"If you wish to find out who is really responsible for Israel’s scofflaw behavior and war crimes, look in the mirror. Citizens like you and I are letting the lobbyists for a small, ruthless government make America its uncomplaining servant."
(Paul Findley, 26 February 2009)

"[It is a privilege to be able to take part] in the commandment of war and the preparations for fulfilling it. Embrace this commandment with all your hearts. It is a right previous generations could not realize."
(Avichai Ronsky, 23 February 2009)

"King David taught the people of Judah how to use the bow and arrow ... Jacob our patriarch blessed his son Judah and told him to fight Israel's enemies, to attack them and not fight defensively... The descendants of the tribe of Judah will do the same. ... Do we have another home? Somewhere else to go? This is our only home. Therefore, we have no choice but to fight... a preemptive war... not to wait for the next Operation Defensive Shield."
(Israel Meir Lau, 23 February 2009)

"fighting our enemies is a commandment. To serve in the IDF is a commandment. We must remember that we could not carry out this commandment for 2,000 years. How happy we must be that we live in this great and special time, a time in which we have returned to our land, seen the founding of our state, the ingathering of exiles."
(Chaim (Haim) Druckman, 23 February 2009)

"200,000 Israelites and 10,000 Judahites fought Amalek. Why are the Judahites counted separately from the others? Because the Israelite army pitied Amalek. Today this is called being humanitarian. Only the tribe of Judah did not pity Amalek, and destroyed it... The sons of Torah are taught not to pity their enemies. ... We need ethics from the Torah, not the Christian world, which teaches to turn the other cheek. This hypocrisy is against human nature."
(Dov Lior, 23 February 2009)

"Clearly, then, substantial resettlement of the Israeli civilian population in occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, is illegal under the [Fourth Geneva] Convention and cannot be considered to have prejudged the outcome of future negotiations between the parties on the location of the borders of States of the Middle East. Indeed, the presence of these settlements is seen by my Government as an obstacle to the success of the negotiations for a just and final peace between Israel and its neighbours."
(William Scranton, 23 March 1976)

"Even before his inauguration, Nixon sent former Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton on a fact-finding mission to the Middle East, where he electrified friendly Arab rulers by saying Nixon would favor an "even-handed" policy there. The statement also energized Israel's friends in America. The resulting storm was a reminder that any Middle East initiative, especially by Nixon, would have to be handled sensitively. Governor Scranton did not get a Nixon administration job."
(Richard H. Curtiss, June 1994)

"It is important US policy [in the Middle East] become more even-handed ... [dealing] with all countries in the area and not necessarily espousing one."
(William Scranton, 9 December 1968)

"The impression in the ME is widespread that the US is only interested in Israel. I do not think that is true of the present Administration or of Americans. I think we have other interests."
(William Scranton, 11 December 1968)

"His [William Scranton's] remarks are Scranton remarks, not Nixon remarks. ... [Scranton] was in the ME strictly as a fact-finder [for Nixon]."
(Ronald Ziegler, 12 December 1968)

"The first disturbance of the balance was when I saw how they behave with the Arabs [in the 1940s]. With this upset of the moral balance, I knew that something in Zionism had ended. The second time was when Yehiam was killed. Then I knew that in these wars, even of 'defense,' with all the power and the 'struggle,' the end had come of the world in which I want to live. Suddenly it became clear that there is something declamatory, not truthful, in all of the activism of those days. I felt, I felt from the side, very isolated."
(Yizhar Smilansky, 1994)

"During the 1990s it was still possible to describe donations to the Palestinians as an expression of confidence and hope in Israel's readiness to free itself of the occupation regime it had created. But not in 2009. Support for Israeli policy – this is the only way to understand the fact that other countries keep pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars meant to put out the fires set by this policy, without extinguishing the source of the blaze."
(Amira Hass, 4 March 2009)

"In point of view of the purity, that is to say the absence of mixture with outside blood, during the last 1800 years, there is no doubt that the Ashkenazim can show a far clearer bill than the Sephardim who are known to have absorbed in no small quantity both Moorish and Iberian blood, so that the boast of blue-bloodedness come to have a meaning other than that generally assumed."
(Redcliffe N. Salaman, 1911)

"The real Jew is the European Ashkenazi, and I back him against all-comers"
(Redcliffe N. Salaman, 1920)

"Anyone can, for example, through the boycott of Israeli goods, help to ensure that there is pressure for a different policy."
(Hermann Dierkes, February 2009)

"No one expects the official Arab order to contribute seriously to the drive to seek redress for war crimes, including those perpetrated against Arab citizens in other Arab countries. When there was a state of war Arab governments thought that apart from the routine of going to the Security Council, war meant taking revenge through warfare, not through wailing and laments. Later, after Arab states turned to the negotiating process and peace initiatives, they succumbed to a general impression that there was a contradiction between accusing Israeli rulers of being war criminals and making peace with them. For this reason, when Arab officials refer to war crimes at all, they do so timidly and in Arabic, and then take the matter no further. This inconsistency in Arab behaviour does little to help in the arena of litigation. It somehow jars to hear Arab officials levelling charges of war crimes against Israeli officials and then having to watch one news report after another of the same officials flying off to peace conferences and shaking hands and exchanging visits with the person they accused. The world is not stupid. It is always on the lookout for those who vouch for Israel."
(Azmi Bishara, 5 March 2009)

"Well, thanks to the Jewish National Fund, we can keep Arab, Druse and Circassian citizens out of our ethnically pure communities. Even better, the Israel Lands Administration, paid for in part by these undesirables, will manage our estates. Offended? Good, that means you're a decent human being. Unfortunately, the problem for some is not the state-sanctioned segregation but how to keep it legal. You see, for the past 40 years, the ILA has maintained an official relationship with an ethnic-based land trust, and only now is the High Court of Justice reviewing the propriety of the government leasing JNF land to Jews alone. Against this backdrop, National Union MK Uri Ariel recently proposed an amendment to the 1960 Israel Lands Administration Law that would allow the state to continue to discriminate against gentiles when representing the JNF."
(Erik Schechter, 5 August 2007)

"Surely it is time to break with the lachrymose theory of pre-Revolutionary woe, and to adopt a view more in accord with historic truth."
(Salo Wittmayer Baron, June 1928)

"All my life I have been struggling against the hitherto dominant 'lachrymose conception of Jewish history'I because I have felt that an over-emphasis on Jewish suffering distorted the whole picture of the Jewish historic evolution and, at the same time, badly served a generation which had become impatient with the nightmare of endless persecutions and massacres."
(Salo Wittmayer Baron, 1964)

"The Israeli attack on Gaza violated every one of these just war criteria: it was, one might say, an almost perfect moral failure."
(Jerome Slater, 8 March 2009)

"I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they should not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there ... to pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash Arab eggs they had bought ... to buy dozens of dunums [of land] from an Arab is permitted but to sell God forbid one Jewish dunum to an Arab is prohibited; to take Rothschild the incarnation of capitalism as a socialist and to name him the 'benefactor' -- to do all that was not easy."
(David Hacohen, 15 November 1969)

"No, we would be absolutely against two wages [one for Jews and one for Arabs in government jobs in Mandate Palestine]."
(Ernest Bevin, 10 March 2009)

"Dov Lior said: "[Baruch] Goldstein was full of love for fellow human beings. He dedicated himself to helping others." It should be explained here that terms like "human being" refer in Jewish Orthodox Law [Halacha] only to Jewish human beings. When used in Hebrew by rabbis they must have that meaning. The same holds true for Yiddish. Although the word "Mensch" is supposed to mean a man, it is actually used only in reference to a Jewish man. This linguistic habit is never mentioned in the United States, least so by Jewish "liberals" or by The New York Times."
(Israel Shahak, 1994)

"Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in. Let them be handsomely compensated for their land and let their settlement elsewhere be carefully organised and generously financed. The Arabs have very wide territories of their own; they must not claim to exclude the Jews from this small part of Palestine, less than the size of Wales."
(British Labour Party, December 1944)

"I am sorry not only about dead Arabs but also about dead flies."
(Moshe Levinger, 27 February 1994)

"Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the French Republic in Africa and Asia, to the Rightful Heirs of Palestine. Israelites, unique nation, whom, in thousands of years, lust of conquest and tyranny were able to deprive of the ancestral lands only, but not of name and national existence . . . She [France] offers to you at this very time, and contrary to all expectations, Israel’s patrimony . . . Rightful heirs of Palestine . . . hasten! Now is the moment which may not return for thousands of years, to claim the restoration of your rights among the population of the universe which had shamefully withheld from you for thousands of years, your political existence as a nation among the nations, and the unlimited natural right to worship Yehovah in accordance with your faith, publicly and in likelihood for ever . . . . ."
(Napoleon Bonaparte, 1799)

"Carter, Walt, and Mearsheimer have made important advances against the Zionist apparatus. But their tepid and circumscribed criticism leaves untouched the main problem with Israel: that, driven by Zionism, it is compelled to commit human rights violations on an expanding scale. Plainly, we need a ruthless criticism of Israel, one that rejects taboos, goes to the heart of the matter, and refuses to grant Israel its impunity."
(Joel Kovel, January 2009)

"The decision to issue the Balfour Declaration was not therefore driven by British strategic interests in the Ottoman Empire. The main concern for policy-makers in relation to Zionism was the conduct of the war in the USA and Europe, rather than the future of the Holy Land itself"
(James Renton, December 2007)

"If the Zionists claim that the Jews are to have domination of the Holy Land under a British Protectorate, then they are certainly putting their claims too high"
(David Lloyd George, 15 February 1919)

"[The Balfour Declaration] was one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial history."
(Elizabeth Monroe, 1 September 1963)

"If the president [Obama] is going to be so obsequious, if he is going to be so craven, in front of the Israel Lobby, then we are not going to have peace in the Middle East for the next forty years."
(Ray McGovern, 12 March 2009)

"The Arabs are after money, sex and alcohol. They cannot be trusted, they are stupid and they have contributed nothing to humanity. . . . All the Arabs have to be rounded up, a pistol held to their head and then shot. A building in which Arabs and Palestinians live must be destroyed."
(David Buka'i, 2004)

"For Zionism to succeed you need to have a Jewish state, with a Jewish flag and a Jewish language. The person who really understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky."
(Benito Mussolini, some date in the 1930s)

"It is a no, I am afraid. Both Mark [Damazer] and I think it is a brilliant piece, but after discussing it with editorial policy we have decided we cannot run with it on the grounds of impartiality – I think it would be nearly impossible to run a drama that counters Caryl Churchill's view. Having debated long and hard we have decided we can't do Seven Jewish Children."
(Jeremy Howe, early 2009)

"For all of you out there who may have questioned whether there was a powerful 'Israel lobby,' or who admitted that it existed but didn't think it had much influence, or who thought that the real problem was some supposedly all-powerful 'Saudi lobby,' think again."
(Stephen M. Walt, 11 March 2009)

"How is the United States a superpower when it cannot appoint the official who oversees the National Intelligence Estimate without the approval of the Israeli right-wing government and its American agents?"
(Paul Craig Roberts, 18 March 2009)

"Israel is an apartheid state."
(Hendrik Verwoerd, 1963)

"Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One wastwelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered-s-dearh squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo-but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."
(Chris Hedges, October 2001)

"If you do something long enough the world will accept it."
(Daniel Riesner, March 2009)

"I tell you that the time for peace has come - not peace through weakness, but peace through might and a sense of security; not peace at the expense of security but peace that will bring security. We will move quickly toward separation from the Palestinians within four security red lines: a united Jerusalem under our sovereignty as the capital of Israel for eternity, period; under no conditions will we return to the 1967 borders; no foreign army west of the Jordan River; and most of the settlers in Judaea and Samaria will be in settlement blocs under our sovereignty."
(Ehud Barak, May 1999)

"Those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent change inevitable."
(John F. Kennedy, 1960s)

"A lobby is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun."
(Steven J. Rosen, uttered frequently)

"As an American Jew, I was taught to go all gooey-eyed at the thought of Israel..."
(David Brooks, 16 April 2009)

"In the meantime, one begins to fear that another promising American president [Obama], perhaps the most promising of all, is about to fall into the honey trap of words and formulas. This president should be told now is not a time for words. Their time has passed. No more peace plan and – heavens forefend – not another outline; not negotiations, not a formula and not a summit. All the plans are in a drawer, waiting for their day. Now is the time for deeds."
(Gideon Levy, 22 April 2009)

"If I were a Palestinian at the right age, I would have joined one of the terrorist organizations at a certain stage."
(Ehud Barak, March 1998 )

"I do not accept it. It is not my job to give a description of the state. Name yourself the Hebrew Socialist Republic - it is none of my business."
(Mahmoud Abbas, 27 April 2009)

"Our people in Gaza are treated like animals in a zoo. They eat but remain hungry, they cry but no one wipes their tears. There is no water, no electricity, no food, only fear, terror and blockade... Our children are living in a state of trauma and fear. They are sick from it and for other reasons such as malnutrition, poverty and the cold... The hospitals did not have basic first aid before the war and now thousands of wounded and sick are pouring in and they are performing operations in the corridors. The situation is frightening and sad."
(Manuel Musalam, January 2009)

