EXAMPLES OF HATE SPEECH

1. "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies ­not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001

2. "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

3. " [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.

4. "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

5. "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.

6. "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.

7. "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969

8. "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.

9. David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.

10. Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget."

11. "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.

12. "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio. (Certainly the FBI's cover-up of the Israeli spy ring/phone tap scandal suggests that Mr. Sharon may not have been joking.)

13. "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.

14. "We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return" David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.

15. " ... we should prepare to go over to the offensive with the aim of smashing Lebanon, Trans-jordan and Syria... The weak point in the Arab coalition is Lebanon [for] the Moslem regime is artificial and easy to undermine. A Christian state should be established... When we smash the [Arab] Legions strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan, too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo." " David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

16. "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum"

17. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.

18. "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

19. Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters" Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.

20. "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.

21. "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

22. "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism,colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.

23. "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.

24. "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." -- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]

25. "We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own." (You Gentiles, by Jewish Author Maurice Samuels, p. 155).

26. "We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent." (Jewish Banker Paul Warburg, February 17, 1950, as he testified before the U.S. Senate).

27. "We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." (Chaim Weizmann, Published in "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920)

"We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one - progressive, liberal - in Israel; and the other - cruel, injurious - in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day."
(Michael Ben-Yair, 3 March 2002)


"Accusations made by a well-established society about how a people it is oppressing is breaking rules to attain its rights do not have much credence."
(Shlomo Ben-Ami, 2000)


"We'll make a pastrami sandwich of them, ... we'll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years' time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 1973)


"People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust. Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment. We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God's dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers."
(Desmond Tutu, April 2002)


"[T]here is no single fixed method for murder and not even for genocide. The author Y. L. Peretz wrote about "the righteous cat" who does not spill blood, but only suffocates. The government of Israel, using the military and its instruments of destruction, is not only spilling blood, but it is also suffocating. ... Of course with our self-righteousness, with our self-adoration in our "Jewish ethics" we make sure to advertise how beautifully the doctors take care of Palestinian victims in the hospitals. We do not advertise how many of those are executed in cold blood in their own homes. So it's not yet genocide of the terrible and unique style of which we were past victims. And as one of the smart Generals told me, we do not have crematoria and gas chambers. Is anything less than that consistent with Jewish ethics? Did he ever hear how an entire people said that it did not know what was done in its name?"
(Shulamit Aloni, March 2003)


"The United States has an absolute, uncompromising commitment to Israel's security and an absolute conviction that Israel alone must decide the steps necessary to ensure that security. That is Israel's prerogative. We accept that. We endorse that. Whatever Israel decides cannot, will not, will never, not ever, alter our fundamental commitment to her security."
(Al Gore, 18 May 2000)


"I first visited Israel in 2000. I already then felt that I am returning home despite the fact that this was a place I never visited. I have a deep affinity with Israel. I have always admired the history of the State of Israel and the hardness and determination of the people that founded it. ... I am also the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and was brought up on the very moving stories of the Holy Land. They mean a lot to me. When I first visited Mt. Olives, Lake Kinneret, Jerusalem, I felt a very deep emotional experience."
(Condoleezza Rice, May 2003)


"Let there be no doubt -- the United States of America stands with the State of Israel also because it is in our national interests to stand with the State of Israel."
(Nancy Pelosi, April 1, 2003)


"I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism."
(Moshe Shertok, 1950s)


"Let us approach them [the Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories] and say that we have no solution, that you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wants to can leave -- and we will see where this process leads. In five years we may have 200,000 less people - and that is a matter of enormous importance."
(Moshe Dayan, September 1967)


"God bless you. God bless our men and women serving on the frontlines today. And God bless our special relationship between the United States of America and the State of Israel."
(Nancy Pelosi, April 1, 2003)


"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves .. politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. ... Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1938)


". it's utterly hypocritical for Israelis to wonder aloud why Palestinians don't pursue a non-violent strategy. One obvious reason is that, whenever they have, Israel brutally represses it."
(Norman G. Finkelstein, 11 September 2003)


"The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates. It includes parts of Syria and Lebanon."
(Yehudah Leib Fischmann, 1947)


"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 17 Bovember 1998)


"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, 'What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'"
(Yitzhak Rabin, July 1948)


"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal Al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
(Moshe Dayan, 4 April 1969)


"Ours will be a brutal land of pens stretching between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean that will make South African apartheid pale."
(Yigal Bronner, 17 September 2003)


"Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French."
(Mahatma Gandhi, 26 November 1938)


"Sharon certainly does have a plan: to protect Eretz Yisrael, avoid returning any territories and make sure the settlements stay where they are. Everything else is tactics."
(Aluf Benn, 18 September 2003)


"Arabs in Israel ... have no right to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, to marry a Jew in Israel according to state law, or even to study in the language of the majority."
(Amnon Rubinstein, 18 September 2003)


" We live in a thunderously failed reality. ... A state lacking justice cannot survive. ... Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger for ever, it won't work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall."
(Avraham Burg, 15 September 2003)


"Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centres of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated."
(Avraham Burg, 15 September 2003)


"Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state"
(Avraham Burg, 15 September 2003)


"Do you want democracy? No problem. Either abandon the greater land of Israel, to the last settlement and outpost, or give full citizenship and voting rights to everyone, including Arabs. The result, of course, will be that those who did not want a Palestinian state alongside us will have one in our midst, via the ballot box. The prime minister should present the choices forthrightly: Jewish racism or democracy. Settlements, or hope for both peoples."
(Avraham Burg, 15 September 2003)


"The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes ['kushim'] and for those there is no value."
(Chaim Weizmann, around 1917)


"We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back."
(Theodore Herzl, 12 June 1895)


"Exploiting the genuine security related worries of the Israeli people and the majority's wish for a political parting from the Palestinians, the Sharon government is constructing a system of fences that will not achieve separation, that will not draw a border, and that will not, eventually, bring security. What we are facing in the "fence" is yet another typical, thoroughly calculated "Sharonic" act of deception. The real purpose of the walls is very different. They are intended as another layer--maybe the ultimate one--in the complex matrix of control which constitutes the Israeli occupation: the settlements, the roads, the roadblocks, the curfews, the closures, and the use of brute military force. The walls that Sharon is building now are intended to render Israel's hold over the land it captured in 1967 irreversible. They are the last nail in the coffin of the two-states solution. We shall wake up, in another year and a half from now, to a drastically different reality: a cruel state consisting of pens enclosures will stretch between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean."
(Yigal Bronner, 23 September 2003)


"Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
(Moshe Dayan, unknown date)


"Consider Jenin and Warsaw. In both cases, the world, Western democratic countries stood by and watched the slaughter. Horrified but unwilling to act. But today, in Jenin, unlike during the Nazi slaughter of the Jews in Warsaw, no one can say they didn't know."
(James Petras, April 2002)


"[I]n Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country ... The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."
(Arthur James Balfour, 11 August 1919)


"There is no terrible regime - Columbia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile during the time of the colonels, Burma, Taiwan, Zaire, Liberia, Congo, Sierra Leone - there is not one that does not have a major military connection to Israel. Israeli arms dealers are there [acting as] mercenaries - the guy behind Noriega was Michael Harari, an Israeli, who got out of Panama. Israeli mercenaries in Sierra Leone go around the UN boycotts of what are called blood diamonds, same in Angola. Israel was very involved in South Africa, of course, during the apartheid regime."
(Jeff Halper, 20 September 2003)


"Israel has also become the main subcontractor of American arms. Just last year, Israel signed a contract to train and equip the Chinese army. It signed another multi-billion dollar contract to train and equip the Indian army. What is it equipping them with? It is equipping them with American weapons."
(Jeff Halper, 20 September 2003)


"When AIPAC sells Israel to Congress, it doesn't go to Congressmen and ask them to support Israel because it is Judeo-Christian, or because it is the 'only democracy in the Middle East,' which it also does. It sells it on this basis: 'You are a member of Congress and it is your responsibility to support Israel, because this is how many industries in your state have business links to Israel, this is how many military research people are sitting in universities in your district, this is how many jobs in your district are dependent on the military and the defence industry,' and they translate it down to the extent to which your district is dependent on Israel. Therefore, if you are voting against Israel, you are voting against the goose that lays the golden egg. In most of the districts in the United States, members of Congress have a great dependence on the military. More than half of industrial employment in California is in one way or another connected to defence. Israel is right there, right in the middle of it all. And that is part of its strength."
(Jeff Halper, 20 September 2003)


