"I want to show that I am in Tripoli and not in Venezuela. Do not believe the channels belonging to stray dogs. I wanted to say something to the youths at Green Square [in Tripoli] and stay up late with them. But it started raining. Thank God, it's a good thing."
(Muammar Gaddafi, 22 February 2011)

"Recently, we here were presented with a rather problematic choice: Do we support democracy, or do we support the Israeli interest in maintaining security and stability?"
(Shlomo Avineri, 14 February 2011)

". . . the foundation of a National Home for the Jews in Palestine ... largely depends for its success on the future utilization of the waters of the Litani and the Yarmuk."
(George Nathaniel Curzon, 16 October 1920)

"At the beginning of 1917 the Zionist leadership was still under the naive illusion that France was not interested in the country which lay to the south of Beirut and Damascus and that the whole area up to these cities could be claimed for the Jewish homeland."
(H F Frishchwasser, 1955)

"There exists apparently some vague arrangement between the British and French governments concerning Palestine. I do not think that these arrangements have a binding character but at present they stand in the way and give rise to complications. We are trying our utmost here to clear up the matter but we would certainly need all the help from from America in order to strengthen our hands."
(Chaim Weizmann, 27 April 1917)

"The Hermon is Palestine's real 'Father of Walers' and cannot be severed from it without striking at the very root of its economic life. The Hermon not only needs reafforestation but also other works before it can again adequately serve as the water reservoir of the country It must therefore be wholly under the control of those who will most willingly as well as most adequately restore it to its maximum utility. Some international arrangement must be made whereby the riparian rights of the people dwelling south of the Litani River may be fully protected. Properly cared for these head walers can be made to serve in the development of the Lebanon as well as of Palestine."
(World Zionist Organization (WZO), 3 February 1919)

"Mr. Lieberman, this is a citizen's arrest. You are charged with the crime of apartheid. Please come with me to the nearest police station."
(David Cronin, 22 February 2011)

"In declaring our conclusions today, we do not merely pronounce judgement on past events. We do more than report the criminal policies and actions of a Government. Our function is not that of a historian. We have not studied and deliberated solely in order to preserve the truth about Vietnam for posterity. We must discharge a deeper and harder duty; we speak because silence is complicity, a lie, a crime. We expose in order to arouse conscience. We condemn evil in order to extirpate its causes. Our truth challenges mankind. What words can describe the evil we've discovered? The moral, legal, and political categories by which we are accustomed to judge human conduct are inadequate for these crimes."
(Bertrand Russell, 7 December 1967)

"Further to our meeting, this is to inform you that within a few days we will start demolishing about 90 abandoned villages on the Golan Heights (see attached list). I would like you to conduct archaeological surveys and supervise the demolitions to ensure that no archaeological remains in the villages are lost."
(Hanan Davidson, 15 May 1968)

"We surveyed this village at the end of July 1968 [an unnamed village in the vicinity of Qunetra]. Since the village and the surrounding area contained no apparent archaeological remains, we released it for total demolition. About a week later, we supervised the demolition of the village. The village was demolished and completely leveled. No archaeological findings emerged during the demolition."
(Dan Urman, 1 January 1969)

"I know that God promised Palestine to the children of Israel, but I do not know what boundaries He set."
(Chaim Weizmann, May 1936)

"What this means for contemporary Jewish discourse is critical: Even though many contemporary Jews are not observant, pilpul continues to be deployed. Pilpul occurs any time the speaker is committed to "prove" his point regardless of the evidence in front of him. The casuistic aspect of this hair-splitting leads to a labyrinthine form of argument where the speaker blows enough rhetorical smoke to make his interlocutor submit. Reason is not an issue when pilpul takes over: what counts is the establishment of a fixed, immutable point that can never truly be disputed."
(David Shasha, 22 March 2010)

"The contentiousness of the Middle East conflict is intimately informed by pilpul. Whether it is Alan Dershowitz or Noam Chomsky, both of them Ashkenazim who had traditional Jewish educations, the terms of the debate are consistently framed by pilpul. What is most unfortunate about pilpul -- and this is something that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the controversies involving Israel and Palestine -- is that, since the rational has been removed from the process, all that is left is yelling, irrational emotionalism, and, ultimately, the threat of violence. It is this agitation that continues to mar a political process that has long abandoned the rational understanding of the issues involved in its construction."
(David Shasha, 22 March 2010)

"There can be no doubt that the Jews of Germany had far surpassed the Jews of Spain in religious devotion and readiness for martyrdom. Judging by the principles that inspired them, their self-immolation in defense of their faith set an example of moral grandeur that had never been excelled in the annals of mankind."
(Ben-Zion Netanyahu, 2001)

"Discussed with Bodenheimer the demands we will make [of the Sultan in Constantinople]. Area: from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates. Stipulate a transitional period with our own institutions. A Jewish governor for this period. Afterwards, a relationship like that between Egypt and the Sultan. As soon as the Jewish inhabitants of a district amount to 2/3 of the population, Jewish administration goes in force politically, while local government (communal autonomy) always depends on the number of voters in the community. These are Bodenheimer's ideas, in part excellent. A transitional stage is a good idea."
(Theodor Herzl, October 1898)

"A half-million dollar investment is getting exposure worth five or six million dollars - and I'm not even counting the [crazy] Christian networks."
(official of Israeli Ministry of Tourism, 24 February 2011)

"How dare you. You are the one who disappointed us. You haven't made a single step to advance peace."
(Angela Merkel, 21 February 2011)

"I notice that the Arab population are spoken of, or included in, "the non-Jewish communities" which sounds as if there were a few Arab villages in a country full of Jews."
(John Tilley, 19 March 1920)

"Bisogna anzitutto creare un distacco territoriale largo e ben preciso tra formazioni ribelli e popolazione sottomessa. Non mi nascondo la portata e la gravità di questo provvedimento che vorrà dire la rovina della popolazione cosiddetta sottomessa. Ma ormai la via ci è stata tracciata e noi dobbiamo perseguirla fino alla fine, anche se dovesse perire tutta la popolazione della Cirenaica."
(Pietro Badoglio, 20 June 1930)

"We must first create a broad and well-defined spatial separation between rebel groups and subject populations. I do not deny that the extent and severity of this measure will mean the ruin of the so-called submissive population. But now this is the approach into which we have been drawn and which we must pursue until the end, even if it destroys the entire population of Cyrenaica."
(Pietro Badoglio, 20 June 1930)

"The War Cabinet equally decides that we must do our best to avoid any association of French troops with ours, since the General Staff considers that a mixed force should be rejected for many reasons, political and military."
(British Government, 15 December 1916)

"The German government is going to launch the Zionist question, with th view of creating a Jewish Republic in Palestine. It could thereby assure itself the support of Jewish opinion and Jewish finance the world over."
(Jules Cambon, 11 March 1917)

"If the Jewish finance of New York will incline itself to the side of the Germans, all that can heavily weigh on Mr. Wilson's decisions."
(Jules Cambon, 11 March 1917)

"I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened."
(Thomas L. Friedman, 3 April 2003)

"There is no better example of the eradication of all traces of an entire civilization from the landscape - leaving behind only Crusader remains, which do not interfere with the conveniently chosen historical narrative - than the restoration of Kokhav Hayarden (Kawkab al-Hawa, the Crusader Belvoir) and Caesarea. At those two sites the Arab structures were removed and the Crusader buildings were restored and made into tourist attractions. In the Israeli context, it is preferable to immortalize those who exterminated the Jewish communities of Europe (in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries) and murdered the Jews of Jerusalem in 1099 than to preserve relics of the local Arab civilization with which today´s Israelis supposedly coexist. Crusader structures, both authentic and fabricated, lend a European, romantic character to the country´s landscape, whereas Arab buildings spoil the myth of an occupied land under foreign rule, awaiting liberation at the hands of the Jews returning to their homeland. And if it is impossible to erase the physical remains, it is at least possible to ascribe them to someone else - "Crusaders, Mamluks, or Ottomans.""
(Meron Benvenisti, January 2002)

"History passed over the plans, ambitions, compromises and rationalizations expressed by German Judaism before November 1918. After Germany lost the war, it was made painfully manifest to the German Jews, regardless of their Zionism or opposition thereto, that they had lost their high status within world Judaism. Thus, the German Zionists registered 'with amazement' that also they were regarded by Anglo-American Zionists as amongthe vanquished."
(Klaus J. Herrmann, Summer 1965)

"Der Erfolg, den die Erreichung der Balfour-Deklaration bedeutete, hatte Weizmann zum gleichsam selbstverständlichen Führer der zionistischen Bewegung gemacht. Als wir deutschen Zionisten aus der durch den Krieg bedingten Isolierung heraustreten konnten, sahen wir uns überhaupt einer in jeder Hinsicht neuorientierten jüdischen Welt gegenüber. Unsere Stellung in der zionistischen Bewegung und auch innerhalb des Weltjudentums war völlig verändert. Mit Erstaunen mußten wir erkennen, daß auch die Zionisten der Entente-Länder uns als Mitbesiegte ansahen."
(Kurt Blumenfeld, some date before 1956)

"The successful achievement of the Balfour Declaration had made Weizmann a quasi-obvious leader of the Zionist movement. When we German Zionists were able to emerge from our wartime isolation, we looked at all the changes in the Jewish world which had reoriented in every way. Our position in the Zionist movement and also within the Jewish world had radically changed. With amazement, we had to recognize that the Zionists of the Entente countries also saw us as vanquished."
(Kurt Blumenfeld, some date before 1956)

"I would therefore suggest that the northern boundary of Palestine be drawn from the mouth of the Litani River due east to the marshes which lie immediately to the north of Lake Huleh."
(William Ormsby-Gore, August 1918)

"I think it will be best to establish a French - purely French - military administration in the province of the Lebanon and in that part of the vilayet of Beyrouth that lies north of the Khamsiyeh (Litany river)."
(William Ormsby-Gore, 23 Septemebr 1918)

"So far as our relations to the very influential Jewish press are concerned, they are in good shape, and will be carefully nourished. It is important in this connection that all news [from Germany] pertaining to them shall elevate the Jewish self-respect - for instance, the appointment of Jewish officers, the installation and honors conferred upon Jewish professors, should all be sent here [New York]."
(German Information Bureau, 5 November 1914)

"In the Arab world, there is no room for democracy. This is the truth. We prefer stability."
(Amos Gilad, February 2011)

"A soldier who won't attack when they tell him 'forward' because he says, 'Two soldiers to my right and two to my left have been killed, so I won't move' - any normal military system should put a bullet in his head, and a liberal system should put him in jail. ... The education we give soldiers isn't an education of risking or being willing to sacrifice one's life ... of knowing that some of the soldiers won't return, but still, everyone goes. And anyone who doesn't go should get a bullet in the head or be in jail. ... There was a discussion in the General Staff on the subject of human dignity after [former Supreme Court President Aharon] Barak breathed life into the interpreters of this phrase. There was a huge argument. I said we mustn't cave in to the trend led by Barak, because the reason the army must give people respect is totally different: It's that dishrags don't attack ... In the army, someone who's a dishrag won't attack, and someone who has no dignity won't attack. Anyone who has no dignity is a dishrag. ... [The army is] an organization designed to kill. It's a whole organization that tells people, 'You will kill and be killed.'"
(Yaakov Amidror, 2009)

"We plunged into the organization of the New York Kehillah, led by Dr. Magnes, but no sooner was it set up when it began to slide back into the old groove, and made an alliance with the American Jewish Committee. That Committee, of which Judge Mayer Sulzberger was the first President, was the object of our hearty attacks. We just could not abide its undemocratic constitution. It was a self-appointed body. It was contemptuous of public opinion, and invariably took the unpopular side. We, organizers of a free Jewish opinion, upon which Zionist success depended, felt that we had to fight the American Jewish Committee or be faithless as Zionists and Americans."
(Louis Lipsky, 1927)

"Herzl passed away soon after the Uganda incident, and David Wolffsohn took the reins of Government [of the Zionist Organization] into his hands, transferring its seat from Vienna, the gay, to Cologne, the stolid."
(Louis Lipsky, 1927)

"The old Zionist Executive, - Warburg, Tschlenow, Sokolow, Levin and Hantke - could no longer be regarded as an Executive. Professor Warburg and Dr. Hantke, being German citizens, were unable to tkae theor old places. Tschlenow had passed away in London. Only Mr. Sokolow and Dr. Levin remained. But there had arisen a de facto Executive, which had negotiated the Balfour Declaration, which had obtained the San Remo decision from the Allied Governments, which was recognized by the British Government as the authorized spokesman of the Zionist Organization. The de facto Executive was headed by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who had power and wielded authority. Around him, at the first moment, the pioneers of Zionism rallied, and all were intent on welding together once more the scattered fragments of the Zionist Organization and resuming the old Zionist traditions - the statutes, the methods of election, the same parliamentary methods. The past had not been effaced."
(Louis Lipsky, 1927)

"The issue of qualitative military edge for Israel becomes more essential for us, and I believe also more essential for you [the United States]. It might be wise to invest another $20 billion to upgrade the security of Israel for the next generation or so. ... A strong, responsible Israel can become a stabilizer in such a turbulent region."
(Ehud Barak, 9 March 2011)

"A binational state would be disastrous for Israel"
(Benjamin Netanyahu, a few days before 4 March 2011)

"This trend will intensify and become stronger. However there are those in Israel who think that one state is a good idea. I think it is a disaster."
(Benjamin Netanyahu, a few days before 4 March 2011)

"Unsere Phantasie war durch das außerordentliche Erlebnis beflügelt und kannte keine Hemmungen. So verlangte ich denn nach dem Wort Gottes in der Bibel das Land vom Bach Ägyptens bis zum Euphrat als jüdisches Kolonisationsgebiet. Für den Übergang war eine Einteilung des Landes in Bezirke gedacht, die in jüdische Verwaltung übergehen sollten, sobald eine erhebliche Mehrheit der jüdischen Bevölkerung erreicht sei."
(Max Isidor Bodenheimer, some date before 1941)

"Our fancy had been given wings by our extraordinary experience, and knew no bounds. Thus I called, according to the word of God as set forth in the Bible, for the opening of all lands from the Nile to the Euphrates as territory for Jewish colonization. For the interim period a division of the land into districts was envisaged, which was to come under Jewish administration as soon as a considerable population had been reached."
(Max Isidor Bodenheimer, some date before 1941)

"Of course the best that can happen to any people that has not already a high civilization of its own is to assimilate and profit by American or European ideas, the ideas of civilization and Christianity, without submitting to alien control; but such control, in spite of all its defects, is in a very large number of cases the prerequisite condition to the moral and material advance of the peoples who dwell in the darker corners of the earth."
(Theodore Roosevelt, 18 January 1909)

"If some of the veteran diplomats could have heard us, they would have fallen in a faint."
(William Tyrrell, 13 November 1913)

"Den Herren Justizrat Dr. Bodenheimer und Privatdozent Dr. Oppenheimer, Bevollmächtigten des Komitees zur Befreiung der russischen Juden, bescheinige ich gern, daß ich den Bestrebungen ihres Komitees ein wohlwollendes Interesse entgegenbringe und bereit bin, seine Ziele zu fördern.
Radom, den 15. Oktober 1914    S.H.O.
       Der Oberbefehlshaber des Ostheeres
       von Hindenburg"
(Paul von Hindenburg, 15 October 1914)