"What he [Ban Ki-Moon] was saying in effect is that he found Israel's attack on Gaza perfectly acceptable, but he disagreed only with the tonnage of high explosives that should be dropped by Israeli planes. Indeed, he should specify exactly how many dead children, how many demolished houses, how many burn victims, how many destroyed mosques he would tolerate as not being "excessive." Would half the number killed and half the damage inflicted be reasonably non-excessive, or perhaps one-third? It would be helpful for both sides to know so that the Israelis would limit their killing to the UN-specified quota, and the Gazans would know how many of their community to sacrifice for the sacred UN-sanctioned killing."
(Hasan Abu Nimah, 6 May 2009)

"The ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed was 100 to 1. Nearly one in every 225 Gazans was either killed or wounded. Those figures attest not to a war but a massacre. A minimum condition for a war is two sides fighting at each other, shooting at each other, and what happened in Gaza doesn't meet those minimum conditions. Three thousand planes, 3,000 combat missions, no planes damaged, no planes downed; ground invasion, no major battles, no major clashes; in fact, the Palestinians couldn't even see the Israelis who did most of the fighting at night. A kill ratio of 100:1 is plainly not a war in any meaningful sense. What happened in Gaza was a massacre."
(Norman G. Finkelstein, 28 April 2009)

"Now here comes Netanyahu, in an interview with his faithful stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic"
(Roger Cohen, 8 April 2009)

"Iran is the center of terrorism, fundamentalism and subversion and is in my view more dangerous than Nazism, because Hitler did not possess a nuclear bomb, whereas the Iranians are trying to perfect a nuclear option."
(Shimon Peres, 1996)

"The sophistry of these words: 'the damage that that could cause to the Middle East peace talks' – is newspeak for 'dangerous truths that would further damage the reputations of Israel and the United States.'"
(Media Lens Staff, 18 May 2009)

"The Persian population in Iran is not a majority, it is a plurality. There are many different, diverse, and disagreeing populations inside Iran and an obvious strategy, which I believe is a good strategy, is to separate those populations."
(Jane Harman, 3 May 2009)

"What we ask for is moral consistency: if it was acceptable for British academics to support unreservedly the academic boycott of South Africa with a view to ending the system of apartheid, then the same should apply in the case of Israel."
(Amjad Barham, 26 May 2009)

"Once, as I was crossing one of the hundreds of military checkpoints on my way to my university, I was stopped by an Israeli soldier who turned out to be a fellow mathematician at an Israeli university. But our collegiality ended here: he told me that I could cross the checkpoint if I was able to answer a mathematics question correctly! What kind of engagement can be possible here?"
(Amjad Barham, 26 May 2009)

"Israel forced the [Palestinian] residents their land. They are unemployed and they are not allowed to get food from outside and they are actually locked up. Israel ignores the Arabs like the German population ignored the Jewish suffering before World War II."
(Dalia Golomb, 17 May 2009)

"Obama ... proposed “prolonged detention” for terrorism suspects who cannot be tried"
(SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, 22 May 2009)

"The men and women of the Second Aliya view themselves as workers out of conviction, yet they quickly realize that compared with the Arab farm workers, idealists like thenselves almost always lose out. There, 'workers' are needed who can endure the heavy physical work and oppressive living conditions. In their search for such productive manpower the men and women of the Second Aliya discover the industrious Yemenite Jews, some of whom have already come to the country at the time of the first Aliya. They plan to bring laborers from Yemen to Palestine. . . . As a result of Yavnieli's mission, 2,000 new immigrants come to Palestine. They build new neighbourhoods and work very hard and for little pay in the farmers' fields. The Yemenites are patient workers who seldom complain about the harsh living conditions. For they believe that one would only be worthy of living in Eretz Israel if one 'earns it through tribulation.'"
(Mordecai Naor, November 1998)

"Through Dr. Georg Landauer I traveled to Jena on August 11 to meet Prof. Hans F.K. Günther, the founder of National-Socialist race theory. The conversation lasted two hours. Günther was most congenial but refused to accept credit for coining the Arian-concept, and agreed with me that the Jews are not inferior but different, and that the Jewish Question has to be solved justly."
(Arthur Ruppin, 16 August 1933)

"I see the work of the Jewish National Fund as being similar to that of the Colonization Commission working in Prussia and Western Poland."
(Arthur Ruppin, 1907)

"[I] should view with horror the establishment of a Jewish colony pure and simple; such a colony would be Imperium Imperio; it would be a Ghetto with the prejudice of the Ghetto; it would be a small petty Jewish state, orthodox and illiberal, excluding the Gentile and the Christian."
(Nathan Meyer de Rothschild, August 1902)

"In the middle of April 1917, the Germans took a sombre decision. . . . Upon the western front they had from the beginning used the most terrible means of offense at their disposal. They had employed poison gas on the largest scale and had invented the 'Flammenwerfer.' Nevertheless, it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia."
(Winston S. Churchill, 1929)

"Did they play Barack Obama's speech to the Muslim world in the prison corridors of Abu Ghraib, Bagram air base, Guantanamo or the dozens of secret sites where we hold thousands of Muslims around the world? Did it echo off the walls of the crowded morgues filled with the mutilated bodies of the Muslim dead in Baghdad or Kabul? Was it broadcast from the tops of minarets in the villages and towns decimated by U.S. iron fragmentation bombs? Was it heard in the squalid refugee camps of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians live in the world's largest ghetto?
What do words of peace and cooperation mean from us when we torture-yes, we still torture-only Muslims? What do these words mean when we sanction Israel's brutal air assaults on Lebanon and Gaza, assaults that demolished thousands of homes and left hundreds dead and injured? How does it look for Obama to call for democracy and human rights from Egypt, where we lavishly fund and support the despotic regime of Hosni Mubarak, one of the longest-reigning dictators in the Middle East?"
(Chris Hedges, 8 June 2009)

"The Palestinian Authority doesn't have a strategy to actually end the occupation; they simply have a strategy to remain in power, and that is it. And if that includes cracking down on Hamas, if it means beefing up the security forces, if it means repressing demonstrations in the West Bank when Palestinians are protesting the Israeli war crimes in the Gaza strip, then they will do it."
(Diana Buttu, 1 June 2009)

"The officer’s attorneys asked his brigade commander to testify in his defense, and the commander agreed. And as the commander proceeded to defend this officer and his right to beat Palestinians, the more sharp-eyed observers noticed that someone who has long been declared persona non grata by the Israeli military had slipped into the courtroom: the truth."
(Michael Sfard, 10 June 2009)

"The UN took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians."
(Nelson Mandela, 4 December 1997)

"We have courts that explain the laws of the state and the proper moral guidelines, but the Sephardic community doesn't buy it any more, because they've felt what Ashkenazic justice means. It's a fact that 80 percent of all prisoners throughout the years of the state were Sephardic."
(Iris Mizrahi, 1997)

"That’s good but it’s only a first step"
(Carl Bildt, 15 June 2009)

"We can all be bleeding hearts, but I think it is unsuitable [for Jews and Arabs] to live together."
(Ariel Atias, 2 July 2009)

"Land purchase and use were controlled by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), but it had little success in organizing settlement. In 1907 the Zionist Congress set up the Palestine Office in Jaffa under Arthur Ruppin, leading to the creation of the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC), a joint stock company copied from the Prussian Colonization Commission."
(David Kenneth Fieldhouse, 2006)

"the Orthodox Union remains deeply troubled by the President’s underlying approach - which is to have the U.S. play an “evenhanded” role."
(Stephen Savitsky, 13 July 2009)

"Who will believe that Israel came to the negotiation table with clean hands at a time when it is putting its paws on yet another chunk of land?"
(Akiva Eldar, 14 July 2009)

"An important tool for us is accelerated reconstruction of ancient geographical names and Hebraicization [shi'abur] of Arabic toponyms. In this respect the most important task is to disseminate the practical use of the new names, a process that has run into difficulties among Jews too. In Jaffa the name 'Jibaliyya' is still current, although 'Giv'at Aliya' is gradually disinheriting it. By contrast, a Hebrew name has not been found yet for 'Ajami,' and some new immigrants still incorrectly call the Arab neighborhood within it the 'Ghetto' or 'Arab Ghetto.' It is possible, by being strictly formal and with adequate indoctrination, to make the Arab inhabitants of 'Rami' [in the Galilee] get used to calling their village, in speech and writing, 'Ha-Rama' [Ramat Naftali], or to make the inhabitants of 'Majd al-Krum' [also in the Galilee] become used to calling their village 'Beit ha-Kerem.' From the inhabitants of what the Arabs called 'Shafa'amer' [near Haifa], I have already heard the [Hebraicized] name 'Shefar'am.'"
(Alexander Dotan, 1952)

"Yes, there is a religious component in anti-Semitism, but there is also a political and economic element, reflected in the objective anti-Semitism of Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky, Friedrich Engels, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, and other Jewish leftist leaders who above all abhor capitalism. Jews, amazingly, excel so readily in all intellectual fields that they outperform all rivals even in the arena of anti-Semitism."
(George Gilder, 22 July 2009)

"The only way to make sense of Israel’s senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times."
(Avi Shlaim, 1 September 2009)

"In the years since 1993, I have often asked myself: who was right and who was wrong? When things were going well, when progress was being made, when Oslo II was signed, for example, I thought that I was right and that Edward was wrong. When the political process (between Israel and the Palestinians) stalled with the inevitable return to violence, I thought that Edward Said was right and I was wrong. From today's vantage point, 16 years on, it is indisputable that I was wrong and Edward Said was right in his analysis of the nature and limitations of the Oslo accord."
(Avi Shlaim, 2009)

"His post-conversion interpretation of history is old history with a vengeance. It is indistinguishable from the propaganda of the victors. He [Benny Morris] used to have the courage of his convictions. He now has the courage of his prejudices."
(Avi Shlaim, 2009)

"It's the Mobius Strip of issues -- there's only one side [to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians]."
(Jon Stewart (2), 5 January 2009)

"Hamas has already won one election -— we cannot allow them to win another."
(John Kerry, 5 May 2009)

"The galleries were packed with an almost exclusively Zionist audience. They applauded declarations of support for Zionism. They hissed Arab speakers. They created the atmosphere of a football match, with the Arabs as the away team."
(Harold Beeley, some date before 2002)

"The Israel Lands Administration is responsible for 93% of all the land in Israel. Today the ILA determines, practically at its exclusive discretion, when and where to allocate land. Thus this authority is involved in the lives of the country's citizens when it comes to situations such as granting a permit for closing a balcony or even building a pergola. People who buy a home with their hard-earned money do not own their home, but rather lease it from the ILA."
(Haaretz staff, 3 August 2009)

"There's a lot of bullying by certain elements of the Jewish community. They bully people who try to address the severe situation in Gaza and the West Bank. Archbishop Desmond Tutu gets the same criticism."
(Mary Robinson, 2 August 2009)

"I never was a Zionist. I am not a Zionist., and I don't think I will ever be a Zionist. I have not returned either to the Jewish people or the State of Israel. . . . I do not have, nor have I had, any connection of any sort to Israel, and I feel no obligation towards it either sentimental or political."
(Dennis Goldberg, 8 March 1985)

"A majority of us [South African Jews] are supporting the Union Government's policy in connection with apartheid"
(Charles Hoppenstein, 1960)

"And is there any real difference between the way that the people of Israel are trying to maintain themselves amind nin-Jewish peoples and the way the Afriakner is trying to remain what he is? The people of Israel base themselves upon the Old Testament to explain why they do not wish to mix with other people: the Afrikaner does this too."
(staff of Die Transvaler, 1961)

"[This is] Three and a half million Jewish Israelis hold a total monopoly over governmental resources, control the economy, form the upper social stratum, and determine the educational and national values and objectives of the republic. The two million Palestinians divide into Israeli Palestinians and the Palestinians in the territories. Though the former are citizens of the republic, their citizenship does not assure them equality in law ... The ethnic groups maintain economic interaction defined in professional literature as “internal colonialism,” that is, the inferior economic group serves both as cheap labor and as a market for finished consumer products ..."
(Meron Benvenisti, 7 January 1987)

"as one of those who in 1917 took an active part in the planning of the Balfour Declaration [I] ..."
(Jan Smuts, 1945 or 1946)

"I wish I knew as confidently as Mr. Segal what the Jewish tradition enjoins on Jews in a situation like that prevailing in South Africa today. Mr. Segal is aware that the tradition is a complex thing. He knows that if it seeks justice, it also encourages 'a reluctance to fall out with those in power' ... From such a tradition ... we cannot get a sinlge clear directive to present action."
(Dan Jacobson (2), November 1957)

"People are beginning to ask why, if Israel ands its Rabbis feel impelled to attack the policy of separate development here, the policy of separate development in Israel is not wrong in their eyes as well . . . it may not be said that they wish to differentiate in separate states because of religious and not racial differences, because if differentiation is wrong on one score it is also wrong on another . . . we believed in the separate state of Israel, but now begin to wonder whether that support should be withdrawn if, according to their own convictions, the ideal of separate development is fundamentally wrong. You see, therefore, that the action of Israel has set in train a new line of thought."
(Hendrik Verwoerd, November 1961)

