"Catch 23: If the Arabs are strong, you can't make peace with them. You have to defeat them. And if the Arabs are weak, there is no need to make peace with them. Why offer them anything?
Catch 24: If the Arabs say they want war, you have to believe them. But if the Arabs say they want peace, they are clearly lying. And how can you make peace with liars?"
(Uri Avnery, 10 January 2004)

"If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-semitism, we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism. If our people is deserving and willing to live its own national life, then it is an alien body thrust into the nations among whom it lives, an alien body that insists on its own distinctive identity, reducing the domain of their life. It is right, therefore, that they should fight against us for their national integrity Instead of establishing societies for defense against the anti-semites, who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defense against our friends who desire to defend our rights."
(Jacob Klatzkin, 1925)

"We are simply aliens, we are foreign people in your midst, and we emphasize, we wish to stay that way."
(Jacob Klatzkin, uncertain date before 1949)

"'We were informed by Iraqi fishermen after they had returned from sea that there were British gunboats in an area which is out of Iraqi control. We don't know why they were there."
(Hakim Jassim, March 2007)

"Iraq's military commander of the country's territorial waters, Brig. Gen. Hakim Jassim, said Iraqi fishermen had reported that the British boats were "in an area that is out of Iraqi control.""
(Ali Akbar Dareini, 25 March 2007)

"Usually there is no presence of British forces in that area, so we were surprised and we wondered whether the British forces were inside Iraqi waters or inside Iranian regional waters."
(Hakim Jassim, March 2007)

"I was boycotted in my university and there had been attempts to expel me from my job. I am getting threatening calls from people every day"
(Ilan Pappe, 28 March 2007)

"Not only is Israel absent from the US State Department Terrorism list, Israel appears to determine who is on it."
(Franklin P. Lamb, 6 April 2007)

"Bush and his people have been so anxious to please Israel that what might be good for America is no longer the basis for American actions in the Middle East."
(James G. Abourezk, 10 April 2007)

"I am against concessions in any area, and if the Arabs will want war over this, I am not opposed."
(Moshe Dayan, 1950s, probably 1954)

"the settlement enterprise in the Occupied Territories has created a system of legally sanctioned separation based on discrimination that has, perhaps, no parallel anywhere in the world since the apartheid regime in South Africa."
(Yehezkel Lein, May 2002)

"Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wishes to boost Palestinian President Abbas. President George W. Bush also wishes to strengthen him. The approach chosen to achieve this objective is to send weapons to forces affiliated with Abbas so that they can fight against forces loyal to Hamas, Fatah's partner in the Palestinian national unity government."
(Yossi Beilin, 17 April 2007)

"In other words, from the IDF's perspective, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, everything is the same. There's no difference between the Ramallah-Nablus road and the Tel Aviv-Haifa road."
(Akiva Eldar, 27 April 2007)

"The idea of a national home for Jews in the Middle East was bound to appeal to a certain type of Nazi-"idealists", scrupulous constructionists of National Socialist glosses on Volk and Raum , who were wont to identify with the national aspirations of the Jewish people. Well aware of this particular current in Nazi thought, the ZVfD in the spring of 1933 commissioned Kurt Tuchler, a member of the Juedische Volkspartei on the Berlin Executive, to fire the imagination of such broad-minded Nazis for the Jewish enterprise in Palestine. Tuchler found an interested party in Baron Leopold Itz von Mildenstein, the Judenreferent in the S.S.; and later that spring the two men, accompanied by their wives, embarked on their Palestinian jaunt. Upon his return the Baron, who also dabbled in journalism, persuaded the editors of Der Angriff, Goebbels's newspaper, to devote a series of illustrated articles to this curious fact-finding journey. Having learned a little Hebrew, von Mildenstein also brought back with him a collection of records from Palestine; to Tuchler's astonishment, strains of familiar Hebrew folk songs greeted him on entering the Baron's office in 1934. To commemorate the voyage of a Nazi to Palestine, Der Angriff even had a medal struck showing the Swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other."
(Jacob Boas, 1984)

"Even the term Nakba -- the catastrophe -- I don’t like. A Nakba is something that happens to you, it is a catastrophe, but nobody is responsible for a catastrophe; it like the storm we had, it is a catastrophe. A crime has criminals and it has victims. I named the criminals not because I want to bring them to trial, I named them because if they are criminals there was a crime and not a Nakba. There was no Nakba; Nakba is something that happens. There was a crime, and we should talk about this crime because if a state was born on the depopulation of half of the people who lived there, on the destruction of half of the villages that were there, and the world said nothing and the world was silent, you should not be surprised that the state itself was built on the same ideology."
(Ilan Pappe, 3 February 2007)

"There is a military policy that is causing the Arab population to leave the center of Hebron. It's a clear plan, it's a fact. Everything would be all right if they would say so openly, if our policy were to create Jewish contiguity in Hebron, and the government were to tell the army to do so: We would go to elections over that. But that is not the policy of the State of Israel. The problem is that under military rule the spirit of the commander is stronger than anything else."
(Haggai (Hagai) Alon, May 2007)

"The partition of Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel is an invasion of the Arab world, initially by European Jews, and therefore alien."
(Dorothy Thompson, 1951)

"They [Yemenite Jews] are people who need education. They cannot, in a cultural sense, take any action. This action, so necessary for our rebirth, can only be taken by young Ashkenazi people."
(Shmuel Yavnieli (Yavne'eli), 1920s)

"Even though we had it good with the Arabs [in Morocco], we said we would come to the Land of Israel."
(Rafael Deri, 2007)

"Sderot was set up between the [Ashkenazi] kibbutzim [in the Western Negev] and was intended to provide a reservoir of [Mizrahi] workers. The town has very few residents who have not worked on one of the kibbutzim or factories in the area at one stage or another. This connection was the source of the love-hate relationship. There were the kibbutzniks from Gevim, who threw out the water of the thirsty children from the transit camps, but there were other kibbutzniks who went to help them."
(Meron Rapoport, 25 May 2007)

"The people of Sderot, he adds, recognized the hypocrisy of the kibbutzniks who spoke about socialism while exploiting them and treating them with disdain."
(Meron Rapoport, 25 May 2007)

"My conclusion is that civilian settlement of the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."
(Theodor Meron, 1967)

"Today we know that Israel's triumph was a Pyrrhic victory. Tom Segev's new book makes that more clear than anything written on the subject until today."
(Amos Elon, 22 July 2005)

"The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail and exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory."
(Mordechai (Mordecai) Bentov, 14 April 1971)

"The non-allocation of frequencies is another front in the economic war Israel is waging against the Palestinians."
(Amira Hass, 31 May 2007)

"I now consider myself an Israeli professor, and I will act as if I am an Israeli professor. If they boycott Israel, they're boycotting me."
(Alan Dershowitz, 1 June 2007)

"Don't romanticize Palestinians just because they are primitive."
(Steven Weinberg, 1 June 2007)

"It was terrorism from the Jewish side that we faced."
(Derek Cooper, 2002)

"After the 1967 war the inhabitants of several villages in the area, including among others those of Beit Nuba and Yalu, were forcibly removed and their homes destroyed. There was no question here of people being compelled to move as a result of military action. That same autumn I drove past the places where the villages had been and once or twice I noticed Arab peasants sitting around, apparently with nothing to do, in the afternoon sunlight. Once I stopped and asked on of them where the village of Yalu was. He said, "Yalu is destroyed; you can only find it in our hearts". He and others had not learned to forget their home, and continued to return to a spot which had helped them to remember happier days."
(Odd Bull, 1976)

"He [Aziz Shehadeh] called on us to use the surprise in the geopolitical change that had occurred after the removal of Hashemite rule and to work immediately to set up a Palestinian state. According to this line, he argued, it is vital for the state to be established within a week and that it sign a peace treaty with Israel within three days."
(Dan Bavli, 2002)

"Everything was virgin territory. There was a sense that we had to strike while the iron was hot and use the golden opportunity that had fallen into our laps to reach an agreement with the leaders of the territories. The Palestine Liberation Organization was a new organization, and had yet to accumulate power, the hatred for the Jordanians was still fresh and we still hadn't had a chance to take the Palestinians' lands from them."
(David Kimche, June 2007)

"There was something surreal and embarrassing in the slow and quiet movement of old people, men and women being expelled from their homes [in the villages of the Latrun salient, Imwas, Beit Nuba and Yalu] not to return"
(Dan Bavli, 2002)

"Indeed, the right to live together in the home expanse was denied not only to the 1948 refugees, but also to the new refugees of 1967: About 240,000 people, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip who were expelled and fled fearing the battles, and another approximately 60,000 who were abroad when the war broke out. The young state, only 19 years old at the time, acted as though it were mature and experienced: It hastened to deny the vast majority of them the status of residency in their land. By means of various tricks it also denied residency to another 100,000 individuals who went abroad to work or study after 1967, with a skillfulness that created another link in the chain of dispossession that began in 1948 and to which we have not put an end to this day."
(Amira Hass, 5 June 2007)

