"The New York Times's resident expert on the Middle East is a fellow called Ethan Bronner. Ethan Bronner sits on the editorial board, and he writes all the Time's editorials on the Israel-Palestine conflict. So Ethan Bronner writes a review of Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel, and he thinks that this is a wonderful book – a brilliant book he tells readers the readers of the NYT. The book is a sheer fraud. What does it tell you when the NYT's resident expert and authority on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the fellow who writes the editorials, doesn't have the vaguest idea – doesn't have a clue – as to the actual historical record or the human rights record of Israel in the occupied territories. Anyone who knew anything about the topic – I mean a fifth grade knowledge – would know immediately from reading Dershowitz's book (assuming he wrote it, and being generous and calling it a book) would know that Dershowitz's book is sheer nonsense. But the Times gives it a rave review, and which tells you something about their intellectual, moral and political standards."
(Norman G. Finkelstein, 28 August 2005)

"Evacuate the [Hebron] market and we will make a commitment to you [Israeli settlers who are squatting illegally] that, within a few months, the stores will return to your hands."
(Yair Naveh, January 2006)

"They [Israeli troops] are treating people [Israeli settlers] here like Arabs"
(Ariyeh Eldad, 1 February 2006)

"The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state."
(Hendrik Verwoerd, 1961)

"As you are undoubtedly aware, the pro-Palestinian and anti-semitic campaign to demonise Israel focuses on the entirely false and abusive analogy with South Africa. Using the term 'apartheid' to apply to Israel's legitimate responses to terror and the threat of annihilation both demeans the South African experience, and is the most immoral of charges against the right of the Jewish people to self-determination"
(Gerald Steinberg, some date before February 2006)

"Like the struggle against apartheid, the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israeli occupation of their country enjoys enormous support from the global community. Therefore a more concrete expression of this support by global societies to this campaign is timely and fitting."
(Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, some date before February 2006)

"Apartheid was an extension of the colonial project to dispossess people of their land. That is exactly what has happened in Israel and the occupied territories; the use of force and the law to take the land. That is what apartheid and Israel have in common."
(Ronnie Kasrils, some date before February 2006)

"If we take the magnitude of the injustice done to the Palestinians by the state of Israel, there is a basis for comparison with apartheid. If we take the magnitude of suffering, we are in the same league. Of course apartheid was a very different philosophy from what we do, most of which stems from security considerations. But from the point of view of outcome, we are in the same league."
(Alon Liel, some date before February 2006)

"[When I saw architecture and planning evolve as tools for territorial expansion after the 1967 war] I watched Jerusalem with horror and great doubt and fear for the future. There were those who said that what's happening is architecture, not politics. You can't talk about planning as an abstraction. It's called establishing facts on the ground."
(Arthur Goldreich, some date before February 2006)

"Since the annexation of Jerusalem, the municipality has built almost no new school, public building or medical clinic for Palestinians. The lion's share of investment has been dedicated to the city's Jewish areas."
(B'Tselem, some date before February 2006)

"The similarities between the situation of East Jerusalemites and black South Africans is very great in respect of their residency rights. We had the old Group Areas Act in South Africa. East Jerusalem has territorial classification that has the same sort of consequences as race classification had in South Africa in respect of who you can marry, where you can live, where you can go to school or hospital."
(John Dugard, some date before February 2006)

"Israel treats Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem as immigrants, who live in their homes at the beneficence of the authorities and not by right. The authorities maintain this policy although these Palestinians were born in Jerusalem, lived in the city and have no other home. Treating these Palestinians as foreigners who entered Israel is astonishing, since it was Israel that entered East Jerusalem in 1967."
(B'Tselem, some date before February 2006`)

"Planning and urban policy, which normal cities view as this benign tool, was used as a powerful partisan tool to subordinate and control black people in Johannesburg and is still used that way against Palestinians in Jerusalem. In South Africa there was 'group areas' legislation, and then there was land use, planning tools and zoning that were used to reinforce and back up group areas. In Israel, they use a whole set of similar tools. They are very devious, in that planning is often viewed as this thing that is not part of politics. In Jerusalem, it's fundamental to their project of control, and Israeli planners and politicians have known that since day one. They've been very explicit in linking the planning tools with their political project."
(Scott A. Bollens, some date before February 2006)

"The mantra of the past 37 years has been 'maintaining the demographic balance', which doesn't mean forcing Palestinians to leave. It means curtailing their ability to develop by limiting construction to the already developed areas, by largely preventing development in new areas and by taking 35% [of Palestinian-owned land in greater East Jerusalem] and having a massive government incentive for [Jews] to build up that area."
(Daniel Seidemann, some date before February 2006)

"The principle that guides me and the mayor is that, in the Arab neighbourhoods, the municipality has no interest or reason to get into any kind of planning process. Thus, we encourage the building of Jewish neighbourhoods in empty areas that have been expropriated by the state of Israel. But so long as the policy of the state of Israel is not to get involved in the character of existing Arab neighbourhoods, there is no reason to require plans."
(Avraham Kahila, 1992)

"We take the land first and the law comes after."
(Ya'akov Palmon, 1972)

"Houses were built for Israelis, but the lands were overwhelmingly taken from Palestinians. This was the tool by which Israel was able to consolidate its hold over East Jerusalem. This was based on the law of expropriation for public purposes, but the public bearing the brunt of this was always Palestinian and the public benefiting from this was always Israeli."
(Daniel Seidemann, some dtae before February 2006)

"The government calls it a green zone to stop Palestinians building homes there, and then when the government wants to develop an area [as Jewish] it lifts that green zoning miraculously and it becomes a development place."
(Scott A. Bollens, some date before February 2006)

"Muslims and Christians are barred from buying in the Jewish quarter of the old city on the grounds of 'historic patterns of life of each community having its own quarter'. But that didn't prevent the Israeli government from aggressively pursuing activities to place Jews within the Muslim quarter. The attitude is: what's mine is exclusively mine, but what's yours is mixed if we happen to target it."
(Daniel Seidemann, some date before February 2006)

"Any Palestinian who was at any point in 'enemy territory' after 1967, forfeits his property. But enemy territory includes the West Bank. It's a remarkable situation. Any property that was ever 'abandoned' by any Palestinian becomes state land and is then 'turned over to the Jewish people'. Any property that once belonged to a Jew is 'recovered to the Jewish people' and turned over to the settlers. I hate the term ethnic cleansing in the context of this, because of the connotations of rape and pillage, which this is not. But there was and is an active government effort using procedures such as this to rid targeted areas of its Palestinian residents and turn it into an exclusively or predominantly Jewish area. And I say, with regret, that the efforts have been moderately successful."
(Daniel Seidemann, some date before February 2006)

"What stands out for Jerusalem and Johannesburg is that it was and is such a prolonged use of planning in pursuit of a political objective. One distinction with South Africa is the racial identifiers and the racial rhetoric was so blatant, and it was so visible and it was so much part of apartheid South African language. But, despite the difference in rhetoric, the outcomes are very, very similar and the urban landscape Israel has created in the Jerusalem region is just as unequal, just as subjugating of the Palestinians as the 'group area' planning was in South Africa for the blacks."
(Scott A. Bollens, some date before February 2006)

"It is characteristic everywhere of colonial regimes which believe that the 'natives' are worthy neither of suitable representation nor of being masters of their own fate. The planning team apparently sets out from the assumption that, in any case, one is dealing with a Jewish city and therefore there is no reason to ask the opinion of anyone who does not belong to the Jewish people."
(Meir Margalit, some date before February 2006)

"One cannot but receive an impression that behind the document [the 2004 masterplan for Jerusalem] lies an attempt to restrict the natural increase of the Arabs in the east of the city. With their historical experience, the planning team understands that this cannot be achieved through doing away with all the firstborn sons, but the plan assumes that by restricting the Arabs' living space, they will be compelled to leave the city and move into places in the periphery where they will be able to build without restriction."
(Meir Margalit, some date before February 2006)

"This, in fact, is the strength of municipal racism. It is neither brutal nor openly visible, preferring to take cover behind apparently neutral formulations. Thus it is always carefully concealed behind consensus-oriented wording, hidden beneath a thick layer of cosmetic liberal language. This is how a unique term which does not exist in the professional literature was born in our country: 'grey racism'. This is not a racism stemming from hatred of the 'other', but a 'lite racism' rooted in a Zionist ideology which strove to be democratic but, in giving priority to Jewish interests, inevitably deprived others of their rights. When there is no equality, there is bound to be discrimination, and when all those discriminated against are of the same nationality, there is no alternative but to call it what it is - 'national discrimination' - which belongs to the same family as the infamous racial discrimination."
(Meir Margalit, some date before February 2006)

"[There is] institutionalised legal and societal discrimination against Israel's Christian, Muslim and Druze citizens. ... The government does not provide Israeli Arabs, who constitute 20% of the population, with the same quality of education, housing, employment and social services as Jews."
(US Department of State, some date before February 2006)

"In the past few days alone, the police have arrested eight women, the Palestinian wives of Arab Israelis, in the Israeli village of Jaljulya and deported them to the occupied territories. Among women living under the threat of future deportation is the wife of an Israeli football player."
(Chris McGreal, 6 February 2006)

"I have been reproached that I am now discriminating against the Jews as Jews. Now let me say frankly that I admit that it is so, but let me add that if you want to effectively protect South Africa against the special influx from outside, it must inevitably be done."
(Daniel (Danie) Francois Malan, 1937)

"Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity. ... This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was 'a land without people for a people without land', so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.""
(Ronnie Kasrils, some date before February 2006)

"The image of the Jews was that they were following Helen Suzman. [However?] I think the majority didn't like what apartheid was doing to the blacks but enjoyed the fruits of the system and thought that maybe that's the only way to run a country like South Africa.""
(Alon Liel, some date before February 2006)

"At a state banquet [in Jerusalem in April 1976 for John Vorster, the visiting South African prime minister], Rabin toasted 'the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence'. Both countries, he said, faced 'foreign-inspired instability and recklessness'."
(Chris McGreal, 7 February 2006)

"Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."
(Apartheid-era Government of South Africa, 1976)

"We created the South African arms industry. They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies. We were involved in Angola as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate."
(Alon Liel, some date before February 2006)

"There are things we South Africans recognise in the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination and human rights. The repressed are demonised as terrorists to justify ever-greater violations of their rights. We have the absurdity that the victims are blamed for the violence meted out against them. Both apartheid and Israel are prime examples of terrorist states blaming the victims."
(Ronnie Kasrils, some date before February 2006)

"Israel is an affirmative-action state set up to protect Jews from genocide. We are previously disadvantaged and we can't rely on the goodwill of the world"
(Warren Goldstein, some date before February 2006)

"This [the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories] is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale."
(Ronnie Kasrils, 2004)

"[The Israeli road system in the West Bank bears] clear similarities to the racist apartheid regime that existed in South Africa."
(B'Tselem, some date before February 2006)

"The road regime is not by legislation. It's by political decision and military orders. When I look at all of those maps and I look at the roads, it's like Alice in Wonderland. There are roads that Israelis can go on and roads Palestinians can go on, and roads Israelis and Palestinians can go on. The roads, the checkpoints, the fence - all by edict. I look at it and ask, what is the thinking behind this?"
(Arthur Goldreich, some date before February 2006)

"Three years ago, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the former Italian prime minister, Massimo D'Alema, as telling dinner guests at a Jerusalem hotel that, on a visit to Rome a few years earlier, Sharon had told him that the bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. When one of the guests suggested to D'Alema that he was interpreting, not repeating, Sharon's words, the former prime minister said not. 'No, sir, that is not interpretation. That is a precise quotation of your prime minister,' he said."
(Chris McGreal, 7 February 2006)

"In case they [Palestinians in the occupied territories] don't leave [within the next 20 years], plans would have to be drawn up to expel them by force. Many people support the idea but few are willing to speak about it publicly.""
(Uzi Cohen, some date before February 2006)

"For many of us, it's as though they [the Palestinians] are encroaching on our very right to be there [in the occupied territories]"
(Uzi Landau, some date after 2000 but before February 2006)

"We've always had the fanatics talking of greater Israel. There are blokes who say it says in the Bible this land is ours, God gave it to us. It's fascism."
(Don Krausz, some date before February 2006)

"I am one of those who believe that there is no permanent home for even a section of the Bantu in the white area of South Africa and the destiny of South Africa depends on this essential point. If the principle of permanent residence for the black man in the area of the white is accepted then it is the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it in this country."
(PW Botha, 1964)

"Apartheid was all about land. Apartheid was about keeping the best parts of the country for the whites and sending the blacks to the least habitable, least desirable parts of the country. And one sees that all the time here [in the occupied Palestinian territories], particularly with the wall, now, which is really a land grab. One sees Palestinians dispossessed of their homes by bulldozers. One can draw certain parallels with respect to South Africa that, during the heyday of apartheid, population relocation did result in destruction of property, but not on the same scale as the devastation in Gaza in particular, [or in] the West Bank."
(John Dugard, some date before February 2006)

"Yes, there are enormous parallels with apartheid, but the problem with making comparisons is it actually distracts from the Palestinian context. We have to look for another definition. What struck me is dispossession, colonial dispossession. Most colonial dispossession took place over centuries through settlers and forced removals. In South Africa, that was a 300-year process. Here [in Palestine], it's taken place in 50 years; 1948, 1967 and the present in terms of the heightened nature of militarism in the West Bank and Gaza leading to the wall, which I don't see as a wall of security but a wall of dispossession."
(Ronnie Kasrils, some date before February 2006)

"The army sent him [my son, who moved to South Africa after completing his conscription in the Israeli military] to the occupied territories and he said he would never forgive this country for what it made him do. ... If Israel retains the [occupied] territories it ceases to be a democracy, and in that sense it is apartheid because it differentiates between two classes of people and separates and creates two sets of laws which is what apartheid did. It creates two standards of education, health, of dispensing funds. But you can't call Israel an apartheid state when 76% of the people want an agreement with the Palestinians. Yes, there's discrimination against the Arabs, the Ethiopians and others, but it's not a racist society. There's colonialism, but there's not apartheid. I feel very strongly about apartheid. I hate the term being abused."
(Hirsh Goodman, some date before February 2006)

"When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. If we don't kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings."
(Arnon Sofer, some date before February 2006)

"I do not see equality in the way the system handles them [Arabs and Jews] when they are guilty of the same type of offence," he said. "If I had arrested a terrorist from [the West Bank city of] Nablus and Eden Nathan Zada [the Jewish man who shot dead four Arabs on a bus last August], they wouldn't have received similar treatment in interrogation or court."
(Yuval Diskin, 2006)

"Architecture and planning are an integral part of the fascist apartheid state [Israel]."
(Steven Rose, February 2006)

"[Speaking about the wall in Palestine and the proposed architects' boycott of Israel:] It is right that architects should not play a part in building communities and structures that drive people apart."
(George Ferguson, February 2006)