"... not every presence [of a doctor] in a GSS facility means participation in torture... besides, we do not live in a country named Utopia. As a citizen, I can understand that these things are a necessity for the state of Israel... I know the right people and I can speak to them, and this brings about results. A week ago, the issue of the more comfortable handcuffs and the ventilated sack was publicized. Who do you think was behind that?"
(Eran Dolev, 29 January 1999)

"Asia Minor has but two elements of life, two races capable of civilization and progress, the Greeks and the Jews. Nothwithstanding the deep degradation of the Jews of the East, on the day when new life (which, by the way, is drawn from the Occident) shall have reanimated this population, the Jew, by the force of his name, by the promises of his future, will again become a centre of irresistible attraction to all the Jewish forces of the Orient, even of a part of Europe. A new state will be formed upon the coasts of Galilee and in old Canaan, where the Jewish claim will dominate under the combined pressure of historic remembrances, of persecution in some countries, and of the Puritan sympathy of Biblical England."
(Joseph Salvador, 1853)

"They must have made a mistake; they should not have sent you here."
(Israeli security official at ben Gurion airport, July 1978)

"And just how different has been the treatment of Arabs under their control by the Israelis from the treatment of Africans by white South Africa? Under the wrappings, many of the goods are the same."
(Ronald M. Segal, 1973)

"Unless the gates of Palestine are opened the pressure will be directed towards the USA and the British EMpire, where almost every European Jew has relatives or friends. [In the long run] the Jewish problem is the problem for these two great Commonwealths, which after the war will include considerably more than half of world Jewry. Unless through a Jewish State in Palestine they introduce an element which has been absent for 2,000 years, they are in danger of being poisoned by the Jewish question as others have been before them."
(Chaim Weizmann, 20 March 1945)

"I became an anti-Zionist after Oslo, when the government expelled the Arabs of Jahhaleenn to make room for the big new settlement area if Maale Adummim... Like the Zionists, I believe we Jews need a state of our own. But unlike the Zionists I don't think this should be built on the ruins of someone else's home. So our state need not necessarily be right here."
(Amos Gvirtz, March 2009)

"It's a pleasure to see the crowd here, and it's a pleasure to see that there are no chahchahim [a derogatory word alluding to Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern background] who ruin election gatherings. The Likud's chachchahim are at Metzudat Ze'ev [Likud Party headquarters]."
(Dudu Topaz, 1981)

"Brand Obama is a marketer's dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they can make you feel."
(Chris Hedges, 4 May 2009)

"But what stood out most starkly in the article was the following: 'Far from being an antisemite, Mr Kaminski is about as pro-Israeli an MEP as exists.' The idea that being 'pro-Israeli' inoculates you against being an antisemite, or that it means that you are incapable of holding antisemitic views, is simply false – both as a theoretical proposition and as a statement of fact. But said by Pollard, at this point in time, such a statement comes as no surprise."
(Antony Lerman, 21 August 2009)

"Far from being an anti-Semite, Mr Kaminski is about as pro-Israeli an MEP as exists."
(Stephen Pollard, 7 August 2009)

"Senior Israeli officials were blunt in indicating that this plan was directed first and foremost at the United States Congress, not South Africa. In devising it, the Cabinet was seeking a delicate balance of interests: the mimimum amount of Israeli sanctions on South Africa, with the minimum negative effect on Israel's military exports, in return for the maximum impact on Congress and American Jews."
(Thomas L. Friedman, 20 March 1987)

"[Mr. Arafat is fighting] a unique form of colonialism and we wish him success in his struggle."
(Nelson Mandela, 28 February 1990)

"Racism is not apartheid and apartheid is not racism. Apartheid is racism enforced by Acts of Parliament. In my view it is wrong to single out the State of Israel on the grounds that racism in Israel is significantly more rife than in many other member states of the UN. It is, however, right, correct and necessary to single out the State of Israel, alone or otherwise, on the grounds that after the demise of apartheid in the Republic of South Africa it remains the only, or near only, member state of the UN that regulates racism through Acts of Parliament (Knesset) and applies the force of the law to compel its citizens to make racial choices, first and foremost in all matters pertaining to access to land, housing and freedom of residence, correlatively criminalising humanitarian choices."
(Uri Davis, September 2003)

"It [Fatah] cannot win the struggle for equality that it has waged for so long as long as it remains only representative of Palestinians. To win the moral [high ground] it has to project itself as a democratic alternative for all. That is the message I first delivered and that I have persevered with and has led to my election to the Revolutionary Council after 25 years."
(Uri Davis, 23 August 2009)

"We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us"
(Ehud Olmert, February 2008)

"They [the Palestinians] are like grasshoppers compared to us."
(Yitzhak Yizernitzky, 31 March 1988)

"Israel resents comparisons to South Africa, and the two societies are indeed very different. But many of the tactics being used now by the occupation authorities are right out of the South African book: mass detentions without trial, isolating resistant populations, banning the press. And what we see is not limited to now: to this year. It is the future - if Yitzhak Shamir's refusal to withdraw from the occupied territories remains the policy of Israel. The price of occupation is going to be repression forever."
(Anthony Lewis, 3 April 1988)

"This is very different from grabbing land ... We're not going to expropriate additional land."
(Benjamin Netanyahu, 24 August 2009)

"Perhaps successive efforts at peace have failed because they have ducked the core, existential questions, the issues of 1948. Maybe a true peace will only come when it confronts the hardest issues: on one side, the dispossession of the Palestinians, forced to become a refugee nation; and on the other, the urge which led to Israel's creation, the Jews' desire after two millennia in exile to live in a state of their own."
(Jonathan Freedland, 25 August 2009)

"Sometimes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes me so angry that I kick the wastepaper bin in my office or throw things around."
(Anna Maria Lindh, 2003)

"The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of the international community – in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months, a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at the end of the Israeli occupation."
(Desmond Tutu, 17 October 2002)

"The question is not 'is Israel the same as South Africa?', it is 'do Israel’s actions meet the international definition of what apartheid is?' And if you look at those conditions which includes the transfer of people, which includes multiple tiers of law, official state segregation, then you see that, yes, it does meet that definition - which is different than saying it is South Africa. No two states are the same. It’s not the question, it’s a distraction."
(Naomi Klein, 27 June 2009)

"The boycott [against apartheid South Africa] was immensely important. Much more than the armed struggle. The importance of the boycott was not only economic, but also moral."
(Desmond Tutu, 29 August 2009)

"Just don't put any Stars of David on the boxes."
(Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, December 1982)

"[Adolf Eichmann] dealt cordially and cooperatively with Zionist representatives from Palestine. When the Zionists sought permission to open vocational training camps for future emigrants [to Palestine], Eichmann willingly supplied them with housing and equipment."
(Howard M. Sachar, unknown date)

"It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of antisemitism, was to become a factor in the rise of antisemitism. Israelis must be aware that the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also Jews throughout the world."
(Yehoshafat Harkabi, unknown date)

"I am a Jew. I fell in love with Palestine. I want desperately to help the homeless of Central and Eastern Europe to find a home there.... I do not blame them for refusing to accept minority status in an Arab state.... But equally I do not blame the Arabs of Palestine for fighting against minority status in a Jewish state."
(I. F. Stone, 1948)

"But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians."
(Desmond Tutu, 27 August 2009)

"A more likely alternative to the present debacle is one state, which is obviously the goal of Israeli leaders who insist on colonizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem. A majority of the Palestinian leaders with whom we met are seriously considering acceptance of one state, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. By renouncing the dream of an independent Palestine, they would become fellow citizens with their Jewish neighbors and then demand equal rights within a democracy. In this nonviolent civil rights struggle, their examples would be Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. They are aware of demographic trends. Non-Jews are already a slight majority of total citizens in this area, and within a few years Arabs will constitute a clear majority. A two-state solution is clearly preferable and has been embraced at the grass roots."
(Jimmy Carter, 6 September 2009)

"Racism can never be a substitute for Judaism. Racism is a boorish impostor. At best it is bigotry wearing a mortarboard, at worst it is the resurrected ghost of Hitler."
(Irving Reichert, 1953)

"... the real reason for the power of the Zionism=racism charge is plain: once the world begins to recognize that Zionism is in fact necessarily racist – and on an expanding scale – then the legitimacy of Israel collapses like the proverbial house of cards. Zionism's ideological apparatus reacts to any hint of this like a swarm of yellow-jackets when someone steps on their hive."
(Joel Kovel, 10 September 2009)

"some 200 settlements with more than 450,000 settlers in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem ... make the peace efforts by the international community more vulnerable and virtually impossible"
(WCC (World Council of Churches), September 2009)

"Richard Goldstone, the chair of the UN fact-finding commission on the war in Gaza, defines himself as a Zionist and has visited in Israel countless times. His youngest daughter lived in Jerusalem for 11 years, and he himself chaired the association of the Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for 25 years. He also served for seven years as chairman of the World ORT education organization, which runs over 150 schools with over 90,000 students in Israel."
(Barak RavidUri Blau, 16 September 2009)

"He is a Zionist. My dad loves Israel"
(Nicole Goldstone, 16 September 2009)

"My father's participation softened UN Gaza report"
(Nicole Goldstone, 16 September 2009)

"[The BDS movement] does not adopt a particular political solution to the colonial conflict. [The main strategy] is based on the principle that human rights and international law must be upheld and respected no matter what the political solution may be. This was key to securing a near consensus in Palestinian civil society and a wide network of support around the world, including the Western mainstream."
(Omar Barghouti, September 2009)

"Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can negate the use of terror as a means of battle."
(Stern gang, 2 August 1943)

"What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. […] This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved."
(Gadi Eisenkot, 3 October 2008)

"We are no longer cool. ... You tell John Smith "I'm from Israel" while he drinks his beer and he gives you a foggy stare and says: "You've got quite a few problems there, man. Must be tough." And John is relatively ok. He has a cousin who serves in Iraq and hates those "damn towel-heads." Maggie from London simply grabs her cocktail and walks away with her blond head up high, to ensure you see her disgust. Julio from Madrid has a Keffiyeh wrapped around his neck because he identifies with all the miserable creatures in the world, and Jorgen from Munich – from Munich, for God's sake! – says he's a pacifist, which is a code-word for his unwillingness to accept blame for the Holocaust, because he wasn't even born back then, so we shouldn't think it justifies everything. There is something insulting about it. Like being the most popular girl in high school who later gained weight"
(Yair Lapid, 19 September 2009)

"Israel ultimately is not democratic . . . and they engage in a light form of apartheid"
(Gavin Polone, 22 September 2009)

"We are not exactly impotent little babies. They [the Israelis] have to fly over our airspace in Iraq [to attack Iran]. Are we just going to sit there and watch? Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse."
(Zbigniew Brzezinski, 18 September 2009)

"At a meeting that [Barack] Obama held with Jewish leaders in July, the president referred to [Rahm] Emanuel as his 'advisor on settlements.'"
(Akiva Eldar, 25 September 2009)

"No doubt Judge Goldstone, a Jew and a Zionist, seized on every scrap of data that could help Israel and avoid a damning report, but the facts were overwhelming and weighted the scales in Israel’s disfavour. No one with a modicum of insight could accept the narrative according to which Judge Goldstone was trustworthy when he served as a prosecutor and investigator in the genocide in Rwanda and war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, but had now suddenly turned into an enemy of the Jewish people."
(Gideon Spiro, 17 September 2009)

"Along with his air force comrades, Ilan Ramon participated in the first Lebanon War in which the air force committed war crimes when it bombed civilian targets. The son [Asaf Ramon] and his classmates in the pilots’ course were in the middle of training for preparation to drop bombs on Gaza and on Lebanon, and to participate in the next wars that Israel will initiate."
(Gideon Spiro, 17 September 2009)

"During his two-day stay, Sir Jock Stirrup visited several Israel Defense Forces units that use advanced weaponry. He also met with senior members of the General Staff to discuss the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and legal action in British courts against IDF officers."
(Barak Ravid, 25 September 2009)

"... that is the Israel Lobby; you cannot say negative things about the Israeli occupation, you can't say negative things about the Gaza war; you can't say anything negative about Israel's behaviour and maintain a political life in Washington. That is what it is about."
(Philip Weiss, 24 September 2009)

"I really must point that in international affairs, I cannot settle things if my problem [in Palestine] is made the subject of local elections [in the US]."
(Ernest Bevin, 25 February 1947)

"I did reach a stage, however, in meeting the Jews separately, in which I advanced the idea of an interim arrangement, leading ultimately to self-government. I indicated that I did not mind whether this interim arrangement was for five years, or 10 years, or three years, or whatever it was. I said to them, "If you will work together for three, five, or 20 years, it might well be that you will not want to separate. Let us try to make up the difference." At that stage things looked more hopeful. There was a feeling—I do not think I overestimated it—when they left me in the Foreign Office that day, that I had the right approach at last. But what happened? I went back to the Paris Peace Conference, and next day—I believe it was the Day of Atonement, or a special day of the Jewish religion—my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister telephoned me at midnight, and told me that the President of the United States was going to issue another statement on the 100,000. I think the country and the world ought to know about this.