"A ceasefire went into effect on the afternoon of 10 June [1967], which did not inhibit Israel two days later from seizing a strongpoint on Mount Hermon which the Syrians had abandoned, and which was to become a prime Israeli electronic listening post."
(Patrick Seale, 11 January 1990)

"[Azmi] Bishara does not recognise the right of the Jewish people to a state and he has crossed the line. The decision to disqualify him [from standing for election] has been submitted to the Attorney General."
(Ami Ayalon, 2000)

"Israel is organising an occupation of the territories it has captured, which can only result in oppression, repression and expulsion, and there is resistance in those territories that Israel is calling terrorist."
(Charles de Gaulle, 1967)

"The Promised Land had, by the stroke of a pen, become twice-promised."
(Tom Segev, October 2001)

"The Jewish army's intention to" cleanse the Carmel" is expressed in a rare May 1948 document. (Documents kept at IDFA that refer to expulsion are usually censored). Tuvia Arazy had worked for the Shai (Sherut Yedi'ot, literally "The Information Service"), the Hagana intelligence arm, and later for the Arab section of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency. Arazy was holding talks with representatives of the Druze villages of Mount Carmel and reported their outcome to Moshe Carmel, the commander of the Carmeli Brigade, the army unit responsible for the area. The following is a reply Moshe Carmel sent Arazy in May 1948: . ..I emphasized this to you by phone before the meeting and I repeat, the Hagana has not authorized anyone to negotiate with the Druze in matters of security and defense, nor to make agreements with them in these matters either in writing or verbally. Whatever was decided in this meeting does not bind the Hagana and it will operate according to its own considerations and inclinations. Furthermore, this meeting if it touches on military matters, contradicts the Hagana inclination to cleanse (letihur ) the Carmel and causes damage in matters of security . ... This plan "to cleanse the Carmel" was not carried through fully. Two Moslem village, Fredis and Jisr az-Zarqa' (originally 'Arab al-Ghawarneh) remained intact, as well as the two Druze villages, Dalyet al-Karmel and 'Isfiyyeh (which had previous ties with Jewish dignitaries). The rest of the villages in this area were indeed depopulated. In some cases, such as in the village of Sarafand, (which was relatively small), the inhabitants left out of fear before they were attacked whereas in most cases the inhabitants did not leave until they realized that they had lost the battle."
(Efrat Ben-Ze'ev, 2002)

"I emphasized this to you by phone before the meeting and I repeat, the Hagana has not authorized anyone to negotiate with the Druze in matters of security and defense, nor to make agreements with them in these matters either in writing or verbally. Whatever was decided in this meeting does not bind the Hagana and it will operate according to its own considerations and inclinations. Furthermore, this meeting if it touches on military matters, contradicts the Hagana inclination to cleanse (letihur) the Carmel and causes damage in matters of security . ..."
(Moshe Carmel (Cherbinsky), May 1948)

"... and then I say: yes, gosh, I would like to know, gosh hey. All that hunger, misery, sickness, disasters. Uhhh. Children abuse, child porn and the holocaust. Why? And then He says: Well, yes, because of this and that, this and this and this and this and that. And then say: Aha! Yes, indeed. Yes, yes, yes, oh, yes. Naturally... No, now I understand it. It is not so bad then?"
(Hans Teeuwen, 2000)

"Whether the Zionists like it or not, the UCU decision to boycott Israel's academia is a moral act of the highest order."
(Khalid Amayreh, 31 May 2007)

"It is a delusion that we can ever have peace with the Arabs. This is why the Heights must remain Israeli."
(Rafael Eitan, 14 September 1992)

"I have a sinking feeling about the damage this [DePaul University's denial of tenure to Norman Finkelstein] will do to academic freedom"
(Raul Hilberg, 10 June 2007)

"It would have been better, perhaps, if there were no Arab students. If they remained hewers of wood, it would perhaps be easier to rule over them."
(Uri Lubrani, some date before 1982)

"It was while Johnson was sitting between Mary Lasker and Mathilde Krim, enjoying a glittering dinner dance [on 3 June 1967], that [Abe] Feinberg bent over and told him that the war would start within 24 hours."
(Judith Apter Klinghoffer, 30 July 1999)

"Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet, which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO."
(Chas Freeman, April 2004)

"In 1950, the Israeli had established a new kibbutz at Beit Katzir in the [southern] demilitarized sone. Like most of their kibbutzim in troubled areas, it was fortified with trenches and a double-apron barbed-wire fence from behind which its settlers sallied out to cultivate the surrounding land, digging irrigation canals to channel the water from Lake Tiberias with such vigour that before long no Arab farmed in the area was allowed into the stretch of land between the kibbutz and the lake. From here they soon extended their activities so that the inhabitants of two neighbouring Arab villages, Lower and Upper Tawafiq [a Syrian village just east of the southern DMZ], observed the kibbutznik tractor-drivers with alarm as they speeded up on each turn at the eastern boundaries of their fields, making the ploughs swerve out, thus slowly but surely extending their 'previous' cultivation eastwards into Arab [Palestinian] land. This was, of course, part of a premediated Israeli policy to edge east through the demilitarized zone towards the old Palestine border (as shown on their maps) and to get all Arabs out of the way by fair means or foul."
(Carl Carlsson von Horn, 1966)

"These [Palestinian] Arabs should not be living here, just as American Jews should not be living in America."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1950)

"I think that it [the creation of a Jewish state] is the most foolish thing that the Jewish people has done in the past 1,000 years. Putting down a stake in a permanent place is an invitation to a new Holocaust. A Jewish state is a dream, a fiction, a journalist's romance ... to which we have related with excessive seriousness."
(Sami Michael, February 2007)

"Many of you know my interest in Israel and in the Jewish community has been long-standing. My father was the chairman of the Church of Scotland's Israel Committee. Not only as I've described to some of you before did he make visits on almost two occasions a year for 20 years to Israel - but because of that, although Fife [Scotland], where I grew up, was a long way from Israel with no TV pictures to link us together - I had a very clear view from household slides and projectors about the history of Israel, about the trials and tribulations of the Jewish people, about the enormous suffering and loss during the Holocaust, as well as the extraordinary struggle that he described to me of people to create this magnificent homeland."
(Gordon Brown, April 2007)

"Can you imagine a real Liberal carrying out the Denshawai massacre --'executions' they called it-three years ago, when the pigeon shooting officers were avenged of a whole rural population by widespread public floggings and hangings?"
(Roger Casement, 23 June 1909)

"Denshawai is a little Egyptian village in the Nile Delta. It has pigeon houses: for the villagers keep pigeons just as an English farmer keeps poultry. Try to imagine the feelings of an English village if a party of Chinese officers suddenly appeared and began shooting the ducks, the geese, the hens, the turkeys and carried them off, asserting that they were wild birds. ... But as a mark of consideration for the family, he [Hassan Mahfouz] was hanged in full view of his own house, with his wife and children and grandchildren enjoying the spectacle from the roof. ... they had room for only one man on the gallows, and had to leave him hanging half an hour to make sure [he was dead] and give his family plenty of time to watch him swinging, thus having two hours to kill as well as four men, they kept the entertainment going by flogging eight men with fifty lashes each."
(George Bernard Shaw, some date not long after 1906)

"The main reason for what happened is related and limited to the PA, which is an illegal and illusory authority. The PA is the fruit of the Oslo agreements, which died when Rabin died."
(Farouk Kaddoumi, 21 June 2007)

"When it comes to the administration's policy toward Iran, there is, in my view, a little too much of a tendency to identify Israel's very justifiable existential fears of Iran with Iran's place in U.S. foreign policy."
(Michael Hirsh, June 2007)

"In other words, Israeli fears aside, the U.S. does not face an existential threat and it must consider its own interests. Appeasing Iran is definitely a U.S. interest. This view is shared by many U.S. policy makers. A recent study by The Israel Project, which specializes in examining U.S. public opinion, asked 800 respondents to rank the issues over which the U.S. should fear Iran. ... On the face of it, the findings justify Israel's policy of keeping a low profile: It is better to pull the levers behind the scenes than to be depicted as the tail wagging the American dog and siccing it on the Iranians."
(Aluf Benn, 6 July 2007)

"I do not believe the Jewish state will preserve its antiquities. We must place scientific sovereignty above political sovereignty. We are interested in the archaeology of the whole land, and the only way [to ensure this] is a unified department [for the Jewish state and the Arab state]."
(Eliezer L Sukenik, December 1947)

"Ben-Gurion wanted to erase everything that had been, to erase the Islamic past."
(Meron Rappaport, 6 July 2007)