"There reaches a certain point where an architect can't sit on the fence. Not to stand up to it would be to be complicit. ... [The separation barrier built by Israel is] a contorted, crazy, mad, divisive, drunken thing. In 10 years' time its builders will see it as a great folly. Architecturally it is madness. I understand fully that security is the problem for Israel and they have the right to protect themselves. But this is not the solution. It is an extremist measure which forments extremism, by incarcerating and intimidating Palestinians."
(Charles Jenckes, February 2006)

"A boycott [of Israel by British architects] would be totally legitimate. The wall and the settlements have been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice and we should boycott any company which does business, any architects that participate - anyone facilitating these human rights violations and war crimes."
(Eyal Weizman, February 2006)

"It's like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won't die."
(Dov Weisglass, February 2006)

"The main objective of my writing today is to nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it is practised today is in effect to be anti-semitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler's racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail. It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought anti-semitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel's betrayal of its true heritage. When world Jewry defends Israeli policies right or wrong, then anger turns not only against Israel but against all Jews. I wish it was mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible."
(Paul Oestreicher, 20 February 2006)

"[When considering Holocaust deniers] We're dealing with a closed club, a clique of people who quote each other and see themselves as heroes who have set out to fight against a conspiracy by the Jewish-American establishment that, to their mind, rules the world"
(Dina Porat, February 2006)

"The life of a non-Jew certainly has value ... but the value of Shabbat is more important. When there is a clash between a directive in the spirit of the [IDF ethical] code and an order of Jewish law, it is clear that one must listen to the opinion of Jewish law."
(Avi Ronsky, February 2006)

"The Palestinian Authority election marks the beginning of a new period in the region that could be termed "the era of the masses." Henceforth Israel will have to factor into its foreign policy something it has always ignored - Arab public opinion. Israel has always based its regional policy on arrangements and terror-balances with the Arab dictators. They understood force and Israel could do business with them. Their authority was seen as a barrier protecting Israel from the rage of the hostile rabble in the "Arab street." That was the basis of the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, Yasser Arafat and his heirs and the game rules vis-a-vis Syria and Lebanon. But those days are over."
(Aluf Benn, 29 January 2006)

"The time has come for the Supreme Court in Israel and the military and civilian judicial systems to start treating suspicions of war crimes seriously. Otherwise, the only place Israeli officers and soldiers will be able to travel to will be the Sinai Peninsula."
(Yesh Gvul, 26 February 2006)

"If the committee's findings uphold the allegations against Israel – even on poor reasoning – this will fundamentally alter the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian leadership and may make it impossible for Israel to resist calls for an international force, the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state and the prosecution of individuals said to have committed the alleged acts."
(Daniel Bethlehem, April 2002)

"If the committee's findings uphold the allegations against Israel - even on poor reasoning - this will fundamentally alter the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian leadership and may make it impossible for Israel to resist calls for an international force, the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state and the prosecution of individuals said to have committed the alleged acts. ... For all practical purposes, Israel is faced with a war crimes investigation."
(Daniel Bethlehem, April 2002)

"Do you know why you’re the one who does all the operations? Because you never ask for written orders. Everyone else wants explicit clarifications. But … you just do it."
(Moshe Dayan, some date in the 1950s)

"[In future, now that we have captured additional territories] The Mandate borders and armistice lines are not to be printed on the new maps."
(Yigal Allon, 3 October 1967)

"And what Eban and the other Israeli diplomats told the Americans did not necessarily correspond with what was actually happening in the West Bank or Golan Heights. Kfar Etzion, for example, was established as a civilian settlement, but was presented to the Americans as a military outpost serving defense needs. Gorenberg describes how an American diplomat once inquired whether the reports regarding the intentions to build a yeshiva, synagogue and kindergarten in Hebron for the settlers staying at the time in the military government building were true; Foreign Ministry official Shlomo Argov gave an evasive answer."
(Aryeh (Arie) Dayan, 9 March 2006)

"Already there [in the destruction of the Mughrabi (Moroccan) quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem on 10 June 1967] one could find many of the characteristics typical of activities in the territories that we see today. The homes were destroyed without a government decision, without an orderly procedure, not according to law and without being able to determine exactly who made the decision. Like many of the activities that would follow, the destruction of the Mughrabi Quarter stemmed from the emotional tendencies of the state's leaders to determine facts that would affect the permanent status created on the ground.""
(Gershom Gorenberg, March 2006)

"They [the leaders of the Israeli state in 1967] knew perfectly well that they were doing things opposed to international law. ... They were always aware of this problem [of one possible outcome of the settlements being a binational state]. Levi Eshkol, for example, constantly talked about how he much he wanted the bride, i.e. the territories, but how he didn't want the dowry that came with her, i.e. the Palestinians in the territories."
(Gershom Gorenberg, March 2006)

"Because Israel's problem is not Hamas, strong or weak; the problem is with the Palestinian people, who chose it. They have to be changed or eliminated if one wants quiet - that is the problem with this public."
(Zvi Bar'el, 12 March 2006)

"Question: In you opinion, why isn't the denial of Israel's right to exist considered anti-Semitism?
Antony Lerman: "Because if I was a Palestinian and my family had lived in Palestine for six generations, and I thought of this as my home, and somebody comes in from outside and says, "actually, this is my home and I'm going to set up a state here," I can quite understand that persons' feelings that the people who have done this and set up this state are illegitimate. If I were a Palestinian, I would say that I understand the claim of the Jews because they suffered etc., but why should it be here? They [the Jews] say it's because biblically they have an attachment but I, as a Palestinian, say, 'well my people have been here for centuries, generations – that to me is equal if not more equal than the biblical claim.' I can understand that view.""
(Antony Lerman, 15 March 2006)

"Amiram Barakat: This leads to the conclusion that Israel, as a party that bears at least partial blame for the conflict not yet being resolved, also bears indirect responsibility for Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe.
Antony Lerman: "Yes, I think that's right. Israel is a sovereign state, it has to take what actions it feels are right, but the fact of the matter is that it has consequences for Jewish communities, and some these consequences are indeed to aggravate the problem of anti-Semitism.""
(Antony Lerman, 15 March 2006)

"Because if I was a Palestinian and my family had lived in Palestine for six generations, and I thought of this as my home, and somebody comes in from outside and says, "actually, this is my home and I'm going to set up a state here," I can quite understand that persons' feelings that the people who have done this and set up this state are illegitimate. If I were a Palestinian, I would say that I understand the claim of the Jews because they suffered etc., but why should it be here? They [the Jews] say it's because biblically they have an attachment but I, as a Palestinian, say, 'well my people have been here for centuries, generations - that to me is equal if not more equal than the biblical claim.' I can understand that view."
(Antony Lerman, March 2006)

"[The problem of attacks on Jews by Muslim immigrants in Europe can be easily resolved: as soon as Israel agrees to a] just solution to the Palestinian problem."
(Antony Lerman, 15 March 2006)

"No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of."
(Stephen M. Walt, 23 March 2006)

"There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. This situation undercuts Washington’s efforts to promote democracy abroad and makes it look hypocritical when it presses other states to respect human rights. US efforts to limit nuclear proliferation appear equally hypocritical given its willingness to accept Israel's nuclear arsenal, which only encourages Iran and others to seek a similar capability."
(Stephen M. Walt, 23 March 2006)

"The strategic balance decidedly favors Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbors."
(Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, 22 November 2005)

"Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any body of laws in the world ‘Ye shall blot them out to the last man.’"
(Yitzhak Shamir, Summer 1943)

"I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert. I had yearned for a Jewish homeland ever since learning as a child in Germany that in Palestine even the the policemen were Jews! Like most American Jews, however, I settled on a remote brand of Zionism, which rejected all importuning to move to Israel to share its hardships and dangers . With their guilt thus compounded, American Jews poured energy and money into synagogues and organizations whose main purpose was helping Israel, both directly and through vigorous political lobbying of presidents and Congresses. Israel became so crucial to the definition of Jewish identity that most Jews gave unqualified support to its governments . They brooked no criticism of Israeli society or policy. Especially ..."
(Max Frankel, 1999)

"Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective. And I wrote in confidence that The Times no longer suffered from any secret desire to deny or overcome its ethnic roots. Besides freely and frequently lecturing Israel on its diplomatic opportunities, I dared near the end of my first year to speak to America's Jews as a Jew. Entitled "The Jews"
(Max Frankel, 1999)

"I cannot help myself. I sympathise with the Arabs who are in revolt [in Palestine], whose land is being 'bought'. A Red Indian fate, says [my wife]"
(Victor Klemperer, 2 November 1933)

"To me, the Zionists, who want to go back to the Jewish state of AD70 (destruction of Jerusalem by Titus), are just as offensive as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient 'cultural roots', their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world they are altogether a match for the National Socialists."
(Victor Klemperer, 13 June 1934)

"Acquiring a superior [that is, nuclear] weapons system would mean the possibility of using it for compellent purposes - that is, forcing the other side to accept Israeli political demands"
(Shimon Peres, some date before the 1970s)

"I don't want the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to be held under the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb."
(Moshe Sneh, some date before 2006)

"This very night, as he sips his cognac, what is Vladimir Putin thinking? Is he perhaps thinking about the perverse symmetries of history? If so, he may also be wondering (and discussing with his closest aides) how a truly great nation like the United States could be so blind and so stupid as to allow another state, i.e., Israel, to control its foreign policy, especially in a region as vital (and volatile) as the Mid-East."
(Mark Gaffney, 2 November 2004)

"I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy [in the Middle East] not approved by the Jews. Former Secretary of State George Marshall and former Defense Secretary James Forrestal learned that… terrific control the Jews have over the news media and the barrage the Jews have built up on Congressmen… I am very much concerned over the fact that the Jewish influence here is completely dominating the scene and making it almost impossible to get Congress to do anything they don't approve of. The Israeli embassy is practically dictating to the Congress through influential Jewish people in the country."
(John Foster Dulles, February 1957)

"I've never seen a president – I don't care who he is – stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles your mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what's going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what grip those people have on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don't have any idea what goes on."
(Thomas Moorer, 1999)

"[On leaving Jerusalem at the end of the mandate, I felt] overwhelming sadness. ... Thirty years and we achieved nearly nothing."
(Alan Cunningham, some date after 14 May 1948)

"Hardly had the last English soldier disappeared than the Jews launched their offensive, consolidating their possession of Katamon which they occupied two weeks before and seizing the German Colony and the other southern districts of Jerusalem. The last remaining Arabs were liquidated, and from henceforth, the Jews were absolute masters of the southern part of the city."
(Pablo de Azcárate y Flórez, 1966)

"If the U.N. does not come into account in this matter, and they [the Arab states] make war against us and we defeat them ... why should we bind ourselves?"
(David Ben-Gurion, 12 May 1948)

"The regime created by the [British Mandate] Emergency Regulations is without precedent in a civilized society. Even Nazi Germany had no such laws ... Only one kind of system resembles these conditions — that of a country under occupation."
(Ya'akov (Ya'acov) Shimshon Shapira, 1945)

"Martial law was initially instituted to prevent the return of refugees, or 'infiltrators,' as they were called, and to prevent those who had succeeded in crossing the border from returning to their homes. ... The second role assigned to martial rule was to evacuate semi-abandoned neighborhoods and villages as well as some which had not been abandoned — and to transfer their inhabitants to other parts of the country. Some were evacuated from a 'security cordon' along the borders, and others were removed in order to make room for Jews. The third function of martial rule was to impose political supervision over the Arab population. In the process, the Arabs were isolated from the Jewish population."
(Tom Segev, 1986)

"All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust [Charles] Percy. And the American politicians—those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire—got the message."
(Thomas (Tom) A. Dine, 1984)

"I think financial aid must be given to Hamas. Giving to NGO's will not solve the problem. You cannot call for democracy in the Arab world and then punish the people who are elected."
(Shlomo Ben-Ami, 9 April 2006)

"The convergence plan is based on fallacies. [Olmert] assumes that if he fails to reach a settlement with the PA - and the PA for him is Abu Mazen [PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas] - the international community will accept his unilaterally defined borders as final borders. They will not. ... All the years we held a security zone, we did not achieve the level of quiet that we have had since we returned to internationally accepted borders. Withdrawing to unilateral borders that include settlement blocs is not going to give us security."
(Shlomo Ben-Ami, 9 April 2006)

"The Clinton plan gave the Palestinians compensation and a land swap. But the Bush letter to [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon is like the Balfour Declaration. It only tells Jews what they will get and ignores the other side."
(Shlomo Ben-Ami, 9 April 2006)

"[US policy is] based on a major conceptual mistake of the Neocons. They thought that if you give the Arabs a choice to vote, they will chose what you want. But if you give the vote today to Egyptians they will bring in an Islamist government which is not friendly to either the US or Israel."
(Shlomo Ben-Ami, 9 April 2006)

"Hamas is not al-Qaida. It is an organization that has used terror in the service of well-defined national goals ... You can argue the means are inadmissible, but the rationale is essentially nationalistic."
(Shlomo Ben-Ami, 9 April 2006)

"I think if Hamas offered a long-term cease-fire long ago, in contradiction to their basic ideology, then negotiations will likely lead them further ... they cannot be expected to change their long-standing policy ... about accepting Israel without signs of a quid pro quo."
(Shlomo Ben-Ami, 9 April 2006)

"Cutting aid to the Palestinian Authority is certain to lead to more violence, not less. Israel and the international community should find a formula for interacting with the Palestinian Authority."
(Nicholas Pelham, 10 April 2006)

"Writing of George Wadsworth, who served in various Middle Eastern posts before and during World War II, Baram remarks that he in effect misled his Arab hearers with his constant maximal pledges of American support and with his concomitant downgrading of any American interest in Zionism. ... For had not State Department officers like Wadsworth conditioned and assured them for years that American foreign policy was anti-Zionist."
(Elie Kedourie, July 1979)

"Israel stands by its refusal, still dumping all the responsibility on Pollard ... even though we know that all the prime ministers knew of this matter. ... They must tell the Americans, gentlemen, it was Israel which spied on the United States, not Pollard, but Israel."
(Nitzana Darshan-Leitner, April 2006)

"It would be accurate to call what I am pursuing a 'hitkansut'."
(Ehud Olmert, 20 March 2006)

"In 1996, Richard Perle and Doug Feith joined a small group of researchers who were asked to help Benjamin Netanyahu in his first steps as prime minister. ... At this point the two Jewish experts, eventually to become key Pentagon players, are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments (including the Reagan administration, in which Perle played a key role) and Israeli interests."
(Akiva Eldar, 2 October 2002)

"You call, we come"
(Colin Powell, some date in 2001-2004)

"[Moshe Dayan says that] The only thing that is necessary [in Lebanon] is to find an officer, even just a Major. We should either win his heart or buy him with money, to make him agree to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani [River] southward will be totally annexed to Israel and everything will be all right."
(Moshe Shertok, 16 May 1955)

