."
(Yusof al-Qazaz, September 2005)
"We have to make sure that Gaza remains free from occupation and block the way for the
possibility of Israel's despicable attempt to return."
(Rajab Abu-Sirriyah, September 2005)
"Article 77 of the Fourth Geneva convention obligates the occupying power that withdraws from
a given territory to transfer all incarcerated residents of that territory to the entity that receives
control of the area. Yet despite Israel's obligation under this clause, it does not plan to transfer to
the PA the "ordinary" prisoners and detainees who are Gaza residents."
(Yuval Yoaz, 14 September 2005)
"According to Article 76 of the Geneva Convention, a resident of an occupied territory who has
been charged with a crime or sentenced by a military court must be held in the occupied territory
itself. If, as Israel claims, the occupation in Gaza has indeed ended, then Article 77 of that same
convention stipulates a basic duty to hand those charged and convicted in Israeli military courts
over to the Palestinian Authority."
(Association for Civil Rights in Israel, 13 September 2005)
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EXAMPLES OF HATE SPEECH

4. "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed

6. "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return

7. "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda

19. Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of

23. "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it

"We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties,

"Accusations made by a well-established society about how a people it is oppressing is breaking

"Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."

"it is permissible to lie for the sake of the Land of Israel"

"Today there is no separation [between an anti-Semitism that should be condemned and a

"Better Sharm-el-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm-el-Sheikh."

"Without an internationally recognized provocation, an Israeli invasion of Lebanon would have a

"But there are Arabs in Palestine. I did not know."

"The land without people -- for the people without land."

"Question: Is anti-Semitism on the increase?

"We have to reserve the right to bomb the niggers."

"[Ariel Sharon has a strong tendency] to not tell the truth."

"The Israeli government seemingly cultivates this fear of existential threat."

Will Israel be prepared to fight this war?

While CNN has its cameras at the wall?

What will the end result of all this killing be?

Unilateral separation doesn't guarantee "peace" - it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an

"Our lives come first."

"Possibly we are too sensitive about all forms of anti-Semitism."

"What good is freedom of speech if we don't use it?"

"we are all obligated to carry out genocide"

"[The Deir Yassin massacre was a deliberate and unprovoked attack."

"We have to do everything to make [Palestinians] so miserable they will leave."

"Well done, now give it back to them."

"There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only subjects."

"Take the American declaration of Independence. It contains no mention of territorial limits. We

"A state on scattered territories will not work"

"Israel is creating a new crime - of talking to journalists. It is a shocking betrayal of democratic

"I combine my Arab nationality, my Christianity, my Muslim culture and Marxism."

"When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff."

1. Protest against the bans imposed on Professors Simons and Roux;

"We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography"

"[Gaza will] never be returned to Egypt."

"Show no pity to anyone, even if it causes traffic holdups and anger"

What Really Happened

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