"One of the fraudulent things about the Israeli-Jewish left is the statement that yes, there will be equality. There will not be equality. There will be dispute."
(Ruth Gavison, 2006)

"The Jewish people in the Land of Israel was not reduced to total devastation [when Titus conquered Jerusalem]. ... The population had to a remarkable degree recovered its numeric and economic strength by the end of the first century."
(Haim (Hayim) Hillel Ben-Sasson, 1976)

"The strange thing is, Israelis know these facts. They learn them in school. On their vacations, they visit the remains of ancient synagogues and the graves of the rabbis. They have before them, constantly, the evidence of a large and continuous Jewish presence well into the eighth century. They eagerly unearth this evidence in order to show how long they were present in the land, for they think this bolsters their claim to it. The evidence exists side by side in their minds, quite comfortably, with the belief that it contradicts: the belief in a forced exile."
(Stephen Langfur, May 2007)

"A foreign and hated race, a motley crowd of Poles, Russians, Romanians, Spaniards, Yemenites, etc., who can claim absolutely no right over the country, except that of sentiment and the fact that their forefathers inhabited it over two thousand years ago[.] The introduction into Palestine of Jewish rule, or even Jewish predominance, will mean the spoliation of the Arab inhabitants of their hereditary rights and the upsetting of the principles of nationalities. ... Politically, a Jewish State in Palestine will mean a permanent danger to a lasting peace in the Near East."
(A. P. Albina, some date before 1918)

"The road to liberating Palestine passes through the palace in Amman."
(Ahmed Shukeiri, some date before 1980)

"The situation between us is like the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the young girl he has taken against her wishes. But when their children are born, they will see the man as their father and the woman as their mother. The initial act will mean nothing to them. You, the Palestinians, as a nation, do not want us today, but we will change your attitude by imposing our presence upon you."
(Moshe Dayan, 1967)

"What is it that moves Israeli scholars to distort and make ugly the Jewish national liberation movement, whose only desire was to realize the two-thousand-year-old hope to return to Zion?"
(Aharon Megged, 1994)

"This role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story."
(Hannah Arendt, 1963)

"Were I to know that all German Jewish children could be rescued by transferring them to England and only half by transfer to Palestine, I would opt for the latter, because our concern is not only the personal interest of these children, but the historic interest of the Jewish people."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1938)

"the purpose of settlement, since the day in July 1967 when the first Israeli settler climbed out of a jeep in the Syrian heights, had been to create facts that would determine the final status of the land, to sculpt the political reality before negotiations ever got under way."
(Gershom Gorenberg, 2006)

"For a month, for a year, or for a whole generation we will have to sit as occupiers in places that touch our hearts with their history. And we must remember: as occupiers, because there is no alternative. And as a pressure tactic to hasten peace. Not as saviors or liberators. Only in the twilight of myths can one speak of the liberation of a land struggling under a foreign yoke. Land is not enslaved and there is no such thing as a liberation of lands. There are enslaved people, and the word “liberation” applies only to human beings. We have not liberated Hebron and Ramallah and El-Arish, nor have we redeemed their inhabitants. We have conquered them and we are going to rule over them only until our peace is secured."
(Amos Oz, 1967)

"We do not believe ... that extended public speculation regarding Israeli atomic energy program will advance the interests of the United States, and we have taken and will continue to take any feasible measures to damp down speculation on this matter and in particular to avoid giving occasion for renewed suspicions and possible undesirable reactions in the Arab world"
(William B. Macomber, January 1961)

"In the past, the WZO has served as a kind of subcontractor for the government, building settlements over the Green Line but with money from the government, not the Jewish Agency."
(Gil Sedan, 31 July 2003)

"This time, the settlement drive also will include the Negev, with special emphasis on single-family farms that will encompass large plots of land. The aim is to offset the rapid growth of the Bedouin population in the area."
(Gil Sedan, 31 July 2003)

"The government of Israel is the government of all its citizens. The Jewish Agency is the government of the Jewish people."
(Shai Hermesh, July 2003)

"They settled the kibbutzim and the moshavim on the frontier. These neighborhoods [such as Kfar Shalem] were not frontier zones. The state just wanted to give those immigrants a roof over their heads. Who was thinking about rights at that time?"
(Eli Moran, July 2007)

"But the residents [of Kfar Shalem, previously the Palestinian village of Salameh] find it hard to shake off the feeling that the state, which sent them to the village in order to prevent its Palestinian inhabitants from returning, is now sloughing them off."
(Meron Rapoport, 15 July 2007)

"Sooner or later Hamas will fail in its war against Israel. But that does mean that there will then be a return to the days of Oslo and the two-state vision, which has withered and died since September 2000. Rather, there will be increasingly strong demands by Palestinian Arabs, who constitute almost half the inhabitants of this land, who will say: Under the present conditions we cannot establish a state of our own, and what remains for us is to demand civil rights in the country that is our homeland. They will adopt the slogans of the struggle of the Arabs who are Israeli citizens, who demand equality and the definition of Israel as a state of all its citizens. That won't happen tomorrow morning, but there doesn't seem to be any option to its happening eventually. If there aren't two states for the two nations, in the end there will be one state."
(Danny Rubinstein, 16 July 2007)

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
(Abraham Lincoln, some date before 1866)

"If you think Judaism and Zionism are one, it is like thinking Islam and the Taliban are the same, and they are not."
(Ciamak Moresadegh, April 2007)

"What has happened to Heftsiba shows that those who steal land from Palestinians end up stealing from Israelis"
(Yariv Oppenheimer, August 2007)

"Nowhere in the United States Constitution is it written that the special US-Israel relationship is part and parcel of America's foundational principles. That's why I have never, not for a single moment, taken for granted America's unique ties with Israel, and why I have spent a good part of my professional life urging fellow American Jews never to succumb to complacency or the mistaken notion that the link is on automatic pilot."
(David A. Harris, 25 August 2006)

"[Speaking of Senator Joseph Lieberman during the 2000 campaign] I don't think American voters care where a man goes to church on Sunday."
(John Breaux, 2000)

"No American President can stand up to Israel."
(Thomas Moorer, date unknown)

"For 2,000 years, I don’t remember that we were praying and dreaming that we can’t wait to establish a democratic state in the Middle East, but we did say that we can’t wait to reestablish a Jewish homeland."
(Russell F. Robinson, July 2007)

"Israel is not America. It was created first as a Jewish state, where America was created first as [a] democracy."
(Morton (Mort) A. Klein, July 2007)

"[Jewish emigrants from Israel are] the dreck of wimps"
(Yitzhak Rabin, late 1970s)

"It would represent something to my knowledge unique in history. It is common for great powers to try to fight wars by proxy, getting smaller powers to fight for their interests. This would be the first instance I know where a great power (in fact, a superpower) would do the fighting as the proxy of a small client state."
(Paul W. Schroeder, 21 October 2002)

"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men."
(Woodrow Wilson, 1914)

"The consequence is that the PKN is, under its church order, more joined with, for example, an unbelieving Jew in Alaska, than a Christian Palestinian in Palestine. That the State of Israel defines itself also primarily in ethnic terms becomes clear from the fact that according to the current legislation a Jew from Alaska has more right to live in Israel than Palestinian whose ancestors have lived there for centuries."
(Henri Veldhuis, August 2007)

"Israel was founded in the land that once belonged to the Philistines, while the Palestinians, who got their name from the Philistines, live in the land that belonged to the ancient Kingdom of Israel."
(Steven Runciman, before the 1967 War)

"One point that none of the pundits and analysts have noted was that, in attacking Syria, Israel committed a blatant act of aggression against its northern neighbor of the kind denounced as the "supreme international crime" by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal."
(Jonathan Cook, 27 September 2007)

"Wherever U.S forces go, nuclear weapons go with them or can be made to follow in short order. The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy."
(Martin van Creveld, 21 August 2004)

"the church has a stronger bond with a non-believing Alaskan Jewish person than a Palestinian Christian."
(Henri Veldhuis, August 2007)

"The U.S. alliance with Israel has unquestionably led to a gross distortion of U.S. policy in exactly the way in which Washington predicted, creating the illusion of a common interest where none exists and injecting Israel's enmities into the U.S. with little or no justification. If the U.S. cannot distinguish its own interests from those of Israel and Israel's lobby, then it simply cannot act, as it should, purely in its own interest. Those who minimize the role of the Israel lobby in influencing U.S. policy choices, and who refuse or fail to recognize the part Israel and the lobby have played in leading the U.S. into disastrous foreign adventures, pose an incalculable danger to the U.S., for a failure to recognize the reason for a misguided policy will inevitably doom us to repeat it."
(Bill Christison, 28 September 2007)

"I think I ought to announce that I am joining Kadima."
(Thomas Pickering, December 2005)