"This underlies the point that it is precisely those [Palestinian] refugees whom Lebanon would most like to get rid of—the poor, the underqualified—who are least able to emigrate. Without an exit, state policies appear aimed less at increasing emigration than at creating despair and social breakdown in the camps, perhaps to justify their demolition as 'breeding grounds of criminality'."
(Rosemary Sayigh, 1995)

"It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public."
(Edward S. Herman, October 1995)

"When Israel’s interests are being considered, members of Congress act like trained poodles. They jump dutifully through hoops held by Israel’s lobby. ... The lobby’s most powerful instrument of intimidation is the reckless charge of anti-Semitism."
(George W. Ball, some date before 1995)

"Alexandria was the New York of the ancient world. ... Like New York it was a meeting point of diverse races, languages, cultures, and religions. Like New York, it was the city with the largest Jewish population in the world. The Jewish diaspora started in Alexandria long before the destruction of Jerusalem."
(Amos Elon, 26 May 2005)

"Moshe Dayan compared the Fatah to the Irgun; in this comparison, Israel took the role of the despised British. Many years later, Ehud Barak said that if he were a Palestinian, he would have joined the terror organizations. Fatah hijacked planes and thereby put the Palestinian problem on the world map - Who knows if anyone would have heard about their distress if it weren't for their terror? It's doubtful if Ariel Sharon would have initiated the dismantling of the settlements in the Gaza Strip if not for Palestinian terror. This is the same Ariel Sharon who in the 1950s stood at the head of a renowned paratroop unit that committed acts of terror in Palestinian villages across the border. What does all this mean? Only that terror is terror is terror."
(Tom Segev, 21 April 2006)

"[Literature about 'The Holocaust'] condones in advance any inhuman treatment of non-Jews, for the prevailing mythology is that 'all peoples collaborated with the Nazis in the destruction of Jewry,' hence everything is permissible to Jews in their relationship to other peoples."
(Boas (Boaz) Evron, 1995)

"Holocaust awareness is actually an official, propagandistic indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present.""
(Boas (Boaz) Evron, 1995)

"It [the Balfour Declaration] was undoubtedly inspired by natural sympathy, admiration, and also by the fact that, as you must remember, we had been trained even more in Hebrew history than in the history of our own country. On five days a week in the day school, and on Sunday in our Sunday schools, we were thoroughly versed in the history of the Hebrews ... We had all that in our minds, so that the appeal came to sympathetic and educated — and, on that question, intelligent — hearts."
(David Lloyd George, 1925)

"This country of Palestine belongs to you and to me, it is essentially ours. It was given to the Father of Israel in the words: ‘Walk through the land in the length of it, and in the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee.’ We mean to walk through Palestine in the length and in the breadth of it, because that land has been given to us. It is the land from which comes news of our Redemption. It is the land towards which we turn as the fountain of all our hopes; it is the land to which we may look with as true a patriotism as we do to this dear old England, which we love so much."
(William IX Thomson, 1865)

"I once had a long conversation with a Western journalist who lamented that during an interview with a Palestinian activist, she had used the term 'occupation' incessantly. When I asked what the problem was, the journalist responded, 'We are tired of hearing about the occupation,' oblivious to the fact that I, as a Palestinian, am tired of living it."
(Diana Buttu, May 2006)

"I never expected the exhibition to be taken down. The mission statement of this educational institution [Brandeis university] is ’truth unto its innermost parts,’ and the fact that the exhibit was taken down behind my back is the absolute opposite of that statement."
(Lior Halperin, May 2006)

"More than once, the Palestine question was put to Dad [Harry S. Truman] in terms of American politics. At a cabinet luncheon on October 6, 1947, Bob Hannegan almost made a speech, pointing out how many Jews were major contributors to the Democratic Party's campaign fund and were expecting the United States to support the Zionists' position on Palestine."
(Margaret Truman, 1972)

"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."
(Philip D. Zelikow, 10 September 2002)

"Finally. . . I wanted to offer some comments on Iraq. . . . I beg your patience, but I think there are some points that are worth making that aren’t being made by either side in the current debate.

The Iraq situation this administration inherited is and has been unsustainable. Ever since 1996 the Iraqi situation has basically unravelled. . . . So then the real question is, OK, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to end up fixing it? And if you don’t like the administration’s approach, what’s the recommended alternative?

Another thing Americans absorb, and this administration especially, is the lesson of Afghanistan. Because remember we knew that international terrorist groups were plotting to kill Americans in a sanctuary called Afghanistan. . . [I]n retrospect, it is perfectly clear that only . . . an [American] invasion could reliably have pre-empted the 9/11 attacks, which relied on people who were being trained in that sanctuary . . . So what lesson does one take from that with respect to Iraq? Well you can see the lesson this administration has taken from that example. And so contemplate what lesson you take.

Third. The unstated threat. And here I criticise the [Bush] administration a little, because the argument that they make over and over again is that this is about a threat to the United States. And then everybody says: ‘Show me an imminent threat from Iraq to America. Show me, why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?’ So I’ll tell you what I think the real threat is, and actually has been since 1990. It’s the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it’s not a popular sell.

Now . . . if the danger is a biological weapon handed to Hamas, then what’s the American alternative then? Especially if those weapons have developed to the point where they now can deter us from attacking them, because they really can retaliate against us, by then. Play out those scenarios . . . Don’t look at the ties between Iraq and al-Qaida, but then ask yourself the question: ‘Gee, is Iraq tied to Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the people who are carrying out suicide bombings in Israel?’ Easy question to answer, and the evidence is abundant.

Yes, there are a lot of other problems in the world . . . My view, by the way, is the more you examine these other problems and try to put together a comprehensive strategy for America and the Middle East, the more I’m driven to the conclusion that it’s better for us to deal with Iraq sooner rather than later. Because those other problems don’t get easier . . . And the Iraq problem is a peculiar combination at the moment, of being exceptionally dangerous at a time when Iraq is exceptionally weak militarily. Now that’s an appealing combination for immediate action . . . But . . . if we wait two years, and then there’s another major terrorist attack against the United States, does it then become easier to act against Iraq, even though the terrorist attack didn’t come from Iraq? No. . . . [A]t this moment, because of the time we bought in the war against terror, it actually makes it easier to go about Iraq now, than waiting a year or two until the war against terror gets harder again."
(Philip D. Zelikow, 10 September 2002)

"It would have been better if Israel never happened."
(Tony Kushner, some date before 2007)

"We met with one Palestinian this whole trip. They don’t seem to have any voice in the media. This [Israel] is the most racist country I’ve ever seen."
(Carlo McCormick, May 2006)

"I can’t help but wonder, what do the Palestinians have to say about things?"
(Aliya King, 21 May 2006)

"Israel will supervise and guard the external envelope on land, will maintain exclusive control in the air space of Gaza, and will continue to conduct military activities in the sea space of the Gaza Strip."
(Haaretz staff, 16 April 2004)

"I believe that in four years’ time, Israel will be disengaged from the vast majority of the Palestinian population, within new borders, with the route of the fence - which until now has been a security fence - adjusted to the new line of the permanent borders."
(Ehud Olmert, 27 March 2006)

"Eugenics is considered to be something that only happened in Germany. Germany was indeed the most murderous manifestation of eugenics, but in fact it was a movement that attracted many followers. In every place it took on a unique, local aspect. It is interesting to note that both in Germany and in Israel a link was made between eugenics, health and nationalism."
(Sachlav Stoler-Liss, 2004)

"Who is entitled to give birth to children? The correct answer is sought by eugenics, the science of improving the race and preserving it from degeneration. This science is still young, but its positive results are already great and important - These cases [referring to marriages of people with hereditary disorders] are not at all rare in all nations and in particular in the Hebrew nation that has lived a life of exile for 1,800 years. And now our nation has returned to be reborn, to a natural life in the land of the Patriarchs. Is it not our obligation to see to it that we have whole and healthy children in body and soul? For us, eugenics as a whole, and the prevention of the transmission of hereditary disorders in particular, even greater value than for all other nations! ... Doctors, people involved in sport and the national leaders must make broad propaganda for the idea: Do not have children if you are not certain that they will be healthy in body and soul!"
(Joseph (Yosef) Meir, 1934)

"We have no interest in the 10th child or even in the seventh in poor families from the East ... In today's reality we should pray frequently for a second child in a family that is a part of the intelligentsia. The poor classes of the population must not be instructed to have many children, but rather restricted."
(Joseph (Yosef) Meir, 1950)

"Today the secret is out. We [the Israeli team at the United Nations] really are not just five diplomats. We are at least six including John Bolton [the US ambassador to the UN]."
(Dan Gillerman, 22 May 2006)

"I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated – the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else."
(Marwan al-Barghouti, 16 January 2002)

"Later I did publish one of the pictures in the United Church Observer, of a little girl recovering from napalm burns. That, I was told, proved I was anti-Semitic. To condemn napalm in Vietnam is alright. To report its use by the Israelis is considered anti-Semitic."
(Alfred Clinton Forrest, 1971)

"We will never agree to become subject to an investigation by international bodies."
(Ehud Olmert, 18 June 2006)

"From 1946 to 1947 there were scarcely any Arab attacks on the Yishuv [the Jewish community in Palestine]."
(David Ben-Gurion, in his history of Israel)

"While Koestler proved to be right about a Turkic component in the Ashkenazic ethnogenesis, he erroneously overemphasized this component (which appears to have been far less significant than the Slavic) ..."
(Paul Wexler, 1993)

"At the Caesarea Conference, a devastating report was revealed proving that discrimination against Arabs in education, the establishment of industrial zones, investment aid, and wage levels has led to poverty among Israeli Arabs that is three times greater than the Jewish population."
(Meron Benvenisti, 29 June 2006)

"A huge penal colony, a collection of overcrowded slums, a cesspool of poverty and frustration ready to explode at any minute because there is no hope – that is Gaza. It is there in front of us for anyone to diagnose or analyse. But, Israel, above all, has no right to pass judgment or complain about the way the denizens of Gaza behave. Israel is the curse of Gaza; it made Gaza what it is today."
(Azmi Bishara, 29 June 2006)

"The name given to this hormonal outburst is "Summer Rains" - something else that is abnormal in the region. Summer rains; it's certainly less successful than the codename the Palestinians gave to their attack: "Smashed illusion." The signs of the disease are already evident - insignificant to start with, but symptomatic nonetheless. First destroy the power station and impose a blackout on Gaza and then, at night, drop leaflets on the population. And how are they supposed to read the Israeli letter in the dark? Amass tanks and armored personnel carriers, which have zero capability of fighting in the narrow alleys of Gaza, and at the same time, fly noisily over Bashar Assad's palace. That's logical. After all, the idea is to frighten people, both those considered influential over the leaders of the foreign-based Hamas, as well as the local leadership by making the terrified local population rise up against it. But there's no wait for the effect of the intimidation. Instead, there's a rush to kidnap a few dozen politicians, of the type who were supposed to get frightened, and lock them up."
(Zvi Bar'el, 2 July 2006)

"A new order is what this government wants to impose, to wipe out the Hamas government and install Abu Mazen as Israel's business manager in the territories."
(Zvi Bar'el, 2 July 2006)

"The arrest of public figures in Hamas is intended to provide Israel with a bargaining chip vis-a-vis Gilad Shalit's kidnappers. So that Israel itself will not be seen as a state that takes hostages, the arrests are justified on the grounds that Hamas is a terror organization"
(Uzi Benziman, 2 July 2006)

"THE SECOND victim of the operation is the "Convergence Plan", which has become ridiculous. In the eyes of the ordinary Israeli, it looks like this: We have left Gaza, and now we are returning. We dismantled the settlements there, and got the Qassams on Sderot in return. Sharon has failed, so Olmert will fail doubly. That is true, but not for the obvious reasons. The withdrawal from Gaza has not brought security, because it was carried out without any dialogue or agreement with the Palestinians. It has not brought peace nearer, because it was coupled with an open intention to annex large parts of the West Bank. And, no less importantly, we did indeed leave the Gaza Strip entirely, but have blockaded it and cut it off from the world. All this is even more true for the "convergence" of Olmert. The "Summer Rains" may have washed it off the map."
(Uri Avnery, 1 July 2006)

"Israel will do everything to avoid a negotiation. Hence, it deliberately inflicts inhumane hardships on the Palestinians in order to radicalise them and drive the moderates from the scene. Moderates, who are prepared to talk, are Israel's real enemies."
(Patrick Seale, 3 July 2006)

"We do not want to create a situation like that which exists in South Africa, where the whites are the owners and rulers, and the blacks are the workers. If we do not do all kinds of work, easy and hard, skilled and unskilled, if we become merely landlords, then this will not be our homeland."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1934)

"The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."
(Dov Weisglass, 2006)

" Gaza is still a prison and its inhabitants are still doomed to live in poverty and oppression. Israel closes them off from the sea, the air and land, except for a limited safety valve at the Rafah crossing. They cannot visit their relatives in the West Bank or look for work in Israel, upon which the Gazan economy has been dependent for some 40 years. Sometimes goods can be transported, sometimes not. Gaza has no chance of escaping its poverty under these conditions. Nobody will invest in it, nobody can develop it, nobody can feel free in it. Israel left the cage, threw away the keys and left the residents to their bitter fate."
(Gideon Levy, 9 July 2006)

"What could otherwise have been expected? That Israel would unilaterally withdraw, brutally and outrageously ignoring the Palestinians and their needs, and that they would silently bear their bitter fate and would not continue to fight for their liberty, livelihood and dignity? We promised a safe passage to the West Bank and didn't keep the promise. We promised to free prisoners and didn't keep the promise. We supported democratic elections and then boycotted the legally elected leadership, confiscating funds that belong to it, and declaring war on it. We could have withdrawn from Gaza through negotiations and coordination, while strengthening the existing Palestinian leadership, but we refused to do so. And now, we complain about "a lack of leadership?" We did everything we could to undermine their society and leadership, making sure as much as possible that the disengagement would not be a new chapter in our relationship with the neighboring nation, and now we are amazed by the violence and hatred that we sowed with our own hands."
(Gideon Levy, 9 July 2006)

"Nobody would have given any thought to the fate of the people of Gaza if they did not behave violently. That is a very bitter truth, but the first 20 years of the occupation passed quietly and we did not lift a finger to end it. Instead, under cover of the quiet, we built the enormous, criminal settlement enterprise."
(Gideon Levy, 9 July 2006)

"We started. We started with the occupation, and we are duty-bound to end it, a real and complete ending. We started with the violence. There is no violence worse than the violence of the occupier, using force on an entire nation, so the question about who fired first is therefore an evasion meant to distort the picture."
(Gideon Levy, 9 July 2006)