"Israel is very important, because on the one hand it is a very sophisticated, high-tech, arms developer and dealer. But on the other hand, there are no ethical or moral constraints: there is no Congress, there are no human rights concerns, there are no laws against taking bribes - the Israeli government can do anything it wants to. So you have very sophisticated rogue state - not a Libyan rogue state, but a high tech, military-expert rogue state. Now that is tremendously useful, both for Europe and for the United States. For example, there are American Congressional constraints on selling arms to China because of China's human rights problems. So what Israel does is it tinkers with American arms just enough that they can be considered Israeli arms, and in that way bypasses Congress."
(Jeff Halper, 20 September 2003)


"I don't think we can dismantle the matrix of control. I think it has gone too far, and that the occupation is permanent. We are in a state of apartheid. But not everybody agrees with me - Uri Avnery doesn't agree with me, the people who are in favour of a two-state solution still think that we can end the occupation, or that we can roll it back enough that a Palestinian state will emerge. But the danger in being for a Palestinian state is that if you don't understand the control dimensions, then you are actually agitating for a Bantustan. I mean, Sharon also wants a Palestinian state; he wants a state that is completely controlled by Israel. So if you only look at territory and you don't look at the issue of control, you end up advocating a Bantustan."
(Jeff Halper, 20 September 2003)


"I was recently at a conference with John Dugard, who is now the Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights for the Occupations Palestinian Territories, and is originally from South Africa. He was (jokingly) offended that apartheid was being maligned [by its comparison the Israeli occupation]. In South Africa you didn't have apartheid on the roads, you didn't have walls being constructed."
(Jessica Montell, September 21, 2003)


"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, 2003)


" We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should manoeuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise position. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism."
(Yehoshafat Harkabi, 2 November 1973)


"Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs' acts are legendary, the Israelites did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, they did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon, nor of the source of belief in the God of Israel. These facts have been known for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and nobody wants to hear about it."
(Ze'ev Herzog, 29 October 1999)


"All these events [in the biblical books of Exodus and Joshua] are practically contradicted by archaeology."
(Ze'ev Herzog, 23 December 1999)


"Even orders given by a government elected by a perfectly formal democratic process can be criminal orders. The French in their colonies and the Americans in Vietnam provided classic examples of war crimes perpetrated by democratic governments."
(Ze'ev (Zeev) Sternhell, 17 October 2003)


"In fact, I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in full view of nightly TV audiences, has performed such miracles of detailed sadism against an entire society and gotten away with it."
(Edward Said, September 25, 2003)


"The obvious intention of the Israeli government is to see that the reality of forced poverty and starvation, brought on by the imposition of the wall and the new "closed zones" become so unbearable for communities in the northern West Bank that people choose to leave in the hope of finding a better life. The village of Jubara is just one of many cases being fatally affected in this latest attempt by Israel and its military to cleanse the recently seized "closed zone" of all its Palestinian inhabitants and thus annex the land, and its existing illegal settlers to Israel proper."
(Mustafa (Mustapha) Barghouti, October 27, 2003)


"DiY media analysis: It is relatively easy to locate bias and imbalances in the media. An obvious way into it is to note the language used to describe news actors and assess whether the same words are used for similar actions or behaviours. Look for the language used to describe political stories. Who are the 'terrorists'?; and who the 'activists', 'fighters' or 'guerrillas'? Which governments are described in negative terms as 'extreme' or 'corrupt' and which in more positive terms? Check which side in a conflict are said to 'kill', 'murder' or commit 'massacres' and which are said simply to 'respond', 'strike' or commit actions which result in 'deaths'? Is it always the case that these descriptors are simply factual terms?"
(David Miller, 2003)


"It's been a long time since I've felt so small, uncomfortable and red-faced as during the show of whining and whimpering organized by Israel at The Hague. ... The Palestinians are fighting occupation and we want the world to stand by us as we pay the price for that occupation. Sooner or later, the fence will fall, just like the Berlin Wall. ... Exploiting bereavement and wallowing in self-pity is fitting for soap operas - not for the strongest country in the Middle East."
(Yoel Marcus, 27 February 2004)


"Is it conceivable that somebody on our side has decided that all of Palestinian society is the target? ... [Israel's] war without questions intensifies and broadens the circles of hatred for generations."
(Alex Fishman, October 2003)


"The depressing truth is that Israel's current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews."
(Tony Judt, 23 October 2003)


"While Israeli forces were engaged in what many termed a brutal - some even say criminal - campaign to crush Palestinian militants and terrorist cells in West Bank towns, U.S. military officials were in Israel seeing what they could learn from that urban fight."
(Christian Lowe, 10 June 2002)