"Before she returned to Boston, Kahn wanted an experience that would give her a better understanding of Israeli society, of "how the army works." That is the goal of Marva, a program designed to give participants a taste of real Israeli life. For eight weeks, the group lives on army bases"
(Jessica Steinberg, 31 August 2001)

"I hate all Iranians."
(Debra Cagan, September 2006)

"I would say that the glory of that time was that the planning considerations and the political considerations went hand in hand… To tell you that an architect influences politics? He doesn’t. The whole story of Judea and Samaria could have been different, but this is on levels that are neither in your hands nor in mine."
(Thomas (Tommy) Leitersdorf, 2002)

"Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land is an important coda to Edward Said’s explique of Israel’s cartographic-cumtopographic control of Palestinian enclaves. He surpasses Said’s essentially two-dimensional vision with a 3D Sensurround revelation of a land in which architecture, infrastructure and town planning have become strategic military apparatus as important as tanks and special troops."
(Jay Merrick, 5 July 2007)

"She makes a point of calling herself a Palestinian scholar so I was curious about why she did that. The word Palestinian is a contested term. ... There is no country yet called Palestine so I didn't know what she meant by that."
(Shulamit Reinharz, 2007)

"Money. A lot of the Jewish money from New York. Come on, let's not kid about it. A significant percentage of Jewish money, and many leading American Jews support the Israeli position that Iran is an existential threat. And I think it is as simple as that. ... That's American politics circa 2007."
(Seymour (Sy) Hersh, 2 October 2007)

"For it must be said that this [Jeffrey Goldberg's 'Prisoners: A Muslim & A Jew Across The Middle East Divide'] is a quite wretched book which, for all its willingness to acknowledge ugly realities about Israel's occupation, albeit realities which can no longer be concealed, nonetheless reiterates and, because of the seeming openness, revivifies the old pernicious myths and threadbare clichés sustaining the occupation, presenting them in a form less detached from reality yet processed to make them assimilable by his liberal American Jewish audience."
(Norman G. Finkelstein, 6 October 2007)

"We should invade their [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
(Ann Coulter, 13 September 2001)

"Israeli rule in East Jerusalem is visible mainly in a wave of construction for Jews, not in the granting of equal rights to the Arab inhabitants, not in providing equal services to the two parts of the city."
(Tom Segev, 9 October 2007)

"Since 1991, Israel has been using the partial or total imprisonment of the Gazans in their cage, for longer or shorter periods, as a political strategy: Sometimes it is depicted as punishment, sometimes as a deterrent action and always as a preface to a political plan. Until not long ago, it seemed as though the terms of imprisonment could not be any worse. The past four months have proven that there is always "worse.""
(Amira Hass, 15 October 2007)

"Every time I visit, the situation seems to have worsened. This time, I was very struck by the sense of hopelessness among the Palestinian people [due to] the crushing effect of human rights violations."
(John Dugard, October 2007)

"In the worst moments I have had death threats, and much worse, threats against my family. ... These people would call up my office and they would say, 'Tell Tony Judt he had better not let his kids out on the street,' or 'Tell Tony Judt this is Hitler calling and he says, Congratulations.' ... I didn't think I knew until then just how deep and how uniquely American this obsession with blocking any criticism of Israel is. It is uniquely American."
(Tony Judt, March 2007)

"People accuse me of wanting to see the abolition of Israel, which is nonsense. Israel exists. The question is what kind of state is it going to be in future years, what kind of laws is it going to have for first- and second-class citizens?"
(Tony Judt, March 2007)

"Up on the Golan Heights [in June 1967], I met and heard officers talking, and for the first time I was seeing a side of Israel I had managed to turn a blind eye to. Until then, the dominant rhetoric in Israel had still been that you didn't disparage the Arabs, you believed in socialism and equality. Now it was straightforward anti-Arab sentiment. What began in 1967, and accelerated in a great tumble through the mid-1970s, was the rise of a different Israel: hard-line, rightwing, very often religious, believing they had a real-estate pact with God. It was very ugly, at least I found it very ugly."
(Tony Judt, March 2007)

"There is no doubt that, under international law, the complex of settlements, interlinking road systems and the Separation Wall are considered to be illegal. Many aspects of them are illegal under Israeli domestic law as well."
(George Joffe, January 2006)

"We've got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously - I believe that if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace."
(George W. Bush, 21 October 2007)

"Unfortunately, we have too many mosques in this country."
(Peter King, September 2007)

"The fact Holocaust memorial day is being celebrated in Belfast this year and is focusing on Rwanda is something we should enthusiastically join in and at the same time say we have solidarity with you in remembering this genocide, but that does not mean that we support what Israel is doing to the Palestinians today. Indeed you could draw some parallels."
(Fiona MacTaggart, October 2003)

"I would love to be there on the day that Palestinian independence is declared because that would mean Israeli independence as well, in a real sense."
(Richard Crowley, 20 September 2007)

"We, as the army, are helping Jewish settlers to commit crimes against unarmed Palestinian civilians."
(Yuval Bazak, 26 October 2007)

"Iran is Israel's best friend and we do not intend to change our position in relation to Tehran."
(Yitzhak Rabin, October 1987)

"My friend, take care. When you recognize the concept of "Palestine," you demolish your right to live in Ein Hahoresh. If this is Palestine and not the Land of Israel, then you are conquerers and not tillers of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it belongs to a people who lived here before you came. Only if its the Land of Israel do you have a right to live in Ein Hahoresh and Deganiyah B. If it is not your country, your fatherland, the country of your ancestors and your sons, then what are you doing here? You came to another people's homeland, as they claim, you expelled them and you have taken their land."
(Menachem Begin, October 1969)

"My friend, take care. When you recognize the concept of "Palestine," you demolish your right to live in Ein Hahoresh. If this is Palestine and not the Land of Israel, then you are conquerers and not tillers of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it belongs to a people who lived here before you came. Only if its the Land of Israel do you have a right to live in Ein Hahoresh and Deganiyah B. If it is not your country, your fatherland, the country of your ancestors and your sons, then what are you doing here? You came to another people's homeland, as they claim, you expelled them and you have taken their land."
(Menachem Begin, October 1969)

"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat is-it's the threat to Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name...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)

"The Zionist movement was created to liberate Jews from persecution, oppression and humiliation, to reconstruct a full-fledged national life, and it was only natural for it to seek this aim in the country historically connected with the Jewish people."
(Mordehai (Mordechai) Nahumi, 1975)

"The Red House in Tel Aviv is gone now. It was a typical building in Tel Aviv that had all the characteristics of Mediterranean homes but with the local Palestinian architecture of the '20's. Today a USA Sheraton Hotel stands in its place. The Red House was the home of the Hagganah; a Jewish underground organization but before 1948 it was the home of a socialist movement, from which it received its name."
(Ilan Pappe, 8 November 2006)

"[Is Saddam Hussein] uniquely evil?"
(Tony Blair, November 2002)

"But the prime minister [Tony Blair], he [Charles Tripp] recalls, seemed detached except to seek confirmation that Saddam was "uniquely evil"."
(Ian Black, 21 September 2007)

"Why must Jewish organizations be and be seen as the loudest drum-beaters of all? Why can we not bring ourselves to say that military intervention is not on the table at all? Why not stash it under the table, out of sight, and mount instead a diplomatic assault?
Germany, 1938? The more relevant and equally cautionary precedent is Iraq, 2003 - and counting."
(Leonard Fein, 7 November 2007)

"It must be clear to everyone that the state of Israel is a national homeland for the Jewish people ... the national demands of Israeli Arabs should end the moment a Palestinian state is established."
(Tzipora Livni, November 2007)

"The partition resolution can therefore be seen as the mother of all the ensuing diplomatic fictions, from Security Council Resolution 242 to the "road map.""
(Tom Segev, 29 November 2007)

"And in the Middle East, as Yitzhak Rabin said about the Oslo Accords, "no date is sacred.""
(Shmuel Rosner, 28 November 2007)

"The Israelis, who are one of the few peoples whose survival is genuinely threatened, are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons"
(Henry Kissinger, 19 July 1969)

"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."
(Ehud Olmert, November 2007)

"If Palestine Jewry could be charged with a share in the care-taking of American interests in that part of the world, the famous dictum of Justice Brandeis would indeed come true: you would have to be a Zionist in order to be a perfect American patriot. And why should this good fortune not come to pass?"
(Hannah Arendt, October 1945)

"If Palestine Jewry could be charged with a share in the care-taking of American interests in that part of the world, the famous dictum of Justice Brandeis would indeed come true: you would have to be a Zionist in order to be a perfect American patriot. And why should this good fortune not come to pass?"
(Hannah Arendt, October 1945)