"… and what a lovely setting for it too: against the backdrop of the rosy cliffs of Petra. Here were gathered a handful of Nobel Prize laureates who had performed not a single service for humanity. None of these had invented insulin or even aspirin, or produced great literature or made peace anywhere in the world – in fact, one of them had caused wars. It was a collection of self-obsessed narcissists, caring only about how to refine and polish their image. Prime among them was a mediocre novelist, a self-promoting racist by the name of Elie Weisel, who, regretfully, took the appalling tragedy of the death of millions of Jews in the Holocaust and reduced it to a kiosk for selling anti-Arab hatred."
(Azmi Bishara, 6 July 2006)

"That morning there was not much activity at the Tapuah checkpoint, the entry gate to the third strip of land, in the Jordan Valley, occupied by Israel. The first strip twists along the Green Line (the border before the Six-Day War) to the mountain ridge; the second strip runs along the mountain ridge, and from there slides down to the third strip - the Jordan Valley."
(Zvi Bar'el, 10 July 2006)

"There are increasing signs that the government is making plans to redraw Jerusalem's boundaries. According to the plan taking shape, the neighborhoods that are on the "edge" of the city will be removed from its boundaries "in order to improve the demographic balance," which is clearly tilting in favor of the Palestinians."
(Daniel Seidemann, 11 July 2006)

"The children see like everyone else what is going on around them. I'm afraid that they will be the ones who lead the third intifada, just as the children of the first intifada led the second intifada."
(Karen Koning Abu Zayd, 11 July 2006)

"Since the early days of Zionism, Jews have become used to the fact that national institutions such as the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund, are off limits for Israeli Arabs. Left and right have joined together to prevent Israel's Arab citizens from gaining entry to these Jewish clubs. After all, the purpose of their existence is to "Judaize" the country and "redeem" its lands. The High Court of Justice did rule that a democratic country may not allocate its resources based on the origin of its citizens or their religious faith (Katzir High Court of Justice ruling), but the World Zionist Organization's activists and its various branches, who do not refrain from donating their money for grabbing land in the West Bank, found ways to assure that state lands in the Galilee do not fall into the hands of the gentiles."
(Akiva Eldar, 11 July 2006)

"How is one to assess the present situation? In moral terms, Israel’s conduct is morally indefensible. But I am concerned with the law. And here it is clear that Israel is in violation of the most fundamental norms of humanitarian law and human rights law. Operation ’Summer Rains’, as Israel has cynically labelled its siege of Gaza, offends the prohibition on collective punishment. It likewise violates the prohibition on "measures of intimidation and terrorism" – ail contained in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The arrest of Hamas Cabinet ministers and legislators seems to constitute "the taking of hostages", prohibited by Article 34."
(John Dugard, 5 July 2006)

"[W]e can either go to the aid of Jordan against Israel, or we can launch Musketeer; we cannot do both."
(Gerald Templer, 10 Oct 1956)

"[The best way to retrieve the two captured soldiers] is to destroy totally the international airport of Beirut. ... [Prevention of the movement of the two soldiers] is why we will also destroy all the roads in Lebanon leading outside the country."
(Tzipora Livni, 13 July 2006)

"[Israel will] turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years"
(Dan Halutz (Haloutz), 12 July 2006)

"Over the years Israelis had cultivated a self-serving myth that ours was an 'enlightened occupation.' Our self image as a humane society and history's eternal victim blinded us to what was going on in the territories…. What I discovered [in the negotiations] was that a West Bank Palestinian could not build, work, study, purchase land, grow produce, start a business, take a walk at night, enter Israel, go abroad, or visit his family in Gaza or Jordan without a permit from us. About a third of the Palestinian population had been detained or imprisoned by Israel. And the whole of the population had been grossly humiliated by us."
(Uri Savir, 29 June 1999)

"So to Jeremy Bowen, James Reynolds, Ben Brown, Wyre Davies, Matthew Price and all the other BBC journalists reporting from the frontline of the Middle East, and the faceless news executives who sent them there, I say: you may be nice people with the best of intentions, but shame on you."
(Jonathan Cook, 17 July 2006)

"No, my dear, the Jewish state will make us nationalists, and will one day make us racialists."
(Hugh Blaschko, mid 1970s)

"What's proportion got to do with it? It's not about proportion is it? Human life is not cheap to the Israelis. And human life on the other side is quite cheap actually because they strap bombs to people and send them to blow themselves up"
(Maureen Lipman, 13 July 2006)

"To justify or condone Israel's wars against the Arabs is to render Israel a very bad service indeed and harm its own long-term interest. ... The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase 'Man kann sich totseigen!' 'You can triumph yourself to death'."
(Isaac Deutscher, 1967)

"An intellectual dean of the neoconservatives, Bernard Lewis, has long advocated the “Lebanonization” of the Middle East, meaning the disintegration of nation states into “a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties.” This divide-and-conquer strategy, a brainchild of the region’s British colonizers, is already taking effect in Iraq, where America overthrew a secular state, installed a Shiite majority and its militias in power and now portrays itself as the only protection for Sunnis against those same Shiites. The resulting quagmire has become a justification for American troops to remain."
(Tom Hayden, 20 July 2006)

"In summary, it can be said that the area of Maroun al-Ras, that had served as a [Hezbollah] vantage point over Avivim, now serves as an [Israeli] vantage point over Bint Jbail."
(Benny Gantz, 22 July 2006)

"[The plight of Lebanon is part of the] birth pangs of a new Middle East. ... This is a different Middle East. It's a new Middle East. It's hard, We're going through a very violent time. A ceasefire would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo. Such a step would allow terrorists to launch attacks at the time and terms of their choosing and to threaten innocent people, Arab and Israeli, throughout the region."
(Condoleezza (Condi) Rice, 22 July 2006)

"The difference between archaeology and diplomacy, Thomas Pickering once said, is that in archaeology you uncover the unknown, in diplomacy you cover the known."
(Shmuel Rosner, 21 July 2006)

"If these numbers have to be evacuated, it [the evacuation of British citizens from a Lebanon being attacked by Israel] becomes the biggest evacuation since Dunkirk."
(Kim Howells, 16 July 2006)

"In their leaflet campaign, the Israelis have warned repeatedly they would consider minivans, trucks and motorcyles as targets. "The minivans are a target for Israel because they can take Katyusha rockets for Hizbullah, so they do not contemplate too long," the UN official said. "They just shoot it.""
(Suzanne Goldenberg, 24 July 2006)

"These [Israeli attacks on Lebanon] have not been surgical strikes. And it's very, very difficult I think to understand the kind of military tactics that have been used."
(Kim Howells, 22 July 2006)

"[The Israelis] know only too well it is not enough just to seek a military victory, they have got to win a wider political battle. That means they have got to think very hard about those children who are dying. It is not enough to say it is unfortunate collateral damage. Every person who has got a mobile phone, every person who can take a photograph of somebody being blown to bits, or a child with a limb missing, is a reporter now."
(Kim Howells, 23 July 2006)

"I think it [the Israeli attack on Lebanon] is something the whole world should worry a great deal about."
(Kim Howells, 23 July 2006)

"I very much hope that the Americans understand what's happening to Lebanon. The destruction of the infrastructure, the death of so many children and so many people. These have not been surgical strikes."
(Kim Howells, 22 July 2006)

"In a macabre twist, the bodies of 13 Lebanese fighters were taken from Maroun al-Ras and buried in Israel to use in future negotiations over the release of Israeli prisoners."
(Ian Black, 24 July 2006)

"[The Israeli attacks are] a violation of humanitarian law. It is horrific. I did not know it was block after block of houses. It's bigger, it's more extensive than I even could imagine."
(Jan Egeland, 23 July 2006)

"More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified."
(Matthew Kalman, 21 July 2006)

"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared. In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal, when it became clear the international community was not going to prevent Hezbollah from stockpiling missiles and attacking Israel. By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."
(Gerald Steinberg, July 2006)

"In Lebanon the shock of the assassination [of Rafik Hariri] was equal to the aftermath of September 11 and Princess Diana's funeral"
(Nadim Shehadi, March 2005)

"Without the support, active or passive, of the general Jewish public the terrorist gangs who actually carried out these criminal acts would soon be unearthed, and in this measure the Jews in this country are accomplices and bear a share of the guilt.

I am determined that they shall suffer punishment and be made aware of the contempt and loathing with which we regard their conduct. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the hypocritical sympathy shown by their leaders and representative bodies, or by their protests that they are in no way responsible for these acts. I repeat that if the Jewish public really wanted to stop these crimes, they could do so by acting in co-operation with us.

Consequently, I have decided that with effect on receipt of this letter you will put out of bounds to all ranks all Jewish establishments, restaurants, shop, and private dwellings. No British soldier is to have any social intercourse with any Jew, and any intercourse in the way of duty should be as brief as possible and kept strictly to the business in hand.

I appreciate that these measures will inflict some hardship on the troops, yet I am certain that if my reasons are fully explained to them they will understand their propriety and will be punishing the Jews in a way the race dislikes as much as any, by striking at their pockets and showing our contempt of them."
(Evelyn Barker, 26 July 1946)

"While it's not surprising that nearly every editorial page in the U.S. has offered support for Israel's right to retaliate against Hamas and Hezbollah, it's a disgrace that few have expressed outrage, or at least condemnation, over the extent of death and destruction in and around Beirut -- and the attacks on the country's infrastructure, which harms most citizens of that country."
(Greg Mitchell, July 2006)

"The goal of the operation is to get the southern Lebanese population to move northward, hoping that this will tell the Lebanese government something about the refugees, who may get as far north as Beirut."
(Yitzhak Rabin, July 1993)

"The residents of southern Lebanon are under pressure… If they understand that the address for peace and quiet is the government of Lebanon, which will impose its authority on Hizbollah, then this pressure is worthwhile."
(Giora Inbar, April 1996)

"Let's say we manage to kill every single Hizbullah fighter. Say America attacks Iran and takes out its nuclear reactor. Say we hit Iran. When we've done all that we'll still have to deal with Gaza and the Palestinians."
(Tom Segev, July 2006)

"The Olmert-Peretz plan was to shell and demolish south Lebanon and south Beirut until the Lebanese public demanded that its government vomit Hezbollah out from its midst. It appears that like a number of other Israeli leaders, they did not understand how much killing, poverty and distress people are willing to take, as long as their honor is not harmed, as long as they are not humiliated. And indeed, instead of demanding that Hezbollah be dismantled, the people of Lebanon want revenge, and they want it now. That is their response to the killing of 750 civilians and the destruction of thousands of homes, bridges, roads, villages and towns, putting Lebanon 20 years in the past."
(Nehemia Shtrasler, 1 August 2006)

"So when this latest foreign army arrives, count the days – or hours – to the first attack upon it. Then we'll hear all over again that we are fighting evil, that "they" – Hizbollah or Palestinian guerrillas, or anyone else planning to destroy "our" army – hate our values; and then, of course, we'll be told that this is all part of the "War on Terror" – the nonsense which Israel has been peddling. And then perhaps we'll remember what George Bush senior said after Hizbollah's allies suicide-bombed the Marines in 1982, that American policy would not be swayed by a bunch of "insidious terrorist cowards". And we all know what happened then. Or have we forgotten?"
(Robert Fisk, 1 August 2006)

"We must reduce to dust the villages of the south [of Lebanon] ... I don’t understand why there is still electricity there ..."
(Haim Ramon, 28 July 2006)

"The Bible says: "They have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind." I feel deeply sorry for the families of killed Israelis, just as I feel deeply sorry for the families of killed Lebanese and Palestinians. But when the Israeli electorate decided, in its folly, to elect Olmert, they voted to reap the whirlwind."
(Gerald Kaufman, 31 July 2006)

" Israel's plan seems to be either to use foreigners to do its work or, if that fails, to turn south Lebanon into a giant Rafah - the city in Gaza where it demolished hundreds of homes and created a free-fire zone in which anything that moved was shot."
(Jonathan Steele, 28 July 2006)

"Until Jews are prepared to articulate the need to sever the identification of Judaism and Israel, anti-Semitism will flourish. Until Jews are prepared to argue that the Holocaust and its legacy is not the province of a nation state, let alone a justification for Zionism, our responsibility in relation to the dead will continue to be betrayed. We should demand better of ourselves."
(Andrew Benjamin, 4 August 2006)

"Neocon prescriptions [of use of force to try to change things unilaterally] of which Israel has its equivalents, are fatal for America and ultimately for Israel. They will totally turn the overwhelming majority of the Middle East's population against the United States. The lessons of Iraq speak for themselves. Eventually, if neocon policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well."
(Zbigniew Brzezinski, July 2006)

"While insisting on its ‘right to exist’ within ‘secure’ borders, Israel has never declared them, and its leaders resist any attempt to make them do so. Israel’s Defence Ministry insists that the so-called ‘separation fence’, which confiscates a significant portion of the Palestinian West Bank, including rich farming lands, creates a ‘seam’, not a border. The territory over which the Jewish state exercises sovereignty is, in all but name, a binational country. This in no small part accounts for Zionism’s schizophrenic relationship to borders, which are at once deemed necessary (for the sake of ‘separation’ from the Arabs) and resented (as an obstacle to further expansion)."
(Adam Shatz, 28 July 2006)

"When I suggested last year that those defending the Israeli government should declare whether or not they were Jewish, there was a bit of a shindig and I was accused, not of the first time, of being anti-Semitic. The point seemed then - and still seems - uncontroversial. It applies not only to Jews, but anyone taking sides in any of the controversies of our day. If a man writes in support of gay marriages, for example, is he himself gay? As the late John Junor used to say, I think we should be told. In journalism, as in politics, people who have an interest should declare it."
(Richard Ingrams, 5 August 2006)

"“I believe this [war on Lebanon] is a war which is fought by all the Jews”"
(Ehud Olmert, August 2006)

"Initially, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert opposed the reinforcement of UNIFIL, arguing that the force was ineffective, and demanded a new force with a Security Council mandate. He changed his mind after he realized that the Lebanese government has the right to veto the deployment of foreign troops on its soil."
(Aluf Benn, 6 August 2006)

"Nasrallah will remember who Amir Peretz is."
(Amir Peretz, August 2006)

"Nasrallah will never forget the name Amir Peretz!"
(Amir Peretz, August 2006)