"To Justizrat Dr. Bodenheimer and Privatdocent Dr. Oppenheimer, authorized representatives of the Committee for the Liberation of Russian Jewry, I certify gladly that I view with benevolent interest the aims of their committee and am prepared to further its aims.
SHO, Radom, October 15, 1914    Commander in Chief
of the East Army
von Hindenburg"
(Paul von Hindenburg, 15 October 1914)

"[The problem in Congress is the] Hibernian patriots [who] always desired a fling at England."
(Woodrow Wilson, November 1913)

"[O'Gorman] constantly regards himself as an Irishman contending against England rather than as a United States Senator upholding the dignity and welfare of this country."
(Woodrow Wilson, November 1913)

"[At the start of WWI, the Zionist leader in Palestine reached] an understanding with the Turkish government to set up a Jewish Legion in order to protect the country. Two representatives of these circles - Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion proposed in November 1914 to the Turkish Commander-in-Chief the setting up of a Jewish volunteer legion with the stipulation that this legion would remain in the country for the duration of the war, and would only defend its population in case of attack. The proposal was accepted by the military council."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1934)

"Salonika is neither Greek, nor Bulgarian, nor Turkish; it is Jewish."
(David Florentin, 3 January 1913)

"Or, Salonique n'est ni grec, ni bulgare, ni turc; il est juif."
(David Florentin, 3 January 1913)

"Our brothers from Salonika are emigrating in great numbers. . . . Every ship brings a new quantity to New York."
(Moise Gadol, 1 October 1915)

"It is desirable that every commanding officer (from Squadron Commander to Chief of Staff) should change his surname, whether German, English, Slavic, French or foreign in general, to a Hebrew surname, in order to be a role model for his soldiers. The Israel Defense Forces must be Hebrew in spirit, vision, and in all internal and external expressions."
(David Ben-Gurion, July 1948)

"If you check historically, you won't find any other nation what wanted this land [the West Bank]"
(Yehuda Ben Ali, March 2011)

"The Israel Lands Administration manages the [Greek Orthodox] Patriarchate's properties, in the name of the Jewish National Fund."
(Ranit Nahum-Halevy, 18 March 2011)

"We can’t let the Jewish lobby create this blind, blanket support of something that’s inhumane. We’re not free, as long as that continues. My mother was the head of Hadassah, and I believe in the Jewish homeland as a democratic place, but for everyone who lives there. You shouldn’t have to be Jewish to be free in Israel."
(Julian Schnabel, 16 March 2011)

"It was an epiphany. I was totally naïve, totally in the dark and I believe so many of the American Jewish population are totally in the dark. We cannot believe that a Jewish person would behave like that. It’s not the Jewish way. We have suffered so much that if anybody should understand the Palestinian problem, it should be Jewish people. It was so disappointing and ashamed at certain moments. I was at the airport one day, leaving with Rula. I respect the security, when they check your bags. But they took her bags and put them through an X-ray machine not once but three times. We went to a second checkpoint and they made her strip and, the last minute, let her come on the airplane Jon Kilik and I were taking. And it felt just like apartheid, there was absolutely no reason for it. It was pure racism and prejudice. It was cruel and I was ashamed of everybody in that airport."
(Julian Schnabel, 16 March 2011)

"You are the real Jews. We have been waiting for you for twenty-five years. You speak Yiddish! . . . Every loyal Jew must speak Yiddish, for he who does not know Yiddish is not a Jew. You are a superior breed - you will provide us with heroes."
(Golda Meir, March 1971)

"In a phone interview Dershowitz denied writing to the Governor, declaring, "My letter to the Governor doesn't exist." But when pressed on the issue, he said, "It was not a letter. It was a polite note.""
(Jon Wiener, 11 July 2005)

"This is a dispute between those who care what non-Jews will say and those who believe in being a light unto nations, between the mentality of exile and that of redemption. J Street is not a Zionist organization. It offers love with strings attached. They say, ‘We love you only if you behave the way we like.’"
(Otniel Schneller, 23 March 2011)

"The complete evacuation of the country from its other inhabitants and handing it over to the Jewish people is the answer."
(Joseph (Yosef/Yossef) Weitz, 20 March 1941)

"äàí ìîãðå ìäéåú ëä àëæøééí îäðàöéí?"
(Yosef Nachmani (Nahmani), 1948)

"The legislation that passed in the Knesset that dark night last week, which makes ethnic inequality a legal norm, has no parallel in democratic countries because it contradicts the very essence of democracy. In terms of the principle on which it is based, institutionalized discrimination against the non-Jewish population takes us back to the early days, when Israel’s Arab citizens were under a military government."
(Zeev Sternhell, 1 April 2011)

"Growing up we were taught to believe that the Arabs had left Eretz Israel partly on their own and partially at the directive of their so called leaders, and that therefore taking their land and homes was morally OK. It never occurred to us that even if they did leave willingly, we had no right to prohibit their return. But then Israeli historians had found that what Palestinians have been saying for decades was true."
(Miko Peled, 30 March 2011)

"What the Palestinians did not have, the one thing in which they did not invest was a military. And while they constituted the vast majority of the population, when the Jewish militias attacked, they were helpless."
(Miko Peled, 30 March 2011)

"In a stormy meeting of the IDF top brass and the Israeli cabinet that took place on the 2nd of June, 1967, my father General Matti Peled told the cabinet in no uncertain terms that the Egyptians needed at least a year and a half in order to be ready for a full scale war. His point was that the time to strike a devastating blow against the Egyptian army was now, not because of an existential threat but because the Egyptian army is NOT prepared for war. The other generals agreed. But the cabinet was hesitant. The cabinet members and Prime Minister and a tug-of-war of unimaginable proportions ensued. During that same stormy meeting my father said to the Prime Minister: “Nasser (Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser) is advancing an ill prepared army because he is counting on the cabinet being hesitant. He is convinced that we will not strike. Your hesitation is working in his advantage.” No mention of an existential threat but of an opportunity to assert Israeli strength. Years later this was confirmed by other Generals, including the butcher Ariel Sharon."
(Miko Peled, 30 March 2011)

"Goldstone has done neither international law and accountability for war crimes—nor himself—any favors with this latest, depressing op-ed."
(Yaniv Reich, 2 April 2011)

"This endorsement [by Richard Goldstone in an April 2011 Washington Post op-ed] of the Israeli investigation is directly contradicted by the expert's report he appears to be referencing."
(Adam Horowitz, 2 April 2011)

"He [Munther Fahmi] was born in Jerusalem, he has lived most of his life in Jerusalem and his family lives in Jerusalem. What is being done to him is an outrage. It's part of an attempt to embitter the lives of Palestinians so that they leave."
(David Grossman, April 2011)

"The tsunami of racist laws passed by the Knesset in recent months is also being explained by reasoned and worthy arguments: the right of small communities to preserve their own character (the Acceptance Committees Law ); the state's right to prevent hostile use of the funds it allocates to education and culture (the Nakba Law ); and the right to deny citizenship to persons convicted of espionage or treason (the Citizenship Law ). But I believe that as in other historical instances, the aim of this legislation is the gradual establishment of an apartheid state in Israel, and the future separation on a racial basis of Jews and non-Jews."
(Daniel Blatman, 4 April 2011)

"The historical background of the Israeli apartheid state-in-the-making that is emerging before our eyes should be sought in 1967. It is part of a process that has been going on for about 44 years: What started as rule over another people has gradually ripened - especially since the latter part of the 1970s - into a colonialism that is nurturing a regime of oppression and discrimination with regard to the Palestinian population. It is robbing that population of its land and of its basic civil rights, and is encouraging a minority group (the settlers ) to develop a crude, violent attitude toward the Arabs in the territories. This was exactly the reality that, after many years, led to the establishment of the apartheid state in South Africa."
(Daniel Blatman, 4 April 2011)

"Israeli racism, whose natural "hothouse" is the colonialist project in the territories, has long since spilled over into Israeli society and has been legitimized in the series of laws recently passed in the Knesset. Only people who avoid looking at the broad historical context of such a process are still able to believe it is possible to stop the emergence of an Israeli apartheid state without getting rid of the colonialist-racist grip on the territories."
(Daniel Blatman, 4 April 2011)

"There is nothing Zionism likes better than putting up fences. It has erected a wall of hostility between itself and the Arab peoples. The gates in that wall [in the old railway tunnel at Ras al Naqoura] are only opened for a new aggression, a new encroachment on the rights of others."
(Saliba Khamis, 1981)

"I probably didn't expect to see the comments he [Richard Goldstone] made, to be honest. ... But the tenor of the report in its entirety, in my opinion, stands"
(Desmond Travers, 4 April 2011)

"Absolutely not; no process or acceptable procedure would invalidate the UN Report; if it does happen, it would be seen as a 'suspect move'."
(Hina Jilani, 4 April 2011)

"We are heading to elections based on the following parameters: the Jordan will serve as a security border, Jerusalem will not be divided and the settlements will not be removed. That will be our position in the negotiations. There is no need to remove settlements."
(Shimon Peres, April 1996)

"So it cannot be new evidence that caused Goldstone to write this article. Rather, it is his wish to return to the Zionist comfort zone that propelled this bizarre and faulty article."
(Ilan Pappe, 4 April 2011)

"Goldstone has not entered as yet the lunatic fringe of ultra-Zionism as Morris did. But if he is not careful the future promises to be a pleasant journey with the likes of Morris, Alan Dershowitz (who already said that Goldstone is a 'repentant Jew') between annual meetings of the AIPAC rottweilers and the wacky conventions of the Christian Zionists. He would soon find out that once you cower in the face of Zionism -- you are expected to go all the way or be at the very same spot you thought you had successfully left behind you."
(Ilan Pappe, 4 April 2011)

"This [article by Richard Goldstone] is a good start. Jews must always accept those who repent back into the fold and this is the case here."
(Alan Dershowitz, 3 April 2011)

"Sociologically, one of the most interesting aspects of the conquests and expulsions was that even though the policy was not explicitly articulated, either orally or in writing, everyone knew about it. In most cases, whether before or during an operation, neither the political leadership nor the General Staff issued guidelines regarding the fate of the Arab residents, but the expulsions took place. The young commanders in the IDF and the Palmach had no need for concrete orders; they were motivated by an ideology which had coalesced during the decade of the 1940s. Overruning villages and killing or expelling the inhabitants seemed to them a logical or necessary "military action" which overrode all moral inhibitions. A case in point is the behavior of Amos Mokadi, commander of Golani Brigade's Twelfth Battalion. During the capture of the Galilee village of Nasr a-Din, the Arab fighters emerged from their positions surrounded by their children and wives. Although no order was given, the Israelis held their fire. Long afterward, Mokadi recalled that he had been fearful and hesitant: if he let the village men go, the order to destroy the enemy would not be fulfilled, but on the other hand women and children were in the way. "And then I gave an order, and it was quite difficult, that everyone who comes out of the position is a fighter, and therefore — fire!" For an instant, Mokadi was confronted with a moral dilemma, but he did not let morality get in his way. And he concluded: "We burned the houses in the village. That lowered the morale of the Arab fighters in Tiberias and raised our morale.""
(Uri Ben-Eliezer, June 1998)

"Well the nearest village to the scene of the mine was a place called al-Bassa and our Company C were ordered to take part in punitive measures. And I will never forget arriving at al-Bassa and seeing the Rolls Royce armoured cars of the 11th Hussars peppering Bassa with machine gun fire and this went on for about 20 minutes and then we went in and I remembered we had lighted braziers and we set the houses on fire and we burnt the village to the ground. Now Monty was our divisional commander at the time, with his headquarters at Haifa, and he happened to be out on his balcony of his headquarters, and he saw a lot of smoke rising in the hills and he called one of his staff officers and he said 'I wonder what this smoke is in the hills there' and one of them said 'I think that must be the Royal Ulster Rifles taking punitive measures against Bassa.' Well we all thought that this was going to be the end of our commanding officer Gerald Whitfeld, because you know certainly if it happened these days it would‟ve been. Well anyway Monty had him up and he asked him all about it and Gerald Whitfeld explained to him. He said 'Sir, I have warned the mukhtars in these villages that if this happened to any of my officers or men, I would take punitive measures against them and I did this and I would've lost control of the frontier if I hadn't.' Monty said 'All right but just go a wee bit easier in the future.'"
(Desmond Woods, some date before 2003)

"You remember reading of an Arab bus blown up on the frontier road just after Paddy was killed. Well the Ulsters did it – a 42 seater full of Arabs and an RE [Royal Engineers] Sgt [Sergeant] blew the mine. Since that day not a single mine has been laid on that road."
(Raymond Oswald Cafferata, 22 October 1938)

"We may yet teach Hitler something new about the conduct of concentration camps."
(Elliot David Forster, 13 May 1939)

"On the whole I cannot help wondering at the way the Arabs trust us and believe us and believe that in the end we will try and do what is right. Some of the villages which have recently been hardly [sic] hit seem to go as far as possible in making allowances. Sometimes they appear to accept the severest treatment as the inevitable result of acts of violence by the gangs, even though they themselves are not responsible. And they do not hold the government responsible for actions taken by the military authorities, though we know that the government can‟t disclaim responsibility. The people at Kafr Yasif were very eager to point out that the troops who destroyed their houses were not English but Irish."
(an Anglican chaplain in Haifa, 28 February 1939)

"As appears from the Washington Post article, information subsequent to publication of the report did meet with the view that one correction should be made with regard to intentionality on the part of Israel. Further information as a result of domestic investigations could lead to further reconsideration, but as presently advised I have no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time."
(Richard Goldstone, 5 April 2011)

"While I firmly advocate nonviolent forms of struggle such as boycott, divestment, and sanctions to attain Palestinian goals, I just as decisively, though on a separate track, support a unitary state based on freedom, justice, and comprehensive equality as the solution to the Palestinian-Israeli colonial conflict. To my mind, in a struggle for equal humanity and emancipation from oppression, a correlation between means and ends, and the decisive effect of the former on the outcome and durability of the latter, is indisputable. If Israel is an exclusivist, ethnocentric, settler-colonial state, then its ethical, just, and sustainable alternative must be a secular, democratic state, ending injustice and offering unequivocal equality in citizenship and individual and communal rights both to Palestinians (refugees included) and to Israeli Jews. Only such a state can ethically reconcile the ostensibly irreconcilable: the inalienable, UN-sanctioned rights of the indigenous people of Palestine to self-determination, repatriation, and equality in accordance with international law and the acquired and internationally recognized rights of Israeli Jews to coexist—as equals, not colonial masters—in the land of Palestine."
(Omar Barghouti, April 2011)

"The Etzel operation in Dir Yassin, in which women, children and other innocents were murdered made me sick. This terrible and barbaric crime might raise public opinion against us. Because of that operation, nobody will trust us to protect Arab rights in this country."
(Yosef Nachmani (Nahmani), 12 April 1948)

