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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don’t want to give them [Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem] a feeling of equality. I know that we cannot give them a feeling of equality. But I want, here and there, where it doesn’t cost too much, and where it is only an investment of money or something, to give them nevertheless a feeling that they can live here. If I do not give them this feeling, we will suffer."
(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, 13 February 1996)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The population in the camps is becoming a sort of second nation, a rebellious 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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Amnesty International is primarily motivated not by human rights but by publicity. Second comes money. Third comes getting more members. Fourth, internal turf battles. And then finally, human rights, genuine human rights concerns. To be sure, if you are dealing with a human rights situation in a country that is at odds with the United States or Britain, it gets an awful lot of attention, resources, man and womanpower, publicity, you name it, they can throw whatever they want at that. But if it's dealing with violations of human rights by the United States, Britain, Israel, then it's like pulling teeth to get them to really do something on the situation. They might, very reluctantly and after an enormous amount of internal fightings and battles and pressures, you name it."
(Francis A. 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, 1997)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That the Columbia University administration acted as a collaborator with the witch-hunters instead of defending me and offering itself as a refuge from rightwing McCarthyism has been a cause of grave personal and professional disappointment to me. I am utterly disillusioned with a university administration that treats its faculty with such contempt and am hoping against hope that the faculty will rise to the task before them and force President Bollinger to reverse this perilous course on which he has taken Columbia’s faculty and students. The major goal of the witch-hunters is to destroy the institution of the university in general. I am merely the entry point for their political project. As the university is the last bastion of free-thinking that has not yet fallen under the authority of extreme rightwing forces, it has become their main target. The challenge before us is therefore to be steadfast in fighting for academic freedom."
(Joseph A. 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 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]."
(Menahem 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 [of Ethiopia] ... 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 1938/39)

"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, 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, 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, 10 August 1991)

"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."
(Omar Barghouti, 31 May 2005)

"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."
(Omar Barghouti, 31 May 2005)

"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."
(Omar Barghouti, 31 May 2005)

"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, 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 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."
(Daniel Dor, June 2005)

"[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."
(Daniel Dor, June 2005)

"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."
(Gideon Levy, June 2005)

"[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."
(Gideon Levy, June 2005)

"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."
(Gideon Levy, June 2005)

"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."
(Gideon Levy, June 2005)

"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."
(Yosef (Yosi) Grodzinsky, 7 June 2005)

"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."
(Yosef (Yosi) Grodzinsky, 7 June 2005)

"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."
(Yosef (Yosi) Grodzinsky, 7 June 2005)

"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."
(Yosef (Yosi) Grodzinsky, 7 June 2005)

"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 (Lyova/Lova/Liova) 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 Seidemann, 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)

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