I went next morning to the Secretary of State, Mr. Byrnes, and told him how far I had got the day before. I believed we were on the road, if only they would leave us alone. I begged that the statement be not issued, but I was told that if it was not issued by Mr. Truman, a competitive statement would be issued by Mr. Dewey. In international affairs I cannot settle things if my problem is made the subject of local elections. I hope I am not saying anything to cause bad feeling with the United States, but I feel so intensely about this. A vexed problem like this, with a thousand years of religious differences, has to be handled with the greatest detail and care. No one knows that more than I do. I have seen these tense religious struggles in parts of this country, in Ireland, and elsewhere. I know what it involves. It can lead to civil war before you know where you are. However, the statement was issued. I was dealing with Jewish representatives at the time, and I had to call it off because the whole thing was spoilt."
(Ernest Bevin, 25 February 1947)

" It is said that, if we have a unitary State, the Jews, as Jews, will not be in the United Nations. Really, this is raising a very 1916 big question. Are we in the United Nations as a religion, are we in the United Nations as a people geographically situated, or how are we in it? If the United Nations is to arrive at a position in which it will have five or six great religions as dominant factors, then that will be a very disturbing situation"
(Ernest Bevin, 25 February 1947)

"I am among the few who address combat from the angle of the army's attitude towards its own troops. The lives of our troops interest me more than the wellbeing and dignity of the Palestinians."
(Asa Kasher, September 2009)

"It is permissible to carry out a targeted killing even if there are going to be neighbors or innocent civilians who are killed in the course of the operation, provided that it can't be done differently. It is permissible, because there is no other choice. If we keep the wanted man without hurting him. Tomorrow there will be a terror attack and many Israelis are going to get hurt. From my perspective, protecting the lives of Israelis mandates striking at terrorists while endangering the lives of his neighbors."
(Asa Kasher, September 2009)

"Secularization also revolutionized Jewish identity from within: traditional Jews can be distinguished by what they do or should do; the new Jews by what they are. While they practice the same religion, it would be truly daring to assume that Jews from Poland, Yemen and Morocco belong to the same ethnic group, let alone are descendents of the Biblical Hebrews. Some, such as Professor Shlomo Sand of Tel-Aviv University, argue that the Jewish people, as an ethnic concept, was simply 'invented' for the needs of Zionism in the late 19th century: after all, one needs a nation to be a nationalist."
(Yakov M. Rabkin, 2 October 2009)

"The historical record shows that on the whole, Jews did not relate to the vision of the Return in a more active way than most Christians viewed the Second Coming. As a symbol of belief, integration, and group identity it was a powerful component of the value system, but as an activating … The fact remains that for all of its emotional, cultural, and religious intensity, this link with Palestine did not change the praxis of Jewish life in the Diaspora: Jews might pray three times a day for the deliverance that would transform the world and transport them to Jerusalem, but they did not emigrate there."
(Shlomo Avineri, 1981)

"The State of Israel is depriving people of water in order to force them to leave the Bedouins' permanent communities. The authorities have waged a war to strip us of our land and give it to the Jewish National Fund. We are not Jews, so where is our place? Where is our children's future? The situation is bad, I feel alone against the State of Israel. If they dare approach our land, it will not be good and all the Bedouins will mobilize to prevent this."
(Nuri Al-Ukbi, 3 October 2009)

"So why did the Israeli government boycott the [Goldstone] commission? The real answer is quite simple: they knew full well that the commission, any commission, would have to reach the conclusions it did reach."
(Uri Avnery, 19 September 2009)

"[The restoration of the Jews in Palestine requires that] Firstly that the Jews themselves will take up the matter, universally and unanimously. Secondly that the European powers will aid them in their views."
(Charles Henry Churchill, June 1841)

"I cannot conceal from you my most anxious desire to see your countrymen endeavour once more to resume their existence as a people. I consider the object to be perfectly attainable. But, two things are indispensably necessary. Firstly that the Jews will themselves take up the matter universally and unanimously. Secondly, that the European Powers will aid them in their views. It is for the Jews to make a commencement. Let the principal persons of their community places themselves at the head of the movement ...
Were the resources which you all possess steadily directed towards the regeneration of Syria and Palestine, there cannot be a doubt but that, under the blessing of the Most High, those countries would amply repay the undertaking and that you would end by obtaining the sovereignty of at least Palestine ..."
(Charles Henry Churchill, June 1841)

"At a certain point we came to court. The judge approached me and said, 'you're digging under their houses.' I said 'I'm digging under their houses? King David dug under their houses. I'm just cleaning.' He said to me, 'Clean as much as possible.' Since then, we're just cleaning; we're not digging."
(David Be'eri, 2008)

"This is the time for action. The lack of accountability for war crimes and possible crimes against humanity has reached a crisis point; the ongoing lack of justice is undermining any hope for a successful peace process and reinforcing an environment that fosters violence."
(Richard Goldstone, 29 September 2009)

"We must see the situation for what it is. On the security front, we are those attacked and who are on the defensive. But in the political field we are the attackers and the Arabs are those defending themselves. They are living in the country and own the land, the village. We live in the Diaspora and want only to immigrate [to Palestine] and gain possession of [lirkosh] the land from them."
(David Ben-Gurion, 7 July 1938)

"I don't understand your optimism . . . Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see only one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"
(David Ben-Gurion, 1956)

"I don't understand your optimism . . . Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see only one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations' time, but for the moment there is no chance. So, it's simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1956)

"What happened is a mistake, but can be repaired. We have the courage to admit there was a mistake."
(Yasser Abed Rabbo, 7 October 2009)

"By entering into the Covenant, you too have become the descendant of the Patriarchs"
(Maimonides, unknown date around 1200)

"For the assumed descent was not conceived of as solely spiritual. Even if only for the sole purpose of retaining the ritual unchanged and prohibiting any reform, it demanded adhesion to a genealogical fiction. By entering into the covenant of Abraham and Moses, the convert changed his ancestors. Those of the Israelites, the Bedouins in the Sinai, became his: he would adopt the system of tribal values and the national myth of the group which he joined."
(Ilan Halevi, May 1987)

" Recognizing the murder of six million Jews more than six decades ago is, in fact, vital for understanding the supreme dangers posed to six million Jews in Israel today by a nuclear Iran and by the Goldstone Report."
(Michael B. Oren, 6 October 2009)

"The Goldstone Report goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers by stripping the Jews not only of the ability and the need but of the right to defend themselves."
(Michael B. Oren, 6 October 2009)

"The Goldstone mission will go down in history as the 21st century’s equivalent to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – a notorious work of fiction which spun a conspiratorial web of deceit and distortion that has fueled hatred of Jews ever since. At its core, the Goldstone report repeats the ancient blood libel against the Jewish people – the allegation of bloodthirsty Jews intent on butchering the innocent. ... With this report the UN has come full circle. Rising from the Jewish ashes of crimes against humanity, it now purports to render the Jewish people’s exercise of the right of self-defence as itself a crime against humanity. ... In this so-called interactive dialogue, there is, therefore, only one question to put to you, Richard. How does it feel to have used your Jewishness to jeopardize the safety and security of the people Israel and to find yourself in the company of human rights abusers everywhere?"
(Anne F. Bayefsky, 29 September 2009)

"For most of my adult life, I was criticized by white South Africans for daring to speak out against the policy of the then-South African government. I was accused by a white person of being a traitor to the white minority in South Africa. ... I would suggest that it should not be regarded as a matter of criticism that a member or members of the Jewish people should criticize the government of Israel or the IDF for what is seen to be violations of international law. ... [The history of the Jews as a persecuted people is] an absolutely compelling reason for all Jews to speak out against injustice and the violation of human rights."
(Richard Goldstone, 29 September 2009)

"I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it."
(David Ben-Gurion, 12 June 1938)

"I feel like I'm in a cesspool [UN], and I don't want to be here anymore."
(Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, 11 October 2009)

"I have lived in Israel for over thirty years, and to this day, I know of virtually no Israeli within the so-called national consensus who favors a genuine two-state solution. Don’t believe what Benny Morris, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, Tom Segev, Amos Oz, Shimon Peres, or any of the so-called Israeli “moderates” or “leftists” tell you. They are all in favor of a one-state/one-“state” solution, where the former is a powerful state with an independent economy, foreign affairs, and military, and the other is a “state-minus,” in which the Palestinians are allowed a certain degree of autonomy provided that they don’t pose a threat to the first state. Even the much-vaunted Geneva Initiative perpetuates inequities when it proposes that a Palestinian state be left without a modern Palestinian defence force, without making a similar demand of Israel – even though one hundred years of Zionism teaches us that the Palestinians have much more to fear from the Zionists than vice-versa. Only one side has ever actually wiped the other’s country off the map – and it wasn’t the Palestinian side."
(Jeremiah Haber, 8 August 2007)

"behind the problems of nationality and freedom there is a still deeper problem which cannot be solved by mere phrases, namely, the race question, which is as old as history itself and which must be solved before attempting the solution of the political and social problems."
(Moses Hess, 1862, English translation 1943, 1995)

"He [Obama] hasn't made any progress at all on the Palestine-Israel issue. Mahmoud Abbas has about as much credibility in Palestine as Karzai after his fraudulent elections in Afghanistan […]. Look, I don't think there has been any [progress]… Look when you get an envoy of Obama turning up in Jerusalem and being told by the Israeli foreign minister – who is almost as much a crackpot as Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran – that it is going to take many-many years before there is any kind of peace between Israel and the Palestine. There is no progress, absolutely none. We cannot go on endlessly listening to the New York Times correspondents and the various State Department statements to the effect that things are moving, that he has got things going. Name a single victory that Obama has done. This Nobel Prize is a little bit like a Nobel Prize for Science to someone who might in the future find a cure for cancer. You can't do that type of thing; but they did it."
(Robert Fisk, 11 October 2009)

"there was no real antagonism between the two groups [rabbinic Jews and Karaites] until European Karaites renounced their Judaism in the 19th and 20th centuries and were not considered Jews by the czars or the Nazis"
(Daniel J. Lasker, May 2007)

"Israel practices a brutal form of apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp."
(Shulamit Aloni, 2008)

"How come Darwish writes such a poem? Is he asking us to leave the country to become peace lovers?"
(Moshe Sneh, 1968)

"We must, above all, not dream of restoring ancient Judaea. We must not attach ourselves to the place where our political life was once violently interrupted and destroyed. The goal of our present endeavours must not be the "Holy Land", but a land of our own. We need nothing but a large piece of land for our poor brothers, a piece of land which shall remain our property, from which no foreign master can expel us."
(Leon (Yehuda Leib) Pinsker, 1882)

"For a while, which was decisive and fatal, Zionist newspapers expressed open and vigorous support for the versions and denials of th Nazi propaganda minister, Goebbels, faced with the 'exaggerations' and 'inventions' of his free world enemies."
(Shabtai B. Beit-Zvi, 1977)

"I’m pleased that President Obama accepted my request that there should be no preconditions"
(Benjamin Netanyahu, 23 September 2009)

"You [Uri Avnery] repeatedly use the word peace but not once do you use the word justice."
(Jeffrey Blankfort, 5 September 2009)

"It is true that the first phase of the conquest took place under the sign of the money given to the effendi more than under thatòf the sword. The effendi was the legal owner. But the result of this was the expulsion of those who were working the land. That land which we are cultivating today, was indeed previously cultivated by Arab peasants! ... And even the alternative offered to the Arabs (resettlement outside Palestine) constitutes an injustice, if we consider it from a strictly private point of view, and not a national one. Why should the Arab have to go and look for a plot of land in Mesopotamia if his ancestors have, for generations, always lived on the land of Merhavia, Kinnereth, etc.?"
(Schmuel (Samuel) Hugo Bergmann, 1915)

"I don't think mainstream Jews feel very comfortable with the ultra-Orthodox. It's a class thing. Their image is smelly. That's what I'd say now that you've got me thinking about it. Hasids and New York diamond dealers. United Jewish Appeal (UJA) people have told me several times they don't want to fly El Al because of 'those people'. Actually, I prefer Swissair or Lufthansa myself. But I fly El Al to Israel because it's direct. Yes, TWA flies direct too. But it's low-class, like the Orthodox. Yes, that's still the image."
(Thomas (Tom) A. Dine, 1989)

"similar about the Palestine ... To Prince Hohenlohe, the Prussian imperial chancellor, who asked him who the owners of the lands that Herzl intended to purchase in Palestine were, he replied: 'Arabs, Greeks, the whole mixed multitude of the Orient'"
(Ouri Eisenzweig, 1980)

"Ross believes that there are a number of secret Sabbateans who hold key positions of influence in the Turkish parliament, legislature and executive branches of government, including the foreign minister himself. This, he observes, may help explain the close relations that exist today between Israel and Turkey"
(Orly Halpern, 26 June 2002)

"The rhythm of land acquisitions slowed during the 1930s, after reaching a peak in 1924, with the end of the big scandal of the lands of Marj Ibn 'Amr, bought from the Beirut Greek Sursok family by the Jewish National Fund: 24 hamlets and villages sold as a single lot, and the whole population evacuated by the British police."
(Ilan Halevi, May 1987)

"The Obama administration joined our recommendation calling for full and good-faith investigations, both in Israel and in Gaza, but said that the report was flawed but I have yet to hear from the Obama administration what the flaws in the report that they have identified are. I would be happy to respond to them, if and when I know what they are."
(Richard Goldstone, 22 October 2009)