"I, as a geographer, pay less attention to the words, and more to what was happening and what was happening is that the Arab neighborhoods were being destroyes in many cities as well as hundreds of Arab villages in Israel. This serves as proof that the aim was to physically block their return. The JNF was very instrumental here because it bought a million dunams from the state, then another, all refugee lands, exactly one day before UN resolution 194 states that Arabs can return. It actually took the land from its original owners and made it something that doesn't belong to the state. That's the JNF logic that later infiltrated the government in Israel and it was very effective. It began in the 1920s and 1930s with people like Nachmani."
(Oren Yiftachel, 2009)

"The Hagannah carried out the Nasser A-Din operation today and the report is of 20 casualties. The attack, which could be seen in Tiberias, lasted 8 hours and the British soldiers heard the shots, but refused to get involved, stating they were neutral. I was horrified by the sight of fleeing women and children. I saw everything from my window."
(Yosef Nachmani (Nahmani), 12 April 1948)

"Social life in Lifta revolved around a small shopping centre, which included a club and two coffee houses. It attracted Jerusalemites as well, as no doubt it would today were it still there. One of the coffee houses was the target of the Hagana when it attacked on 28 December 1947. Armed with machine guns the Jews sprayed the coffee house, while members of the Stern Gang stopped a bus nearby and began firing into it randomly."
(Ilan Pappe, 19 October 2006)

"The court of world opinion has accepted that the Report is credible and that the events it described occurred. People saw on their TV screens that unacceptable levels of terror were brought down on a defenseless city. And then a report came out and confirmed that understanding."
(Desmond Travers, 6 April 2011)

"We have a new verb, “to Goldstone.” Its meaning: To make a finding, and then partially retract it for uncertain motive. Etymology: the strange actions of a respected South African Jewish jurist under intense pressure from Israel, the U.S. Congress and world Jewish groups."
(Roger Cohen, 7 April 2011)

"The Committee reiterates the conclusion of its previous report that there is no indication that Israel has opened investigations into the actions of those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead."
(Mary McGowan Davis, 18 March 2011)

"In short there is a mystery here. Goldstone has moved but the evidence has not, really. That raises the issue of whether the jurist buckled under pressure so unrelenting it almost got him barred from his grandson’s bar mitzvah in South Africa. Is this more a matter of judicial cojones than coherence?"
(Roger Cohen, 7 April 2011)

"My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland. Most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust. My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count."
(Gerald Kaufman, 15 January 2009)

"On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army, Major Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians -- the total is now 1,000. She replied instantly that '500 of them were militants.' That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose that the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants."
(Gerald Kaufman, 15 January 2009)

"Israel's oiled propaganda-machine was further lubricated by its self-acknowledged decision to select women as their masbirim (misinformation spokespersons) so as "to project a feminine and softer image." To add some cool glamour to Israel's hot lies, Tzipi Livni, the state's foreign minister and a natural blonde, announced, in response to calls for truce: "There is no humanitarian crisis in the [Gaza] Strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce." The blonde offensive, led by the rising star of Israeli politics, was fortified by a team of peroxide blonde Israeli women, whose sex, lies and video games decorated TV screens worldwide. They explained to the sympathetic world the hardships endured by the nuclear-armed Israelis threatened by the crude rockets. After all, one Israeli was killed in the last six months, while three other Israelis (one of them a Palestinian citizen of Israel) were killed by rockets since Gaza has been turned into a slaughter-house by the silk gloves of the Israeli army."
(Yosefa Loshitzky, 5 January 2009)

"Remarkably, what emanates so succinctly from the Haggadah is the supreme importance of Jewish peoplehood. The community ethic is a core component of Jewish identity. One cannot call oneself a good Jew if one distances oneself from the lot of one’s People and community."
(Laurence Perez, 3 May 2010)

"[Damage to the Labor Party's ratings in the polls was caused by] the public perception of [Amir] Peretz as an inexperienced, aggressive Moroccan. ... [Labor's] excellent [new Knesset list now] includes Ashkenazi members to balance out Peretz's Sephardi background."
(Isaac Herzog, January 2006)

"I also think the clearest possible answer to people who are calling for a boycott of Israel is to promote cooperation. So when people call for an academic boycott, we push for scientific cooperation. Just when people call for an economic boycott, we push commercial collaboration and when people call for a cultural boycott, we push cultural collaboration."
(Matthew Gould, 14 September 2010)

"One of the two people who set the car on fire went missing. One night – I think it was the second morning following the incident – our two regular GSS officers showed up with an old man and a child, aged five to six years. The child was blindfolded. His trousers were wet with urine. They told me to watch over the child. I fed him out of a tuna-salad-with-tomato-sauce can. He was there for a rather simple reason: He was the brother of the missing suspect, and the investigators informed his family that should the suspect not turn himself in, they would ship the child to the Ansar detainees camp; there was no need detailing what will happen to him there. It worked. The brother turned himself in the following day."
(Yossi Gurvitz, 14 April 2011)

"A village like this, like Awarta, from which the murderers of the Fogel family and of the Shebo family emerged, must suffer as a village. A situation must be created whereby the inhabitants prevent anyone in this village from harming Jews. Yes, it is collective punishment. They must not be allowed to sleep at night, they must not be allowed to go to work, they must not be allowed to drive their cars. There are many ways."
(Avichai Ronski, April 2011)

"I am speaking from a Zionist standpoint. Zionism sets as its goal the preservation of a Jewish national home with a solid Jewish majority – this was the dream of people from the left, right and center of classical Zionism. But the continuation of the occupation guarantees the nullification of Zionism – that is, it rules out the possibility that the Jewish people will live in its land with a strong majority and international recognition. In my eyes, this makes [Israel's] government clearly anti-Zionist."
(Yehudah Bauer, April 2011)

"For the last 10 years I was in arguments with my father over the settlement policy. I believe in a Jewish homeland; I also believe in a Palestinian homeland. Politically, I find myself to the left of my father once again. So we continue to have pretty vibrant arguments after he passed away."
(David Simon (2), November 2010)

"For both sides, and mainly for the Palestinians, the size of the nation confronting them is not clear - whether it consists only of Israeli Jews or the entire Jewish diaspora. And the Israelis don't know whether they are confronting only the Palestinian people or the entire Arab nation. In other words, the demographic boundaries of the two sides are not clear either."
(A.B. Yehoshua, 26 April 2011)

"Any similar action violating the sovereignty of Pakistan will warrant a review on the level of military/intelligence cooperation with the United States."
(Ashfaq Kayani, 5 May 2011)

"I think they're [the post-Mubarak fovernment of Egypt] getting a little bit ahead of themselves... They're kidding themselves first of all if they think that there are all sorts of wonderful other options out there for Egyptian foreign policy that won't have significant downsides. The more they move in this direction, the more they're going to realize that you know what, the Mubarak government did what it did for some very good reasons and that you don't want to make United States and Israel dramatically unhappy. And so it's going to pose some very interesting questions. Because the U.S. on the one hand wants to support and nurture and succor the new Egyptian regime, and the new democratic Egypt, but at the same time there are some red lines that it doesn't want to see crossed, and there's a lot of aid and a lot of benefits for Egypt in being friendly with the United States and Israel. So just how much room the Egyptian foreign policy has to run in meeting the demands of its people it will be interesting to see. I think there is a little bit less flexibility than many of the people who are now in power in Egypt or who are starting to think they're in power will find"
(Gideon Rose, 3 May 2011)

"U.S. President Barack Obama ignored all the ethical criteria, and murdered bin Laden in order to achieve success at any price in advance of the elections. Even someone who prefers Obama to his opponents has good reason to fear the cynicism that Obama demonstrated in the bin Laden affair."
(Haim Baram, 6 May 2011)

"I would describe it as apartheid. I was not seeking to reflect this view in The Promise, but if you ask me personally, then I do. What is happening in Israel is very akin to the concept of separate development. It reminds me of the Bantustan policy of the South African government."
(Peter Kosminsky, 8 May 2011)

"Overall the Israeli diamond industry contributes about $1 billion annually to the Israeli military and security industries ... every time somebody buys a diamond that was exported from Israel some of that money ends up in the Israeli military so the financial connection is quite clear."
(Shir Hever, 2010)

"Israeli Jews and Palestinians both claim descent from the ancient peoples of the lands they now contest. Their competing narratives are at the heart of the perverse drama there. In this drama, the spiritual descendants of Jews who left Palestine assert a religious duty to dispossess the biological descendants of those who chose to remain. Over the course of centuries, the Jews of the diaspora were grievously persecuted by Christians. This experience helped to inspire Zionism. It culminated in the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. Meanwhile, under Byzantium and the Caliphate, all but a few of the Jews of Palestine sought refuge in conversion to Judaism’s successor faiths: Christianity and Islam. As an ironic result, the homegrown descendants of Palestine’s original Jewish population – the Palestinians –now suffer because newcomers proclaim them to be interlopers in lands they have inhabited from time immemorial. And yet another Jewish-descended diaspora – this time, Christian and Muslim – has been ejected from Palestine to suffer in exile. Not even the most imaginative writer of fiction could have composed an account of traumatic suffering and human tragedy comparable to that which Zionists and Palestinians have undergone and continue to inflict on each other."
(Chas Freeman, 4 May 2011)

"[T]he cruelties of Israelis to their Arab captives and neighbors, especially in the ongoing siege of Gaza and repeated attacks on the people of Lebanon, have cost the Jewish state much of the global sympathy that the Holocaust previously conferred on it. The racist tyranny of Jewish settlers over West Bank Arabs and the progressive emergence of a version of apartheid in Israel itself are deeply troubling to a growing number of people abroad who have traditionally identified with Israel. Many – perhaps most of the most disaffected – are Jews. They are in the process of dissociating themselves from Israel. They know that, to the extent that Judaism comes to be conflated with racist arrogance (as terrorism is now conflated with Islam), Israeli behavior threatens a rebirth of anti-Semitism in the West. Ironically, Israel – conceived as a refuge and guarantee against European anti-Semitism – has become the sole conceivable stimulus to its revival and globalization. Demonstrably, Israel has been bad for the Palestinians. It is turning out also to be bad for the Jews."
(Chas Freeman, 4 May 2011)

"Obfuscatory euphemisms are, unfortunately, the norm in the Holy Land. But rhetorical tricks can no longer conceal the protracted moral zero-sum game that is in progress there. A people without rights confronts a settler movement without scruples. A predatory state with cutting-edge military technology battles kids with stones and resistance fighters with belts of nails and explosives. Israel’s Cabinet openly directs the murder of Palestinian political leaders. There have been about 850 such extrajudicial executions over the past decade. Israel is vigorously engaged in the collective punishment and systematic ethnic cleansing of its captive Arab populations. It rails against terrorism while carrying out policies explicitly described as intended to terrorize the peoples of the territories it is attacking or into which it is illegally expanding."
(Chas Freeman, 4 May 2011)

"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 assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal molds. Eight years later, it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy."
(Daniel Reisner, some date just before 4 April 2009)

"We in Israel are in a key position in the development of customary international law in this field because we are on the front lines in the fight against terrorism. The more often Western states apply principles that originated in Israel to their own non-traditional conflicts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, then the greater the chance these principles have of becoming a valuable part of international law."
(Asa Kasher, February 2010)

"[T]he U.S. has routinely exercised its veto to prevent the application of well-established principles of international law to Israel. The Security Council has been transformed from the champion of the global rule of law into the enemy of legality as the standard of global governance. Repeated American vetoes on behalf of Israel have reduced the United Nations and other international fora to impotence on fundamental questions of justice and human dignity. Confidence in these institutions has largely disappeared. Thus, the Israel-Palestine dispute has shaped a world in which both the rule of law and the means by which it might be realized have been deliberately degraded. We are all the worse off for this."
(Chas Freeman, 4 May 2011)

"In late November 1988, shortly after the election of George H. W. Bush as [United States] president, I was invited to lunch by a senior Israeli official with whom, in pursuance of U.S. policy, I had worked closely to expand Israel’s diplomatic and military presence in Africa. I had come to like and respect this official. He wished to thank me, he said, for what I had done for his country. I was pleased. Over lunch, however, he asked me what I planned to do in the new administration, adding, 'Tell me what job you want. We can get it for you.' The casual arrogance with which this representative of a foreign power claimed to be able to manipulate the staffing of national security positions in the U.S. government was a stunning belittlement of American patriotism. Twenty years later, I was to be reminded that agents of foreign influence who can make appointments to national security positions in the United States can also unmake them."
(Chas Freeman, 4 May 2011)

"And in Israel -- governed entirely by religious law for marriages -- even women who are less religious can be affected. Children born from other unions will be considered illegitimate by the state. 'Very few women want to be in the position where their kids are considered mamzerim, or bastards. The stigma is really great and the stigma is so bad that it goes forever,' Susan Weiss, director of the Center for Women's Justice in Israel, told NPR in April. 'In other words, this person who's stigmatized -- his children are stigmatized, his grandchildren are stigmatized, everyone is stigmatized.'"
(Sarah Wildman, 4 January 2011)

"Very few women want to be in the position where their kids are considered mamzerim, or bastards. The stigma is really great and the stigma is so bad that it goes forever. In other words, this person who's stigmatized -- his children are stigmatized, his grandchildren are stigmatized, everyone is stigmatized."
(Susan Weiss, April 2010)

"People who worship death for their children are not human. ... [The Palestinians have] developed a culture which is unprecedented in human history."
(Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, 5 May 2011)

"We don’t want to have anything to do with any organization that employs Arabs. There is no sense in training a rapid response team in a settlement or an institution where you have a bunch of Arabs walking around gathering information."
(Israel Danziger, 2008)

"[R]eports of a new train line between Ramallah and Gaza, via Ben Gurion Airport, were premature... This is not due to become reality anytime soon, it was only a legal requirement that permitted land confiscations across the Green Line for the needs of the Tel Aviv - Jerusalem train."
(Gil'ad Ardan, August 2010)

"The mass withdrawal of residency rights from tens of thousands of West Bank residents, tantamount to permanent exile from their homeland, remains an illegitimate demographic policy and a grave violation of international law"
(HaMoked Center for the Defense of the Individual, May 2011)

"I doubt there is a family in the West Bank that does not have a relative who lost their residency rights in this way"
(Dalia Kerstein, May 2011)

"The reality is that one state of Israel exists. The territories, taken by Israel in the 1967 war, are with the exception of the Sinai a part of this one state. For Palestinians this one state is a disaster. Israel denies Palestinians in varying degrees human rights and continues to confiscate Palestinian land. This oppression stems from the nature of Zionism and the Zionist state. The creation in the foreseeable future of a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is unrealistic. Israel, backed and supported by the United States, is sufficiently strong to prevent the creation of such a state. There is not yet near sufficient evidence to indicate that the unrest and revolution in parts of the Arab Middle East will have a negative effect upon Israel and will help the Palestinians. At sometime in the future the situation in Israel-Palestine will change. Israeli Jews need to realize that they must cast away their Zionism and with Palestinians create a more democratic state. The United States will most likely not always be there or be able to save the Zionist state. The size and place of Israel in the Middle East and the demography, combined with the anti-democratic and oppressive nature of the Zionist state, will, unless changes are made, ultimately doom that state and unfortunately most of its Jewish population."
(Norton Mezvinsky, 9 May 2011)