"[Y]ou have here in the United States the very powerful role played by the Israel lobby on Amnesty International USA. They are very powerful; they apply enormous pressure on Amnesty International USA, headquartered in New York. Amnesty International USA pretty much kowtows to them, and they use contributions to make sure that Amnesty International USA tows the line on Israel, and Amnesty International USA pays about 20% of the London budget. So that has an impact over in London too."
(Francis Boyle, Summer 2002)


"make their life so bitter that they will transfer themselves willingly"
(Binyamin (Benny) Elon, some date around 2003)


"[Some people believe] a mistaken claim holding that Zionism's main rationale was to create a sanctuary for persecuted Jews"
(David Breakstone, 5 November 2003)


"I am prepared, as an American and a Jew, to make the well being of Israel my primary concern"
(Gary Rosenblatt, 7 November 2003)


"The delusions, the self-righteousness, and the disassociation from a hostile world and the distancing from universal norms are symptoms of a society sinking into apartheid, as the South Africans who experienced that descent can attest. The hiding behind anti-Semitism may make an impression on the Europeans, but it will not be long before the ostracism will penetrate the walls of self-righteousness and bring them crashing down."
(Meron Benvenisti, 6 November 2003)


"The issue of Palestinian refugees resonated with me because I myself was a refugee. ... We came to the U.S. in August 1944 as part of a token group of about 1,000 mostly Jewish refugees ... In 1987, when I read Simha Flapan's The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, I was so shocked and disbelieving that it took me a second reading of his book to come to terms with what he wrote at the outset: that the 1948 war was as needless and unnecessary for the "security" of Israel as was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon of 1982. I learned that ... the 1948 war was not defensive, but a war to gain more territory than the U.N. had allotted for the Jewish state and to "cleanse" the area of Palestinian Arabs. I learned that even before the May 15 invasion by Arab armies, Jewish forces had succeeded in expelling some 300,000 Palestinians from their homes, but another 400,000 Palestinians remained in areas that the Jews coveted. Since the Jewish population of Palestine in 1948 was only about 600,000, the Ben-Gurion leadership required war in order to rid the new Jewish state of most of its Arab population."
(Ronald Bleier, November 1992)


"The guideline of our policy has always been the idea that a permanent situation of no peace and a latent war is the best situation for us, and that it must be maintained at all costs. ... we are becoming stronger year by year in a situation of impending conflict where it is possible that actual fighting may break out from time to time. SUch wars will usually be short and the results guaranteed in advance, since the gap between us and the Arabs is increasing. In this way we shall move on from occupation to further occupation. ... this criminally mischievous policy has led us into the crisis we are living through today"
(Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 30 November 1973)


"We have not been seeking peace for twenty-five years -- all declarations to that effect have been no more than coloured statements or deliberate lies. There is of course no assurance that we could have made peace with the Arabs if we had wanted to. However, it has to be heavily emphasized that we have not only made no attempts to seek peace, but have deliberately and with premeditation, sabotaged every possibility of doing so."
(Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 30 November 1973)


"I want the Arabs to see Jewish lights every night 500 meters from them."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 1980)


"We're involved here ... in a struggle for the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jews, as opposed to those who want to force us to be a state of all its citizens."
(Limor Livnat, 2002)


"Indeed, the most pernicious aspect of a political philosophy like Zionism that masquerades as democratic is that it requires an enemy in order to survive and, where an enemy does not already exist, it requires that one be created. In order to justify racist repression and dispossession, particularly in a system purporting to be democratic, those being repressed and displaced must be portrayed as murderous and predatory. And in order to keep its own population in line, to prevent a humane people from objecting to their own government's repressive policies, it requires that fear be instilled in the population: fear of "the other," fear of the terrorist, fear of the Jew-hater. The Jews of Israel must always be made to believe that they are the preyed-upon. This justifies having forced these enemies to leave, it justifies discriminating against those who remained, it justifies denying democratic rights to those who later came under Israel's control in the occupied territories."
(Kathleen Christison, 8 November 2003)


"I think that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this. It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the indigenous people of this land that drives us out of our minds."
(Haim Hanegbi, 8 August 2003)


"It would be quite astounding if Israel, the US's most loyal ally, which we now know has at least one secret prison, wasn't offering its services to the US. Israel has decades of expertise in torturing and interrogating Arab prisoners -- exactly the skills the Americans now need since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq."
(Dalia Kerstein, November 2003)


"Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."
(George H. W. Bush, September 1998)


"Our claim that Israel has fulfilled its side of the 'road map' is seen as lacking credibility because not only have we not evacuated the illegal outposts, we are working in every way to whitewash their existence and build more."
(Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Autumn 2003)


"We don't have unlimited time ... More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against 'occupation,' in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle - and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state."
(Ehud Olmert, November 2003)


"We don't have unlimited time ... More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution ... we may have to espouse unilateral separation. We won't need the Palestinians' support for that. What we would need is to pull ourselves together, to determine where the line should run. ... [The fence would] ultimately become part of [the unilateral plan]"
(Ehud Olmert, November 2003)


"The fear of the loss of the majority has already yielded plans for campaigns against the danger, such as the projects for increasing the Jewish birth rate, granting voting rights to expatriates or even to Jews wherever they may be."
(Meron Benvenisti, 20 November 2003)


"Israel and the Palestinians are sinking together into the mud of the "one state." The question is no longer whether it will be binational, but which model to choose."
(Meron Benvenisti, 20 November 2003)


"It's a unitary state controlled by one dominant national group, which leaves the other national group disenfranchised and subject to laws "for natives only," which for the purposes of respectability and international law are known as laws of "belligerent occupation." ... That's the situation nowadays."
(Meron Benvenisti, 20 November 2003)


"We should say we accept a two-state solution, but that it means going back to the 1967 borders, and a fully independent and sovereign Palestinian state. We should give them six months. If there is no decision, we should say Israel, by its own choice, doesn't want a two-state solution. If Israel wants a one-state solution we accept; but 20 years from now, we're going to ask for one person, one vote."
(Ali Jirbawi, November 2003)


"If you look at the drive for a two-state solution in the past, it was always to prevent conflict. What is becoming more prevalent is that people are saying we have to do it because if we don't we're going to end up with a bi-national state. ... If you look at all the surveys of public opinion, the one issue that unites the Jewish population of Israel is that more than 90 per cent say they want to retain a Jewish majority. The problem of the right wing is that they want a Greater Israel including the occupied territories, without any withdrawal. The irony is by doing that they invite a bi-national state."
(David Newman, November 2003)


"In progress in the occupied territories is a war of repression entirely subservient to the ideology of the settlement drive. The Palestinian population is being subjected to starvation, denial of medical treatment, demolition of homes and economic strangulation. I will take no part in these war crimes, nor will I serve as a fig leaf for them."
(Idan Landau, July 2001)


"Benny Morris used to be a "Young Turk", but now he's become an old jerk with a vengenace."
(Avi Shlaim, 8 November 2003)


"The trees grow back and ultimately we hope to harvest them in the place of the unwanted inhabitants of the area."
(Yossi Peli, 14 November 2003)


"The life of the Palestinians has indeed become hell. Most of them live below the poverty line, many on the threshold of hunger, some in an actual state of hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children suffer from malnutrition. Every village has become a prison camp, completely surrounded by roadblocks. Traffic is well-nigh impossible. Many Palestinians cannot reach their place of work, hospital, university or school or bring their produce to market. Israeli troops prowl in the towns and villages, demolishing homes, arresting or killing activists and, at the same time, women and children, too. The distant sound of an airplane engine is enough for the whole population to hold their breath."
(Uri Avnery, 14 November 2003)


"Palestine will be as Jewish as England is English."
(Chaim Weizmann, 1921)


"It was decided and carried out: they washed her, cut her hair, raped her and killed her."
(David Ben-Gurion, 1949)


"What answer do we have to the question: Why should Natasha from Kiev, whose ancestors had no connection to the Jewish people, be preferred to Ahmad, whose family tilled the land around Safed for centuries?"
(Jonathan (Jonathon) Rosenblum, 1999)


"The mass non-Jewish immigration undermines the very legitimacy of Israel. The spate of bills introduced by Arab Knesset members to amend the definition of Israel as a Jewish state and to recognize an Arab right of return derive their credibility from the non-Jewish immigration."
(Jonathan (Jonathon) Rosenblum, 1999)


"[M]ass immigration of non-Jews has the potential to trigger a social conflagration the likes of which we have never seen. Israelis of Middle Eastern descent, who had just begin to recover from the devastation of their own absorption in the country, feel they are being shunted aside in favor of those who are not even Jewish. The resentment aroused by this sense of being shoved back into the underclass has little to do with religion.