"I am informed that the G.O.C. [General Officer Commanding] Palestine is credited with having said that he would like to 'uproot every Jew in Palestine'."
(Chaim Weizmann, 21 July 1946)

"The evidence of the Palestine Administration and the Military [to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry] was - for obvious reasons of security - presented in camera. The first meeting was with Lieutenant General J. C. D'Arcy, the G.O.C. in Palestine. His evidence related mainly to the Jewish military build-up in Palestine. He said that there was now a fairly well-equipped Jewish army under the direction of a General H.Q., and that any attempts to disarm it would be very difficult, if not impossible. In the event of a future Arab-Jewish confrontation, asked Leggett, 'would that mean a considerable slaughter of the Arabs?' D'Arcy's answer was clear: 'Yes, indeed.' The impression gained from D'Arcy's testimony was that from the military angle the easiest solution to the Palestine problem would be a Jewish one:He could enforce a pro-Jewish solution (on the Arabs) without much difficulty; in enforcing the Hagana would be very helpful; a pro-Arab solution would ... require three divisions (to enforce on the Jews); in such a solution Arab support would be of no value."
(Amikam Nachmani, 26 March 1987)

"Where the Gaza atrocity of 2009 has changed things is that a turning point has been reached in the history of Israel's persecution of the Palestinians. World opinion has been aroused against Israel as never before. In fact things can never be the same again and that is why Zionists like Goldstein are so vicious and intolerant of Zionists like Goldstone who take a principled stand in the face of such unquestionable criminal actions. What Israel´s merciless aggression has opened-up at last is a world-wide process whereby the questioning of the legitimacy of the Zionist project has been unleashed."
(Ronnie Kasrils, 24 October 2009)

"But Operation Cast Lead was a resounding military success. It put a stop to the Qassam rocket fire in the south and we sustained few casualties. Yet even this success does not relieve the commanders of the need to go into battle with a lawyer in tow. ... One needs to be blind not to recognize the fact that the world is judging us by a double standard. ... If the officers who led Operation Cast Lead end up paying for it with their careers, or even if they do not pay but their appearances before a commission of inquiry become nightmarish, this will be the real crime."
(Shahar Ilan, 26 October 2009)

"Let me say a word about Israel and Europe. I don’t think that the Israeli people are aware of the relationship, as deep as it is, between the European Union and Israel. There is no country outside the European continent who has the type of relations that Israel has with the European Union. Israel, allow me to say, is a member of the European Union without being a member of the institutions. It is member of all the programs... [applause]... and I would like to emphasize and underline, with a very thick line, in all the programs of research and technology – this is fundamental – and ... I am sorry to say, but ... I don’t see the president of Croatia here. But I have to tell you, now that he is not here – his country is part of the European Union – that your relation, today, with the European Union is stronger than the relation of Croatia. Don't tell him that."
(Javier Solana, 21 October 2009)

"Now, 14 villages actually ceased to exist. Of these 14 it is significant that 13 are in the Emek —that is to say in the valleys of Esdrachon and Jezreel. Of the 13, twelve villages were occupied in the past by tenants of the well-known Sursock family of Beirut."
(Moshe Shertok, 16 July 1947)

"One day one of these people [Israeli leaders in charge of the attack on Gaza] will make a mistake and go to the wrong country and face a criminal process — and then it'll be a matter for the courts of that country to give them a fair trial: that's what the Palestinian victims want."
(Daniel Machover, October 2009)

"Sir Abdur Rahman: Who was in possession and occupation of Palestine as it is known today before the Israelites?
Mr. Ben Gurion: There were a large number of people who came here; there are many names.
CHAIRMAN: Before whom?
Sir Abdur Rahman : Before the Israelites.
Mr. Ben Gurion: The names are supplied in our Bible.
Sir Abdur Rahman: All of them have died out?
Mr. Ben Gurion: Yes, all of them.
Sir, Abdur Rahman: All of them and their descendants have died out?
Mr. Ben Gurion: Yes, they disappeared.
Sir Abdur Rahman: And the fellaheen who exist in Palestine today, are they descendants?
Mr. Ben Gurion: I do not think so."
(Abdul RahmanDavid Ben-Gurion, 8 July 1947)

"A Yad Vashem spokeswoman said there is no proof the Nazis made soap from human bodies during the Holocaust."
(Amiram Barkat, 11 February 2005)

"Colonel Newcombe is rather sore at the way in which certain of his suggestions [e.g., handing the Galilee panhandle back to Lebanon] have been over-ruled and that he is inclined to take the line … that too much attention has been paid to the interests of the Zionists and too little to those of the British government... Newcombe has been doing all he can for the British interests, but he did not yet understand that at this point in time the British interests include the successful outcome of the Zionist project."
(John Evelyn Shuckburgh, 17 October 1921)

"The local population in Palestine is closer to the Jews in racial composition than any other people, even the 'Semitic' peoples; it is highly feasible to assume that the fellahin in Palestine are the direct descendants of the remnants of the Jewish and Canaanite agricultural community, together with a very slight mixture of Arab blood. For it is known that the Arabs, as proud conquerors, mingled very little with the masses in the countries they conquered."
(Dov Ber Borochov, 1905)

"If in fact the Jewish settlements became inhabited by entirely different people, they would not have preserved the Hebrew names (which in fact, did occur in most of those settlements where the population did change, such as in the eastern part of the Jordan). Such is not the case in western land of Israel where the old Hebrew names are preserved, which proves the continuity of settlement in this place."
(Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1932)

"It was already proven by Major Condor, in his research on the land of Israel, that the 'Arabs' of the Land of Israel had spoken Aramaic in the days of the Crusades, the language spoken by the Jews until the Arab conquest - meaning that these Aramaic-speaking 'Arabs' were actually Jews themselves"
(Israel Belkind, 1890s)

"The fellahin are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers, and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations, the Arabians did not engage in farming. ... They did not seek new lands on which to settle their peasantry, which hardly existed. Their whole interest in the new countries was political, religious and material: to rule, to propagate Islam and to collect taxes."
(David Ben-GurionYitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1918)

"To argue that after the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus and the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt Jews altogether ceased to cultivate the land of Eretz Israel is to demonstrate complete ignorance in the history and contemporary literature of Israel. ... The Jewish farmer, like any other farmer, was not easily torn from his soil, which had been watered with his sweat and the sweat of his forebears. ... Despite the repression and suffering, the rural population remained unchanged."
(David Ben-GurionYitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1918)

"Obviously it would be mistaken to say that all the fellahin are descendants of the ancient Jews, but it can be said of most of them, or their core. ... the great majority of the fellahin do not descend from the Arab conquerors but before that, from the Jewish fellahin, who were the foundation of this country before its conquest by Islam."
(Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1929)

"[a study of the names of] all the villages, streams, springs, mountains, ruins, valleys and hills 'from Dan to Beersheba' ... confirm[s] that the entire biblical terminology of Eretz Israel remains alive, as it had been, in the speech of the fellah population."
(David Ben-GurionYitzhak Ben-Zvi, October 2009)

"The president, meanwhile, has learned a thing or two about Jewish power in America."
(Yoel Marcus, 3 November 2009)

"A number of officials strongly suspect that the Israelis repackaged much of Pollard's material and provided it to the Soviet Union in exchange for continued Soviet permission for Jews to emigrate to Israel. Other officials go further, and say there was reason to believe that secret information was exchanged for Jews working in highly sensitive positions in the Soviet Union. A significant percentage of Pollard's documents, including some that described the techniques the American Navy used to track Soviet submarines around the world, was of practical importance only to the Soviet Union. One longtime C.I.A. officer who worked as a station chief in the Middle East said he understood that "certain elements in the Israeli military had used it" -- Pollard's material -- "to trade for people they wanted to get out," including Jewish scientists working in missile technology and on nuclear issues. Pollard's spying came at a time when the Israeli government was publicly committed to the free flow of Jewish emigres from the Soviet Union. The officials stressed the fact that they had no hard evidence -- no "smoking gun," in the form of a document from an Israeli or a Soviet archive -- to demonstrate the link between Pollard, Israel, and the Soviet Union, but they also said that the documents that Pollard had been directed by his Israeli handlers to betray led them to no other conclusion."
(Seymour (Sy) Hersh, 18 January 1999)

"[The government] doesn’t know how to deal with [the Palestinians]. If I was Prime Minister, I would send all of them to Iran, to Sudan, to Egypt, to Jordan. I would wish them all the best, but not in the land of Israel."
(Ronit Shuker, May 2009)

"I have had great respect for you [Richard Goldstone] over the years. Your work at the head of the South Africa Reconciliation Commission and in helping to find a just solution to the Bosnian conflict deserves the highest commendation. Moreover, I know you to be a proud Jew who serves on the Board of Trustees of Hebrew University and who has a daughter living in Israel. With this background, I wondered in the first place how you could take on the chairmanship of the investigation of the war in Gaza mandated by the UN Human Rights Council. After all, the Human Rights Council has repeatedly demonstrated its bias against Israel and in its stated mission for the investigation began with assumptions presuming Israeli guilt."
(Abraham H. Foxman, November 2009)

"The mindset and basic values of Israeli Jewish society and Palestinian Muslim society are so different and mutually exclusive as to render a vision of binational statehood tenable only in the most disconnected and unrealistic of minds. The value placed on human life and the rule of (secular) law is completely different–as exhibited, in Israel itself, in the vast hiatus between Jewish and Arab perpetration of crimes and lethal road traffic violations. Arabs, to put it simply, proportionally commit far more crimes (and not only ones connected to property) and commit far more lethal traffic violations than do Jews. In large measure, this is a function of different value systems (such as the respect accorded to human life and the rule of law)."
(Benny Morris, 28 April 2009)

"Barak himself, in domestic discussions, often used a telling metaphor: Israel is 'a villa in the middle of a jungle'. Meaning: we are an island of civilization surrounded by savage animals. This is remarkably similar to old-established colonial attitudes, and, indeed, a variation of Herzl's metaphor of the 'wall against barbarism'."
(Uri Avnery, 14 July 2002)

"[Israel is] a villa located in a jungle"
(Ehud Barak, frequently uttered by Barak in domestic Israeli discussions)

" In Israel, a myth was propagated to the effect that the territory occupied in 1967 was thinly populated and full of fortified bunkers, military camps and minefields. Until then, however, 223 Syrian locales had in fact existed on the Golan, with a total population of about 130,000 - eight times the number of Israelis living there now."
(Akiva Eldar, 19 July 2009)

"I lift this rifle in fulfillment of my pledge to reclaim my homeland"
(Kim Chernin, around 1971)

"Anyone who rejects the two-state solution, won't bring a one-state solution. They will instead bring one war, not one state. A bloody war with no end."
(Shimon Peres, 7 November 2009)

"The Zimbabwe conflict took 15 years ... and cost 20,000 lives and I can assure you that the South African transfer of power will take a good deal more than that, both in time and I am afraid lives."
(Helen Suzman, 1987)

"These two people, the Afrikaner and the black, are not capable of becoming one nation. Our differences are unique, cultural and deep. The only way a man can be happy, can live in peace, is really when he is among his own people, when he shares cultural values."
(Hendrik Verwoerd Jr., 1986)

"One of the weirder products of apartheid is the crippling of language in a maw of hypocrisy, euphemism and sociologese. You talk about the Afrikaner 'right to self-determination' -- meaning power over everybody else."
(Economist staff, around 1986)

"… about the siege of Gaza… and here I come to a question about the United States. Let all of us remember that the siege is also being conducted by Europe; the boycott is also imposed by Europe. So it is not only a question who is nominated in the White House, it is also a question is also about why is Europe such a blind, automatic, supporter of the United States when it comes to the Middle East. I never understood it. First, Europe and the US wanted elections, then there were elections, democratic by any kind of criteria, and yet they elected the one we didn’t want them to elect. So we boycott them. I think it is the only – the only – example in history that the occupied people is being boycotted. Usually it is the occupiers – I can't, maybe there are some bigger experts of history – where was an occupied people ever boycotted by the world? Never heard about it! But Europe is part and parcel of this."
(Gideon Levy, 2 December 2008)

"A volk must do its own labor to ensure its survival, and therefore dependence on foreign labour must be avoided."
(Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), February 1987)

"I hate the idea that only Jews are allowed to criticize Jews. I think that's a ludicrous point of view."
(Wallace Shawn, October 2009)

"Now, I am Jewish and I am also a Latino man living in California–a state where we have a pluralistic demographic composition: not one group, not even non-Latino whites, amount to 50% of the population. If I were to hear white people bemoaning the demographic threat that the rise of people of color in the state represents, I would call it like it is, and that is racism, pure and simple. I have no use for the phrase demographic threat. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth and a sharp pain in my gut."
(Sydney Levy, 27 October 2009)

"It is true. We do have a Masada complex. We have a pogrom complex. We have a Hitler complex."
(Golda Meir, 1973)

"In more colorful words I will say that the State is not authorized to caress with one hand the Jewish 'ideological' felons, and flog with its other hand the Arab 'ideological' felons. If the State feels that ideological offences justify relatively forgiving enforcement for minors, then this should be the policy towards all minors regardless of nationality or religion."
(Yuval Shadmi, 11 November 2009)

"I was a Zionist before I was a Democrat"
(Howard Berman, 12 November 2009)