"And it is precisely this assertion of primacy, where Western needs have precedence over anyone else's, in total disregard for the consequences to others that recalls the Palestinian example to mind. A Western decision to resolve Europe's problem with its Jews led in 1948 to the creation of Israel in my homeland, Palestine. We were never consulted or involved, but we paid an exorbitant price for Israel's establishment in lost lives, land, property and even history. The underlying premise for this act was truly astounding: that another party, the Jews, no matter how tragic their sufferings, had a superior claim to my country than I did, that Jews had primary rights over my homeland because of their history in Europe which I, a native, could not challenge. The effects of this on me and the millions of other exiles apparently counted for nothing. That is the basis of Israel's rejection of the right to Palestinian return from an exile caused by Israel itself. Growing up in England, I was shocked at how my story was consistently ignored or denied, as if I were lying or hallucinating. In America, where blind support for Israel is de rigeur this rejection of my story was even more extreme."
(Ghada Karmi, 12 May 2011)

"Starting in 1977, I worked as his chief of staff for two years ... Starting in 1977, I worked as his chief of staff for two yearse spoke a lot about the city's Arabs. Kollek saw it as his duty to be everyone's mayor, though he was sorry that this population had not fled or been expelled in the Six-Day War, as the country's Arabs had fled and been expelled in the War of Independence. He was unable to persuade the Arab inhabitants that "united Jerusalem" would be a blessing for everyone, just as the Zionist movement had failed in its attempt to persuade the Arabs that establishing the State of Israel would be economically beneficial to them as well."
(Tom Segev, 13 May 2011)

"áñåó ëì îùôè ùàúí àåîøéí áòáøéú éåùá òøáé òí ðøâéìä, àôéìå àí äåà îúçéì áñéáéø àå áäåìéååã òí äáà ðâéìä"
(Meir Ariel, some date before 1999)

"At the end of every sentence you say in Hebrew sits an Arab with a Nargilah even if it starts in Siberia or in Hollywood with Hava Nagila"
(Meir Ariel, some date before 1999)

"Then the War of Independence broke out, and tens of thousands of homes were suddenly available. This was what Shaul Avigur called ‘the Arab miracle’: Hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled, and were expelled from their homes. Entire cities and hundreds of villages left empty were repopulated in short order with new immigrants. In April 1949 they numbered 100,000, most of them Holocaust survivors. The moment was a dramatic one in the war for Israel, and a frightfully banal one, too, focused as it was on the struggle over houses and furniture. Free people–Arabs–had gone into exile and become destitute refugees; destitute refugees–Jews–took the exiles’ places as a first step in their new lives as free people. One group lost all they had, while the other found everything they needed–tables, chairs, closets pots, pans, plates, sometimes clothes, family albums, books, radios, and pets. Most of the immigrants broke into the abandoned Arab houses without direction, without order, without permission. For several months the country was caught up in a frenzy of take-what-you-can, first-come, first-served. Afterwards, the authorities tried to halt the looting and take control of the allocation of houses, but in general they came too late. Immigrants also took possession of Arab stores and workshops, and some Arab neighborhoods soon looked like Jewish towns in prewar Europe, with tailors, shoemakers, dry goods merchants–all the traditional Jewish occupations."
(Tom Segev, November 2000)

"The Arabs of the Land of Israel, they have but one function left - to run away."
(David Ben-Gurion, 21 October 1948)

"An elderly man wandered in, a spruce figure with a hat and umbrella. 'An end to all traitors,' he read. He smiled: 'There's still a few of them about.' He lived, he said, in an estate in Lurgan which used to be totally Protestant. 'Mine is the last Protestant house left. I had three windows broken last week. They've a fortune wasted on eggs, pelting my house and my car. They can't pass my house without spitting. I would move out tomorrow but I'm just too stiff-necked.' He was in one of the Orders. 'I'm in a lodge that never meets in the same place twice. It's a travelling lodge, the lodge of research. I can only go so far within it, because I go to the synagogue. After the preceptory, So he was a Jew. A Protestant Jew."
(Susan McKay, 2000)

"Few events - not even the execution of Osama bin Laden - have caused me greater pleasure in recent weeks than news of the death of the Italian so-called 'peace activist' Vittorio Arrigoni."
(Geoffrey Alderman, 13 May 2011)

"He [Vittorio Arrigoni] was a Jew-hater like Adolf Hitler. Yes, he deserved to die for being a Jew-hater. I rejoiced in the death of a Jew-hater. I have no regrets."
(Geoffrey Alderman, some date between 13 and 17 May 2011)

"He [Vittorio Arrigoni] was a member of the ISM, for God's sake. That's not peace activism, that's hard core Palestinian terror."
(Stephen Pollard, some date between 13 and 17 May 2011)

"Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security."
(Alexander Haig, 1981)

"We will be sort of another American aircraft carrier out here, a platform from which the Americans can operate."
(unnamed Israeli commentator, some date before 2002)

"They [Bedouin being evicted by the Israeli government from Tel al Malach] can double up in their tents until the villages are ready. They're used to it."
(Benjamin Gur-Arieh, August 1979)

"I was the Minister of Justice. I am a lawyer... But I am against law -- international law in particular. Law in general."
(Tzipi Livni, 13 November 2007)

"In fact, there is a strong argument that the settlements are lawful under the 1922 Mandate for Palestine, which continues to apply in the West Bank through Article 80 of the UN Charter, and which calls for 'close settlement by Jews on the land'."
(David Lewis (5)Gerald M AdlerJonathan DC Turner, 21 May 2011)

"Every diaspora Jew, wherever he is, and this includes France, must help Israel. This is the reason why it is important for Jews to take political responsibilities. In my position and in my daily life, I modestly try to help to build Israel."
(Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 1991)

"As you will see from the attached copy of his letter of May 24th, he [St. John Philby] is sympathetically interested in Zionism, and his views on Eastern politics in general are, I am told, unusually broad and liberal."
(Chaim Weizmann, 27 May 1920)

"I hope you are making good progress with your work and will soon have the satisfaction of seeing Palestine surrendered to a civil administration with a mandate to go ahead with the Zionist policy... I particularly hope that a satisfactory arrangement with the Arab states will be a prelude to the development of Palestine on reasonable lines in the spirit of the Zionist proclamation."
(Harry St John Bridger Philby, 1920)

"In a world which is demonstrably on the side of the Palestinians and Arabs - where Israel stands virtually alone - the United States has a special role to play. When the United States is even-handed, Israel is automatically at a disadvantage, tilting the diplomatic playing field overwhelmingly toward the Palestinians and Arabs."
(Howard Kohr, 23 May 2011)

"The 1967 lines are not 'indefensible,' as Netanyahu declared in his immediate response to Obama’s speech. What is 'indefensible' over time for Israel is colonizing another people."
(Roger Cohen, 20 May 2011)

"I heard Israeli soldiers shoot every few minutes. It was like the shooting was done by snipers, because after each shot we would see a wounded person fall. The protesters were throwing stones. No one tried to get over the fence, they were putting Palestinian flags in the barbed wire. It is a multilayered fence with an electric fence, and no one had the tools to cut through it."
(a photojournalist who was at Nakba-day protest on Lebanese border, 20 May 2011)

"For there to be peace Palestinians will have to accept some basic realities. The first is that while Israel is prepared to make generous compromises for peace, it cannot cannot go back to the 1967 lines because these lines are indefensible, because they don’t take into account certain changes that have taken place on the ground, demographic changes that have taken place over the last 44 years. ... So we can't go back to those indefensible lines and we’re going to have to have a long-term military presence along the Jordan."
(Binyamin Netanyahu, 20 May 2011)

"I believe that the historical record shows, incontrovertibly, that the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes as part of the creation of the state of Israel was ethnic cleansing, a conclusion I reached mainly by reading the work of Benny Morris, an acclaimed and conservative Israeli historian whose political opinions are much more in accord with Mr. Wiesenfeld's than with mine; Mr. Morris differs from Mr. Wiesenfeld in bringing to his examination of history a scholar's rigor, integrity, seriousness of purpose and commitment to telling the truth."
(Tony Kushner, May 2011)

"Those who expect that the map of Jerusalem unfolded at the [final status] negotiation table will cover only post-1967 Jerusalem will be in for a cold surprise. More likely it will extend from Beit Shemesh and Mod’in in the West (almost half-way to TelAviv), to a few miles from Halhoul and Hebron in the south, to beyond Ramallah in the north, to within miles of Jericho in the east. This vast area that Israel conventionally considers Metropolitan Jerusalem comprises approximately 482 square miles, of which three-quarters are situated within the West Bank."
(Jan de Jong, 1993)

"But Vienna was a large city, and I never saw these people again, especially if they were not Jewish. All my friends were Jews. There definitely was segregation - voluntary and instinctive - and I had a very limited social life outside the movement."
(Teddy Kollek, 1978)

"The terrain immediately around the settlement was desert, but a short distance away were some Arab villages. We [the kibbutz] actually owned very little land, and over the years we negotiated with our neighbours for a little more. (The problem was really solved only in 1967, after the Six Day War, when Ein. Gev was able to expand into what had previously been no-man's land.)"
(Teddy Kollek, 1978)

"On June 7, soon after our troops reached the Wall, people from throughout the city rushed there, and it was difficult for the soldiers to convince them to wait until a cease-fire went into effect. When we decided to allow the first pilgrimage in nineteen years on the following Wednesday, the holiday of Shavuot, we expected hundreds of thousands of people to take part. The pent-up feelings of a generation would express themselves in the chance to touch the stones of the Wall once more, to pray at this holiest of Holy Places. But how would these hundreds of thousands reach the Wall through the dangerous narrow alleyways? The only answer was to do away with the slum hovels of the Moghrabi Quarter. I received the go-ahead from Herzog, Narkiss, and Dayan and called a meeting of Ya'acov Yanai, Yigael Yadin, the architect Arieh Sharon, and several others. My overpowering feeling was: do it now; it may be impossible to do it later, and it must be done. To make the decision formal, I turned to my own Municipality group, and they approved the move as well. Then the archaeologists and other experts went to the Wall and drew a map of exactly what should be torn down and what should not and we found proper accommodations for the families that were living in those hovels. On the night of Saturday, June 10, the work of clearing the Moghrabi Quarter began. In two days it was done - finished, clean."
(Teddy Kollek, 1978)

"It was the best thing we did. The old place had a galut character; it was a place for wailing. This made sense in the past. It wasn't what we want to do in the future."
(Teddy Kollek, 3 January 2007)

"When we visited the Wailing Wall, we found a urinal placed right up against it. The OC Central Command, Uzi Narkiss, was there, Teddy Kollek, the Mayor of Jerusalem, and myself. We decided to remove the urinal, and, from one thing to another, came to the conclusion that we should take advantage of the opportunity to clear the entire area in front of the Wall. It was a historic opportunity that might not recur. We knew that the coming Wednesday was the Eve of the Festival of Weeks and that many people would be coming to pray beside the Wall. So everything we wanted to do had to be finished by then. On Saturday morning, we three again visited the Wailing Wall during the hour of prayer and decided to put the bulldozers to work immediately after the Sabbath had expired. We hadn't been authorized by anyone and we didn't seek any authorization. We were concerned about losing time and the government's difficulty in making a decision. We knew that in another few days it would be too late. The next day, Sunday, the Cabinet ministers visited the Wailing Wall. They were astounded. All they saw was ruin and dust. Warhaftig, the Minister of Religion, who was also a jurist, claimed that our actions were against the law. At any rate, what was done was done, and by Wednesday evening the work was completed."
(Chaim (Haim) Herzog, some date before 1995)

"We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother." I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under."
(Martin van Creveld, some date before 21 September 2003)

"Dr Malan, in his own particular white world, he's quite a nice old gentleman. But when he comes into the world of race, when race morality becomes his supreme morality, which it is, that's what apartheid is, it's race morality, then he will take any step whatsoever to ensure the [unclear - perhaps supremacy? or paternity?] of his own people. In other words, Mr. McCutcheon, if you make your own survival your supreme moral value, then you're capable of almost anything, even though you're a nice old man."
(Alan Paton, 1957)

"If you make your own survival your supreme moral value, then you're capable of almost anything."
(Alan Paton, 1957)

"[Magnes] showed me two documents ... The second document, of which Dr. Magnes was the author, contained a statement about Palestine being the land of three religions, and therefore not being the centre of a state of either Jews or Arabs or English, and the general approval of the first document. ... I told Dr. Magnes that in my view the time was very inappropriate for launching a discussion of this kind, that whatever liberal sentiment in Europe and America might hold, the proposal amounted to transferring in a large measure the Government of Palestine to a gang of scoundrels."
(Harry Sacher, 21 November 1929)

"[Your proposal shows] no recognition of the fact that Jewish immigration to Palestine is as of right, and is a result of the Jewish people's rights in Palestine, and of their historical connexion with Palestine. . . . [T]he only way to achieve [guarantees against the domination of one nation over the other] is the establishment of complete parity, as between Jews and Arabs, irrespective of their numbers, in all central organs of the Palestine Government. I hope that this agreement will not be necessary for ever, because I believe that the time will come when Arabs and Jews will work together in mutual confidence, and the lines of division will become other than racial ones . . . [A] Jewish-Arab agreement is in practice impossible without the consent and approval of Great Britain."
(David Ben-Gurion, 31 May 1937)

"Mr. Philby's scheme for settling the Arab-Jewish problem was discussed. . . . Philby's idea was that Western Palestine should be handed over completely to the Jews, clear of Arab population except for a "Vatican City" of Jerusalem. In return, the Jews should try to secure for the Arabs national unity and independence as, according to him, was promised in the MacMahon-Hussein Correspondence; moreover, extensive financial help should be given to the Arabs by the Jews. Such unity could be achieved under Ibn Saud alone . . . Dr. Weizmann clearly emphasized that while we could promise economic advantages which would merely depend on us ourselves we could not give any valid promises in the political sphere where we had not the power "to deliver the goods"; moreover, that we could not do anything which might conflict with our loyalty towards Great Britain and France. . . . Dr. Weizmann said that when in America he expected to see President Roosevelt and to gain his support for some big scheme of such a character. If Mr. Philby meantime gained Ibn Saud's assent and support for his ideas, he should send word to me ... Philby was quite frank about the financial difficulties of Ibn Saud increased as they are by the stoppage of pilgrimages during the war. He suggested the sum of £ 20,000,000 for Ibn Saud in case the scheme was carried out in full. Shertok suggested that part at least of that sum should be used for development in connection with the transfer of the Palestine Arabs to other Arab countries . . . At the very end, Philby asked me, slightly embarrassed, and saying that he himself disliked such things, whether, if necessary, we would be prepared to give bribes to the Mufti and some people in Ibn Saud's entourage so as to prevent a campaign against this proposed settlement. I said that we too disliked bribing, but that if necessary we would supply the money, provided we were sure that the recipients would do what they promised"
(Lewis Namier, October 1939)

"Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, has directed me to write to your lordship, enquiring whether you are still of the same opinion in regard to the defence of the rights of the Arabs. Though he formerly replied to you that he was unable to assist you in securing them, it is now within the power of His Majesty's Government to afford you all the assistance required in view of the determination of the Turkish Government to join the ranks of the enemy and to sever the traditional friendly rela tions between the two countries."
(Ronald Storrs, Autumn 1914)

"Tell Storrs to send secret and carefully chosen messenger from me to Sharif Abdallah to ascertain whether 'should present armed German influence in Constantinople coerce Sultan against his will, and Sublime Porte, to acts of aggression and war against Great Britain, he and his father and Arabs of the Hejaz would be with us or against us'."
(Horatio Kitchener, 24 September 1914)

"Tell Storrs to send secret and carefully chosen messenger from me to Sharif Abdallah to ascertain whether 'should present armed German influence in Constantinople coerce Sultan against his will, and Sublime Porte, to acts of aggression and war against Great Britain, he and his father and Arabs of the Hejaz would be with us or against us'."
(Horatio Kitchener, 24 September 1914)

"if the Amir and Arabs in general assist Great Britain in this conflict that has been forced upon us (by) Turkey, Great Britain will promise not to intervene in any manner whatsoever whether in things religious or otherwise. Moreover recognising and respecting the sacred and unique office of the Amir Hosayn, Great Britain will guarantee the independence, rights and privileges of the Sharifate against ali external foreign aggression, in particular that of the Ottomans."
(Horatio Kitchener, 31 October 1914)

"if half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews could be put in their place ... That, of course, would be a first installment"
(Chaim Weizmann, 30 January 1941)

"[I responded] that if half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews could be put in their place. ... That, of course, would be a first installment; what might happen afterwards was a matter for history."
(Chaim Weizmann, 30 January 1941)

"Then there was Major Jarvis who was Governor of Sinai. He was especially interested in restoring some of the productivity of ancient times. He got the Arab Sheik to clean out ancient cis terns and divert water into them for irrigation. It was Jarvis who said that Arabs should be called "Fathers of the Desert," instead of "Sons of the Desert," because wherever the Arabs had gone, they begot deserts."
(Walter Clay Lowdermilk, 1969)

"The Arabs, descendents of Abraham through the line of Hag and Ishmael, are frequently spoken of as 'sons of the desert,' but after seeing what they had done to the lands of North Africa and the Middle East, I felt it would be more apt to call them 'the fathers of the desert.' It is they who have transformed hundreds of millions of formerly productive acres into man-made deserts, some of which were being reclaimed by colonizing farmers of France and Italy, while others had been so eroded and gullied that little could be done to make them productive again."
(Walter Clay Lowdermilk, 1969)

"äöòú äèøðñôø(äòáøä) ùì äòøáéí îúåï äòî÷éí ùìðå. àðå ìà éëåìéí åøùàéí ìäöéò ãáø ëæä, ëé îòåìí ìà øöéðå ìðùì àú äòøáéí. àáì îëéåï ùàðâìéä îåñøú çì÷ ùì äàøõ, àùø äåáèä ìðå, ìîãéðä òøáéú, àéï æä àìà îï äéåùø ùäòøáéí áîãéðúðå éåòáøå ìçì÷ äòøáé."
(David Ben-Gurion, 27 July 1937)

"weak argument, raise voice"
(Moshe Sneh, some date before 1973)

"You could find the equivalent of 2.5% of the territories, but when people in Israel talk about it, they are talking about keeping 6% to 10%. Finding that kind of land inside Israel just can’t be done."
(Gideon Biger, May 2011)

" Listening to Obama's 45-minute speech this month – the "kick off' to four whole days of weasel words and puffery by the man who tried to reach out to the Muslim world in Cairo two years ago, and then did nothing – one might have thought that the American President had initiated the Arab revolts, rather than sat on the sidelines in fear. There was an interesting linguistic collapse in the president's language over those critical four days. On Thursday 19 May, he referred to the continuation of Israeli "settlements". A day later, Netanyahu was lecturing him on "certain demographic changes that have taken place on the ground". Then when Obama addressed the American Aipac lobby group (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) on the Sunday, he had cravenly adopted Netanyahu's own preposterous expression. Now he, too, spoke of "new demographic realities on the ground." Who would believe that he was talking about internationally illegal Jewish colonies built on land stolen from Arabs in one of the biggest property heists in the history of "Palestine"?"
(Robert Fisk, 30 May 2011)

"There is store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old - a republic where. there is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotisms of the East. Then our race shall have an organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defence in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishman or American. And the world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom; there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West. Difficulties? I know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement move in the great among our people, and the work will begin."
(Ezra Mordecai Cohen, 1876)

"There has been a change in public opinion and awareness about Israel's behaviour and there was specific pressure on [David Cameron] to step down from the JNF. We believe he has stepped down as a result of this political pressure. Given the establishment support that the JNF has received, it's not a decision he will have taken lightly."
(SofiahMacLeod, 29 May 2011)

"If he does not deploy his armed men in the heart of a civilian neighborhood, how will the ruler feel like a ruler? How will the sovereign - if his forces do not patrol spitefully near a school during recess - depict himself as the Order that must not be disturbed?"
(Amira Hass, 30 May 2011)

"We have also reached an embarrassing situation in which a special unit has formulated a list of allowed foods for the inhabitants of Gaza - as though it were a collective prison under our control."
(Shlomo Avineri, 30 May 2011)

"Now, upon the opening of the Egyptian border, the time has come to complete the disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Israel must lift the naval and air blockades and at the same time shut down entirely the land crossing points from Israel to Gaza. The Gaza Strip is enemy territory and from the moment it is open to the wider world through the Rafah crossing, all the remnants of the Israeli occupation as manifested in the naval and air blockade should be eliminated, thereby removing from us the responsibility for provisioning the Gaza Strip. The border between Israel and Gaza should be like the border between Israel and Lebanon, and just as Israel is not imposing a naval blockade on Lebanon it should not be imposing one on Gaza. If this policy is implemented, transferring provisions and humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip will be done through Egypt - or directly to Gaza. If the organizers of the flotilla to Gaza want to reach Gaza - you are welcome: This is none of our business. There is no Israeli blockade, and so-called human rights activists - whose only aim is to embarrass Israel - aren't bringing weapons there anyway. . . . Gaza is a foreign country. It is hard to digest this, but this is the logic of the disengagement, which must now be completed. Thanks are due to Egypt for having made this possible."
(Shlomo Avineri, 30 May 2011)

"so-called human rights activists - whose only aim is to embarrass Israel - aren't bringing weapons there [to Gaza] anyway"
(Shlomo Avineri, 30 May 2011)

"We will not allow residents of the eastern part of the city to build as much as they need ... I don't think the most important task is to resolve the housing shortage in East Jerusalem. ... At the end of the day, however politically incorrect it may be to say, we will also look at the demographic situation in Jerusalem to make sure that in another 20 years we don't wake up in an Arab city."
(Yakir Segev, 2010)

"The fence was built on this route for a demographic reason – to remove 50,000 Arabs from Jerusalem. Now, the situation is being left as is. They simply don't want to say, 'We already gave up part of the Jerusalem neighborhoods.' Otherwise, people will ask, 'If we already gave up parts, why not divide [the city]?'"
(Yakir Segev, January 2010)

"Through the war years, Shertok and Weizmann remained steady proponents of transfer, flogging the idea to whoever would listen."
(Benny Morris, 11 December 2003)

"The Druse, several Beduin tribes in the Jordan Valley and the South, the Circassians, and perhaps also the Matawalis [would] not mind being transferred, under favourable conditions, to some neighbouring country."
(David Ben-Gurion, 15 October 1941)

"The spirit of the proposed Affirmative Action bill is more important than the language, and everyone is clear on its purpose: to get rid of the Haredim and the Arabs."
(Aluf Benn, 1 June 2011)

"Philip Murray House was one of about 70 workers buildings constructed by the Histadrut around the country over a short period during the early days of the state. It is named after the Scottish-American labor union leader who headed the United Steelworkers of America. After his death in 1952, the organization donated a substantial sum to build the workers facility in the remote southern Israeli city. The American laborers believed that the facility would improve the welfare of Eilat laborers and help them form unions and protect themselves. The Histadrut officials also managed to solicit many donations from the counterparts abroad and among other things, to build the David Dubinsky Soccer Stadium in Haifa (1955 ), the Joseph Breslau Cultural Center in Nehora (1958 ), the Walter Reuter Youth Center in Holon (1962 ) and many other buildings."
(Noam Dvir, 1 June 2011)

"Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all."
(Milton Winternitz, 1922)

"If the Palestinian people already had one real passport, maybe the Israelis wouldn't need two."
(Gideon Levy, 2 June 2011)

"Early in the morning [of 22 April 1948], Maxy Cohen informed the brigade's headquarters that the Arabs were using a loudspeaker and calling on everyone to gather in the market square [in Haifa], 'because the Jews have conquered Stanton Street and are continuing to make their way downtown.' Upon receiving the report, an order was given to the commander of the auxiliary weapons company, Ehud Almog, to make use of the three-inch mortars, which were situated next to Rothschild Hospital, and they opened up on the market square [where there was] a great crowd. When the shelling started and shells fell into it [the crowd], a great panic took hold. The multitude burst into the port, pushed aside the policemen, stormed the boats and began fleeing the town. Throughout the day the mortars continued to shell the city alternately, and the panic that seized the enemy became a rout."
(Tzadok Eshel, 1978)

"There was a very clear sense that, despite all the anguish and seeming chaos on the ground, the evacuation went like clockwork"
(Hazel Ward, some time between August 2005 and 9 January 2006)

"They held meetings where the settlers would say, 'Let's keep to the agreement, we don't beat up the soldiers, we will lie on the ground holding hands', and the soldiers were saying, 'We will break you apart, in small squads of four soldiers but not using excessive force, and you are not allowed to kick at the military.' This is what one of the officers told me. . . . An officer told me they agreed the settlers could throw any food they wanted, tomatoes, hummus, pickles - as long as the pickles had been removed from the cans."
(David Ratner, some date between August 2005 and 9 January 2006)

"Those accounts and images of the soldiers looked compassionate, but when you saw it take place, it didn't seem genuine but more like, 'Oh God, now I've got to hug another settler.'"
(Amelia Thomas, some date between August 2005 and 9 January 2006)

"A veteran reservist said that he believes the evacuation of Shirat Hayam will be relatively smooth. "For the young, people this is like simulating the struggle against the British Mandate. They want to protest and express what they feel about the establishment but there won't be any extremist actions, in my opinion," he said."
(David Ratner, 12 August 2005)

"After what we've seen from crimes in Deraa and all over Syria, I am unable to continue with the Syrian Arab army. I urge the army, and I say: 'Is the army here to steal and protect the Assad family?' I call upon all honourable officers to tell their soldiers about the real picture, use your conscience... if you are not honourable, stay with Assad."
(Abdul-Razak Tlas, 7 June 2011)

"I own an apartment in East Talpiot, one of Jerusalem's post-1967 'new' neighborhoods, one I purchased with a loan that had favorable terms for olim, or new immigrants."
(Ron Kampeas, 2 June 2009)

"I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one"
(Theodore Roosevelt, 1897)

"All the great masterful races have been fighting races. And the minute that a race loses its hard fighting virtues, it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best."
(Theodore Roosevelt, 1897)

"No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war"
(Theodore Roosevelt, 1897)

"In Zakai's view, Israel's central error during the tahadiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce that formally ended on Friday, was failing to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip."
(Bradley Burston, 22 December 2008)

"What I would like to argue briefly is that the liberal Zionist vision of the two-state solution is not morally justifiable"
(Jerry Haber, 8 June 2011)

"When the Oslo Accord spoke of 'Gaza first' a popular rightwing bumper sticker was, 'Tel Aviv first.' The framers of Oslo were criticized for offering things that the rightwing was interested in keeping, but that they weren't."
(Jerry Haber, 8 June 2011)

"Although couched in terms that emphasize religious tolerance Herzl's plans clearly involves a marginalization and displacement of the current population. He notes a couple of days later in his diary: The musty deposits of two thousand years of inhumanity, intolerance, and uncleanliness lie in the foul-smelling streets. . .. If we ever get Jerusalem back and if I’m able to still do something, the first thing I would do is clean it up. I would get rid of everything that is not sacred, set up homes for workers outside the city, empty out and tear down the nests of filth, burn the secular ruins, and move the bazaars elsewhere. Then, retaining the old architecture as much as possible, I would build a comfortable, well-ventilated, wellorganized, new city around the Holy places. The Zionists would cleanse the foul-smelling streets, tear down the secular buildings, and get rid of the means of sustenance for the Arab people, while “cultivating” and bringing “fructification” to the impoverished land. Here, Herzl’s articulation of the Zionist idea was not only an answer to the “Jewish question” in Europe but, somewhat paradoxically, also an extension of the violence of the European Universal—the nation-state, the colonial power, the idea of civilization, and the concept of world history. In the vein of the great theoreticians of world history, Herzl described the project in a critical essay of 1899, “Jews as Pioneer People,” in the following understated terms: “the world is redistributed from time to time.” In this deeply ambivalent essay, Herzl tries to elevate the Jews to world-historical people by placing Zionism on par with other expansionist, colonial discourses."
(Todd Samuel Presner, 2007)

"I can muster no sympathy whatever for the misguided piety that makes a national religion from a piece of the wall of Herod, and for its sake challenges the feelings of the local natives."
(Sigmund Freud, 26 February 1930)

"Gar keine Sympathie kann ich für die mis(!)gedeutete Pietät aufbringen, die aus einem Stück der Mauer des Herodes eine nationale Reliquie macht und ihretwegen die Gefühle der Einheimischen herausfordert."
(Sigmund Freud, 26 February 1930)

"The message Freud passed on to his children and descendants was unmistakable: Don't be Jewish! This message was conveyed through daily life and explicit enough words. . . . Freud's message of avoiding Jewishness was not rare among intellectuals of Jewish descent. If we look at the list of prominent psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud, we discover that those of Jewish descent expressed the same message. They did not want to be known as Jews, and did not want their children to be known as Jews. If we look at the life of Melanie Klein, Erik Erikson or Heinz Kohut, the picture is identical. All these great theoreticians of psychoanalysis wanted to cleanse their lives from any traces of Jewish identity. It is not a matter of ambivalance, but of total aversion. In this context we should mention that Alfred Adler, an early disciple of Freud and a leader of another Viennese school, chose to convert to Christianity, not because of religious faith, but as a public repudiation of Jewish tribalism and in defiance of dominant social boundaries."
(Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, 31 July 2002)

"On the other hand I do not believe that Palestine will ever become a Jewish state, and that the Christians or the Islamic world will ever be prepared to leave their shrines in Jewish hands. It would have seemed more comprehensible to me to found a Jewish fatherland on new, unencumbered soil."
(Sigmund Freud, 26 February 1930)

"Whoever wants to influence a crowd, must have something respunding, enthusiastic to say, and my sober appraisal of Zionism does not permit this."
(Sigmund Freud, 26 February 1930)

"Gar keine Sympathie kann ich für die missgeleitete Pietät aufbringen, die aus einem Stück der Mauer des Herodes eine nationale Reliquie macht und ihretwegen die Gefühle der Einheimischen herausfordert"
(Sigmund Freud, 26 February 1930)

"It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically burdened land. But I know that such a rational viewpoint would never have gained the enthusiasm of the masses and the financial support of the wealthy. I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives."
(Sigmund Freud, 26 February 1930)

"Ich kann keine Sympathie für die fehlgeleitete Frömmigkeit finden, die aus einem Stück Mauer aus Herodes' Zeiten eine Nationalreligion macht und ihretwillen die Gefühle der Eingeborenen verletzt."
(Sigmund Freud, 26 February 1930)

"There is something I regret. I regret I didn't do more to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel."
(George William Rendel, some date before 1980)

"In the conflict between his country and Zionism seven decades ago, Gilbert is on Zionism's side."
(Tom Segev, 10 June 2011)

"In my opinion it is incorrect to describe Polish information regarding German atrocities as 'trustworthy.' The Poles, and to a far greater extent the Jews, tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up. They seem to have succeeded.