The pork shops and churches of the non-Jewish immigrants are merely the most potent symbols of the contempt in which the Middle Eastern population feels it is held. Even crucifix-wearing, pork-eating Russians are considered preferable to them."
(Jonathan (Jonathon) Rosenblum, 1999)



"The credibility issue is extremely important. On numerous occasions the IDF has put out lying accounts of incidents, and in the end the Palestinian version turned out to be true. This tradition of lying is very dangerous for the resilience of the society, especially if the lies are wrapped in a security cloak."
(Gideon Levy, 23 November 2003)


"Ben-Gurion gave the official version. He denied any IDF involvement [in the Qibya massacre] ... This was not Ben-Gurions first lie for what he saw as the good of his country, nor was it to be the last, but it was one of the most blatant."
(Avi Shlaim, 2000)


"it is permissible to lie for the sake of the Land of Israel"
(Yitzhak Yizernitzky, unknown date)


"Without lies, it would be impossible to talk about peace with the Palestinians for 36 years while at the same time seizing more and more Palestinian land. Without lies, it would be impossible to claim that there is no partner for the road map, while at the same time injecting more and more money into outposts that the road map calls for dismantling. Without lies, it would be impossible to promise "painful concessions" in exchange for peace, while at the same time terming people who concluded such an agreement "traitors.""
(Akiva Eldar, 24 November 2003)


"[I]n Israel, lying has become the norm among the working levels of the army, the legal establishment and the diplomatic corps. Lying has become a way of life for commanders and soldiers, lawyers and clerks, most of whom are far from having right-wing views and many of whom loathe the occupation."
(Akiva Eldar, 24 November 2003)


"While the politicians lie in order to perpetuate the occupation, the workers learn to lie in order to justify it. Israel Defense Forces soldiers have become used to seeing settlers prepare a road to yet another outpost in the morning, and then hearing on the radio in the evening that the defense minister and the prime minister "vehemently deny" the existence of any new outposts. So what do they do? They say (perhaps even to themselves) that this is a "security road.""
(Akiva Eldar, 24 November 2003)


"Members of the Shin Bet security service know that not every Palestinian who was executed without trial was truly a "ticking bomb." They have become used to "cutting corners" and to living with the lie. Analysts understand that it is impossible to defeat a people fighting for its land and that there is no basis for the claim that there is no Palestinian partner for a fair division of the land. But they have learned that it does not pay to tell the leaders the truth."
(Akiva Eldar, 24 November 2003)


"The soldiers who harden their hearts at roadblocks, the pilots who loose bombs in the middle of cities, the attorneys who whitewash and the spokesmen who lie are not people who lack moral values. Most are merely victims of the situation created by the occupation."
(Akiva Eldar, 24 November 2003)


"Today there is no separation [between an anti-Semitism that should be condemned and a legitimate criticism toward Israel's policies]. We are talking about collective anti-Semitism."
(Ariel (Arik) Sharon, 24 November 2003)


"Our sufferings have granted us immunity papers, as it were . . . After what all those dirty goyim have done to us, none of them is entitled to preach morality to us. We, on the other hand, have carte blanche, because we were victims and have suffered so much. Once a victim, always a victim, and victimhood entitles its owners to a moral exemption."
(Amos Oz (born Klausner), 1982)


"The failure to differentiate between civilians and terrorists turns all the Palestinians into potential suicide bombers."
(Yosef Paritzky, 2003)


"The world is rightly horrified at the cruel and bloody deaths of Israeli civilians, including babies and small children, inflicted by terrorist suicide bombers. Grievous though every one of these deaths most certainly is, it cannot be denied that during the three years of the Second Intifada the Israelis have killed three times as many Palestinians, some of them terrorists (in illegal targeted assassinations) but most of them innocent civilians, including babies and pregnant women."
(Gerald Kaufman, 22 November 2003)


"The prime minister has a plan. First he has to complete the eastern security fence. Then he will declare an enclave consisting of 52 percent of the West Bank "a temporary Palestinian state." The working premise of this plan is that 300,000 or more Palestinians will find themselves imprisoned between the fence and the Green Line, cut off from the mainstream of West Bank life, and will migrate slowly to the enclave."
(Akiva Eldar, 25 November 2003)


"Better Sharm-el-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm-el-Sheikh."
(Moshe Dayan, 1967)