"For us Arafat is like Hitler. He wants to see every one of us dead."
(Yitzhak Yizernitzky, 25 April 1988)

"Israel operates on two fundamentally different levels of enforcement for ideological offenses committed by Arab and Jewish minors."
(Yuval Shadmi, 11 November 2009)

"I was a Zionist before I was a Democrat"
(Howard Berman, 3 November 2009)

"When this small group of the Palmach left, the Irgun and the Stern Gang started the massacre [at Deir Yassin]. I couldn't even tell if there was a commander of the Irun or the Lehi who was directing it or preventing it. It was like a bunch of pogromists, but this time it was not just a pogrom to loot; it was a massacre. Then I started to run here and there. I had a fellow with me with a good camera and I told him to take photos. I couldn't fine the room to speak. But I found myself watching this story and until this day I can’t overcome my remorse. In the afternoon, the people of Givat Shaul entered Dair Yassin and the massacre stopped. I could see that the dissidents took about 25 males in a truck to Jerusalem and back and they put them in the quarry against the wall and shot them. When I was walking from house to house I could see people dead in the corners — an old man, a wife and two children, here and there a male; it was terrible. We took photos. I left the village just before Friday night and I sent my comrade to take the films; we shot I think two rolls. I told him, "Take the films to the intelligence to the intelligence service. Develop the films but only the negatives, so that no picture will be distributed in Jerusalem." I didn't want it. "Bring me in the morning the two films, developed, but only the negatives." Then I sat in my room and I wrote a report about what I had seen. I had come just to see the Irgun and the Stern Gang's performance. THey didn't know how to fight, but as murderers they were pretty good. Until now I cannot see my report. It is hidden, they say, in the Jewish Defence Forces archives. I am still suffering; I don’t like it. Because if at the time I was sufficiently far-sighted, I would have kept the seventeen Palmach people with me, and there would have been no massacre."
(Meir Pa'il, 11 December 1996)

"It is not just the Negev and Galilee. It is actually every piece of land between the river and the sea: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Be'er Sheva and every village, orchard, field, river and tree in between. The only question that is left open is how long will it take for the Shekel to drop? How long will it take before Israelis grasp that they dwell on stolen land?"
(Gilad Atzmon, 11 November 2009)

"Rabbinical arguments may rest on an imaginary definition of ethnicity, but the legitimacy of a Jewish homeland does not. Ultimately, Israel’s case is the remedy for atrocity, about which Sand has nothing to say."
(Simon Schama, 13 November 2009)

"His [Sherif Hussein] aim is the establishment of a Caliphate for himself, and independence for people speaking Arabic from their present irritating subjection to people speaking Turkish. His aims are thus in definite opposition to the Pan-Islamic party who are his strong obstacle [...] his activity seems beneficial to us, because it marches with our immediate aims, the break up of the Islamic block and the defeat and disruption of the ottoman Empire, and because the states he would set up to succeed the Turks would be as harmless to ourselves as Turkey was before she became a tool in German hands. The Arabs are even less stable than the Turks. If properly handed they would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities, incapable of cohesion and yet always ready to combineagainst an outside force. The alternative to this seems to be the control and colonization by a European power other than ourselves which would inevitably come into conflict with the interests we already possess in the Near East [...] If we can only arrange that his (Sherif Hussein) political change shall be a violent one, we will have abolished the threat of Islam, by dividing it against itself in its very heart. There will be a Khalifa in Turkey and a Khalifa in Arabia, in theological warfare, and Islam will be as little formidable as the Papacy when Popes lived in Avignon."
(T E Lawrence, January 1916)

"We are one people--our enemies have made us one without our consent"
(Theodor Herzl, 1896)

"Until the midfourth century the Jewish community constituted a decisive majority in Galilee. The population un the cities was mixed, while the villages were predominantly Jewish"
(Zeev Safrai, 1998)

"If I become Prime Minister Israel has a friend who will never turn his back on Israel."
(David Cameron, 12 June 2009)

"Aside from raising cash, some of the Israel lobbies in parliament pay for and arrange trips to Israel that have sent almost as many MPs and candidates in trips to Israel as trips made by all MPs to the United States and Europe combined over the last eight years."
(Peter Oborne, 16 November 2009)

"Our elders told us that some generations earlier the Jews in these parts [Ukraine] spoke only this Russian language, and this Ashkenazi Jewish language we speak now had not yet spread among all the Jews living in these regions."
(Isaac Baer Levinsohn, 1828)

"the first Jews who came to the southern regions from Russia did not originate in Germany, as many writers tend to believe, but from the Greek cities on the shores of the Black Sea and from Asia, via the mountains of the Caucasus"
(Abraham Harkavy, 1867)

"The activities of certain groups among the Jews who immigrated to Poland in ancient times and engaged in agriculture is evidenced by the Jewish villages that we find in Poland and Russia during the early Middle Ages. The names of these villages prove the origin of the people who lived in them. They are: Zidow, Zhidowo, Sidowo, or Kozara, Kozari, and Kozhazhow. There can be little doubt that the earliest of them were those villages whose names derive from that of the Khazars. It is possible that these Jewish Khazar settlements came into being during the 10th century, when a wave of Khazar immigrants arrived in Poland and Russia seeking refuge after the collapse of their state."
(Yitzhak Schipper, 1930s)

"[Koestler's book, The Thirteenth Tribe] is an antisemitic action financed by the Palestinians"
(Gideon Raphael, 1976)

"I have thought it as well to utter here a provisional warning against the lamentable error of proposing (just as people have encouraged a Zionist movement) to create a Sodomist movement and the rebuild Sodom. For, no sooner had they arrived there than the Sodomites would leave the town so as not to have the appearance of belonging to it, would take wives, keep mistresses in other cities where they would find, incidentally, every diversion that appealed to them. ... In other words, everything would go on very much as it does today in London, Berlin, Rome, Petrograd or Paris."
(Marcel Proust, 1921)

"Like the Sabine virgins, she [Mexico] will soon learn to love her ravisher."
(Editorial writer for the New York Herald, 1847)

"We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there."
(Jonathan Powell, 1997)

"… what is generally called "our ally", the state of Israel. And you probably have heard me say this before, and people are shocked that I would say it, that Israel is not our ally. Go to your dictionary and look up "ally"; ally is someone with whom you have a mutual defense treaty. There is none with Israel, and there is a reason why there is none with Israel. Do you know what the reason is? The Israelis were broached on this after the 1967 war; we said "maybe it would help if we formed an alliance, and then if the Arabs wanted to attack you they would know that they would be attacking us as well". The Israelis said: well, that is very nice of you, but thanks, but no thanks. Why do you suppose? The reason why is because international treaties require internationally recognized boundaries; the Israelis were not interested in giving up the West Bank… treaties also bind each party to let the other know if they are going to attack another country, and Israel didn’t want to be bound by that either. […] Next time you hear Ileana Ros-Lehtinen or Howard Berman or Steny Hoyer say that we have to automatically protect Israel, our ally, ask them how it is that Israel is our ally any more than Egypt or Syria or even Iran as our ally. None of them are because we have no defense treaty with them."
(Ray McGovern, 19 November 2009)

"The extermination of native Americans can be admitted, the morality of Hiroshima attacked, the national flag publicly committed to the flames. But the systematic continuity of Israel's 52-year-old oppression and maltreatment of the Palestinians is virtually unmentionable, a narrative that has no permission to appear."
(Edward Said, November-December 2000 )

"Drawing on a well-organized, well-connected, highly visible and wealthy Jewish population, AIPAC inspires an awed fear and respect across the political spectrum. Who is going to stand up to this Moloch on behalf of the Palestinians, when they can offer nothing, and AIPAC can destroy a congressional career at the drop of a chequebook?"
(Edward Said, November-December 2000 )

"My wife Maria Weizman in 1927, went out for a few months in Palestine and on the return journey from touting the conditions of life abroad, she has repeatedly expressed intention to leave for permanent residence in Palestine, and leaning towards me."
(Vasily Mikhailovich Savitsky, 7 April 1950)

"We are a nefarious people. What we are doing in the West Bank is worse than all the pogroms done to the Jews. ... [I am] not referring to the Nazis, but the Cossacks"."
(Shulamit Aloni, 29 November 2009)

"The famed 'blood pact' is perceived as a fiction. As soon as he finishes his army service, the 'Druze' soldier becomes an 'Arab'."
(Nohad Ali, 7 December 2009)

"A proposal was raised in the coordination committee to inform the Polish government that we want to institute selection in aliyah, because we cannot continue accepting sick and handicapped people. Please give your opinion as to whether this can be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration."
(Golda Meir, April 1958)

"If Gaza were happening to Jews I'm sure they'd say this is like the holocaust all over again. But since it's Arabs, that's taboo."
(Ali Abunimah, 13 December 2009)

"You'll be confiscating all these lands from Arab villages to build the track, but the people in those villages won't be able to use the train because no stops are even planned there."
(Unknown, 14 December 2009)

"For too long, and I do not exempt myself, most of us [American Jews] have stood silently by or made only a marginal protests about the massive violations of Palestinian rights carried out by Israel. ... as long as this silence continues so will the U.S. billions in aid and arms that facilitates the killings of Palestinians."
(Michael Ratner, 19 January 2009)

"You know that we follow very closely the discovery of any nuclear development in the region. This could create a very dangerous situation. For this reason we monitor your [Israeli] nuclear effort. What could you tell me about this?"
(John F. Kennedy, 2 April 1963)

"I can tell you [President Kennedy] most clearly that we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first."
(Shimon Peres, 2 April 1963)

"Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection. The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out. Everything inside was written in French, when I was there, almost twenty years ago. Back then, the Dimona descended seven floors underground. In 1955, Perez and Guirion met with the French to agree they would get a nuclear reactor if they fought against Egypt to control the Sinai and Suez Canal. That was the war of 1956. Eisenhower demanded that Israel leave the Sinai, but the reactor plant deal continued on. When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them. Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year."
(Mordechai Vanunu, 2005)

"[The Israeli attack on Gaza has] restored Israel's deterrence ... Hamas now understands that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild – and this is a good thing."
(Tzipi Livni, 12 Janaury 2009)

"It [the fact that the Israeli border police shot three bullets into my laptop] is kind of symbolic of Israeli aggression"
(Lily Sussman, December 2009)

"The Jewish Agency emissary in Aden, Shlomo Schmidt, asked permission to propose to the Yemenite authorities that they expel the remaining Jews from their country."
(Tom Segev, 1986)

"The successive Moroccan governments between 1956 and 1961 did not speak in one voice over a variety of issues, some of which were far more important to Morocco than Jewish emigration. Finally, whereas in Nasser's Egypt, Jews and other minorities were expelled or encouraged to leave in 1956-57 and subsequently they managed to leave despite certain emigration restrictions, Moroccan politicians frequently spoke of ethnic diversity, even though Moroccan Jewry were often portrayed in the local press as disloyal and were isolated from Moroccan society on various levels. They were prevented from choosing the emigration alternative because the Moroccan authorities expected them to participate in nation-building, to invest their efforts and capital in Morocco and not elsewhere, certainly not in Israel."
(Michael M. Laskier, July 1995)

"Finally, as Easterman has noted, whereas in Nasser’s Egypt, Jews and other minorities were expelled or encouraged to leave in 1956-57 and subsequently as part of the national homogeneity campaign, Moroccan politicians frequently spoke of national heterogeneity, even though Moroccan Jewry was often portrayed in the local press as being disloyal and was becoming isolated from Moroccan society on various levels. The Jews were prevented from choosing the emigration alternative until 1961, because, according to Easterman, Moroccan authorities expected them to participate in nation-building, to invest their capital in Morocco and not in Israel."
(Michael M. Laskier, July 1989)

"neither the westernized elite nor the masses of Moslems, who were almost entirely ignorant of the implications of Zionism, reacted with great feelings against their countries’ Jews. Had it not been for the conflict with the French…the Jews might well have remained in North Africa for centuries in comparative harmony."
(André Chouraqui, 1968)

"I am not keen on going to America, but am just doing it on behalf of the Zionists. I must serve as famed bigwig and decoy-bird ... I am doing whatever I can for my tribal brethren, who are being treated so vilely everywhere."
(Albert Einstein, 1921)

"The Zionist [clash] was inevitable. It was one resulting from differences in standards. The Easterners—like many Russian Jews in this country—don’t know what honesty is & we simply won’t entrust our money to them. Weizmann does know what honesty is—but weakly yields to his numerous Russian associates. Hence the split."
(Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 1921)

"The Halachah is crystal clear. It is entirely legitimate to kill a rodef – that is to say, one who endangers the life of another – and this is true, incidentally, even if the rodef has not yet actually taken another life. So the Judaism that I practise permits what is generally referred to as "pre-emptive" military action. In this particular case, the ruling power, Hamas, has advertised (in its charter) that its mission is to kill Jewish people. Therefore every member and supporter of Hamas may be considered a rodef. What precise kind of pre-emptive military action might one take? A great deal has been said about "proportionality". This may be a Christian idea, but thankfully it is certainly not a Jewish one."
(Geoffrey Alderman, 12 January 2009)

"Why has Jerry Lewis not signed my petition to Gordon Brown about the Goldstone Report, signed by 2,500 in little over a week? Why has the Board — which constitutionally is obliged to advance Israel’s standing — been silent on the report, unlike the ZF?"
(Jonathan Hoffman, October 2009)