Mr. Allen and myself have both followed German atrocities quite closely. I do not believe that there is any evidence which would be accepted in a Law Court that Polish children have been killed on the spot by Germans when their parents were being deported to work in Germany, nor that Polish children have been sold to German settlers. As regards putting Poles to death in gas chambers, I do not believe that there is any evidence that this has been done. THere have been many stories to this effect, and we have played them in P.W.E. rumours without believing that they had any foundation. At any rate there is far less evidence than exists for the mass murder of Polish officers by the Russians at Katyn. On the other hand, we do know that the Germans are out to destroy Jews of any age unless they are fit for manual labour.

I think that we weaken our case against the Germans by publicly giving credence to atrocity stories for which we have no evidence. These mass executions in gas chambers remind me of the stories of employment of human corpses during the last war for the manufacture of fat, which was a grotesque lie and led to the true stories of German enormities being brushed aside as being mere propaganda."
(Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, August 1943)

"The goal we have set is to have the maximum number of countries oppose the process of having the UN recognise a Palestinian state. ... The Palestinian effort must be referred to as a process that erodes the legitimacy of the State of Israel."
(Rafael Barak, June 2011)

"In other words: the conflict moves back from 1967 to 1948. For Hassan Hijazi, the grandson of a refugee from Jaffa, this is huge achievement."
(Uri Avnery, 10 June 2011)

"Entering negotiations based on the 1967 borders will soon uncover the fact that the myth of 'defensible borders' conceals a real-estate craving. It will quickly become apparent that Netanyahu's settlement blocs are many times bigger than the lands on the Israeli side of the Green Line that he is willing to hand over to the Palestinians."
(Akiva Eldar, 13 June 2011)

"As an Arabic student, it was very impressive to see his attempt to bring Hasbara to the Arab world. It would be very rewarding for me if I were able to communicate as effectively as Mr. Gendelman in such anti-Israel environments."
(Ilan Grapel, 2008)

"Destiny has sent us the body of the Sirdar [the governor-general, Lee Stack] as a solution to a situation that was no longer tolerable."
(Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby, 1924)

"The hand that reaches out against the Soviet centers of power shall be cut off!"
(Yaakov Riftin, around 1952)

"This is an insoluble conflict because it is not about territory. It is not that you can give up a kilometer more and solve it. The root of the conflict is in an entirely different place. Until Abu Mazen recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, there will be no way to reach an agreement."
(Benjamin Netanyahu, June 2011)

"The logically extreme expression of escape is, of course, emigration. ... The danger for the Jewish state is that, given the choice between convincing Middle Easterners that Israel can be a good neighbor and leaving the neighborhood, more and more Israelis are attracted to the latter."
(Ian Lustick, 2008)

"And, if history remains consistent, as Zionism 'purifies' itself, gets rid of all those who would question it or compromise it, it must take its remaining adherents into the realm of unadorned horror. We should all be afraid of this. Very afraid."
(Lawrence Davidson, 15 June 2011)

"One can see just by looking at them and their houses that they are foreigners in this country and will always remain so. They have not succeeded in forming a relationship with this land, and will never be able to 'belong' or to become Palestinians . . . These observations are not only well-founded, but worrying too when I ask myself whether they do not apply just as well to us Jews. Shall we manage to become Palestinians, to become acclimatized to this country? For so much is clear: without such physical but above all inner acclimatization our work cannot conceivably achieve lasting success."
(some Jewish visitor to pre-1948 Palestine, probably Nahum Goldmann, some date before 1948)

"My parents had arrived in the country in 1933. With the help of a loan they opened a smaller copy of their Berliner clothing store on Allenby Street."
(Carl-Jacob Danziger, 1980)

"In Motza, on Broza's lot, on the slope, I planted a young cedar, and Wolffsohn planted a small palm. A few Arabs helped us, as did the settlers Broza and Katz. We returned to Jerusalem in the darkness of night."
(Theodor Herzl, 1 November 1898)

"We have to create our title out of our wish to go to Palestine. It is quite true that some other people might gain something by it, but it may also be that some people might lose by it, and therefore it is for us to do the thing quietly."
(Chaim Weizmann, 1919)

"The Jews will get Palestine, whether you want it or not. There is no power on earth that can stop the Jews from getting to Palestine. You gentlemen can make it easy for them, or you can make it hard for them, but you cannot stop them."
(Chaim Weizmann, 1919)

"The chief of staff's decision is infuriating. This is another example of halakha [Jewish religious law] taking over the army. Just as Israel is becoming a halakhic state, the Israel Defense Forces is becoming a halakhic army. Perhaps its name should be changed to Israel Halakha Forces?"
(Zehava Gal-On, June 2011)

"I'm concerned about the continued freeze [in the peace talks]. I'm concerned that Israel will become a binational state. What is happening now is total foot-dragging. We're about to crash into the wall. We're galloping at full speed toward a situation where Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish state."
(Shimon Peres, June 2011)

"Whoever dwells outside the Land of Israel is like one who has no God."
(David Ben-Gurion, December 1960)

"I am convinced that the people must be forced to go to Palestine. They are neither prepared to understand their own position nor the promises of the future. To them, an American dollar looms as the greatest of objectives. By 'force' I suggest a program. It is not a new program. It was used before, and most recently. It was used in the evacuation of the Jews from Poland and in the story of the 'Exodus'. The first step in such a program is the adoption of the principle that it is the conviction of the world Jewish community that these people must go to Palestine. The second step is the transmittal of that policy to the Displaced Persons. The third step is for the world Jewish community to offer the people the opportunity to go to Palestine. By opportunity, it is to be understood that any means put at the disposal of the people is to be considered an adequate opportunity. THose who are not interested are no longer to be wards of the Jewish community to be maintained in camps, fed and clothed without their having to make any contribution to their own subsistence. To effect this program, it becomes necessary for the Jewish community at large to reverse its policy and instead of creating comforts for the Displaced Persons to make them as uncomfortable as possible. The American Joint Distribution Committee supplies should be withdrawn. I have taken the time to indicate the type of help that the Joint has been giving. My purpose was to be able to indicate that the supplementary aid of the Joint may be termed 'luxury items' in that this aid serves as a means to put the individual in business. A further procedure would call for an organization such as the Haganah to harass the Jew. Utilities would be tampered with and all protection now given by the Adviser on Jewish Affairs, D.P. Chaplains, and Agency personnel is withdrawn. Of course, it is to be understood that there are certain problems that persist even in the most normal of societies which must be cared for by one or more agencies. It must be borne in mind that we are dealing with a sick people. They are not to be asked, but to be told, what to do. They will be thankful in years to come. Too many times have I been cursed in the evening, while moving masses of people, only to be thanked the following morning for having transferred them from an abominable site to a more comfortable location. The cooperation of all agencies is imperative. The principle must be whole-heartedly accepted by all Agencies involved. The AJDC must set aside the funds now allocated to Germany to be used for the execution of this program. If this program is not accepted, let me assure this Conference that an incident will occur which will compel the American Jewish community to reconsider its policy and make the changes herein suggested. At that time, there will have been much more suffering, a greater wave of anti-Semitism and a tougher struggle to accomplish what might perhaps be accomplished today."
(Abraham Judah Klausner, May 1948)

"If today it is possible to hope that in the very near future the town of Jaffa will witness the beginning of the construction of a modern habrour, this is due solely and exclusively to the initiative and energy of Jewish citizens of Tel Aviv."
(Meir Dizengoff, 1922)

"[T]he position of Jews in Jaffa Port was similar to that of a man renting a house from another and paying high rent and furnishing it and arranging it and making it center of his work . . . and suddenly the owner comes one cold night and throws him out and closes the door in his face and denies him any of his rights to [his home]. . . . This is exactly what the Arabs did to us with the strike in Jaffa Port [in] announcing that the port is an Arab port and only Arabs have the right to use it any time they want. . . . Now comes the ancient owner . . . returning anew to life in his country. So we want our own port where we can participate fully and [where] the rights of Jewish workers will be protected."
(Moshe Shertok, 14 July 1937)

"Notice the ambivalence in Shertok’s language: first Jews are 'renters,' then they are 'ancient owners' returning to revive themselves and the ancient homeland. Yet in both depictions the Arabs have disappeared from the space of the port; they exist only as the much-despised landlord from whom Jews fled to Tel Aviv in the first place."
(Mark LeVine, 2 May 2005)

"I would welcome the destruction of Jaffa, Port and City. Let it come; it would be for the better. This city, which grew fat from Jewish immigration and settlement, deserves to be destroyed for having waved an axe at those who built her and made her prosper. If Jaffa went to hell, I would not count myself among the mourners."
(David Ben-Gurion, 11 July 1936)

"[Tel Aviv's] own district and Southern Palestine generally are its [Tel Aviv port's] legitimate hinterland, and the fact is too patent to require any proof"
(Marine Trust staff, 1946)

"[W]e should not forget the local concerns and aims of the people running the new port [Tel Aviv port]. Most important, as the 1946 Report of the Marine Trust put it,'[Tel Aviv's] own district and Southern Palestine generally are its legitimate hinterland, and the fact is too patent to require any proof.' That is, all of southern Palestine (with its largely Palestinian Arab population) was now to be served by Tel Aviv Port, while Jaffa Port was to be restricted to servicing only the Palestinian Arab economy of Jaffa and its immediate surroundings. This argument is a good example of how the economic and communal boundaries that already had been deployed by Zionist researchers to 'describe' separate and autonomously developing Jewish and Palestinian Arab Palestines were also used to justify policies derived from these 'scientific' analyses."
(Mark LeVine, 2 May 2005)

"[T]he conquest of the port in Tel Aviv is one of the biggest settlement activities of our movement. . . . We must see that this activity [the opening of the port] was much more than an answer to the disturbances of Jaffa. It is today one of the main links in the chain of our activities in opening up the country. . . . The debate is not about sharing ports but [about] the vision of our port as a great settlement enterprise. The question is whether we proceed in the same way as agricultural colonization. . . . Only someone who doesn’t see the port as a settlement enterprise would give up on its independence."
(contributor to Hapoel Hatzair, 5 July 1937)

"In other words, the goal of 'settlement' was to take spaces that were inhabited or used by both communities and transform them into exclusively Jewish territory."
(Mark LeVine, 2 May 2005)

"Nearly every male settler carries a gun, sometimes he is in uniform and sometimes he is not, and so attacking them is not the same as attacking a non-combatant civilian population."
(Gideon Spiro, 4 September 2010)

"No problem if there’s intimate encounters between participants. In fact, it’s encouraged!"
(Israel Outdoors employee, some date before 20 June 2011)

"Between 1999 and 2009, one popular tour provider, Momo Lifshitz, instructed 50,000 Birthrighters to see the sights, be afraid of the Arabs, and 'make Jewish babies.'"
(Kiera Feldman, 20 June 2011)

"But what Livni was saying was that she wanted Israel to be a Zionist state based on the Law of Return and open to any Jew. To secure such a state in a country with very limited territory means that land and water must be kept under Jewish control, with differential rights for Jews and non-Jews – rights that affect everything, from housing and access to land, to jobs, subsidies, marriages and migration. The fear is that if Israel became a Jewish majority state with fixed borders, the inevitable demand for full equal rights for minorities would herald the end of Jewish special rights and of Zionism itself. A two-state solution therefore does not solve the problem of how to maintain Zionism, it compounds it. The size of the non-Jewish population of Israel would be reduced from 40 or 50 per cent to 20 per cent if a Palestinian state were created, but the inherent contradiction of a non-Jewish minority with equal rights would undermine it as a Jewish state. Israel’s only answer is to keep its borders undefined while holding on to scarce water and land resources, leaving Palestinians in a state of permanent uncertainty, dependent on Israeli goodwill."
(Alastair Crooke, 3 March 2011)

"The Occupied Territories assumed an elastic, shifting geography in which the rule of law was suspended under cover of the law. It was Sharon who pioneered the philosophy of ‘maintained uncertainty’ that repeatedly extended and then limited the space in which Palestinians could operate by means of an unpredictable combination of changing and selectively enforced regulations, and the dissection of space by settlements, roads Palestinians were not allowed to use and continually shifting borders. All of this was intended to induce in the Palestinians a sense of permanent temporariness. Maintaining control of the Occupied Territories keeps open to Israel the option of displacing Palestinian citizens of Israel into the Territories by means of limited land swaps. It also ensures that Israel retains the ability to force future returning refugees to settle in their ‘homeland’, whereas a sovereign Palestinian state might decline to accept the refugees. It suits Israel to have a ‘state’ without borders so that it can keep negotiating about borders, and count on the resulting uncertainty to maintain acquiescence."
(Alastair Crooke, 3 March 2011)

"[We engage in make-believe negotiations] [b]ecause in the political establishment there are pressures. Peace Now from within, and other elements from without. So you have to maneuver. But what I’m saying now has to be given over to the Americans, and I hope that they will understand. Some of what we have to do is maneuver with the American administration and the European establishment, which are also nourished by Israeli elements, which create the illusion that an agreement can be reached. ... I say that time works for those who make use of it. The founders of Zionism knew how to make use of time, and we in the government know how to make use of time."
(Moshe Ya'alon, March 2010)

"Arab labor organizations confronted not only a union's ordinary problems with employers but problems rooted in Zionist settlement. The British administration's disproportionate use of Jewish contractors limited Arab employment, while the Histadrut's 'Jewish labor' campaign sought to take Arabs' jobs for Jewish workers."
(Jane Power, 1998)

"The . . . town [Jaffa] is picturesquely situated on a headland, the houses rising in terraces from the water’s edge; it is entirely surrounded by a wall and ditch, to which the term fortifications is given, but, such as they are, they are falling rapidly to decay. Surrounding Jaffa are the orange gardens for which it is justly extolled, and which are a considerable source of wealth to the owners. The annual value of fruits grown in Jaffa is said to be 10,000 pounds. I have been greatly struck at times when riding along this coast to see vines and fig-trees growing apparently in barren sand which abounds here; either there is a supply of water beneath the surface sufficient to nourish the roots, or, what I think is more probable, the sand is not more than a foot or two in depth and the roots have been laid in good soil beneath."
(R W Stewart, 15 December 1871)