"Now the IDF has sent to Lebanon soldiers who have been taught to believe that warfare is running down refugees' homes with tanks and bulldozers; that a battle is firing from helicopters at fighters with Kalashnikov rifles who cannot even scratch the Israeli tank surfaces. These soldiers think that defending the homeland is preventing hundreds of thousands of people from living like human beings, by operating roadblocks in the territories. By another twisted standard set by the Israeli army in recent years, homes in northern Israel whose occupants have left to escape the Katyushas are to be designated as "abandoned." This, after all, is how Israeli military spokesmen justified, initially, the fact that bulldozers systematically demolished the homes of civilians in Khan Yunis and Rafah - civilians who had fled massive Israeli fire. Bulldozers will not raze the homes of Israelis in the North, but why should thieves, for example, not take from them whatever they can get their hands on? These are, after all, abandoned homes, the thieves will say in their defense, citing the precedents. Why bring this up today? First, because the war - state cruelty - against the Palestinians is ongoing. Second, because Israel's double standard and basic contempt for anyone who isn't "us" explains better than the army's outdated equipment and faulty training why it has been receiving blows so far and will continue to receive them. Israel is convinced that in Lebanon, as in Gaza and the West Bank, its unlimited power to destroy is both a deterrent and spur to political change. It is ignoring the human factor - that the Palestinians and Lebanese' fortitude grows in lockstep with our strengthening powers of destruction"
(Amira Hass, 9 August 2006)

"I couldn't work in a newspaper whose editor-in-chief wrote he had no problem with killing innocent people in Lebanon. I cannot condone killing or wounding innocent people, whether they're in Beirut, Haifa or Kfar Giladi. It's Rafi Ginat's right to write whatever he likes. After all, I'm nobody and he's the editor of Israel's biggest newspaper. I can only protest, say thank you very much for the beautiful time I spent here and leave."
(Faiz Abbas, August 2006)

"I have no problem being less moral in my own eyes if it saves the life of one child in Golani. For him I'm willing to wash Hezbollah's terrorists, their assistants, the collaborators and those who turn a blind eye in boiling fire - and to let innocent people on their side die instead of innocent people on our side."
(Rafi Ginat, July 2006)

"All the wars launched by Israel against our country have been claimed to be self-defensive ... How could a resolution provide for a cessation of hostilities, and then in fact carry the great risk of continued violence and destruction?"
(Tarek Mitri, 8 August 2006)

"Read this carefully and follow its instructions. The Israeli Defence Forces will escalate their operations and will strike with force against terrorist elements who are using you as human shields and firing rockets from inside your homes against Israel."
(Israeli Government, 8 August 2006)

"There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the South African apartheid regime, nor did we recognize the Afghan Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein's Iraq or the Serbs' ethnic cleansing. We must now get used to the idea: The state of Israel in its current form is history. We do not believe in the notion of God's chosen people. We laugh at this people's fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God's chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism."
(Jostein Gaarder, 5 August 2006)

"One of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon."
(Thomas E. Ricks, 6 August 2006)

"Killing civilians intentionally is a war crime. ... There are people who never notice the black flag [of illegality], even when they are killing a bound Arab. There are others who notice it only when they get old. Like me. When I was a young pilot, I didn’t examine the choice of methods."
(Yigal Shohat, 18 January 2002)

"[The Litani valley is among the] minimum requirements essential to the realization of the Jewish National Home."
(Chaim Weizmann, 1919)

"There is no sense of apartheid on the streets of Tel Aviv. But cross the checkpoints into the West Bank and you find yourself in a bantustan. It looks like a bantustan and it feels like a bantustan, with rutted roads and shabby buildings and little infrastructure. I drove into Ramallah, which is supposed to be the Palestinian capital, and it reminded me of Mthatha, the one-time capital of Transkei."
(Allister Sparks, 9 August 2006)

"the number of people killed [in this war] doesn't reflect morality"
(Israeli professor, 12 August 2006)

"Today Arab and Muslim society is reasonably certain that the defeat of Israel is possible and that countdown to the disappearance of the Zionist entity in the region has begun. ... For, if a mere organization succeeded in defeating Israel, why would Arab nations not succeed in doing so if they allied? Many Arabs and Muslims viewed Israel in a fictional way and the resistance has succeeded in changing this."
(Ahmed Barakat, 13 August 2006)

"All political elites, the presidency, the factions and the government are invited to discuss the future of the Palestinian Authority following this attack [the Israeli arrest of parliament speaker Aziz Dweik]. Can the Palestinian Authority function under the occupation, kidnappings and assassination?"
(Ismail Haniyeh, 9 August 2000)

"It's our right to question the benefit of the continuation of the Palestinian Authority. The continuation of the Palestinian Authority will acquit Israel from it's responsibility as an occupying power."
(Salam Fayyad, 9 August 2000)

"The IDF demanded 60 additional hours of full activity in Lebanon before the ceasefire agreement came into effect. It got 60 additional hours. The goal was to capture strategic points in south Lebanon, up to the Litani River, as well as to cleanse the area of Hizbullah holdouts."
(Nahum Barnea, 13 August 2006)

"The neocons in Washington may be happy [with the Israeli attack on Lebanon in July 2006], but Israel did not need to be pushed, because Israel has been wanting to get rid of Hezbollah. By provoking Israel, Hezbollah provided that opportunity."
(Yossi Melman, some date between 12 July and 13 August 2006)

"Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, 'to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear.'"
(Seymour (Sy) Hersh, 21 August 2006)

"The Israeli plan [for its attack on Lebanon in July 2006], according to the former senior intelligence official, was 'the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.'"
(Seymour (Sy) Hersh, 21 August 2006)

"If our fighters deep in Lebanese territory are left without food or water, I believe they can break into local Lebanese stores to solve that problem. If what they need to do is take water from the stores, they can take."
(Avi Mizrahi, 14 August 2006)

"According to [Moshe Dayan], the only thing that's necessary is to find an officer, even Just a major. We should either win his heart or buy hin with money, to make him agree to declare himself the saviour of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel and everything will be all right. If we were to accept the advice of the Chief of Staff, we would do it tomorrow, without awaiting a signal from Baghdad, but under the circumstances the Government of Iraq will do our will and will occupy Syria.

... I did not want to bicker with Ben Gurion ... in front of his officers and limited myself to saying [to him] that this might mean ... war between Israel and Syria. ... At the same time I agreed to set up a joint commission composed of officials of the Foreign Affairs Ministry and the army to deal with Lebanese affairs. ... /According to Ben-Gurion/ this commission should relate to the Prime Minister.

The Chief of Staff supports a plan to hire a [Lebanese] officer who will agree to serve as a puppet so that the Israeli army may appear as responding to his appeal to liberate Lebanon from its Hosiery oppressors. This will of course be a crazy adventure. ... We must try to prevent dangerous complications. The commission must be charged with research tasks and prudent actions directed at encouraging Maronite circles who reject Moslem pressures and agree to lean on us."
(Moshe Sharet, 28 May 1954)

"According to [Moshe Dayan], the only thing that's necessary is to find an officer, even Just a major. We should either win his heart or buy hin with money, to make him agree to declare himself the saviour of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel and everything will be all right. If we were to accept the advice of the Chief of Staff [Dayan], we would do it tomorrow, without awaiting a signal from Baghdad, but under the circumstances the Government of Iraq will do our will and will occupy Syria. ... I did not want to bicker with Ben Gurion ... in front of his officers and limited myself to saying [to him] that this might mean ... war between Israel and Syria. ... At the same time I agreed to set up a joint commission composed of officials of the Foreign Affairs Ministry and the army to deal with Lebanese affairs. ... [According to Ben-Gurion] this commission should relate to the Prime Minister."
(Moshe Shertok, 16 May 1954)

"For the first time since the foundation of the Jewish state we were able to plan a campaign not as a result of foreign aggression as in 1948, 1967, 1973, and it was free of the restraints of embarrassing partners as in 1956. Israel has proved again its declaration, its power and its respect for human values."
(Gideon Hausner, 11 July 1982)

"I accepted my MBE on behalf of all my unsung Palestinian and Lebanese colleagues and comrades. I have now returned it, also in their name. It is an utter disgrace that the British prime minister refused to press for a ceasefire, remained on holiday while these war crimes were being carried out and that parliament has not been recalled. It is a disgrace that the US ambassador to the UN described a call for a three-day truce to assist in humanitarian relief and evacuation of the wounded as "unhelpful". It is a disgrace that this government ignored the concerns of the electorate and all other forms of lawful protest. I have therefore come to the conclusion that to continue to hold on to my MBE, for which I was nominated by the parliamentary Labour party, is also a disgrace."
(Suzy Wighton, 16 August 2006)

"Both Israeli incursions into Lebanon involved the deliberate targeting of civilians in flagrant violation of the laws of war. In Operation Grapes of Wrath, Israel's strategy was the equivalent of using a bulldozer to weed a garden. The commander of the current operation, Dan Halutz, is a former commander of the air force, and the leading advocate of the use of air power against civilians. Asked what he felt when he dropped a bomb on a civilian target, Halutz replied that there was a slight judder when the bomb was released and that was it. The reply speaks volumes about the depth of moral depravity of Israel's top soldier."
(Avi Shlaim, 4 August 2006)

"'We didn't mean to' is the cousin of 'I didn't know,' and both of them are close neighbors of the double standard. What is permitted to us is forbidden to others. What hurts us does not hurt others (because they are 'other')."
(Amira Hass, 16 August 2006)

"The road to killing children by a military and civilian occupation machine is paved with many non-intentions to cause other damage to civilians; these are not fatal immediately, but day by day, they take away the taste of life from 3.5 million people. These are damages that in ordinary times earn, at best, a mention the size of a postage stamp in the newspapers. But these are the essential building stones of a regime of dispossession, the aim of which is to thwart the Palestinian people's aspirations for independence and sovereignty in its country."
(Amira Hass, 16 August 2006)

"Israeli's armed forces chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, unwisely sold off $27,000 in stock when he heard that Hizbullah had captured 2 Israeli soldiers. That wasn't unwise economically, since when Israel went to war, its stock market fell 12% It is further proof that the war was planned well in advance, and that Halutz knew that the capture would trigger it."
(Juan Cole, 16 August 2006)

"How long would Israel's war have been allowed to continue if American audiences had seen those charred bodies or dead babies? How long would most Western viewers have remained silent if they were exposed to the kind of images shown daily on the Arabic satellite channels? Might we then start to understand why they hate us – and more usefully why we should hate ourselves?"
(Jonathan Cook, 16 August 2006)

"If Nasser had not been stupid enough to give us a pretext for war now, we would have created one in the coming year to 18 months."
(Chaim (Haim) Herzog, 6 June 1967)

"The unilateral concept now seems, after the events in Lebanon and Gaza, to be dying. No more unilateral convergence. Along with it may die its twin sibling: the separation wall. What use is there for a wall when war is fought with Katyushas, Qassams and kidnappings? When the wall's path followed the Green Line, it was one thing, but when it started to penetrate into the West Bank, and particularly into the Jerusalem area - it became a delusional annexation plan that is nearly impossible to carry out, other than with suffering, discrimination and exploitation that cannot last in the long run."
(Danny Rubinstein, 21 August 2006)

"Military service is not open to the general Arab public of the State of Israel."
(Ron Sokol, 17 August 2006)

"As a supporter of Israel and as one who has always been outraged at the horrors inflicted on the little nation by hostile neighbors, I am appalled beyond measure by the treatment of the rioting Palestinians by Jews. I mean, fellas, are you kidding? - Breaking the hands of men and women so they can't throw stones? Dragging civilians out of their houses at random to smash them with sticks in an effort to terrorize a population into quiet - Are we talking about state-sponsored brutality and even torture? - I can't believe it, and I don't know exactly what is to be done."
(Woody Allen, 28 jan 1988)

"In my view, and the view of many people across the world (though not the United States), the Zionist project has markedly accentuated the tribal or chauvinistic side of Jewish identity. How could it be otherwise once this hitherto oppressed people became a nation of conquerors?"
(Joel Kovel, March 2004)

"This arrangement, which is at the heart of Zionism, creates a terrible contradiction that eats away at the soul and conscience of the Jewish people. The problem is that you can’t have a democratic state for just one people while excluding the others. It is just a logical impossibility. The notion of democracy derives from universal ideals based on universal human rights; it cannot exist where there is a systematic inequality, and all the more so when these “others” are those who have been dispossessed by Zionism."
(Joel Kovel, March 2004)

"Of course, systematic inequalities are widespread throughout history, indeed, more or less the norm. But never have they occurred in a society ruled by people with the moral dilemmas created by Jewish exceptionalism and the two-thousand year history of ghettoization. In my view it is this moral twist that accounts for the extraordinary thin-skinnedness of Jews, and their intolerance of criticism of Zionism—what I have called Zionism’s bad conscience. The irony is radical: because Jews have to think of themselves as morally special, “chosen” people, they cannot tolerate the coarse grab for territory and the oppression of the dispossessed inherent to Zionism. They deny the implications with messianic fervor, but the wound cannot be healed."
(Joel Kovel, March 2004)

"No country in the world has had a more dismal record vis-a-vis indigenous or enslaved peoples than the us, or has been more suffused with racism. That is a scar and a wound that continues to fester, and our history simply can’t be understood without taking it into account. But there have also been differences with the Zionist experience, which we can’t take up for lack of space. The most relevant is that the us was never an ethnocratic homeland for one people only. Individual colonies may have been so in part, but when they came together that principle had to be abandoned. The social contract of the new nation-state was always toward the ideal of including all people; and no matter how much this was violated in practice, the ideal of inclusivity remained for the heroes of the civil rights movement to draw upon. Thus our own apartheid system, all too horribly real, also lacked the kind of foundation that we see in Zionist Israel, where it derives from the basic principle of society. Another way of saying this is that the us has a constitution and a Bill of Rights that provides a framework for a democratic society, however poorly realized. Whereas Israel, professing itself a democracy, has never been able to write a constitution."
(Joel Kovel, March 2004)

"The contradictions posed by the notion of a Jewish democratic state are so severe that you can’t codify it in a constitutional form. To do so would mean breaking apart the fiction that there can be a genuine democracy for one ethnic group over others. So a great many questions are just sort of shelved. In fact, the national boundaries cannot be well defined. It is not at all clear just where Israel should begin or end, given the myth of its origins, still held by many Zionists, that “God promised all of this region to us…” There are people who say Israel should keep expanding all the way to Turkey and should take over everything in the region. More crucially, this notion underlies the relentless impulse to occupy all Palestinian land and the appalling story of the settlements in the Occupied Territories."
(Joel Kovel, March 2004)

"Because the CEO of Starbucks is so supportive of Israel and the system of apartheid that it has foisted on the Palestinian people, we strongly urge you to reconsider your arrangement to serve Starbucks products"
(Joshua Ruebner, 4 August 2006)

"I could not in conscience participate in any ceremony where Bloomberg was guest of honor. Last month, following Israel’s attack on Lebanon, Mayor Bloomberg made it abundantly clear that he fully supported the Israeli regime and its invasion of Lebanon. Mayor Bloomberg also commended George Bush and the U.S. government for its continued support of Israel. By any interpretation of international law, the Israeli regime has committed massive war crimes against the defenseless people of Lebanon and Palestine."
(Declan Bree, 22 August 2006)