" And with Israel responsible for the ‘caretaking of American interests’ in the Middle East, she wrote in ‘Zionism Reconsidered’, ‘the famous dictum of Justice Brandeis would indeed come true: you would have to be a Zionist in order to be a perfect American patriot.’"
(Corey Robin, 4 January 2007)

"it is his [Weizmann's] moral quality that is questionable. He is through and through the politician. He is constantly playing a game., very cleverly, and one does not know what he is after."
(Judah Leib Magnes, some date before 1949)

"the underlying philosophy of nearly all Englishmen did not work. In Palestine, there was irreconcilable conflict between Arabs and Jews, not a community of interests which the two peoples merely failed to recognise by mistake."
(A J P Taylor, some date before 1991)

"[I want to express] the strongest condemnation of her [Israel's] crime against her original Arab population and the campaign of lies she has waged ever since on the subject"
(Herbert Bernard Levin, some date around 1965)

"It's a toss-up whether [Lewis] Libby is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day."
(Jack Straw, some date before 2006)

"[Investing settlers in Palestine with] rights in excess of those enjoyed by the rest of the population [will] prove a veritable calamity for the Jewish people. ... The establishment of a Jewish nationality in Palestine, founded in this theory of Jewish homelessness must have the effect throughout the world of stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands, and of undermining their hard-won position as citizens and nationals of those lands."
(Claude Goldsmid-Montefiore, 1917)

"It emerges that the lust to take over Palestinian lands is even stronger than the logic of preserving the quality of the environment."
(Amira Hass, 5 December 2007)

"The Zionist movement invested great efforts into attaining a majority in favor of partition, but the borders proposed by the UN were far from being an answer to its yearnings. Had the Arabs agreed to those lines, the Zionists might have rejected them. In any case, everyone knew that it was not the UN that would determine the borders of the country, but rather the outcome of the war. Israel today controls an area about twice the size of the area it was allotted on November 29, 1947. The partition resolution can therefore be seen as the mother of all the ensuing diplomatic fictions, from Security Council Resolution 242 to the "road map.""
(Tom Segev, 29 November 2007)

"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished."
(Ehud Olmert, 28 November 2007)

"In the past seven years, 368 Palestinians were killed in liquidation operations of which [Avi] Dichter was the founding father."
(Gideon Levy, 9 December 2007)

"I didn't want Jewish money and the Labour Party being put together."
(David Abrahams, December 2007)

"So I think how Israel thinks and views the world is a very important consideration for us in the United States. And certainly from my perspective as a military leader in the U.S. of America"
(Michael G. Mullen, 10 December 2007)

"A return to the 1967 lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival. The most logical outcome would be to trade Israeli settlement blocs around Jerusalem -- a demand President Bush has all but endorsed -- for some equivalent territories in present-day Israel with significant Arab populations. The rejection of such an approach, or alternative available concepts, which would contribute greatly to stability and to demographic balance, reflects a determination to keep incendiary issues permanently open."
(Henry Kissinger, 27 February 2006)

"We are not adopting a position on the number of states that will be in the area. There can be one state, two or a federal system that will recognize a single constitutional regime. Our role is only to safeguard the human rights of everyone.""
(Hassan Jabareen, December 2007)

""[The State of Israel is] a return at last, to the biblical land from which the Jews were driven so many hundreds of years ago ... The establishment of the nation of Israel is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and the very essence of its fulfilment.""
(Jimmy Carter, 1 May 1978)

"In this article I argue that neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian version of the events at Camp David and subsequent talks is wholly accurate. The Palestinian version, however, is much closer to the evidentiary record of articles, interviews, and documents produced by participants in the negotiations, journalists, and other analysts."
(Jeremy Pressman, Fall 2003)

"Three factors made Israel's territorial offer less forthcoming than it initially appeared. First, the 91 percent land offer was based on the Israeli definition of the West Bank, but this differs by approximately 5 percentage points from the Palestinian definition. Palestinians use a total area of 5,854 square kilometers. Israel, however, omits the area known as No Man´s Land (50 sq. km near Latrun),41 post-1967 East Jerusalem (71 sq. km), and the territorial waters of the Dead Sea (195 sq. km), which reduces the total to 5,538 sq. km.42 Thus, an Israeli offer of 91 percent (of 5,538 sq. km) of the West Bank translates into only 86 percent from the Palestinian perspective.

Second, at Camp David, key details related to the exchange of land were left unresolved. In principle, both Israel and the Palestinians agreed to land swaps whereby the Palestinians would get some territory from pre-1967 Israel in exchange for Israeli annexation of some land in the West Bank. In practice, Israel offered only the equivalent of 1 percent of the West Bank in exchange for its annexation of 9 percent. Nor could the Israelis and Palestinians agree on the territory that should be included in the land swaps. At Camp David, the Palestinians rejected the Halutza Sand region (78 sq. km) alongside the Gaza Strip, in part because they claimed that it was inferior in quality to the West Bank land they would be giving up to Israel.

Third, the Israeli territorial offer at Camp David was noncontiguous, breaking the West Bank into two, if not three, separate areas. At a minimum, as Barak has since confirmed, the Israeli offer broke the West Bank into two parts: “The Palestinians were promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor-thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem through from [the Israeli settlement of]Maale Adumim to the Jordan River.” The Palestinian negotiators and others have alleged that Israel included a second east-west salient in the northern West Bank (through the Israeli settlement of Ariel). If true, the salient through Ariel would have cut the West Bank portion of the Palestinian state into three pieces."
(Jeremy Pressman, Fall 2003)

"Those who sit year after year and cry about the Nakba shouldn't be surprised if in the end they really do have a Nakba."
(Avi Dichter, 2007)

"Most Israelis still find it hard to acknowledge that they bear historical responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. The Zionist vision is based, among other things, on the assumption that its fulfillment need not cause injustice to anyone: If only the Arabs would relinquish their nationalist yearnings and agree to the fulfillment of our dream, it would be good for everyone, including them. This historical fiction is very harmful because as long as we convince ourselves that we have no part in the responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian tragedy, we have no real reason to try to correct the injustice. This is the importance of acknowledging our responsibility."
(Tom Segev, 26 December 2007)

"In the decades since the Kafr Qasem massacre, IDF soldiers have killed thousands of innocent Palestinians, the vast majority of them in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. From time to time they have also killed Arab demonstrators, citizens of Israel. To this day the Arabs of Israel are not citizens with equal rights, and Israel insists that it does not want to be a state of all its citizens but rather a "Jewish and democratic" state."
(Tom Segev, 26 December 2007)

"It would be more accurate to say that over 99 percent of Persian Jews still prefer to remain under the rule of the Ayatollahs and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than to come to live in the democratic Jewish homeland."
(Anshel Pfeffer, 28 December 2007)

"The dirty secret is, that, given the choice, many of those prepared to consider leaving wouldn't come to Israel since the thriving Iranian community in Los Angeles is much more attractive. Dozens of Iranian Jews are currently waiting in Vienna for green cards, or better than that, official UN refugee status, allowing them to live wherever they wish in the West."
(Anshel Pfeffer, 28 December 2007)

"Israel's real image problem is not with the international media, but with the world's Jews, who just seem to prefer loving it from afar."
(Anshel Pfeffer, 28 December 2007)

"Nasrallah is right when he deplores the confessional system in Lebanon, in which the Christian Maronites - perhaps 29 per cent of the country - must hold the presidency, while the Sunnis are prime ministers and the Shiites are given the job of speaker of parliament. As long as it is sectarian, Lebanon cannot become a modern state. The problem is that without being sectarian, Lebanon will no longer exist."
(Robert Fisk, 15 December 2006)

"If British evacuation had been postponed another year, the United States would have been far less anxious to see Israel created and Russia would almost certainly have been hostile. . . . Israel slipped into existence through a fortuitous window in history which briefly opened for a few months in 1947-48. That too was luck; or providence."
(Paul Johnson, September 1988)

"If British evacuation had been postponed another year, the United States would have been far less anxious to see Israel created and Russia would almost certainly have been hostile. Hence the effect of the terror campaign on British policy was perhaps decisive to the entire enterprise. Israel slipped into existence through a fortuitous window in history which briefly opened for a few months in 1947-48. That too was luck; or providence."
(Paul Johnson, September 1988)

"Timing was absolutely crucial to Israel's birth and survival. Stalin had the Russian-Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels murdered in January 1948, and this seems to have marked the beginning of an intensely anti-Semitic phase in his policy. The switch to anti-Zionism abroad took longerto develop bit it came decisively in the autumn of 1948. By this time, however, Israel was securely in existence. American policy was also changing, as the growing pressures of the Cold War dissolved her mood of post-war idealism and forced Truman to listen more attentively to Pentagon and State Department Advice. If British evacuation had been postponed another year, the United States would have been far less anxious to see Israel created and Russia would almost certainly have been hostile. Hence the effect of the terror campaign on British policy was perhaps decisive to the entire enterprise. Israel slipped into existence through a fortuitous window in history which briefly opened for a few months in 1947-48. That too was luck; or providence."
(Paul Johnson, September 1988)