"The work of getting the names correctly is somewhat difficult. In the desert a wady will generally have but one name from its head to its termination or junction with a more important one. In these well-populated districts a wady changes its name half-a-dozen times in as many miles, taking a new one in the territory of each village that it passes through. The fear of the fellahin that we have secret designs of re-conquering the country is a fruitful source of difficulty. This got over, remains the crass stupidity which cannot give a direct answer to a simple question, the exact object of which it does not understand; for why should a Frank wish to know the name of an insignificant wady or hill in their land?"
(Charles F Tyrwhitt-Drake, 1872)

"All the religious rubbish of the different nations, says a recent traveller, live at Jerusalem separated from each other, hostile and jealous, a nomad population, incessantly recruited by pilgrimage or decimated by the plague and oppressions. The European dies or returns to Europe after some years; the Pashas and their guards go to Damascus or Constantinople; and the Arabs fly to the desert. Jerusalem is but a place where everyone arrives to pitch his tent and where nobody remains."
(Karl Marx, 15 April 1854)

"The fellahin are all in all the worst type of humanity that I have come across in the east. The 'Ammarin and Lyathineh of Petra are perhaps greater ruffians, being beyond the reach of troops, but they are known to be lawless plunderers, and the traveller expects the worst from them. The fellah is totally destitute of all moral sense ; he changes his pledged word as easily as he slips off his abba ; robbery, even when accompanied by violence and murder, is quite in his line, provided he can do it with little fear of detection. To one who has power he is fawning and cringing to a disgusting extent, but to one whom he does not fear, or who does not understand Arabic, his insolence and ribald abuse are unbounded."
(Charles F Tyrwhitt-Drake, 1872)

"Miriam Rosen, a young American scholar, has compiled a spinetingling collection of typical British attitudes to the Palestinians, attitudes which in extraordinary ways prepare for the official Zionist view, from Weizmann to Begin, of the native Palestinian."
(Edward Said, 1979)

"It seems as if God has covered the soil of Palestine with rocks and marshes and sand, so that its beauty can only be brought out by those who love it and will devote their lives to healing its wounds."
(Chaim Weizmann, 1949)

"A sacred story has emerged equal to if not greater than any biblical narrative, of the exile culminating in the Holocaust followed by literal redemption in the founding of the State of Israel. It was Will Herberg, the earliest and most thorough interpreter of Martin Buber, who first compared this to the doctrine of Charles Maurras, the French fascist intellectual who called for an avowedly atheist Catholic traditionalism."
(Jack Ross, 22 June 2011)

"It was Will Herberg, leading disciple of Buber and friend of Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet, who first likened Jewish nationalism as a new religion to the doctrine of Charles Maurras, the French fascist intellectual who advocated an avowedly atheist form of Catholic traditionalism."
(Jack Ross, 14 December 2010)

"If, as Jewish theologian Will Herberg once put it,“anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of secular Jewish intellectuals,” then Goldhagen is the most anti-Semitic of Jewish papal critics."
(David G Dalin, 2005)

"anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of secular Jewish intellectuals"
(Will Herberg, some date before 1978)

"Catholic-baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals."
(Peter Viereck, some date before 1953)

"Under the influence of secular Jewish nationalism, a new regard for certain traditional holidays and observances has emerged. These are approved because they seem to be the most significant and enduring aspect of 'Jewish culture' and thus very useful to stimulate folk solidarity and promote folk survival. Often these secular survivalist arguments are presented under religious guise, but sometimes their nonreligious character is frankly avowed. In any case, this approach is not one that is likely to appeal to those who take Jewish faith seriously. It involves not only the idolatrous exaltation of folk or national values, but also a deliberate exploitation of sacred things that must appear very close to sacrilege to the religious mind. It bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the postion once adopted by Charles Maurras, leader of the ultranationalist L'Action Francaise, in relation to the Catholic Church. Himself an unbelieving positivist of the Comtean school, Maurras strongly urged support of the Church and its ceremonies. 'Differing on the truth,' he explained, 'we have come to agree on the useful. Divergencies of speculation persist but we have reached a practical accord on the value of Catholicism to the nation.' Sincere Catholics were outraged at this overture, and I do not think its Jewish counterpart is likely to commend itself any more favorably to the believing Jew."
(Will Herberg, 1951)

"Differing about the truth, we have come to agree on the useful: divergencies of speculation subsist, but we have reached a practical accord on the value of Catholicism to the nation."
(Charles Maurras, 1912)

"A theologian like Martin Buber preached the saving grace of a rooted Jewish nationalism in much the same accents as other 'integral nationalists' like Maurras, Barres, Wagner."
(Roland N Stromberg, 1994)

"Zionism was the outlet, particularly for the second generation. This group was especially perplexed, as all second generations were, by the problem of their place in American culture, confused by specific problems of social and ecomomic adjustment, and anxious over the meaning of anti-Semitism. Americans tneded to be extremists in the world Zionist movement, in no small measure because they carried into it the whole burden of their worries and fears as American Jews."
(Oscar Handlin, 1949, reprinted 1954)

"[T]he present demand for the eventual establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine, made by the American Jewish Conference, and constituting one of its major decisions, as well as the subordination of other Jewish issues to the problem of the political structure of Palestine, are in such essential disagreement with the fundamental views of the American Jewish Committee that in the best interests of Jews in this and other countries, including Palestine, the Committee feels impelled to withdraw from the American Jewish Conference."
(Joseph M Proskauer, 25 October 1943)

"The path of modern culture leads from Humanity, through Nationalism, to Bestiality."
(Franz Grillparzer, 1849)

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority. There is no greater heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."
(Lord Acton, 1887)

"Nationality does not aim either at liberty or prosperity, both of which it sacrifices to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the state. Its course will be marked with material as well as moral ruin, in order that a new invention may prevail over the works of God and the interests of mankind."
(John Dalberg-Acton, July 1862)

"I once asked my best friend and husband during the era of segregation, who was as staunch a defender of black people's human rights as anyone I'd ever met: how did you find your way to us, to black people, who so needed you? What force shaped your response to the great injustice facing people of colour of that time? I thought he might say it was the speeches, the marches, the example of Martin Luther King Jr, or of others in the movement who exhibited impactful courage and grace. But no. Thinking back, he recounted an episode from his childhood that had led him, inevitably, to our struggle. He was a little boy on his way home from yeshiva, the Jewish school he attended after regular school let out. His mother, a bookkeeper, was still at work; he was alone. He was frequently harassed by older boys from regular school, and one day two of these boys snatched his yarmulke (skull cap), and, taunting him, ran off with it, eventually throwing it over a fence. Two black boys appeared, saw his tears, assessed the situation, and took off after the boys who had taken his yarmulke. Chasing the boys down and catching them, they made them climb the fence, retrieve and dust off the yarmulke, and place it respectfully back on his head. It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put – without delay, and with tenderness – back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try."
(Alice Walker, June 2011)

"My parents immigrated to Israel in 1933 out of choice and hope, not out of despair or fear. Sixty years ago, shortly after I was born, they sat glued to the radio when David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of a Jewish state that would be democratic, egalitarian and peaceful. My primary mission is to leave behind for my children and grandchildren a state that is loyal to these principles and values. The occupation of a people, while denying its basic rights, robbing its lands and trampling its dignity, is turning us Israelis into prisoners--prison guards spend a significant part of their lives behind prison walls."
(Akiva Eldar, 14 May 2008)

"We underscore that delivering or attempting or conspiring to deliver material support or other resources to or for the benefit of a designated foreign terrorist organization, such as Hamas, could violate U.S. civil and criminal statutes and could lead to fines and incarceration."
(Victoria Nuland, 24 June 2011)

"From all information I have been able to gather, the land in this neighbourhood [the area around Safed] appears to be particularly favourable for agricultural speculation."
(Moses Montefiore, May 1839)

"I am sure if the plan I have in contemplation should succeed, it will be the means of introducing happiness and plenty into the Holy Land. In the first instance I shall apply to Mohhammad Ali for a grant of land for fifty years; some one or two hundred villages; giving him an increased rent from ten to twenty percent, and paying the whole in money annually at Alexandria, but the land and villages to be free during the whole term, from every tax or rate either of Pasha or governor of several districts; and liberty being accorded to dispose of the produce in any quarter of the globe. This grant obtained, I shall, please Heaven, on my return to England, form a company for the cultivation of the land and the encouragement of our brethren in Europe to return to Palestine. Many Jews emigrate to New South Wales, Canada, and c.[sic]; but in the Holy Land they would find a greater certainty of success; here they will find wells already dug, olives and vines already planted, and a land so rich as to require little manure. By degree I hope to induce the return of thousands of our brethren to the Land of Israel. I am sure they would be happy in the enjoyment of the observance of our holy religion, in a manner which is impossible in Europe."
(Moses Montefiore, 24 May 1839)

"If the decision comes down to brutal occupation forever to maintain the Jewishness of the state OR true democracy, which would mean no Jewish state, I would have to choose the latter--but there is nothing easy or wishful in me writing that, and I hope it never comes to that (though more and more it seems like it will)."
(Allison Benedikt, June 2011)

"Israel is the most prominent example of a state that won recognition without having recognized borders (nor does it have them now). In effect, recognizing a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders would constitute the first recognition of the Green Line (the demarcation line in the 1949 armistice agreement) as Israel's defined eastern border."
(Akiva Eldar, 28 June 2011)

"An official document of the Israeli Mission to the European Union, under the heading 'Premature Recognition of a Palestinian State,' is a masterpiece of selective use of agreements and statements. The authors of the document have evinced amazing skill at acrobatics between the lines of a number of UN resolutions concerning the conflict. Not to Israel's benefit, the document opens a series of explosive Pandora's boxes."
(Akiva Eldar, 28 June 2011)

"I was in Tehran earlier this year and failed to see any demonstrations in the centre of the city, though there were plenty of riot police standing about. I was therefore amazed to find a dramatic video on YouTube dated, so far as I recall, February 27, showing a violent demonstration. Then I noticed the protesters in the video were wearing only shirts though it was wet and freezing in Tehran and the men I could see in the streets were in jackets. Presumably somebody had redated a video shot in the summer of 2009 when there were prolonged riots."
(Patrick Cockburn, 27 June 2011)

"My activism against the Israeli occupation is linked to my Jewish-secular background, the values of equality and morality in the home of my parents [who were] natives of Prague who managed to escape from it immediately following the Nazi occupation in March, 1939. During the 1990s the Jewish element in my life became stronger and I became more interested in the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Because Israel considers itself the country that represents all the Jews of the world, my participation in this voyage is my way of declaring that Israel is not acting on my behalf."
(Vivienne Porzsolt, June 2011)

"It is not true that we will be entering Israeli waters. We will be sailing through Gaza waters. Ms Clinton's comments are disgraceful. She has essentially given the green light to Israeli Defence Forces to use violence against participants in the flotilla."
(Paul Murphy, 24 June 2011)

"Ross is trying to peddle the illusion that the most right-wing government Israel has ever seen will abandon the strategy of eradicating the Oslo approach in favor of fulfilling the hated agreement. In an effort to save his latest boss from choosing between recognizing a Palestinian state at the risk of clashing with the Jewish community and voting against recognition at the risk of damaging U.S. standing in the Arab world, Ross is trying to drag the Palestinians back into the 'peace process' trap. If Obama really intended to justify his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, he would not have left the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the hands of this whiz at the never-ending management of the conflict."
(Akiva Eldar, 4 July 2011)

"We had breakfast with [Israeli prime minister Ehud] Barak, TB [Tony Blair] giving him his tuppenceworth of advice. I sensed Barak was more on top of things than before but he despised Arafat, felt he was a liar and that he just used the other Arab leaders. They went over the Jerusalem problem, TB saying he could see how hard it would be for any Israeli PM to hand it over, that it would be like giving Westminster to Germany."
(Alastair Campbell, 7 September 2000)

"If I had a bit more time, we could definitely sort out this Middle East peace process."
(Tony Blair, 6 September 2000)

"I am not for initiating a war. But I am against concessions in any area, even if adamancy brings war. An Arab threat of war should not prevent any action [deemed necessary] by us."
(Moshe Dayan, 8 June 1954)

"For years, Jews of Middle Eastern descent faced discrimination, so now they, too, have found living space among the religious nationalists, and are drowning their social frustrations in hatred of a common enemy that has even less status, and faces even worse discrimination, than they do: the Arabs."
(Gideon Levy, 7 July 2011)

"The left hounded the Haredim as it never hounded the national religious camp. Settlers who invaded Palestinian neighborhoods in the territories and Arab neighborhoods in Israel never experienced ugly persecution and denunciations of the kind endured by Haredim who "invaded" Ramat Aviv. Settlers who shot children in the territories were never condemned the way Haredim who open Chabad kindergartens in Tel Aviv are. Those who torched Palestinian fields and burned down mosques were treated more forgivingly than Haredi men who urged residents of secular neighborhoods to pray."
(Gideon Levy, 7 July 2011)

"I think this should stop. I don't see any difference between Maaleh Adumim and Kfar Sava or between Ariel and Netanya. If there is a fair for [new immigrants], they [settlements in the West Bank] should have equal rights to present their communities as well."
(Danny Danon, July 2011)

"We are now in the third mutation and the supreme source of authority in the post Holocaust world [is] not science. The supreme source of authority is human rights and therefore any hatred of Jews has to be legitimated in terms of human rights. ... That is what makes the new anti-Semitism new and that is why it was able to defeat at a stroke the immune system: if you’re against racism, who are the new racists? The Jews."
(Jonathan Sacks, July 2011)

"Be it resolved, that the Central Conference of American Rabbis adds its voice to the demand that the Jewish population of Palestine be given the privilege of establishing a military force which will fight under its own banner on the side of the democracies, under allied command, to defend its own land and the near East to the end that the victory of democracy may be hastened everywhere."
(Central Conference of American Rabbis, February 1942)

"They ought to take you b......s out and shoot you."
(Emanuel ('Manny') Celler, 1944)

"Although we realized our dream of establishing a Jewish state, we are still at the beginning. Today there are only 900,000 Jews in Israel while the greater part of the Jewish people is still abroad. Our next task will not be easier than the creation of the Jewish state. It consists of bringing all Jews to Israel. You saw how difficult it was to bring in and to absorb 200,000 immigrants. But we are determined to bring millions more and I am positive that we will bring them. We appeal chiefly to the youth in the United States and in other countries to help us achieve this big mission. We appeal to the parents to help us bring their children here. Even if they decline to help, we will bring the youth to Israel, but I hope that this will not be necessary."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1 September 1949)

"I saw you in Israel earlier this year, you told us that while you would like to see some immigration of American Jews to Israel, particuarly those with know-how - specialists, technicians ... you did not expect and would not indulge in any organized campaign for the immigration of American Jewish youth. [If your 1 September 1949 statement is really your policy the American Jewish Committee will] almost certainly [campaign against this policy]."
(Jacob Blaustein, 19 September 1949)