"Given the traditions, the heritage, the commitment, and given the values Jewish workers have always brought to the labor movement, I don’t think it ought to come as any surprise that the Jewish community here – and around the world – has never had a stronger ally than the AFL-CIO. And tonight, let me tell you that, so long as I’m president, you will never have a stronger ally than the AFL-CIO. That’s why we’re proud to stand with the JLC to oppose boycotting Israel."
(Richard L Trumka, 27 October 2009)

"In his 1986 book, "The First Israelis", which has only now been published in German, Segev corrects some of the dogmatic assumptions dating from this time, including the one that claims that all Jews were equally welcome in the new Israeli state. He backs up his claim with references to documents that prove that Yemeni Jews were forced to live in tents while Polish Jews were given preferential treatment and housed in the homes of displaced Arabs or even in hotels."
(Ariana Mirza, 28 May 2008)

"Winston accepted it gravely and, as he placed it in his pocket, the crowd roared approval. Suddenly they began dancing like children, cheering madly, and as the train gather speed they continued to dance alongside, cheering and waving us farewell."
(Walter Henry Thompson, 1938)

"We must give this immigration [of Jews from Poland] special privileges and I am not afraid to say this"
(Eliyahu (Eliahu) Dobkin, 9 October 1949)

"We had orders to harvest organs without families consent"
(Aryeh Eldad, December 2009)

"It is difficult to see that Zionist policy is anything else than unashamed aggression carried out by methods of deceit and brutality not unworthy of Hitler."
(John Troutbeck, 18 May 1948)

"The Palestine position is this. If we deal with our commitments, there is first the general pledge to Hussein in October 1915, under which Palestine was included in the areas to which Great Britain pledged itself that they should be Arab and independent in the future."
(George Nathaniel Curzon, 27 November 1918)

"I feel ... called upon to make some statement on the subject, but I will confine myself in doing so to the point now at issue ... I feel it my duty to state, and I do so definitely and emphatically, that it was not intended by me in giving this pledge to King Hussein to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised."
(Henry McMahon, 23 July 1937)

"Our students understand than an Israeli wearing a skullcap is an orthodox Jew. However, the only orthodox Jews they've ever met are settlers, people whose desire to take our land and expel us is virulently explicit and occasionally embarrasses even the more secular military men."
(Gabriel Baramki, 8 December 2009)

"It is clearer than ever that the Egyptian dictatorship is fully complicit with Israel's crippling siege of Gaza."
(Mick Napier, 4 January 2010)

"It was Israel rather than Hamas that was primarily responsible for the continuing cycle of violence."
(Jerome Slater, 5 January 2010)

"The government is looking urgently at ways in which the UK system might be changed to avoid this situation [attempts to obtain warrants for arrest of Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak for complicity in war crimes] arising again. ... [The government] is determined that Israel's leaders should always be able to travel freely to the UK"
(Patricia Scotland, 5 January 2010)

"Oh, that's simple We use racial profiling, they don't."
(Eran Tuval, 2009)

"We are raised in this spirit, that we know that we are hated, and if a kid knows from the start that he is hated, about what happened to his ancestors in the Holocaust, it evokes anger toward the other side: pain, anger, even hate."
(Adi, an Israeli teenage girl, 2009)

"Everybody knows that Jews are hated. We were raied that way, with hatred and anti-Semitism. I can't remember a single moment, when there was no anti-Semitism."
(Notar, an Israeli teenage girl, 2009)

"This [school trip to the Holocaust sites in Poland] will strengthen the Israeli in me, the Zionist, the Jew in me. I have no doubt about it."
(Perlin, an Israeli teenage girl, 2009)

"Israel has passed racist legislation like the Citizenship Law, which prohibits Palestinians married to Israeli citizens from becoming naturalized citizens, and has brought the consequences of such legislation upon itself. It is no coincidence that the country now has a justice minister who calls for the legal system to be informed by Jewish juridical codes, as well as an interior minister driven by transparent racism and a foreign minister with a racist platform. As such, most Jewish first-graders in Israel receive a religious education explaining that the goyim are not human beings, that women are inferior and that the secular are deficient."
(Sefi Rachlevsky, 17 January 2010)

"Once you take Judaism from the Jew all you are left with is "chicken soup" and "anti-Semitism". Foxman had to choose whether to open a kosher delicatessen or chase anti-Semites. He clearly has chosen the latter."
(Gilad Atzmon, 16 January 2010)

"What has been agreed to, therefore, on behalf of Great Britain is: (1) to recognise the independence of those portions of the Arab-speaking areas in which we are free to act without detriment to the interests of France. Subject to these undefined reservations the said area is understood to be bounded north by about latitude 37 degrees, east by the Persian frontier, south by the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, west by the Red Sea and the Mediterranean up to about latitude 33 degrees, and beyond by an indefinite line drawn inland west of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo: all that lies between this last line and the Mediterranean being, in any case, reserved absolutely for future arrangement with the French and the Arabs."
(David George Hogarth, November 1916)

"The Secretary of State [Condoleeza Rice] said it [the Israeli attack on Lebanon 2006] was the birth pangs of a new Middle East. That's the statement of a freak. A human freak would compare the birth of a child with the destruction of a country, and yet, there are people here [Lebanon] who are so anxious to welcome her."
(Norman G. Finkelstein, 10 January 2010)

"The Holocaust has become part of Europe's new religion. Under its aegis, one has the right to hate foreigners and migrants. The greatest Islamophobes are also friends of Israel, and the Jewish communities for the most part do not dare to defend the victims of the “new” European racism – Muslims, Africans and Gypsies."
(Yitzhak Laor, 22 January 2010)

"You are seeing apartheid in action [in Palestine], you can’t believe what you are seeing ... You’re seeing an area that’s being ethnically cleansed… You’re seeing the architecture of apartheid… This is an open and notorious system of apartheid ... and no one, no one is doing anything about it ... I never had a sense of this until I saw it ... an open and notorious taking of land, a pass system, an apartheid system ..."
(Michael Ratner, 21 January 2010)

"The extreme right wing in Israel is using the Haiti operation to reframe the fallout from the Goldstone report in the eyes of the world. They know the Haitians are not part of the agenda and this is just for propaganda. But if it's good for Israel, they don't care. You can't save everyone, and anyone who has studied mass casualty situations knows that the first thing you have to do is not rush in but to send a small team to evaluate what is the best way to help in the long run. So the fact that Israel wants to race to be the first to be there means nothing in the big picture, because Israel is usually the first to arrive but also the first to leave. If, for example, Israel were to bring water purification systems and chemical toilets, it would be much more helpful. But their logic is that then it wouldn't get on the news. Like Everest climbers, Israel places her national flag at the peak to prove that the site has been conquered."
(Yoel Donchin, 19 January 2010)

"There's no business like Shoa business"
(Abba Eban, 30 January 2001)

"Israel is the criterion according to which all Jews will tend to be judged. Israel as a Jewish state is an example of the Jewish character, which finds free and concentrated expression within it. Anti-Semitism has deep and historical roots. Nevertheless, any flaw in Israeli conduct, which initially is cited as anti-Israelism, is likely to be transformed into empirical proof of the validity of anti-Semitism. It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism. Israelis must be aware that the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also Jews throughout the world."
(Yehoshafat Harkabi, 1986)

"Bu self-criticism is imperative in order to counterbalance the tendencies to self-righteousness and self-pity that stem from basic Jewish attitudes, from the historical experience of persecution, and from the ethos fostered by Menachem Begin. No factor endangers Israel’s future more than self-righteousness, which blinds us to reality, prevents a complex understanding of the situation and legitimizes extreme behaviour."
(Yehoshafat Harkabi, 1986)

"I have no doubt that Begin’s rule will lead to the destruction of the state. In any case, his rule will turn Israel into a monster."
(Teddy Preuss, 1984)

"Since 1967, the Israeli authorities have destroyed more than 24,000 Palestinian homes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. More than 11,400 of those have been destroyed since the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords.
During Israel's war against Gaza last winter, the IDF destroyed 4,247 homes completely – mainly by bulldozing them. Another 6,261 homes suffered what the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) described as "heavy damage, including collapsed section of house, numerous holes..."
Israel has allowed no reconstruction equipment or materials into Gaza. Families whose homes were destroyed have had to double or triple up in other accomodation that is already very overcrowded, or stay in tents."
(Council for the National Interest (CNI), 31 December 2009)

"My greatest desire, as long as I am a protagonist in politics, is to bring Israel into membership of the European Union"
(Silvio Berlusconi, 2 February 2010)

"I'm going to let you down because I didn't notice [the wall]."
(Silvio Berlusconi, 3 February 2010)

"My son entered the IDF five weeks ago."
(Ethan Bronner, 3 February 2010)

"Gaza is a gulag, the only gulag in the Western hemisphere; maintained by democracies; closed-off from food, water, air."
(Desmond Travers, 2 February 2010)

"It is quite evident that the Israelis do not wish to have United Nations observers circulating in the Strip and reporting upon the actions they are taking against the civilian populace. From the reports we receive from UNRWA personnel and from the very few incidents that have been witnessed by observers, I have come to the conclusion that the treatment of civilians is unwarrantedly rough and that a good number of persons have been shot down in cold blood for no apparent reason."
(R F Bayard, 13 November 1956)

"And in 20 years of my experience in running Israel's boxing league, I have never seen any ethnic, racial, or religious tension among our kids. Education for co-existence is at least as important, if not more important, than training fighters, as far as we're concerned"
(William Shahade, 2 June 2009)

"Richard Goldstone, who used to be a friend of mine, who has been to my home for dinner, who taught with me at Harvard, is a truly evil man. He lent his Jewish name and his Jewish identity to a report that he knew was absolutely false. He can't look himself in the mirror in the morning and say "I honestly believe that at the highest level of the Israeli government a policy decision was made to kill as many Palestinian civilians – babies, women – as possible, because that is what the report says. He signed on to that report, and for a man to sign on to a report like that, in order to promote his own career at the United Nations and the international community is truly evil. There is no word strong enough to describe how evil Richard Goldstone is, and the damage he has done to the Jewish people, to the State of Israel, deliberately, willfully and with his eyes open."
(Alan Dershowitz, 31 January 2010)

"I like to say that there are two occupations going on. There is the occupation that is going on in the West Bank and Gaza – that is the military occupation. There is also the occupation of the American mind; the occupation of Americans' imaginations and how Americans think about these kind of issues."
(Sut Jhally, 7 February 2010)

"The one word that sums up that visit is humiliation; at every point in the West Bank I saw people being humiliated. Struggling to lead a normal life, struggling to be cheerful about things, but being humiliated once, twice, three times a day by Israeli soldiers, by the restrictions on the lives, by the way they couldn't get their goods out easily, ... it is just humiliation."
(Jenny Tonge, 14 February 2009)

"The truth of the matter is tragic. The British political system is paralysed by the Israeli Lobby. Like in the USA, British national interests are sacrificed for the sake of dirty Zionist cash. If Britain wants to liberate itself from the Zionist grip and have any prospect of a future, it must move fast and clean the entire list of Zionist infiltrators from its political ranks, Government offices and strategic positions. I am not talking here about Jews. By no means do I mention ethnicity or race. I am talking here about a political and ideological affiliation. Considering Zionism is a murderous, racist, expansionist ideology, it is natural to stress that people who are affiliated with Israel and Zionism must be removed immediately from any political, government, military or strategic posts..."
(Gilad Atzmon, 19 February 2010)

" Israel is currently the only Western country whose cabinet includes the likes of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman and Interior Minister Eli Yishai. The last time politicians holding views similar to theirs were in power in post-World War II Western Europe was in Franco's Spain."
(Zeev Sternhell, 19 February 2010)

"But to the Israeli neocon, the very protection of universal rights is a mortal blow to a principle he holds sacred: the absolute moral superiority of the Jew over anyone else."
(Zeev Sternhell, 19 February 2010)

"There are two kinds of people coming out of Auschwitz, those who said never again for the Jews and those like me who say never again for any human beings."
(Avraham Burg, 1 November 2008)

"We are planning to go to Gaza with a fleet of 20 ships to be set up in an international organization probably in April 2010. Our aid ships will continue to head for Gaza until Israeli embargo is lifted. The cargo ships will carry Israeli-embargoed building materials, generators, medication, medical equipment and educational materials. The passenger ships to accompany the cargo ships will carry journalists, human rights advocates, activists and lawmakers from various countries"
(Bulent Yildirim, 29 January 2010)

"Ramallah was fortunate, amongst West Bank cities, in escaping any mention in the Bible. It was a parvenu village, historically and religiously insignificant. How I rejoice at this omission. We have our Jewish settlements on the outskirts but at least we have been spared the terror of fanatic fundamentalists squatting inside our town claiming that it belongs to their ancestors on biblical grounds as has happened in the old city of Hebron."
(Raja Shehadeh, 30 August 2007)

"If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries…. International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassinations thesis [that extra-judicial killings are permitted when it is necessary to stop a certain operation against the citizens of Israel and when the role played by the target is crucial to the operation] and we had to push it. Eight years later it is in the center of the bounds of legality."
(Daniel Reisner, February 2010)