"I must tell you that this immigration lowers us in the eyes of the government and the local populace. They see poor, ragged, miserable people with tattered bundles, the dregs of society, who are unlikely to do the country any good ... If there are never any wealthy, respectable, well-dressed, attractive people stepping ashore, the word `Jew' will become synonymous for weak, inferior and low-class."
(Menachem Sheinkin, 1908)

"The point of the convergence is for Israel to add a veneer of legitimacy to the annexation of the main Jewish colonies in the West Bank, and to imprison the Palestinians in the space left behind, in the hope that eventually they will grow so desperate they will leave. It is about the theft of some Palestinian land now, and all the Palestinian land later."
(Jonathan Cook, 31 August 2006)

"Nasrallah is generally known as a very trustworthy person, so I am surprised by this whole fantastic story."
(Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, 16 October 2000)

"I often disagree when the term Nazi was applied to the British ... even though the British committed Nazi crimes. But now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being is shaken."
(Aharon Cizlang, 17 November 1948)

"It was in the last days of the war. They gave us orders to fire them [cluster bombs]. They didn't tell us where we were firing - if it was at a village or at open terrain. We fired until the forces that requested the shelling asked us to stop."
(Y, a reservist in an Israeli artillery battalion in the 2006 Lebanon War, September 2006)

"In the beginning of the war, too, there were reports on the use of cluster bombs. But only a few. In the three last days, a tremendous amount of them were fired. It's also hard to know where they were aimed. The dispersion of the bombs is so wide that even if the original target were outside a populated area, many bombs fell amid the houses."
(David Shearer, September 2006)

"Between the sea and the river there is not enough space to contain two states."
(Giora Eiland, June 2006)

"The turnabout will come quickly ... the major loser will be the people of Israel who, by an unmeasured reaction to a provocation, established their position as a foreign element in the region, as the neighborhood bully, the object of impotent hatred."
(Meron Benvenisti, 26 July 2006)

"In Lebanon, we covered entire villages with cluster bombs, what we did there was crazy and monstrous."
(a commander in the Israeli MLRS unit, September 2006)

"They told us that this [early morning] is a good time [to fire cluster rockets toward a village's outskirts] because people are coming out of the mosques and the rockets would deter them."
(a commander in the Israeli MLRS unit, September 2006)

"We will have to expel the great majority of the Arabs of Judea and Samaria. It's impossible with all those Arabs, and it's impossible to give up the territory. We've already seen what they're doing there. ... We will have to take another decision, and that is to sweep the Israeli Arabs from the political system. Here, too, it's clear and simple. We've raised a fifth column, a league of traitors of the first rank. Therefore, we cannot continue to enable so large and so hostile a presence within the political system of Israel."
(Effi Eitam, 10 September 2006)

"About a dozen men had gathered together in Petah Tikvah to undertake the task of guarding the vineyards of Zichron Yaacov. […] I began to guard the vineyards for a monthly salary of 30 francs. This was my first experience as a guard! The owner entrusted me with a rifle – that did not shoot - and powder – that was wet…

During the first night’s watch, the other watchmen, all Arabs, would come to spy on me, examining me from every angle and addressing me in a language that I did not understand. How difficult it was to fight sleep! That summer night seemed interminable! I walked back and forth endlessly. In the morning, a cold mist covered the vineyards. My head felt heavy and dizzy; my eyes were glassy. Time went by so slowly that it seemed to me I had been walking around in circles for a month. […] I told myself repeatedly that the second night would be easier! I was so tired that I could barely drag my feet. At dawn, I sat on a rock to rest. My senses became confused and my consciousness was hazy. When I recovered, I saw two Arabs attempting to take my rifle. I screamed like a madman to drive them away. I went back to my barrack in the morning, collapsing with sleep. I held my rifle tightly against me, but the Arab guards who were following me like shadows waited until I fell asleep to approach me to again try to steal it. […]

The Arab guards banded together against me and were continually trying to pick a quarrel with me. One of them entered the vineyard and began picking grapes right in front of me. At first I chose not to react and wait for the owner to send me the pistol that he had promised me. But I could not control my anger. I chased the thief, falling into the trap that his companions had set up for me: they attacked me without warning and beat me until I bled. The owner, who was nearby and saw them beating me, did not come to my aid because he feared for his own safety. He waited until my assailants had withdrawn to approach me in an agitated state:

“To hell with you and your vineyards”, I said.

I dragged myself to Shefeya […], where they bandaged my head before taking me to the hospital in Zichron Yaacov. I had lost a great deal of blood and I was ill. […]

[Alexander Zeid, nevertheless, allows his companions to convince him to create the first Jewish defense organization.]

Our first meeting was held in the greatest secrecy in Jaffa in Ben Zvi’s small room. […] Shohat and Ben Zvi had drawn up a short program of action. We named ourselves “Bar Giora” and chose the following slogan:

In blood and fire, Judea fell By fire and blood, Judea will rise!

The meeting ended. An expression of loyalty and conviction was engraved on our faces […]. Giladi, the most practical among us, proposed that we concentrate all our efforts in the Galilee… His dream would be realized in Sejera, one of the ICA farms."
(Alexander Zied (Zaid/Zeid), some date before 1939)

"Since its inception the state of Israel has fought a number of wars of choice (the only exception was the Yom Kippur War of 1973). To be sure, these have been presented to the world as wars of necessity or self-defence; but Israel’s statesmen and generals have never been under any such illusion."
(Tony Judt, 21 September 2006)

"Half Lebanon is destroyed. Is that a loss?"
(Ehud Olmert, 4 September 2006)

"The claim that we lost is unfounded. Half of Lebanon is destroyed; is that a loss?"
(Ehud Olmert, 4 September 2006)

"Jabotinsky fully realized the threat hanging over our people. We believed one of the greatest danger spots was Poland, to which Hitler was now turning his attention. At Christmas time, 1938, I went to Warsaw with a plan that might yet save millions of Polish Jews."
(Robert Briscoe, 1958)

"On behalf of the New Zionist Movement, speaking mainly for European Jews, not for those of England or America, speaking for them, I suggest that you ask Britain to turn over the Mandate for Palestine to you and make it in effect a Polish colony. You could then move all your unwanted Polish Jews into Palestine. This would bring great relief to your country, and you would have a rich and growing colony to aid your economy."
(Robert Briscoe, December 1938)

"We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours."
(Golda Meir, unknown date)

"Israel has the right to control Palestinian natural growth"
(Ruth Gabison, some date before May 2006)

"What couldn't be fulfilled under the rule of Napoleon I can be fulfilled by Wilhelm II"
(Theodor Herzl, March 1899)

"Sometimes the souls of sinners, such as adulterers or people who slept with non-Jews, enter the body of a dog."
(Yitzhak Basri, 18 September 2006)

"Apparently the Anti-Defamation League tracks Tony Judt's talks on the Internet and tries to get the talks canceled. This is censorship, which is of concern to Americans who believe in free speech."
(Patricia Huntington, 3 October 2006)

"The pressure was brought by the ADL. They had no choice. Foxman had been leaning on the consulate all afternoon."
(Tony Judt, 3 October 2006)

"Freedom of expression for members of the Arab minority or Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the territories is different from that which is discussed regarding Jewish citizens of Israel"
(Fania Oz-Salzberger, 2006)

"The freedom of expression takes on a different nuance when those who seek it are not from the Jewish majority but rather belong to the Arab minority in Israel, or [Palestinians] in the territories. This state of affairs does not allow us to join wholeheartedly the celebration of the freedom of expression in Israel"
(Fania Oz-Salzberger, 2006)

"It appears that the glorious tradition of the [Israeli] Supreme Court concerning the freedom of expression is not applied in an equal way when those who seek the court’s protection are not from the group of the Jewish majority."
(Fania Oz-Salzberger, 2006)

"There are extremists who would call this apartheid and there is some truth in it. When you have two populations [Palestinians and Israeli settlers] living in the same territory and each has a different set of laws imposed upon it ...”"
(Eli Salzberger, July 2005)

"Extreme philosemitism is not so different in its mental make-up from extreme antisemitism. In both cases we are considered to be not a normal people, not a normal community, not a normal polity, but something very special — a kind of an extreme bearer of human traits, either for the worst or for the better."
(Fania Oz-Salzberger, July 2005)

"El Al pilots are the IAF's reserve backbone"
(Itai Regev, 3 September 2006)

"Both [two Palestinians, Jamal Hilal and Ghassan Antoni, who have spoken out for Peace with Israel] have been arrested repeatedly since July. They are never questioned or charged with anything, just held for 18 days as Israeli law allows. The last time, October 25, they were beaten so badly by soldiers on the way to headquarters that Jamal still cannot walk properly. They are in prison again."
(Hillel Bardin, October 1989)

"I don’t think dialogue will stop the problem. We must fight for justice, but at the same time we cannot get caught up in the cycle [of violence]. Dialogue isn’t a way to solve political and national crises, but it makes the fighting more human."
(Ghassan Andoni, November 1998)

"150 or more towns and villages in South Lebanon…have been repeatedly savaged by the Israeli armed forces since 1968."
(Irene Beeson, some date before 1984)

"The revelation of Sinai has been renewed in our time by our army’s thrust of heroism.... Our army did not infringe on Egyptian territory.... Our operations were restricted to the Sinai Peninsula alone.... The Armistice Agreement with Egypt is dead and buried...the armistice lines between us and Egypt have also given up the ghost...we are prepared for negotiations for a firm peace.... We are prepared for similar negotiations with each of the other Arab states..."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1956)

"Yotvat [the island of Tiran] will once more become a part of the Third Kingdom of Israel!"
(David Ben-Gurion, 1956)

"Although Ben-Gurion had been confined to his sickbed during the entire campaign [in SInai in 1956], he was drunk with victory when it ended. In a cable he sent to the Seventh Brigade following the capture of Sharm El-Sheikh, he wrote, "Yotvata, or Tiran, which until fourteen hundred years ago was part of an independent Jewish state, will revert to being part of the third kingdom of Israel." In his victory speech at the Knesset on 7 November, he hinted that Israel planned to annex the entire Sinai peninsula as well as the Straits of Tiran. Once again he laid a historical claim to the island of Tiran or Yotvata and even quoted from the ancient chronicler Procopius in Greek in support of his claim. In the speech he affirmed triumphantly that the armistice agreement with Egypt was dead, that Israel would not hand over Sinai to foreign forces, and that Israel was ready for direct negotiations with Egypt. THe arrogant tone of the speech caused much anger and antipathy outside Israel, not least among American Jews."
(Avi Shlaim, January 2001)

"Yotvata, or Tiran, which until fourteen hundred years ago was part of an independent Jewish state, will revert to being part of the third kingdom of Israel."
(David Ben-Gurion, November 1956)

"And so on we go with the Middle East tragedy, telling the world that things are getting better when they are getting worse, that democracy is flourishing when it is swamped in blood, that freedom is not without "birth pangs" when the midwife is killing the baby."
(Robert Fisk, 8 October 2006)

"People who are critical of Israel and of the Jewish people often flaunt their Jewishness. Why isn't that an issue?"
(Abraham H. Foxman, October 2006)

"There is an often organized and often spontaneous attempt to marginalize anyone in the Jewish world who offers a critique of Israeli policy. It's equated with anti-Semitism and Israel denial."
(Michael Lerner, October 2006)

"This is serious and frightening, and only in America -- not in Israel -- is this a problem. These are Jewish organizations that believe they should keep people who disagree with them on the Middle East away from anyone who might listen."
(Tony Judt, 9 October 2006)

"The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure. That's obvious -- we are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that."
(Krzysztof Kasprzyk, 9 October 2006)

"What caused me anguish as I tracked down Louis Darquier was to live so closely to the helpless terror of the Jews of France, and to see what the Jews of Israel were passing on to the Palestinian people."
(Carmen Callil, April 2006)

"It [UNSC Resolution 1701] was passed as a [UN Charter Chapter 6] peace-keeping mandate, but to make certain parties were more supportive they included items that should be under Chapter 7 peace enforcement. This is like Chapter 6.5."
(Timur Goksel, 12 October 2006)

"Israel and Australia are like sisters in Asia. We are in Asia without the characteristics of Asians. We don't have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Asia is basically the yellow race. Australia and Israel are not - we are basically the white race. We are on the western side of Asia and they are on the southeastern side."
(Naftali Tamir, October 2006)

"It is unacceptable to let people get killed here even if the number of people killed there is expected to be bigger."
(Asa Kasher, October 2006)

"Cuts in child allowances put a break on the demographic dangers. This is the first time since the establishment of the state that the gap between the Arab and Jewish birthrate is only a single child [per woman] in favor of the Arabs. Prior to the cuts we made to the child allowances, the gap stood at four children in favor of the Arabs ... the demographic bomb that everyone referred to as an existential threat was simply destroyed with these cuts."
(Benjamin Netanyahu, October 2006)

"President McKinley decided we ought to keep the Philippines in order to Christianize the natives. When reminded that the Filipinos were already Roman Catholics, the President responded, 'Exactly.'"
(Gore Vidal, 1998)

"The protection of the criminal law will always be extended to everyone—whether a citizen of the state or a ward of the state, and whether within the borders of the state or in occupied territory."
(Benjamin Halevy, 12 October 1958)

"Today, no serious researcher in Israel or overseas embraces WOJAC's extreme claims."
(Yehuda Shenhav, October 2006)

"The IDF's excessive sensitivity to human life led to some of the failures in the Lebanon war - and this should not happen"
(Elazar Stern, Autumn 2006)

"The extent to which the refugees were savagely driven out by the Israelis as part of a deliberate master plan has been insufficiently recognized."
(John H. Davis, 1969)

"An old maxim says that Israel can fulfill only two of its three desires: to be a Jewish state, to be a democratic state and to hold on to all of the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. It can hold on to the whole territory and be democratic – but then it will not be a Jewish state. It can hold on to the territory and be Jewish – but than it will not be a democratic state. It can be a Jewish and democratic state – but then it cannot hold on to all the territory."
(Uri Avnery, 1 November 2006)

"No one is guilty in Israel. There is never anyone guilty in Israel. The prime minister who is responsible for the brutal policy toward the Palestinians, the defense minister who knew about and approved the bombardments, the chief of staff, the chief of command and the commander of the division who gave the orders to bombard - not one of them is guilty. They will continue with the work of killing as though nothing has happened: The sun shone, the system flourished and the ritual slaughterer slaughtered. They will continue to pursue the routine of their daily lives, accepted in society like anyone else, and remain in their posts despite the blood on their hands."
(Gideon Levy, 12 November 2006)

"The biggest single factor in getting moderate Muslim countries to support a new Iraq would be if there was progress on Israel and Palestine, as part of the strategy for the Middle East as a whole."
(Tony Blair, 14 November 2006)