"The government must find a way to neutralize the payment of "big family" grants to the Arab population, either by linking them to the economic situation or by taking this responsibility from the national insurance system and transferring it to the Jewish Agency or to the Zionist organization, so that the grant is paid to Jews only."
(Israel Koenig, 1 March 1976)

"Make trips abroad for studies easier [for Arab students], while making the return and employment more difficult-this policy is apt to encourage their emigration."
(Israel Koenig, 1 March 1976)

"Let the Mauschels go to Palestine, the sooner they move off the better. I shall not put obstacles in their way.""
(Frederick Wilhelm Viktor Albert von Hohenzollern, 1897)

"Yes, Israel may not be a Jewish Third Reich. However, the moral distance between 1938-Germany and 2007-Israel is definitely shorter, much shorter, than many people think."
(Khalid Amayreh, 2 January 2008)

"After the horror and after the shame and after the anger there still remain a hope, and I know that I can get in a lot of trouble for what I am about to say, but I think that the Hezbollah represents the hope. They are fighting to defend their homeland"
(Norman G. Finkelstein, 7 January 2008)

"One of my most abiding memories of the old South Africa is the memory of what distance and time really meant when travelling, that distance was something to endure in constant fear of being stopped and questioned on one's right to exist. No journey was ever made with the certainty of reaching one's destination. Nothing existed between the beginning and end of the journey but mental and emotional trauma."
(Njabulo Ndebele, 1991)

"The Jewish identity in the future appears bleak. Any nation that remains anchored to the past is unable to move ahead and, especially a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs. In Tel Aviv in 2004 I had the opportunity to speak to some Members of Parliament and Peace activists all of whom argued that the wall and the military build-up was necessary to protect the nation and the people. In other words, I asked, you believe that you can create a snake pit – with many deadly snakes in it – and expect to live in the pit secure and alive? What do you mean? they countered. Well, with your superior weapons and armaments and your attitude towards your neighbors would it not be right to say that you are creating a snake pit? How can anyone live peacefully in such an atmosphere? Would it not be better to befriend those who hate you? Can you not reach out and share your technological advancement with your neighbors and build a relationship?
Apparently, in the modern world, so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept. You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity."
(Arun Gandhi, 7 January 2008)

"[Israel’s bombing of Lebanon civilians was based on] the rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that afflicted populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities."
(Abba Eban, 16 August 1981)

"My visits to Israel and the West Bank left me feeling the utter inadequacy of attempting to convey the reality of daily lives there to anyone who has not witnessed it first-hand, despite the prolific news coverage we receive. So in full comprehension of that fact, I have tried in the work I have produced to explore ideas generated by what I saw through a very personal filter, bearing in mind that history can have an awkward habit of confounding preconception."
(John Keane, January 2004)

"Today in Israel, there is no effective barrier – not legal and certainly not ethical – that stands in the way of using torture. A secret service organization such as the GSS decides independently to use torture and, afterwards, investigates itself as to whether the use of interrogation was justified. The Justice Ministry – from the Attorney General through the State Attorney’s Office and the Attorney in charge of the nameless GSS Ombudsman of Interogees’ Complaints – gives systematic and blind backing to the interrogation methods of the GSS. The legal system tends to avoid torture victims’ complaints."
(Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, May 2007)

"This conflation of Jewish interests with American interests is nowhere more stark than in present American foreign policy. If ever an image was reminiscent of a Jewish world conspiracy, the spectacle of the Jewish neo-cons gathered around the current presidency and directing policy in the Middle East, this must be it. But we are told that the fact that the Jewish neo-cons, many with links with right wing political groups within Israel, are in the forefront of urging a pro-Israel policy, is but a coincidence, and any suggestion that these figures might be influenced by their Jewishness and their links with Israel is immediately marginalised as reviving old anti-Semitic myths about Jewish dual loyalty."
(Paul Eisen, 19 August 2004)

"It is true that 'the Jews' do not constitute a legally recognized body, but Zionism, with its claim to represent all Jews, has increasingly confused the issue. It is also true that the Zionists do not represent all Jews but they do represent the views of very many Jews indeed, and certainly the most powerful and influential Jews. And there is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of organized Jews are fully behind the Zionist project."
(Paul Eisen, 19 August 2004)

"I think everyone knows what the basic outlines of an [Israeli-Palestinian final status] agreement would look like. It would mean that the Palestinians would have to reinterpret the notion of right of return in a way that would preserve Israel as a Jewish state."
(Barack Obama, 18 December 2007)

"I think that situation in Gaza has all but put the nail in the coffin of organized Judaism. No doubt there are still small numbers of Jews who still hold to the moral compus that their prophets preached, but they are a distinct minority. As an organized religion Judaism has been transformed into an ideological arm of Israeli nationalism. Thus, Zionism has actually done what the Holocaust failed to do – destroy Judaism, at least in terms of an organized religion. As for those Jews that have remained silent for whatever reason, they have abdicated control of their faith to the "thugs in suits" who claim to be their Rabbis and community leaders. As goes Gaza, so goes organized Jewry."
(Lawrence Davidson, 21 January 2008)

"This is my turn to be shut out. I'm paying for what I see at the roadblocks. I feel so guilty for what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, that I would understand even if I was shut out over and over. The insult of being unwanted is dwarfed by my frustration and anger at the fact that fear wins the day. It's an emotion that drives the situation even deeper into its lack of a solution."
(Racheli Merhav, 8 February 2008)

"I'm still a Zionist"
(Seth Freedman, 6 February 2008)

"The raw, painful truth is that Israel doesn't have a leg to stand on when it comes to the flagrant and repeated breaches of international law with which it crushes Palestinian's aspirations of independence and hopes for freedom."
(Seth Freedman, 6 February 2008)

"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
(Martin Luther King, 16 April 1963)

"[Martin] Peretz, 68, has edited The New Republic for the past 34 years. He says it has been pro-Zionist from the day it was born in 1914."
(Cnaan Liphshiz, 12 February 2008)

"As I recalled in my last report (S/2007/392), so long as the Israel Defense Forces remain in northern Ghajar, Israel will not have completed its withdrawal from southern Lebanon in accordance with its obligations under resolution 1701 (2006)"
(Ban Ki-Moon, 30 October 2007)

"The letter notes that there were no disciplinary hearings in previous cases when Jewish lecturers removed armed soldiers from lecture halls."
(Tamara Traubmann, 4 December 2007)

"A striking example of the lack of enforcement which originates at the political level is the non-implementation of the delimitation injunctions. This issue is particularly serious in view of the fact that the reference is not to a lack of enforcement by virtue of omission but to the putting a halt to the enforcement process after it has been confirmed by the Supreme Court. Thus a clear message is being sent to the settlers, to the soldiers, to the police and to the general public, that there are no real intentions to evacuate the settlers from illegal outposts. This is because the political level sends out double messages. Declarations made in the Supreme Court are empty of content since they do not result in actions, even when there are no legal grounds for delay …these proceedings transmit a negative message regarding all aspects of law enforcement as it relates to the unauthorized outposts."
(Talia Sasson, 2005)

"The phenomenon of unauthorized outposts has been taking place before our eyes for several long years, thereby perpetrating serious and ongoing violations of the law. Law enforcement elements, government authorities and the political stratum of Israel have been aware of these actions for a number of years. All this time, the authorities took no determined steps to enforce the law in order to put a stop to these acts. On the contrary, as is shown in this report, various state authorities did their best to support this phenomenon, to finance and encourage it, all without legal authority and in fact, in violation of the law. This is the double message which has been sent by the political level to the military level and government authorities for years regarding unauthorized outposts. Justification for not implementing the delimitation injunctions which were issued and approved by the Supreme Court, the complexity of actually implementing and applying the delimitation injunctions, cannot last for long. The more time that passes after the confirmation of the delimitation injunction by the Supreme Court without its being implemented, the more persons will receive the impression that there are no real intentions to evacuate those outposts, and there is concern that this is but another link in the double message syndrome."
(Talia Sasson, 2005)

"Except for a small, courageous and isolated band of Anglo-American-Canadian Jewish intellectuals and academics, all the mainline Jewish organizations raised not a single question, let alone criticism regarding Israel's role in instigating international terror."
(James Petras, 24 February 2008)

"It should be clear that, in this country, there is no room for two peoples … The only solution is an Israel without Arabs … There is no option other than transferring the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries."
(Joseph (Yosef/Yossef) Weitz, 19 December 1940)

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?"
(Hillel, some date early in the first century)