"we know there are no final settlements in history, there are no eternal boundaries and there are no final political claims and undoubtedly many changes and revisions will yet occur in [the map] of the world."
(David Ben-Gurion, 3 December 1947)

"If you will let me say so, every man in leadership suffers a grave danger from the intoxication of victory, and the mark of great statesmanship, which I hope and believe you will show, is restraint and moderation, and [I hope you will] apply this particularly to what in America has developed into a critical situation, the importance of which you may not realize. ... There is wide-spread Catholic indignation at your removal of some government offices to Jerusalem, and certain other conduct of yours with respect to Jerusalem."
(Joseph M Proskauer, April 1949)

"The United States should seek to allay the deep resentment against it that has resulted from the creation of Israel. In the past we had good relations with the Arab peoples. ... Today the Arab peoples are afraid that the United States will back the new State of Israel in aggressive expansion. They are more fearful of Zionism than of Communism, and they fear the United States, lest we become the backer of expansionist Zionism. On the other hand, the Israelis fear that ultimately the Arabs may try to push them into the sea."
(John Foster Dulles, 1 June 1953)

"[The US must] show the capacity to influence British and Israeli policies, which now tend to converge in what is looked upon as new phase of aggression against Arabs."
(John Foster Dulles, May 1953)

"Today the Arab peoples are afraid that the United States will back the new State of Israel in aggressive expansion. They are more fearful of Zionism than of Communism, and they fear the United States, lest we become the backer of expansionist Zionism. On the other hand, the Israelis fear that ultimately the Arabs may try to push them into the sea."
(John Foster Dulles, 1 June 1953)

"If there is anything to be learned from years of disappointment and failure, it’s that the so-called peace process is simply a vehicle for Israel to pretend there is some potential for progress even as on the ground they are making it impossible because of their settlement project. There is a basic dishonesty here. The United States, instead of saying, 'This is a fraud,' says instead Israel wants to see a two-state solution, and thus provides a cover for Israel to expand its settlements on the ground and make an outcome absolutely impossible."
(Henry Siegman, July 2011)

"The “Boycott Law” is a very clever piece of work. ... The law bans all calls for the boycott of the State of Israel, 'including the areas under Israeli control'. Since there are not a dozen Israelis who call for the boycott of the state, it is clear that the real and sole purpose is to outlaw the boycott of the settlements. In its initial draft, the law made this a criminal offense. That would have suited us fine: we were quite willing to go to prison for this cause. But the law, in its final form, imposes sanctions that are another thing. According to the law, any settler who feels that he has been harmed by the boycott can demand unlimited compensation from any person or organization calling for the boycott – without having to prove any actual damage. This means that each of the 300,000 settlers can claim millions from every single peace activist associated with the call for boycott, thus destroying the peace movement altogether."
(Uri Avnery, 18 July 2011)

"I believe that the Israeli government, the Knesset and the vast majority of the people want the law to be enforced in the area east of the Green Line, just as they want it to be enforced to the west of it. But in the present situation, unfortunately, there is no equal treatment for Jews and Arabs when it comes to law enforcement. The legal system that enforces the law in a discriminatory way on the basis of national identity, is actually maintaining an apartheid regime."
(Shlomo Gazit, 19 July 2011)

"Demand for housing is high in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other main cities where most employment is concentrated. The shortage of property is exacerbated by a large number of homes owned by American and European Jews who visit Israel two or three times a year"
(Harriet Sherwood, 17 July 2011)

"The power of the threat of the popular majority that is taking shape against the government - in addition to the anti-democratic determination to maintain control of it - - are harbingers of the danger that the coming elections will be called off. The first part of the plan, which is the process of being implemented, is enacting the law to enable voting abroad. In a country that many have chosen to leave and in which Jews receive citizenship on the spot, this means a de facto cancellation of the elections. The law has three right-wing "teeth" to bolster it: First, most former Israelis who chose to move to a place without hamsins, missiles and an alienated government support the right and its adventures from a safe distance. Second, under cover of the Law of Return, tens of thousands of religious Jews who visit Israel can receive citizenship for the purpose of long-distance voting, so as to help choose the government in a country where they don't live. Lastly, the Interior Ministry has the power to create hundreds of thousands of "Pollards": Just as the incarcerated Jonathan Pollard received long-distance citizenship by means of a temporary order, it will be possible to add to the voter registration lists hundreds of thousands of Haredim from Brooklyn, who haven't even bothered to visit here."
(Sefi Rachlevsky, 25 July 2011)

"The reasonable right parties have their roots at home. The Germans in Germany, the Swedes in Sweden and so on. I think that Israel is also a country that says this is our homeland and we can't open the borders and let everyone in as happened in Europe. That is a reason that Israel today has more trust in the right-wing parties in Europe than in the left-wing parties."
(David Lasar, July 2011)

"Forty lawmakers from both the coalition and opposition Wednesday submitted a proposal to the Knesset for a new Basic Law that would change the accepted definition of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state." The bill, initiated by MKs Avi Dichter (Kadima ), Zeev Elkin (Likud) and David Rotem (Yisrael Beiteinu ), and supported by 20 of the 28 Kadima MKs, would make democratic rule subservient to the state's definition as "the national home for the Jewish people." The legislation, a private member's bill, won support from Labor, Atzamaut, Yisrael Beiteinu and National Union lawmakers."
(Jonathan Lis, 4 August 2011)

"It is not fair. The Jews are only one-third of the overall population and only have a very small share of the land."
(David Ben-Gurion, July 1947)

"abandoned Arab villages had to be removed"
(David Ben-Gurion, 19 July 1948)

"One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. People ask how can these nice Jewish boys and girls become monsters once they put on a uniform. I think the major reason for that is education."
(Nurit Peled-Elhanan, August 2011)

"Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has studied the content of Israeli school books for the past five years, and her account, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, is to be published in the UK this month. She describes what she found as racism– but, more than that, a racism that prepares young Israelis for their compulsory military service."
(Harriet Sherwood, 7 August 2011)

"It's not that the massacres are denied, they are represented in Israeli school books as something that in the long run was good for the Jewish state. For example, Deir Yassin was a terrible slaughter by Israeli soldiers. In school books they tell you that this massacre initiated the massive flight of Arabs from Israel and enabled the establishment of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. So it was for the best. Maybe it was unfortunate, but in the long run the consequences for us were good."
(Nurit Peled-Elhanan, August 2011)

"What needs to happen at this point is a one-state solution, where Palestinian refugees are allowed to go back to their homes, where Israel is a state for Jews and non-Jews alike, a state for its citizens. And this one-state solution is inevitable. I think the choice that Israeli Jews have is whether they accept it peacefully, following the model in South Africa, or do they wait a few decades and have to deal with a much more violent uprising on the part of the Arab Israeli population and the population in the West Bank and Gaza? But I think, one way or the other, it’s inevitable that Israel can’t exist as a Jewish state that doesn’t give equal rights to its non-Jewish Arab citizens."
(Nir Rosen, 21 August 2007)

"Don't talk about how unfortunate you are, talk about what your rights are."
(Reuven Abergil, 7 August 2011)

"We have a demographic problem. But it is not centered on the Palestinian Arabs in the territories, but on Israeli Arabs."
(Benjamin Netanyahu, December 2003)

"We have Arab citizens in the State of Israel. This is our greatest problem. Finish with Gaza, finish with Judea and Samaria, and the biggest problem remains."
(Gideon Ezra, some date before 10 August 2011)

" the regime knows that the Israeli middle class would refuse to pay for the occupation. The regime is unwilling to give up the occupation, so it convinces the masses that the occupation has no economic price for them. We don’t need peace: we can go on like this and have a good life. (Convincing Israelis that the other side does not want peace is another component of the same ideology.) But to keep this lie alive, they have to deliver. And the Israeli governments cannot deliver. The middle class hears the promises of the good life and reads reports on diminishing unemployment rates and strong growth, but it sees a different reality: it gets poorer all the time."
(Ran HaCohen, 8 August 2011)

"Perhaps not the whole course of the war, but certainly the fate of our Ottoman Ally, could have been settled out of hand, if England had secured a decision in that region, or even seriously attempted it. Possession of the country south of the Taurus would have been lost to Turkey at a blow if the English had succeeded in landing in the Gulf of Alexandretta"
(Paul von Hindenburg, some date after 1918)

"What is to be done with the Arabs? Would the Jews expect to be strangers among the Arabs or would they want to make the Arabs strangers among themselves?... The Arabs have exactly the same historical right and it will be unfortunate for you if – taking your stand under the protection of international plunderers, using the underhand dealings and intrigue of a corrupt diplomacy – you make the peaceful Arabs defend their right. They will answer tears with blood and bury your diplomatic documents in the ashes of your own homes."
(Ilya Rubanovich, 1886)

"The Zionists’ Palestine affair can be characterised as a gross example of the deception of the working classes of that oppressed nation by Entente imperialism and the bourgeoisie of the country in question pooling their efforts (in the same way that Zionism in general actually delivers the Arab working population of Palestine, where Jewish workers only form a minority, to exploitation by England, under the cloak of the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine)."
(Communist International, 28 July 1920)

"A Jewish statelet in the heart of the Middle East can be an excellent instrument in the hands of the imperialist states. Isolated from the Arab masses, this state will be defenseless and completely at the mercy of the imperialists. And they will use it in order to fortify their positions … The Arabs will also receive “political independence.”… In this way they hope to isolate and paralyze the Arab proletariat in the Haifa area, an important strategic center with oil refineries, as well as to divide and paralyze the class war of all the workers of Palestine."
(Revolutionary Communist League, September 1947)

"What Dichter proposes is to put an end to the official definition of Israel as a 'Jewish and Democratic State'. He proposes instead to set clear priorities: Israel is first and foremost the nation-state of the Jewish people, and only as a far second a democratic state. Wherever democracy clashes with the Jewishness of the state, Jewishness wins, democracy loses. This makes him, by the way, the first right-wing Zionist (apart from Meir Kahane) who openly admits that there is a basic contradiction between a 'Jewish' state and a 'democratic' state. Since 1948, this has been strenuously denied by all Zionist factions, their phalanx of intellectuals and the Supreme Court. What the new definition means is that the State of Israel belongs to all the Jews in the world – including Senators in Washington, drug-dealers in Mexico, oligarchs in Moscow and casino-owners in Macao, but not to the Arab citizens of Israel, who have been here for at least 1300 years since the Muslims entered Jerusalem. Christian Arabs trace their ancestry back to the crucifixion 1980 years ago, Samaritans were here 2500 years ago and many villagers are probably the descendents of the Canaanites, who were already here some 5000 years ago."
(Uri Avnery, 12 August 2011)

"When you listen to the tape of the meeting, you realise the board was stampeded by an incoherent ramble from the man who protested about the degree, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld. It makes you understand how McCarthyism worked. You simply get a scurrilous smear based on nothing: the guy brought no paperwork, was asked no questions and everyone flew off into the night unaware of the uproar they would create."
(Tony Kushner, August 2011)

"Racists are not fully human. It doesn't serve them. It's not good for anyone to be a racist. It's not good for them. They don't benefit from it. You have to ask yourself: do they get security? do they get support from millions of people? do we all understand support Israel in its fight against the Palestinians? And no longer is this true. So, I think that the time for trying to understand Israelis is over. I was a young man when I joined the anti-apartheid movement and at the beginning I wanted to understand the whites. A lot us did. And a black person, a colleague, said to me then, and I will never forget it, 'The time for understanding the whites is over. Now we want to understand the black people and help them. Don't worry about the whites. They don't matter. In the future, when we will have a society without apartheid, they will live like human beings. At the moment, they don't live like human beings because anyone who enslaves another is not free.' You're not free if you're not allowing other people the same freedom. So the time for understanding Israelis is over."
(Haim Bresheeth, 11 May 2010)

"While the world’s statesmen have dithered, Israel has created a system of apartheid on steroids, a horrifying prison with concrete walls as high as twenty-six feet, topped with body-ravaging coils of razor wire. Spaced along these walls are imposing guard towers that harbor bunkers from which trespassers can be shot by Israeli soldiers. From this physical segregation—one land for Israelis; another, unequal land for Palestinians—flows a torrent of misery, violence and human rights abuses. The West Bank suffers from acute shortages of water, housing, jobs and healthcare. Palestinian children are separated from their parents, denied access to hospitals and stoned and beaten by Jewish settlers. Human rights sanctioned by international law, including the right to health, the prohibition on transferring populations into occupied territories and equal treatment before the law are routinely violated."
(Stephen Robert, 12 August 2011)

"De facto, the Palestinians have been expelled from East Jerusalem. Most were never citizens but permanent residents whose status was revocable and not transferable to spouses and children."
(Stephen Robert, 12 August 2011)

"The Arab Spring should make it abundantly clear that the Jewish state is on the wrong side of history. When, exactly, the tipping point will come is not predictable. But when that point arrives, it will bring tremendous risks for Israel, and for almost half the Jews in the world who reside there. That Israel has the upper hand now portends nothing about the future. A small state of 7 million holding 4 million neighbors in prison, without opportunity, sufficient medical care, food, water and equal justice is not a sustainable situation. When, eventually, stasis gives way to unimaginable change, it will be too late to alter course. Israel, “right or wrong,” a position taken by many, will lead to a catastrophe. It represents a suspension of critical thought; characteristic of many radical ideologies. Friends of Israel would serve it better to know the true facts and then drive Israel toward a moral and practical solution."
(Stephen Robert, 12 August 2011)

"Many believe there is an international campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. At this point Israel is delegitimizing itself."
(Stephen Robert, 12 August 2011)

"A lot of the population regards what Israel is doing as pretty similar to what we were doing. I mean we drove away the indigenous population, kind of exterminated them. It's obviously the right thing to do because we did it and Israel is kind of reviving, renewing it."
(Noam Chomsky, 28 July 2011)

"Even if we put moral and legal considerations aside, you would think that an honest and rational social movement (if we can even call this movement in Israel that) that is trying to imitate the spreading Arab Spring, would figure out that Israel's military spending added to the overall cost of the occupation, the colonies, their infrastructure, the wall, etc. are the main reason behind the massive inequalities in Israel and the extremely unjust distribution of wealth (one of the highest in the developed world). It is equivalent to Afrikaaners, say, demonstrating in Cape Town in the 1980s for better housing for the middle class (read: all white), while completely ignoring apartheid and its crimes. It would have been a joke then. It is a joke now--a nasty one. Most Arabs are watching this copycat Israeli attempt in amusement and a good deal of disgust. It is the epitome of hysterical denial of the colonial reality. ."
(Omar Barghouti, August 2011)

"If you move [invade Lebanon], you move alone. Unless there is a major, internationally recognized provocation, the United States will not support such an action."
(Alexander Haig, October 1981)

"unless there was an internationally recognized provocation and unless Israeli retaliation was proportionate to any such provocation, an attack by Israel into Lebanon would have a devastating effect in the United States"
(Alexander Haig, May 1982)

"For Ben-Gurion, meanwhile, there was little question about how best to achieve Israel's goal of maximum territorial expansion."
(Simha Flapan, August 1987)

"They will be astonished by our ingratitude."
(Felix zu Schwarzenberg, 1849)

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