"When he [Avigdor Lieberman] came to Israel from the Soviet Union, he already brought with him a racist outlook. He wants a purely Jewish state, with no Arabs. For this, he is prepared, so he says, even to give up Israeli territory in which a dense Arab population is living. He proposes to get these citizens out of Israel, together with the land they are living on. Not a second Naqba, God forbid: the Arabs will not be driven from their lands, as then, but will be expelled together with their land. In return, Israel will annex the territories on which the settlers, one of whom is Liberman himself, are living. What's wrong with that? The basic idea is wrong: the turning of Israel into a state "cleansed" of Arabs. In German that would be called "Araber-rein". (Actually, it's an inversion of the Nazi phrase: not Juden-rein, but Rein-für-Juden. That is clearly a racist slogan, which appeals to the most primitive instincts of the masses.)"
(Uri Avnery, 14 November 2006)

"His [David Grossman's] remarks again reflect the existence of the group of Ashkenazi, secular, veteran, socialist, nationalist Israelis, known by a Hebrew acronym coined by sociologist Baruch Kimmerling to describe the generation of the founders who bewail "what happened to the daring young country that was here" (in Grossman's words). They recycle the fantasy that "once, before the occupation" everything was good."
(Meron Benvenisti, 16 November 2006)

"torture, or the threat of torture, is legitimate as one of the instruments against terror, because terror basically ... has nothing to do with our civilized order."
(Michael Wolffsohn, May 2004)

"Ich kann ja nich so ville fressen, wie ick kotzen möchte."
(Max Liebermann, 30 January 1933)

"The naqba [disaster] the Palestinians experienced in 1948 is small compared to the Holocaust, but the political implications of the Holocaust have made its terrors a burden on the Palestinian people alone"
(Khaled Ksab Mahamid, some date before 2007)

"[The Transfer Agreement is] double book-keeping of the most flagrant sort. That nobody should break the boycott but the Jews of Palestine! The Transfer Agreement is a blot on the Jews."
(Baruch Charney Vladeck, some date in the 1930s)

"We come not to dominate you, as our traducers allege against us, nor yet to encroach on your own perfect and sacred rights."
(Jewish National Council of Palestine (Vaad Leumi), 1922)

"[Israel has consistently sought] to limit the number of Palestinians in the [occupied] territories ... the considerations are demographic."
(Ilan Paz, some date before 12 November 2006)

"She [Ruth Gavison] likened the Israeli Arabs to the Mizrahim - the Jews of Middle Eastern descent - in that both groups are themselves to blame for the discrimination they have endured."
(Tom Segev, 23 November 2006)

"For many years I had an unpleasant feeling that we were not being fair to Israel's Arab citizens. I will confess that, amid all the processes and events of recent years, in the light of their attitudes and those of their political leadership, my feeling of guilt toward them is gradually diminishing."
(Ruth Gavison, November 2006)

"But the ... greatest disappointment is not Gavison - it's [Mordechai] Kremnitzer."
(Tom Segev, 23 November 2006)

"It's interesting because the Democratic Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Israel Lobby. And anyone who thinks that things can change by supporting an individual Democrat, other than McKinney, maybe, is crazy."
(SF-IMC staff, 20 November 2006)

"The serious educational messages of extreme groups in the Arab and Jewish society get through and trickle into [people's] hearts and consciousness through the education system, and therefore the question of who teaches and who must not have the right to teach has security implications."
(Ami Ayalon, November 2006)

"Jewish nationalist circles are very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population [in Palestine] would be so far increased."
(Feivel (Feiwel) Polkes, 1937)

"A study of Chapter XII of the United Nations Charter leaves no room for doubt that ... neither the General Assembly nor any other organ of the United Nations is competent to entertain, still less to recommend or enforce, any solution with regard to a mandated territory ... the General Assembly is not competent to recommend, still less to enforce any solution other than the recognition of the independence of Palestine, and that the settlement of the future government of Palestine is a matter solely for the people of Palestine ... To sum up, the dissolution of the League of Nations, and the consequent removal of the legal basis for the Mandate, and the more recent declarations by the Mandatory of its intention to withdraw from Palestine, open the way for the establishment of an independent government in Palestine by the people of the country, without the intervention either of the United Nations or of any other party ... The above conclusion is by no means vitiated by the provisions for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. It was not, and could not have been the intention of the framers of the Mandate that the Jewish immigration to Palestine should result in breaking up the political, geographic, and administrative economy of the country. Any other interpretation would amount to a violation of the principles of the Covenant and would nullify one of the main objectives of the Mandate ... Moreover, partition involves the alienation of territory and the destruction of the integrity of the State of Palestine. The United Nations cannot make a disposition or alienation of territory, nor can it deprive the majority of the people of Palestine of their territory and transfer it to the exclusive use of a minority in the country"
(Subcommittee 2 of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestine Question, 24 November 1947)

"I was requested by phone to go somewhere and check something with the Red Cross. I had no inkling about the Deir-Yassin affair. I was told it was a dangerous mission and asked to report on what happened there. We were let in without ado. There were only dissidents there, loading corpses on trucks. ... There were corpses in the houses, about 100 men, women and children. It was awful. I didn't see any signs of mutilation or rape. Clearly, [the attackers] had gone house to house and shot the people point-blank. In five years as a doctor with the German Army during World War I, I'd never seen such a ghastly sight."
(Alfred Engel, some date after 11 April 1948)

"Is there anyone in Britain interested in the theatre, in civil liberties or in Jews who can't identify this as a scene in Jim Allen's play Perdition? The successful lobbying by Jews in Britain to have its production canceled has made it one of the most famous plays of the decade."
(David Lan, 2 April 1987)

"[The Palestine Mandate is] a real distortion of the Mandatory system. ... When one sees its Article 22 ... that the well-being and development of such peoples should form a sacred trust of civilisation, and when one takes that as the keynote of the Mandatory system, I think your lordships will see that we are straying down a very far path when we are postponing self-government in Palestine until such time as the population is flooded with an alien race."
(Lord Islington, 21 June 1922)

"senior officials in the terrorist organizations' military wings ... can be killed only with the approval of Attorney General Menachem Mazuz."
(Aluf Benn, 23 November 2006)

"They will be assassinated only subject to an opinion by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz."
(Zvi Bar'el, 26 November 2006)

"The massacre [at Sabra and Shatila in 1982] was overseen by Elie Hobeika from the roof of the headquarters of the Israeli general Amos Yaron."
(Uri Avnery, 25 November 2006)

"If Nasser had not been stupid enough to give us a pretext for war now, we would have created one in the coming year to 18 months."
(Chaim (Haim) Herzog, 6 June 1967)

"This is how fascism began in Italy and Germany!"
(Gideon Ruffer, 26 May 1955)

"For Palestinians, borders are a reminder – of our vulnerability and non-belonging, of our displacement and dispossession. It is a reminder – a painful one – of homeland lost. And of what could happen if what remains is lost again. When we are lost again, the way we lose a little bit of ourselves every time we cross and we wait to cross. We wait our entire lives, as Palestinians. If not for a border or checkpoint to open, for a permit to be issued, for an incursion to end, for a time when we don't have to wait anymore."
(Laila M. El-Haddad, 27 November 2006)

"In the end, "security" is all that matters and all that ever will. As Palestinians, we've come to despise that word: Security. It is has become a deity more sacred than life itself. In its name, even murder can become a justifiable act."
(Laila M. El-Haddad, 27 November 2006)

"I, too, like Hitler, believe in the power of the blood idea."
(Haim Nahman Bialik, 1934)

"the PLO's executive committee ... is technically above the [PA] government, because it represents the entire Palestinian people, whereas the government was elected solely by residents of the West Bank and Gaza, who comprise only about half the Palestinian people"
(Danny Rubinstein, 4 December 2006)

"If you put a blank sheet of paper in front of Arafat, he would sign it."
(Rafik (Rafiq) al-Hariri, some date not long before 8 July 2000)

"I, too, like Hitler, believe in the power of the idea of blood"
(Haim Nahman Bialik, 1934)

"[I have met many German Jews who] have come over here in recent months and they have impressed me as very much the type of men like my father, Carl Schurz, and other Germans who came over here in the days of 1848 and who later were among our best citizens."
(Herbert Lehman, 1933)

"The charge of hurting soldiers is a convenient 'hanger' for a variety of practices that favor Jews over Arabs. If it is necessary to give army veterans preference in student housing [at Haifa university], then why not give them preference for scholarships or in university acceptance, or in reduced cafeteria prices? Why shouldn't private employers pay differential salaries? Why shouldn't landlords and restaurateurs also set separate rates? There is a law that grants benefits to demobilized soldiers. If they want to provide them with additional benefits, this should be done by amending the law, not by giving nongovernmental bodies such as universities the option of 'amending' what the Knesset did not. This could be a very slippery slope toward discrimination."
(Ilan Saban, Autumn 2006)

"the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil The native is declared insensitive to ethics the enemy of values. He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces."
(Frantz Fanon, 1965)

"An "archaeological heart of darkness" is how [Dr. Rafi] Greenberg [an archaeologist from Tel Aviv University] has described Israel's behavior in the territories since 1967. He used the phrase in a lecture he delivered recently in the wake of a study he conducted over the past few years, which found that about 1,100 excavation permits were issued for digs that took place at 700 sites in the West Bank, not including East Jerusalem. (In some cases more than one permit was issued for the same site.) But documentation of any kind, Greenberg says, exists for only 15 percent of the digs. And even that documentation was obtained by Greenberg with no small effort, by perusing documents and talking to other archaeologists. All his requests to the Civil Administration for a list containing only the names of the sites that were excavated in the West Bank and the names of the excavators drew a negative response. Not even a request based on the Freedom of Information Law helped. Archaeology in the dark."
(Meron Rapoport, 17 December 2006)

"The interrogators were telling me that there was nobody to entreat for me because I (as a Palestinian) had no state. I am sure that, hadn't Bulgaria taken me under its protection together with the nurses, I would be now rotting in some mass grave."
(Ashraf Ahmad Jum'a al-Hajuj (al-Hadjudj/al-Hazouz/al-Hajouj), some date between 1999 and 2006)

"I am too busy trying to figure out the way this calamity rummages throughout the globe and destroys from its layer ozone to its elementary definitions of decency."
(Hamid Dabashi, 4 August 2006)

"September 12, 1991 is a day that will live in infamy."
(Thomas (Tom) A. Dine, 13 September 1991)

"Even at the time there were those who argued that it was counterproductive. It mainly harmed the liberal opponents of the regime at English-speaking institutions, so there were many of us who supported the sports boycott but opposed the academic one"
(Adrian Guelke, January 2006)

"You [Israel] have lost a very great friend [JFK], but you have found a better one [LBJ]."
(Lyndon B. Johnson, shortly after 22 November 1963)

"One of the causes of resentment between Arabs and Jews was the determined policy of the Jewish public bodies to employ only Jewish workers.This policy of 'economic apartheid' was bound to strengthen the resistance of Arabs to Jewish immigration."
(Norman de Mattos Bentwich, 1965)

"We, of course, do not see things that way. For us, the State of Israel is the culmination of a long historical process of collective homecoming, not a rescue boat from the claws of Germany. While the Nazi genocide definitely accelerated that process, it did not initiate or redirect it."
(Judea Pearl, 29 December 2006)

"The majority of the 600,000 Jews who immigrated to Palestine prior to 1940 did not flee the Holocaust nor did the 580,000 Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries in the early 1950s."
(Judea Pearl, 29 December 2006)

"Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and nowhere else."
(Scott Ritter, September 2006)

"Following the kidnapping of Corporal Shalit, Israel staged several operations inside Gaza where Israeli forces killed 405 Palestinians over six months."
(Sarit Michaeli, 29 December 2006)

"Following the kidnapping of Corporal Shalit, Israel staged several operations inside Gaza where Israeli forces killed 405 Palestinians over six months."
(Sarit Michaeli, 29 December 2006)

"Following the kidnapping of Corporal Shalit, Israel staged several operations inside Gaza where Israeli forces killed 405 Palestinians over six months."
(Sarit Michaeli, 29 December 2006)

"Following the kidnapping of Corporal Shalit, Israel staged several operations inside Gaza where Israeli forces killed 405 Palestinians over six months."
(Sarit Michaeli, 29 December 2006)

"Iran aspires to develop nuclear weapons like the U.S., France, and Israel."
(Ehud Olmert, 11 December 2006)

"Lines that existed before the fifth of June can never again be the boundaries of Israel"
(Golda Meir, March 1969)

"My life is full of joy, for I am in my motherland. Work, my country and my language—to them I dedicate my youth and my strength. I can see in my imagination how we shall build the foundation of a national life. Stone by stone we are rebuilding the land laid waste thousands of years ago. I am happy that I am one of the builders."
(Shmuel Dayan, 1913)

"Those registered as `Jews` have full rights in regard to most of the land, cities, and settlements; those who are not registered as `Jews` are barred from owning real estate in most sectors of the country"
(Uzi Ornan, 10 Feb 1991)

"I call on the prime minister not to approve this appointment [of the first Arab cabinet minister in the history of Israel] ... in order to protect the state of Israel's interest as a Jewish and Zionist state."
(Esterina Tartman, 11 January 2007)

"[President Bush's] speech reflects a profound misunderstanding of our era. America is acting like a colonial power in Iraq. But the age of colonialism is over. Waging a colonial war in the post-colonial age is self-defeating. That is the fatal flaw of Bush's policy."
(Zbigniew Brzezinski, 12 January 2007)

"incidentally, Uri Dan, Sharon's confidant, recently put to rest any doubt that the late Palestinian President was indeed murdered"
(Uri Avnery, 13 January 2007)

"Rice's meeting with Lieberman was like giving a stamp of approval to the racist positions he and his party have adopted. It is not clear why the secretary of state saw a need to hold this meeting, which is not part of the standard protocol for her visits to Israel. Her meeting with Lieberman thus constituted a kind of American recognition of his status and his stances. Instead of the United States denouncing his racist positions, it has given them support, in the form of a well-publicized and unnecessary meeting. Rice, who came to the region to "strengthen the moderate forces," thereby in fact lent her hand to strengthening the extremists, at least on the Israeli side. And what message did she send to the moderate forces on the Palestinian side by meeting with Lieberman?"
(Haaretz editorial writer, 15 January 2007)

"What Israel carried out in 1948 was ethnic cleansing and what Benny [Morris] is telling us now is that Ben-Gurion should have been more thorough and comprehensive in his policy of ethnic cleansing. Benny seems to have lost his moral bearings."
(Avi Shlaim, 2 October 2002)

"When you follow the (Saudi-funded) Arab media, you reach this inescapable conclusions: orders from above have pushed the story of the agony of the Palestinian people to the back pages."
(As'ad Abu-Khalil, 16 January 2007)

"My own authority and that of every department of my Administration is claimed or impinged upon by the Zionist Commission. ... It is no use saying to the Moslem and Christian elements of the population that our declaration as to the maintenance of the status quo on our entry into Jerusalem has been observed. Facts witness otherwise [and] these have firmly and absolutely convinced the non-Jewish elements of our partiality. The situation is intolerable ... I recommend that the Zionist Commission in Palestine be abolished."
(Louis Bols, March 1920)