"An inhabitant of the area explains the daily reality with Each time I want to return home, Border Police officers at the checkpoint near my house detain me. They ask me who I am, where I live, and search my belongings, even the food bags. Each time, I have to explain to them where I live, and that I own the house facing the checkpoint… It is easy for us to leave the house, but hard to return. […] The hardest thing for us is to be separated from family and friends, who are not allowed to visit us. […] I have never considered moving, regardless of the circumstances."
(Palestinian resident of Al Khalil (Hebron), 26 February 2010)

"What struck me most was the innocence of these people, over half of them children, and the indecency and criminality of their continued punishment."
(Sara Roy, 17 February 2010)

"Since Israel's onslaught on Lebanon in 2006, its devastation of Gaza in 2008-9 and Mossad's recent political murder in Dubai, the criminality of the Israeli state has been impossible to disguise."
(John Pilger, 26 February 2010)

"There is nothing like genocide in the territories, but they [the Israeli army] are doing absolutely atrocious things. If the government would let the soldiers do worse things, they would. Everyone says, 'Look how the Germans dealt with the Jews even before the Holocaust: cutting the beards, humiliating them in public, forcing them to clean the street.' That kind of stuff happens in the territories every day. Every goddamn day."
(Jonathan Littell, May 2008)

"I think the Israelis should take a better look at themselves. When they read a book like my book they shouldn't just look at the Jewish side of things. More pragmatically, what's important is to reach a certain level of understanding and apply it to what is happening now and maybe use that to correct things. Sitting around talking with historians about what happened 60 years ago is not very interesting if you don't apply it to what's happening today."
(Jonathan Littell, May 2008)

"I think the Israelis, instead of beating their breast, should take a long, hard look at what they are doing now. I am not saying that present-day Israeli society is comparable to Nazi society in World War II, but it is definitely one of the most crazed Western societies."
(Jonathan Littell, May 2008)

"On the one hand, Israel is a country that underwent a serious trauma, and the Holocaust made it dramatically paranoid. But then there is also greed and land-grabbing and all that shit. That's just inexcusable. I'm sorry, but this cannot be excused by traumas that occurred 60 years ago."
(Jonathan Littell, May 2008)

"I think the extermination of the Jews is a universal problem, I think it concerns everyone. Beyond that, I think that today the issue is being used for political purposes in Israel. [One event] shocked me horribly. I went to Birkenau and spent a couple of days there for the research [for my book]. One day I was up in the tower over the entrance. Just then a few buses of Israeli kids - around 16, I think, schoolkids - arrived. I watched the whole thing and it was amazing. First they entered under the arch at the camp entrance. Then they unfold these huge Israeli flags. They march down to the end, where the gas chambers were, and stay there for three minutes - the teacher probably explained something about the place. Then they march back, waving their flags, and fold them again under the arch. The boys start smoking cigarettes and slapping the girls' asses, and then they leave. That ceremony has nothing to do with what actually happened in Auschwitz. It is more like, you know, 'Listen up, young future Israeli soldiers, this is why you are going to fight.' It is political, a mechanism. It has no connection to what actually happened. The Holocaust, I think, is being exploited politically, in a way that the Nazi extermination policy against other groups - Russians, homosexuals, Gypsies - is not."
(Jonathan Littell, May 2008)

"In all European countries, the authorities understand the Jewish communities to be partly Israeli – regardless of their passports. So we shouldn't be ashamed or confused here. We should carry this obligation toward Israel on our shoulders with pride."
(Vyacheslav Moshe Kantor, 5 March 2010)

"It is altogether likely that Netanyahu has concluded that Barack Obama is – in the vernacular – a wuss. Why, for example, does the president keep sending an endless procession of the most senior U.S. officials to Tel Aviv to plead with their Israeli counterparts, Please, pretty please, don’t start a war with Iran?"
(Ray McGovern, 8 March 2010)

"Even while the United States, and particularly California, is facing a financial crisis, no candidate dares, in all the cuts being proposed in American programs, to reduce the enormous aid we give annually to Israel. Furthermore, this money is given at the beginning of each year, which means, since we are operating at a deficit, that our government pays interest on money we no longer have, while Israel makes interest on it. Such power, which is exerted within virtually every major institution in the US, and yet is invisible to a great many people, was not built overnight."
(Alison Weir, 8 March 2010)

"AIPAC and its allied organizations have effective working control of the electoral process. They can elect or defeat nearly any congressman or senator that they wish, with their money and coordinated organizations"
(William Fulbright, 1989)

"I cannot represent a country [Israel] that does not represent me."
(Scandar Copti, 9 March 2010)

"A military-like crackdown in the middle of the night to interrogate 12 to 14-year-old children on suspicions of throwing stones runs contrary to all reason, and cannot be justified. It's hard to imagine the security forces taking such measures against Jewish minors."
(Yael Stein, 9 March 2010)

"I'm not waking up every day thinking about how to destroy this state, but they are waking up every day thinking about how to kick me out of my place, of the place of my great, great, great, grandfather – before they came here to this land."
(Taiseer Khatib, 9 March 2010)

"I cannot represent a country that does not represent me"
(Scandar Copti, 7 March 2010)

"When the bombardment of the neighbourhoods [in Haifa] is concluded, troops will attack fiercely and aggressively and kill every Arab they meet. I am sending you flammable devices as well. You should burn every flammable object. I am sending you sappers with kits for breaking into houses"
(Mordechai Maklef, 22 April 1948)

"I can see that you are sitting here and advising me, while you have been invited to listen to the orders of the High Command and to assist it. I am not involved in politics and do not deal in them. I am simply obeying orders: I am just carrying out orders, and I have to make sure this order is executed by July 5. If this is not done, I will do it myself. I am a soldier."
(Rehavam Zvalodovski, 1 July 1948)

"[Haifa is] A dying city, a city of corpses. Warehouses, shops, small and big houses, - old and new, without a living person in them apart from stray cats: how did tens of thousands leave in such a panic their city, homes and fortunes? What made them flee? Was it only an order from above? It is impossible to think that such rich people, and there were very rich people here, the richest in the country so they say, left all their capital just because they were ordered to by someone. Was it indeed only fear?"
(David Ben-Gurion, 1948)

"This is really extraordinary. At the same time as the minister of state is about to protest to the Israeli embassy over the misuse of British passports for Israeli intelligence operations, we are apparently contemplating issuing a British passport to the man [David Kimche] who may have been in charge of the operation complained of!"
(S Weir, 1975)

"The cornerstone of the relationship is our absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to Israel's security."
(Joseph R. Biden, Jr., 9 March 2010)

"Stick to your personal stories; do not be drawn into political discussions. There will be people who irritate you and say that you are occupier - do not go there."
(Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, May 2008)

"Last year the IDF and Shin Bet security service made a number of night incursions into Na'alin and Bil'in to carry out mass arrests. Minors and mentally ill people were detained first..."
(Amira Hass, 16 March 2010)

"Liberal has a distinct connotation, it means to believe in the rule of law. It means to believe in international institutions. It means to believe in human rights. [...] What the Goldstone phenomenon registers and catalyzes is the fact that it is impossible to reconcile liberal convictions with Israel's conduct; too much is now known about the history of the conflict and the human rights record and the so-called peace process. It is impossible to be both liberal and defend Israeli policy. That was the conflict that confronted Goldstone. I very much doubt he wanted to condemn Israel."
(Norman G. Finkelstein, 15 March 2010)

"Many of the issues [...] – from civil liberties erosions and radical, lawless National Security State policies to the wars that justify them – have their roots in our involvement in the Middle East, and our self-destructive, blind support for Israeli actions is a major (though not the only or even primary) factor in all of that."
(Glenn Greenwald, 15 March 2010)

"Military and strategic imperatives demand a rupture, or at least a radical divergence, between the US and Israel: political reality forbids it. As the old song puts it: something's gotta give."
(Justin Raimondo, 17 March 2010)

"Throughout my career, Israel has not only remained close to my heart but it has been the center of my work as a United States Senator and now as Vice President of the United States."
(Joseph R. Biden, Jr., 10 March 2010)

"I fear there is great sensitivity in the world today about the whole question of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, and any legal arguments that we try to find will not remove the heavy international pressure, from friendly states as well."
(Theodor Meron, September 1967)

"The pretense that America's and Israel's interests in the Middle East coincide completely is being challenged at the highest level and may never recover."
(Scott McConnell, 30 March 2010)

"After 2-year delay, clothing to enter Gaza"
(Ma'an News Agency, 29 March 2010)

"Every stone built in the Apartheid Wall, every axe strike digging under the Al-Aqsa Mosque and every house destroyed by Israel will increase the intensity of resistance and resentfulness."
(Manuel Musalam, 31 March 2010)

"Last night we carried out between 15 and 20 actions [in the West bank]. That was a fairly typical night. It’s like throwing a blanket on a fire. If we stop for a minute, we will go backwards very quickly. We call it cutting the grass."
(Israeli army officer in West Bank, November 2009)

"It's not that you're out to carry out a massacre, but..."
(Israeli commander briefing soldiers on the eve of the Gaza invasion (Nov. 2009), March 2010)

"If you agree with them [Israel] only 95%, you're a dangerous anti-semite."
(Henry Kissinger, 1970s)

"Just as I have a right of return to Kfar Etzion, there's no reason that Palestinians from Nablus shouldn't have a right of return to Jaffa."
(Eliaz Cohen, 2009)

"There are even two laws – the Law of Return for Jews and the Citizenship Law for Arabs – that determine how you belong to the state. What kind of democracy divides its citizens into two kinds?"
(Uzi Ornan, 6 April 2010)

"Imagine the uproar in Jewish communities in the United States, Britain or France, if the authorities there tried to classify their citizens as 'Jewish' or 'Christian'..."
(Uzi Ornan, 6 April 2010)

"Flash your [Israeli] ID card and whatever government clerk is sitting across from you immediately knows which 'clan' you belong to, and can refer you to those best suited to 'handle your kind.'"
(Uzi Ornan, 6 April 2010)

"We are all Israeli nationals – but only abroad."
(Michael Barizon, 6 April 2010)

"I remarked to the president that, speaking objectively, I could not help but think that suggestions made by Mr. Clifford were wrong. I thought that to adopt these suggestions would have precisely the opposite effect from that intended by him. The transparent dodge to win a few votes would not, in fact, achieve this purpose. The great dignity of the office of the president would be seriously damaged. The counsel offered by Mr. Clifford's advice was based on domestic political considerations, while the problem confronting us was international. I stated bluntly that if the president were to follow Mr. Clifford's advice, and if I were to vote in the next election, I would vote against the president."
(George C. Marshall, 12 May 1948)

"The Shin Bet security service will thwart the activity of any group or individual seeking to harm the Jewish and democratic character of the State of Israel, even if such activity is sanctioned by the law"
(Yuval Diskin, March 2007)

"Every time I have gone to Israel in connection with the peace process... I have been met with an announcement of new settlement activities. It substantially weakens our hand in trying to bring about a peace process."
(James A. Baker III, 1991)

"I, as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, don't think that religious Jews should have to live in the same neighborhood as secular couples, so as to avoid unnecessary friction."
(Ariel Atias, 14 April 2010)

"The state institutions now have a golden opportunity not only to show that equality in the eyes of the law is more than an empty, flowery phrase, but also to declare that there is no way back from the political and legal situation that was created in 1949."
(Zeev Sternhell, 16 April 2010)

"Sixty-two years ago, the United Nations recognized the Jewish people's right to establish a Jewish state. The 1917 Balfour Declaration and 1947 UN partition resolution gave Zionism the diplomatic foundation on which the Jewish state was established and perpetuated. But over the past decade, that foundation has been worn away, and the idea of a Jewish state is now open to attack. The Jewish people's right to sovereignty and self-defense is now controversial. Paradoxically, as Israel gets stronger, its legitimacy is melting away. A national movement that began as "legitimacy without an entity" is becoming "an entity without legitimacy" before our very eyes."
(Ari Shavit, 15 October 2009)

"our claim to this land could be put in a nutshell: God does not exist, and he gave us this land"
(Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, some date before April 2010)

"The State of Israel, and all the states of the world, appear and disappear. The State of Israel, clearly, will disappear in one hundred, three-hundred, five-hundred years. But I suppose that the Jewish people will exist as long as the Jewish religion exists, perhaps for thousands more years. The existence of this state is of no importance for that of the Jewish people…. Jews throughout the world can live quite well without it."
(Boas (Boaz) Evron, some date before April 2010)

"it would seem to require an Israeli willingness to abandon the core Zionist project to establish a Jewish state, and that does not appear likely from the vantage point of the present. But always the goals of a legitimacy war appear to be beyond reach until mysteriously attained by the abrupt and totally unexpected surrender by the losing side. Until it collapses the losing side pretends to be unmovable and invincible, a claim that is usually reinforced by police and military dominance. This is what happened in the Soviet Union and South Africa, earlier to French colonial rule in Indochina and Algeria, and to the United States in Vietnam."
(Richard Falk, some date before 16 April 2010)

"[The threats to protest at the bar bitzvah of Richard Goldstone's grandson] reveal a level of bigotry and intolerance meant to shut down any diversity of opinion."
(Arthur Chaskalson, April 2010)

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