"More than that, Hess's work, "On Capital," contains material that is much more extreme than anything used by Marx, and it is to Marx's credit that he did not include it. For example, Hess writes that the Children of Israel were originally idolators whose principal god, Moloch, demanded blood sacrifices. Hess knew Hebrew from his childhood heder and used this linguistic knowledge in his essay. In the course of time, he maintains, the Jews passed from blood (dam) sacrifices to money (domim) sacrifices, this being the origin of the Jewish money cult, as money took the place of Moloch. Throughout the essay Hess calls the God of Israel "Moloch-Jehova," and it is difficult to find a parallel to such a collective blood libel in even the most virulent anti-Semitic literature. These expressions of Hess are less well known than Marx's essay, "On the Jewish Question," but they are much more drastic and, ironically, served Marx as a source of information when he wrote his essay."
(Shlomo Avineri, April 1984)

"What happened wasn't so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen."
(David Wurmser, 2008)

"[The Bush administration is] engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Mahmoud Abbas] with victory. ... It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen."
(David Wurmser, 2008)

"[the] senatus-consulte of 1865 stipulated that all the colonised indigenous were under French jurisdiction, i.e., French nationals subjected to French laws, but it restricted citizenship only to those who renounced their Muslim religion and culture. There was an obvious split in French legal discourse: a split between nationality and citizenship which established the formal structures of a political apartheid encouraging the existence of 'French subjects' disenfranchised, without any rights to citizenship, treated as objects of French law and not citizens"
(Azzedine Haddour, some date before 2005)

"The Security Council is authorized to take forceful measures with respect to Palestine to remove a threat to international peace. The Charter of the United Nations does not empower the Security Council to enforce a political settlement whether it is pursuant to a recommendation of the General Assembly or of the Security Coujncil itself ... the Security Council's action, in other words, is directed to keeping the peace and not to enforce partition."
(Warren Austin, 1947)

"Gaza is a ghetto, a concentration camp!"
(Aharon Shabtai, 6 March 2008)

"They (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves"
(Matan Vilnai, 29 February 2008)

"This collective ["Israelis"] has nothing to say about itself in the present, apart from hollow cliches on the suffering of Sderot and Ashkelon, or "the return of the terror attacks." This collective brought the suffering of Sderot upon itself when it imagined that imprisoning millions of human beings behind fences could "make them disappear." And with regard to Ashkelon, any idiot can see that we asked for that escalation."
(Yitzhak Laor, 9 March 2008)

"What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing – the birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old one."
(Condoleezza (Condi) Rice, 21 July 2006)

"Israeli policy has always been to treat the Palestinians with an iron fist. I know that, and I heard that several times, even from police people. They would say, “Only through power can you be treated. You don't even know what democracy is.” So that's how we are treated."
(Sharif Hamadeh, 31 March 2005)

"A whole new generation that grew up in the territories and is more violent and radical. They will be the ones who will lead the next confrontation."
(Abu Dib, 18 March 2008)

"To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair – as we should always have called this small town lawyer - should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war – and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper – daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship. Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie? Question 2: How did he get away with it?"
(Robert Fisk, 19 March 2008)

"America's massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?"
(Robert Fisk, 19 March 2008)

"And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to "lose" Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror – yes, our terror – of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and "terror". But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and "terror". It's not too complicated an equation. And we don't need a public inquiry to get it right."
(Robert Fisk, 19 March 2008)

"Among the survivors of the German interment camps were people who would not have survived had they not been what they were, hard, evil, selfish people, and everything they endured uprooted from their souls every last bit of good."
(David Ben-Gurion, some date before 1974)

"We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic."
(Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., 2007)

"When we decided to tackle the story of the massacre at Deir Yassin, an episode quite painful to the collective conscience of the Israelis, we knew we were going to provoke strongly negative reactions in the opinions of many of our Jewish readers. Asher Ben Natan, then the Israeli ambassador to France, begged us not to tell the story. A few years later, Menachem Begin, who had by then become the prime minister of Israel after having been himself a member of the Irgun, would reiterate the same plea."
(Dominique Lapierre, June 2006)

"the immigration of certain human material is liable to bring the Jewish nation down, and make it into a Levantine nightmare"
(A French diplomat, 1949)

"Unless Israel confronts the past, as so many have attempted to do in South Africa, it will continue to be viewed with revulsion and suspicion. Israelis will continue to regard Arab life as worthless and will continue to live by the sword and deceit, feigning surprise when Palestinians violently respond. Without dealing with the agony it has caused there can be no healing and no solution. To do so is to create the basis for all life to be cherished and for Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace, with justice."
(Ronnie Kasrils, 8 April 2008)

"German Chancellor Angela Merkel is boycotting the Olympic games [in China] but paid an official visit to Israel, where she spoke not one word about the shameful conditions in Gaza under Israeli occupation. Is there any other way to describe this, except a double standard?"
(Gideon Levy, 13 April 2008)

"The real Zionist vision does not recognize any maps. It is a vision of a state without borders – a state that expands at all times according to its demographic, military and political power."
(Uri Avnery, 12 April 2008)

"We are fated to live in a permanent state of fighting against the Arabs … For the hundred years of the Return to Zion we are working for two things: the building of the land and the building of the people … That is a process of expansion, of more Jews and more settlements … That is a process that has not reached the end. We were born here and found our parents, who had come here before us … It is not your duty to reach the end. Your duty is to add your layer … to expand the settlement to the best of your ability, during your lifetime ... (and) not to say: this is the end, up to here, we have finished."
(Moshe Dayan, August 1968)

"Several correspondents have queried my statement in The Irish Times. Their concerns seem genuine, which means a serious reply is warranted. The quote in question reads:

There is credible evidence for the claim that the Iraq war was a Jewish war. I happen to believe that the evidence is superficial but nonetheless there is evidence for it. So, if as the situation gets worse in Iraq, if Jews are scapegoated, it is in part a disaster of their own making. (I would have preferred if the reporter had put Jewish war in quotation marks; otherwise it's accurate.)

"
(Norman G. Finkelstein, 15 April 2006)

"Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not."
(Richard Falk, 29 June 2007)

"Notwithstanding all its success and achievements, Israel remains a state based on racism, apartheid and criminality against the Palestinian people whose homeland it seized and whom it is trying to obliterate to this day. To be sure, Israel has failed. Palestinians remain, both as a human entity and as a national entity. Israel, in order to achieve its goals, always sought to acquire, by hook or by crook, as much Palestinian land as possible while taking in as few Palestinian people as possible. The policies and tactics employed by Israel to achieve this goal are both blunt and insidious and amount to ethnic cleansing and the international crime of genocide. Israel has institutionalised racism, bulldozed hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, shamelessly confiscated Palestinian land and property, including private homes, and recently built the so-called "Separation Wall" in the West Bank, aimed first and foremost at annexing to Israel as much Palestinian land as possible. On top of all of this, Israel has perfected the practice of state-sponsored mass terror; a deliberate policy aimed at making Palestinian life as unbearable as possible with the ultimate goal of forcing Palestinians to leave their homes and land altogether. This is done in broad daylight; in full view of key world powers, such as the US, EU, Russia and China, which either keep silent or issue a few terse and innocuous words about the need to stick to a peace process that has form but very little substance."
(Khalid Amayreh, 17 April 2008)

" Even without killing, the Israeli occupation regime kills – hope, plans, relationships, ways of life. Living among Palestinians brings daily examples of the thousands of shades that despair has, just as the regime of occupation and colonization brings with it thousands of variants of material and mental abuse. Every moment, people mourn for the lives they could have had and which they are not experiencing. How explosive is the daily insult which people experience, under a foreign rule that decides who will live in their own houses and who will not, who will have access to their lands and who will not, when the bulldozer will tear up your grandparents' land in order to attach it to a highway and a green settlement, who will waste several hours every day at a checkpoint, who will send their children to university and who will send them to beg, who will lose their source of livelihood, who will see their family and when, and who will not. Massive is the insult felt by the many who depend on charity. Added to all this, of course, is the constant opprobrium of a disappointing and failed Palestinian leadership and the absence of hope in its ability to effect change."
(Amira Hass, 31 December 2007)

"The more likely explanation for the US invasion of Iraq is the neoconservative Bush Regime's commitment to the defense of Israeli territorial expansion. There is no such thing as a neoconservative who is not allied with Israel. Israel hopes to steal all of the West Bank and southern Lebanon for its territorial expansion. An American colonial regime in Iraq not only buttresses Israel from attack, but also can pressure Syria and Iran from giving support to the Palestinians and Lebanese. The Iraqi war is a war for Israeli territorial expansion. Americans are dying and bleeding to death financially for Israel. Bush's "war on terror" is a hoax that serves to cover US intervention in the Middle East in behalf of "greater Israel.""
(Paul Craig Roberts, 23 April 2008)