"In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. . . . Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had “rescued” really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population."
(Wilbur Crane Eveland, 1980)

"Dr. Saeb Erekat relates that when Bill Clinton visited Israel in 2004 in honor of Shimon Peres' 80th birthday, he had a chance to ask the former U.S. president why he blamed Yasser Arafat for the failure of the Camp David talks. Clinton, Erekat says, said Ehud Barak told him that if he blamed the Palestinians, it would help him (Barak) win the elections."
(Akiva Eldar, 23 January 2007)

"The war in Lebanon is the first stage in our conflict with Iran."
(Efraim Sneh, 30 July 1993)

"Apartheid is not the worst danger hovering over the heads of the Palestinians. They are menaced by something infinitely worse: "Transfer", which means total expulsion."
(Uri Avnery, 23 January 2007)

"Balfour was a wicked man."
(Arnold J. Toynbee, Spring 1973)

"A Zionist home, my Lords, undoubtedly means or implies a Zionist Government over the district in which the home is placed, and as 93 percent of the population are Arabs, I do not see how you can establish other than an Arab Government without prejudice to their civil rights. That one sentence alone of the Balfour Declaration seems to involve, without overstating it, exceedingly great difficulty of fulfillment."
(Edward Grey, 27 March 1923)

"His Majesty's Government therefore now declares unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State. They would indeed regard it as contrary to their obligations to the Arabs under the Mandate, as well as to the assurances which have been given to the Arab people in the past, that the Arab population of Palestine should be made the subjects of a Jewish State against their will."
(British Government, May 1939)

"The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan. One does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today -- but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1937)

"I did my best to persuade the claimants of a Jewish state in Palestine that we might find a circumlocution that would express all that we meant, but would say it in a way so as to avoid provoking the Turkish rulers of the coveted land. I suggested "Heimstatte" as a synonym for "State" ... This is the history of the much commented expression. It was equivocal, but we all understood what it meant. To us it signified "Judenstaat" then and it signifies the same now."
(Max Nordau, some date before 1920)

"It has been said and is still being obstinately repeated by anti-Zionists again and again that Zionism aims at the creation of an independent "Jewish state". But this is wholly falacious. The "Jewish State" was never part of the Zionist programme."
(Nahum Sokoloff (Sokolow/Sokolov), 1918)

"All through those 30 years, Britain (admitted) into Palestine, year by year, a quota of Jewish immigrants that varied according to the strength of the respective pressures of the Arabs and Jews at the time. These immigrants could not have come in if they had not been shielded by a British chevaux-de-frise. If Palestine had remained under Ottoman Turkish rule, or if it had become an independent Arab state in 1918, Jewish immigrants would never have been admitted into Palestine in large enough numbers to enable them to overwhelm the Palestinian Arabs in this Arab people's own country. The reason why the State of Israel exists today and why today 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs are refugees is that, for 30 years, Jewish immigration was imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own. The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world's peace."
(Arnold J. Toynbee, 1968)

"as I interpret the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, Palestine had not been excepted by the British Government from the area in which they had pledged themselves to King Hussein to recognize and support Arab independence. The Palestinian Arabs could therefore reasonably assume that Britain was pledged to prepare Palestine for becoming an independent Arab state."
(Arnold J. Toynbee, 1968)

"There is no better proof of the value of the Balfour Declaration as a military move than the fact that Germany entered into negotiations with Turkey in an endeavor to provide an alternative scheme which would appeal to Zionists. A German-Jewish Society, the V. J. O. D., was formed, and in January 1918, Talaat, the Turkish Grand Vizier, at the instigation of the Germans, gave vague promises of legislation by means of which "all justifiable wishes of the Jews in Palestine would be able to meet their fulfillment.

Another most cogent reason for the adoption by the Allies of the policy of the Declaration lay in the state of Russia herself. Russian Jews had been secretly active on behalf of the Central Powers from the first; they had become the chief agents of German pacifist propaganda in Russia; by 1917 they had done much in preparing for that general disintegration of Russian society, later recognized as the Revolution. It was believed that if Great Britain declared for the fulfillment of Zionist aspirations in Palestine under her own pledge, one effect would be to bring Russian Jewry to the cause of the Entente.

It was believed, also, that such a declaration would have a potent influence upon world Jewry outside Russia, and secure for the Entente the aid of Jewish financial interests. In America, their aid in this respect would have a special value when the Allies had almost exhausted the gold and marketable securities available for American purchases. Such were the chief considerations which, in 1917, impelled the British Government towards making a contract with Jewry"
(David Lloyd George, 1936)

"Sami Hadawi made the biggest contribution towards documenting and compiling village land statistics prior to the partition of Palestine in 1948"
(Michael R. Fischbach, December 2003)

"... when we got on the Queen Elizabeth, the secret files of the State Department were disclosed to us. We found that for every promise made by our Presidents from 1920 onwards, for every practically unanimous resolution passed by Congress, and for the planks in the 1944 platforms of both the Republican and Democratic parties, our State Department advised the Arabs that nothing would be done."
(Bartley C. Crum, 1946)

"the area of the Shebaa farms is essential for Israeli security and strategic concerns because topographically it dominates Jordan River sources."
(Reuven Erlich, 9 August 2006)

"I think we should ask for an opportunity of criticizing the passages dealing with the Arab revolt and especially the passages (if any) which deal with HMG's alleged promises to King Hussein."
(George William Rendel, July 1935)

"Israel's war is to be sold as America's war."
(Patrick J. Buchanan, 31 January 2007)

"His Majesty the Sultan grants and guarantees the JOLC [Jewish-Ottoman Land Company] ... the right to exchange economic enclaves of its territory, with the exception of holy places or places designated for worship. The owners shall receive plots of equal size and quality procured by it [the JOLC] in other provinces and territories of the Ottoman Empire. It will not only compensate these owners for the costs of resettlement from oits own funds, but it will also grant modest loans for the building of necessary housing and the acquisition of the necessary equipment. These loans are to be repaid in equal installments over several years, and the new plots can be used as collateral [for the loans]."
(Theodor Herzl, Winter 1993)

"We are involved in building up the Presidential Guard, instructing it, assisting it to build itself up, and giving them ideas."
(Keith Dayton, December 2006)

"US media were surprised by the outbreak of the intifada and its continuation because they refused to recognize Jewish racism. If US journalists want to understand the situation, they might put themselves in the mind of a Palestinian who sees his or her land taken away, with the help of US money, for exclusive Jewish benefit. Let them apply the same standards to Jewish racism as to anti-Semitism, since both are deplorable and should be equally opposed."
(Israel Shahak, Summer 1989)

"As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress"
(Cherie Blair, 18 June 2002)

"By the same token, although many Israelis had known for nearly 40 years about the significant role played by Israel in the creation of the Palestinian refugee proboem, it was the way in which Israeli historian Benny Morris breached their tacit agreement throughout those years not to discuss it in public that made his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 so controversial."
(Eviatar Zerubavel, 1 April 2006)

"Equally illustrative in this regard are Israel's official silence about the destruction of Arab villages during its War of Independence"
(Eviatar Zerubavel, 1 April 2006)

"I went [to Israel in 1967] with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country through work. [The problem was that this view was] remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country and were suffering in refugee camps to make this fantasy possible."
(Tony Judt, December 2003)

"Most would say that they are simply anti-Zionists, not anti-Semites. But I disagree, because in a world where there is only one Jewish state, to oppose it vehemently is to endanger Jews."
(Shulamit Reinharz, 21 December 2006)

"Contemporary communications vehicles make it particularly easy for anti-Semitic Jews to disseminate their ideas. They publish books. They use the web. They go on speaking tours. They seem to be respectable. Most would say that they are simply anti-Zionists, not anti-Semites. But I disagree, because in a world where there is only one Jewish state, to oppose it vehemently is to endanger Jews."
(Shulamit Reinharz, 21 December 2006)

"We recognize Israel's need and right to defend itself, but we believe the route of the separation fence should follow the Green Line. [Our] funding of the research [by Bimkom] was intended to examine the implications of the current route of the fence on the Palestinian population."
(British Embassy in Israel, 5 February 2007)

"The danger isn't as much Ahmadinejad's deciding to launch an attack but Israel's living under a dark cloud of fear from a leader committed to its destruction... Most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who live can live abroad will... I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button."
(Ephraim Sneh, 21 November 2006 )

"All Jews are silenced by the requirement to be supportive of Israel, and all non-Jews are silenced by the fear of being thought anti-Semitic, and there is no conversation on the subject."
(Tony Judt, February 2007)

"[Hillary Clinton] is pretty gutless on this [the need to change US policy towards Israel]."
(Tony Judt, February 2007)

"The Palestinians' lives under the occupation are reminiscent of the lives of Chile's citizens under the dictatorship. There [Chile], too, people who thought differently were considered enemies: They were imprisoned, tortured and killed. There, too, people couldn't move from place to place, they didn't have freedom and they didn't have equality before the law. But here [Palestine] it's harder. It has been going on for longer"
(Juan Guzman (Guzmán), 11 February 2007)

"And thus we arrived at 1967. It is generally said that prior to the Six-Day War, the military administration over Israeli Arabs was abolished; that is not accurate. The repressive powers were transferred from the army to the police. Meanwhile the army began to control the West Bank and the Gaza Strip."
(Tom Segev, 25 August 2006)

"the distribution of weapons to an element or members of one group [of Palestinian Arabs] is likely to be useful to us; it will create the desired tension among the various parts of the population and enable us to control the situation."
(Israeli security forces liaison committee, 1949)

"How easy it is to beat your breast in contrition this Yom Kippur, when the fist lands on the chest of your neighbor, Arafat or Ariel Sharon. And you, your hands did not spill this blood, your hands did not fire missiles at demonstrators, your voice did not denounce."
(Yitzhak Laor, 8 October 2000)

"Haj Amin believed that the Axis powers would win the war and would then grant independence to (British mandate) Palestine... I pointed out to him that such illusions were based on a rather naive calculation, since Hitler had graded the Arabs 14th after the Jews in his hierarchy of races. Had Germany won, the regime which it would have imposed on the Palestinian Arabs would have been far more cruel than that which they had known during the time of British rule."
(Salah Khalaf, some date before 1991)

"Like the terrifying bulldozer pushing before it rocks and lumps of earth, so the occupation pushes before it the Palestinian population – always eastwards, always out."
(Uri Avnery, 3 May 2003)

"[The Occupied Palestinian territories are] Cages in the image of ghettos"
(Walter Mixa, March 2007)

"Israel has, of course, the right to exist, but this right cannot be realized in such a brutal manner"
(Gregor Maria Hanke, March 2007)

"This [the Israeli barrier in the West Bank] is something that is done to animals, not people."
(Joachim Meisner, March 2007)

"Tom Dine is fond of quoting Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger: 'Dine, I deal with you because you could hurt me.'"
(Lloyd Grove, 13 June 1991)

"[Tom] Dine, I deal with you because you could hurt me."
(Lawrence S. Eagleburger, some date before 13 June 1991)

"All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust [Charles] Percy ... And American politicians ... got the message."
(Thomas (Tom) A. Dine, 1984)

"A lobby is like a night flower. It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun."
(Steven J. Rosen, some date before 13 June 1991)

"On any given day it's a toss-up whether Libby is working for the Americans or the Israelis."
(Jack Straw, sometime in 2001-2006)

"Our commitment to Israel defines us as a nation, and [AIPAC lobbyists] help make sure that we don't forget."
(Norm Coleman, 16 March 2007)

"The Israeli occupation comes down to this: the right to determine what will be illuminated and what will be cast into darkness, what will be rendered visible or invisible, accessible or inaccessible. The border governs every aspect, even the division of light and shadow, like some supernatural apparition."
(Christian Salmon, May 2002)

"Even a trip within the Gaza Strip can take longer than the flight from Tel Aviv to New York. In the occupied territories Israel is occupying time as well as space, with people facing long lines at checkpoints before being allowed to return home."
(Christian Salmon, May 2002)

"For Jewish Jerusalem I did something in the past 25 years. For East [Palestinian] Jerusalem? Nothing! Sidewalks? Nothing! Cultural institutions? Not one! Yes, we installed a sewerage 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!"
(Teddy Kollek, 4 March 2002)

"Just as this war [against Iraq], as I've been saying since Day One, was fought to advance Israel's interests, not America's. The next war – yes, I mean the looming conflict with Iran – will be fought for the same reason. American foreign policy has long since ceased pursuing the genuine national interests of this country, and instead is being held hostage by a coalition of neo conservative ideologues and foreign lobbyists, who have no compunctions about leading us into an abyss as long as their no-longer-quite-so-hidden agenda is served."
(Justin Raimondo, 19 March 2007)

"I also tend to obey my government's will without reserve. But I am not accustomed to concealing my ideas and my concerns from my government."
(Yigal Allon, 1948)

"Saladin, we have returned"
(Henri Gouraud, July 1920)

"You know an Israeli soldier is not like a British soldier. For a start, their soldiers are very young, conscripts mainly, though there are professional soldiers. The soldiers are invariably backed up by their commander and the chain of command."
(Tom Fitzalan-Howard, April 2003)

"You realise, don’t you, that we’re not going to get anywhere with the Israelis. ... It’s not quite as simple as that. They’re a hard-bitten lot. They’re not going to admit to anything. A lot of people have tried to call them to account, but I’m afraid they haven’t succeeded. ... You know an Israeli soldier is not like a British soldier. The concept of minimum force is central to a British soldier, who is trained, absolutely, to be accountable for his actions. The British rules of engagement are very strict on this, and they are always applied. It’s quite different with the IDF. ... For a start their soldiers are very young — conscripts mainly, though there are professional soldiers. The soldiers are invariably backed up by their commander and the chain of command. ... Jocelyn, I have to tell you that the investigations are invariably a sham. This will be difficult for you and Anthony to deal with. A soldier is rarely held to account, and whatever he’s done he would never face a murder or manslaughter charge — he’d only be on a lesser charge, perhaps failing to carry out the correct drills. I really don’t want you to expect too much. ... You also need to know that it’s only with political support at the highest level that we’ve achieved anything with any IDF investigations. Problem is that with media pressure alone they hunker down under the antisemitic charge, which they level against anyone who dares to criticise."
(Tom Fitzalan-Howard, April 2003)

"Mindful of the 4th August 2006 call from Palestinian Filmmakers, Artists and Cultural workers to end all cooperation with state-sponsored Israeli cultural events and institutions, Aosdána wishes to encourage Irish artists and cultural institutions to reflect deeply before engaging in any such cooperation, always bearing in mind the undeniable courage of those Israeli artists, writers and intellectuals who oppose their own government's illegal policies towards the Palestinians."
(Aosdána, 28 March 2007)

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