"Our thought is that the colonisation of Palestine has to go in two directions: Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel and the resettlement of the Arabs of Eretz Israel outside the country. The transfer of so many Arabs may seem at first unacceptable economically, but is nonetheless practical. It does not require too much money to resettle a Palestinian village on another land."
(Leo Motzkin, 1917)

"[A Jewish homeland in Palestine] will form for England a 'little loyal Jewish Ulster' in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism"
(Ronald Storrs, 1937, reissued in 1991)

"[A Jewish homeland in Palestine] will form for England a 'little loyal Jewish Ulster' in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism"
(Ronald Storrs, 1937)

"Israel's current policies are slowly expelling Palestinians from their land and pushing those who remain into indignity, desperation and extremism. The word "siege" no longer seems adequate to describe what is being done to Gaza. The territory's 1.5 million people have been thrust into a humanitarian catastrophe. It has become a nonsense to speak of peace negotiations while Israel creates more injustices on the ground in the West Bank and East Jerusalem."
(Sami Abdel-Shafi, 3 May 2008)

"They went up to Zion in messianic fervour and found no warmth in the welcome they received in the land of their fathers."
(Haim Zafrani, some date before 2005)

"Anyone can see that what Israel is doing is unacceptable, violent, cruel, evil and wicked. If Israel is behaving in the manner of a psychotic bullying child, then Britain and the US are like its mad tattooed parents."
(Alexei Sayle, July 2006)

"On this principle we have a stronger claim to parts of France [than the Jewish claim to Palestine]."
(George Nathaniel Curzon, 1920)

"I do not myself recognize that the connection of the Jews with Palestine, which terminated 1200 years ago [sic], gives them any claim whatsoever. On this principle we have a stronger claim to parts of France."
(George Nathaniel Curzon, 1920)

"I think the entire conception wrong. Here is a country with 580,000 Arabs and 30,000 or is it 60,000 Jews (by no means all Zionists). Acting upon the noble principles of self-determination and ending with a splendid appeal to the League of Nations, we then proceed to draw up a document which reeks of Judaism in every paragraph and is an avowed constitution for a Jewish State. Even the poor Arabs are only allowed to look through the keyhole as a non-Jewish community.

It is quite clear that this mandate has been drawn up by someone reeling under the fumes of Zionism. If we are all to submit to that intoxicant, this draft is all right. Perhaps there is no alternative. But I...should like to see something worded differently."
(George Nathaniel Curzon, March 1920)

"On this principle we have a stronger claim to parts of France [than the Jewish claim to Palestine]."
(George Nathaniel Curzon, 1920)

"The Gestapo did everything in those days to promote emigration, particularly to Palestine. We often received their help when we required anything from other authorities regarding preparations for emigration. This position remained constant and uniform the entire time, until the year 1938."
(Hans Friendenthal, 1957)

"Zionism believes that the rebirth of the national life of a people, which is now occurring in Germany through its emphasis on its Christian and national character, must also come about among the Jewish people. For the Jewish people, too, national origin, religion, common destiny and a sense of its uniqueness must be of decisive importance to its existence. This demands the elimination of the egotistical individualism of the liberal era, and its replacement with a sense of community and collective responsibility."
(Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (ZVfD), 1933)

"If anything, I am a self-loving Jew, but the Jew I love in me is the Diaspora Jew, the Jew that was blessed for 2,000 years by having no country to call his/her own. That this was accompanied by many cruel disadvantages is well known, but it had one crowning advantage that towered over all the rest. By being an outsider in every country and belonging to the family of outsiders throughout the world, Jews on the whole suffered less from the small-minded prejudices that disfigure all forms of nationalism."
(Bertell Ollman, 2005)

"There was a time when anyone who claimed that the Jews had a pagan ancestry was accused on the spot of being an anti-semite. Today, anyone who dares suggest that the Jews have never been and still are not a people or a nation is immediately denounced as an enemy of the state of Israel."
(Shlomo Sand, March 2008)

"I do not know if I am a socialist since I have not yet acquainted myself with this doctrine; but I have no doubt that I am a Zionist because the Jewish people is a very nasty people and its neighbours hate it and they are right; its end in the diaspora will be a general Bartholomew Night, and the only rescue is general immigration to Palestine."
(Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1936)

"There can only be one National Home in Palestine, and that a Jewish one, and no equality in the partnership between Jews and Arabs, but a Jewish preponderance as soon as the numbers of the race are sufficiently increased"
(Montagu David Eder, 1921)

"[Israel] had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry"
(Nathan Glazer, 1957)

"Palestine had had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry up until the mid-fifties."
(Nathan Glazer, 1957, new edition 1988)

"[Israel] had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry."
(Nathan Glazer, 2000)

"The Zionist writers' admissions of crimes committed against the Palestinians always come too late, as though they were intended, at best, to atone for the sin. However, in fact these are nothing but masks to hide the generation's crimes."
(Yusuf Damara, May 2008)

"These [Israeli Jewish] writers who declare their affiliation with the left and announce they are joining the Israeli peace movements are at the same time calling for a solution to the refugee problem from a Zionist perspective that gives equal status to the victim and the hangman. They want to preserve the independence of the Hebrew state in its purity – meaning its racism. They turn their backs on the right of return, as this is expressed in the Geneva accords that were signed by, among others, Amos Oz"
(Yusuf Damara, 11 May 2008)

"There is nothing new in the fact that Israel is a terrorist state which, almost from its inception, has used one of its intelligence agencies, the Mossad, to carry out violence or terror, including assassination, it considers necessary for its ends. The Israeli terrorism in Lebanon was exhibited in the "Accountability" and "Grapes of Wrath" operations, for example, when so many people were ordered to leave their homes on a day's notice lest they be bombed to death. Such state terrorism was even worse than the assassination of specific individuals. In fact, however, all Israeli governments have carried out terroristic acts and all Zionist parties support them in principle."
(Israel Shahak, January-February 1998)

"I had a telegram from the Muslim-Christian Association of Jaffa in which it is stated that the Buraq is the sole property of the Muslims. Of course it is. Everybody except some of the extreme Zionist Jews recognize that that is so."
(John Chancellor, October 1929)

"Oh, I think we’ll end up like the Crusaders. It might take some time, but just like them, in the end, we’ll be gone."
(Mattityahu (Matti) Peled, 1978)

"Or think about the nuclear weapons with which the United States seeks to "deter" its enemies. Is it only professors of criminal law who realize that the hidden word in "deterrence" is "terror"?"
(Michael Mandel, July 2004)

"... the mainstream media in Britain – television media in Britain – congratulates itself for being very objective and balanced. But there are certain situations where being balanced is exactly the wrong thing to do. In fact, being balanced in South Africa at the heyday of apartheid would mean that you would justify apartheid as well as the struggle against apartheid, and this is an impossible moral position. And I think that the attempt of the BBC to justify the struggle against the occupation while saying that we also have to bring across the point of view of the occupier is such an immoral and impossible paradox. I think that unfortunately they did not play a more constructive role in attempts to solve the conflict."
(Ilan Pappe, 12 April 2008)

"I would think that – similar to the position that mainstream media took in issues such as Vietnam, South Africa, Pinochet, and the Civil Rights movement in the United States – I think that the same moral weight should be put behind the coverage of the issue of Palestine. There is no justification in the world to say that this is an exceptional case that should be treated differently."
(Ilan Pappe, 12 April 2008)

"the Palestinians will be able to celebrate independence only once the word nakba has been erased from their lexicon"
(Tzipora Livni, 15 May 2008)

"with the establishment of a Palestinian state, we wish to see the end of the conflict. The Palestinians will be able to celebrate their independence if on that same day they also strike the word 'Nakba' from their lexicon."
(Tzipora Livni, 15 May 2008)

"The demand that a people erase its past, ignore and disrespect its national trauma, while we scream ours from the rooftops, is particularly serious coming from Livni, a representative of a centrist party who is considered a moderate; the woman handling the peace talks with the Palestinians. Languages are not erased and other people's traumas are not swept under the rug on command. Livnat must be told: Arabic will not be erased from the mouths of its speakers, and Livni must be told: The nakba will not be erased from the memories of its victims. In fact, in Livni's language, one could add: Only when Israel remembers the nakba, will peace reign."
(Gideon Levy, 25 May 2008)

"[T]here is no civil marriage in Israel. The rabbinate, a government bureaucracy, has a monopoly on tying the knot between Jews."
(Gershom Gorenberg, 2 March 2008)

"Blair has attacked the anti-Israelism that had existed in the Labour Party. Old Labour was cowboys-and-Indians politics, picking underdogs to support, but the milieu has changed. Zionism is pervasive in New Labour. It is automatic that Blair will come to Labour Friends of Israel meetings."
(Jon Mendelsohn, Summer 2004)

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