• The time is always right to do
what is right.
~ Martin Luther King Jr.
• If I was an Arab leader I would
never make [peace] with Israel. That
is natural: we have taken their country.
Sure God promised it to us, but what
does that matter to them? Our God is
not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true,
but two thousand years ago, and what
is that to them? There has been
anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler,
Auschweitz, but was that their fault?
They only see one thing: we came here
and we stole their country. Why should
they accept that?
~ David Ben Gurion, quoted in The
Jewish Paradox, by Nathan Goldmann
(former president of the World Jewish
Congress), Weidenfeld and Nicholson,
1978, p. 99.
• The only
thing necessary
for the triumph
of evil is for
good people to
do nothing.
~ Edmund Burke
• A voluntary reconciliation with the
Arabs is out of the question either now
or in the future. If you wish to colonize
a land in which people are already
living, you must provide a garrison for
the land, or find some rich man or
benefactor who will provide a garrison
on your behalf. Or else-or else, give up
your colonization, for without an armed
force which will render physically
impossible any attempt to destroy or
prevent this colonization, colonization is
impossible, not difficult, not dangerous,
but IMPOSSIBLE!…Zionism is a
colonization adventure and therefore
it stands or falls by the question of
armed force. It is important…to speak
Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even
more important to be able to shoot -
or else I am through with playing
at colonizing.
~ Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of
Revisionist Zionism (precursor of Likud),
The Iron Wall, 1923.
• Walk gently, breathe peacefully,
laugh hysterically.
~ Nelson Mandela
• The world stands on three pillars:
The truth, the justice and the peace.
And these three are indeed one. When
justice is served, truth is served, peace is served.
~ Rabbi Shimon Ben-Gamliel, Talmudic sage
• The Balfour Declaration, made in
November 1917 by the British
Government...was made a) by a
European power, b) about a non-
European territory, c) in flat disregard
of both the presence and wishes of
the native majority resident in that
territory...[As Balfour himself wrote
in 1919], 'The contradiction between
the letter of the Covenant (the Anglo
French Declaration of 1918 promising
the Arabs of the former Ottoman
colonies that as a reward for
supporting the Allies they could have
their independence) is even more
flagrant in the case of the independent
nation of Palestine than in that of the
independent nation of Syria. For in
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.'
~ Edward Said, The Question of
Palestine
• There is,
however, a
difficulty from
which the Zionist
dares not avert
his eyes, though
he rarely likes to
face it. Palestine
proper has already
its inhabitants.
~ Israel Zangwill, The Voice
of Jerusalem, London,
1920, p. 88.
• We must continually raise the
demand that our land be returned
to our possession....If there are
other inhabitants there, they must be
transferred to some other place. We
must take over the land. We have a
great and NOBLER ideal than
preserving several hundred thousands
of [Palestinian] Arabs fellahin [peasants].
~ Manachem Ussishkin, 1930 [a leading
Zionist who served as Chairman of the
Jewish National Fund and President of
the 20th Zionist Congress]
• To fall out of step with one’s tribe,
if alienation or dissidence is not your
habitual or gratifying posture, is a
complex and difficult process. It is hard
to defy the wisdom of the tribe, the
wisdom that values the lives of its
members above all others. It will always
be unpopular, always deemed unpatriotic,
to say that the lives of the members of
the other tribe are as valuable as one’s
own. It is always easier to give one's
allegiance to those we know, to those
with whom we are embedded, to those
with whom we share a community of fear.
~ Susan Sontag
•The West won
the world not by
the superiority of
its ideas or values
or religion but
rather by its
superiority in
applying organized
violence.
Westerners often
forget this fact,
non-Westerners
never do.
~ Samuel P. Huntington
• I do not agree that the dog in a
manger has the final right to the
manger even though he may have
lain there for a very long time. I do
not admit that right. I do not admit
for instance, that a great wrong
has been done to the Red Indians of
America or the black people of
Australia. I do not admit that a wrong
has been done to these people by the
fact that a stronger race, a higher
-grade race, a more worldly wise race
to put it that way, has come in and
taken their place.
~ Winston Churchill [to the Peel
Commission in 1937], “who referred to
Arabs as “a lower manifestation,”
who referred to Indians as “a beastly people
with a beastly religion,” who referred
to Palestinians as “barbaric hordes,”
and who proclaimed: "'Keep England White’
• The struggle
is eternal.
~ Ella Baker
• We have to accept the . . . right
of return. We truly expelled them. I
myself was present and took part in
expelling Arabs from Beersheba. I
stood there with a rifle while they
climbed into the trucks. They didn't
resist. If they had, I would have shot
them. What awful hypocrisy . . . for
us to say that we have the right of
return after 2000 years, but they
don't after 50.
~ Hava Keller, Women on Behalf of
Women Political Prisoners [Ma’ariv, June
15, 2001; English translation by
Gila Svirsky]
•If I am not
for myself,
who will be
for me?
But if I am
only for myself,
what am I?
And if not now,
when?
~ Hillel
• We suffer from an incurable
malady: Hope.
~ Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian
poet
• If we know, and do nothing,
we are worse than the murderers
hired in our name.
If we know, then we must fight for
your life as though it were our
own—which it is—and render
impassable with our bodies the
corridor to the gas chamber. For,
if they take you in the morning,
they will be coming for us that night.
~ James Baldwin to Angela Davis
• From the Mediterranean Sea to the
Jordan River there will be no Arab
state.
Judea and Samaria are part of the
Land of Israel. If we want to achieve
Jewish sovereignty, we have to settle.
Those who have the power here will
prevail - and we have the strength. I
read the Bible. It doesn’t talk about the
borders of England. But Eretz Yisrael
[the land of Israel] is in the Bible.
According to the Bible, I have the right
to the East Bank of Jordan too. For my
generation the West Bank is enough. As
for the next generation the East Bank
is
their problem.
~ Matityahu Drobles, co-chair of the
World Zionist Organization's settlement
department and author of a detailed
plan to colonize the occupied territories
[as told to Robert I. Friedman, author of
Zealots for Zion, Random House, 1992,
p.xxiv, in his office at the Jewish Agency
in Jerusalem in the winter of 1991.]
• All land is
holy.
All people are
chosen.
~ Henri Picciotto
• 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 Ha’aretz,
April 4, 1969.
~ Rafeef Ziadah, “We teach life, sir”
• The Arabs will be our problem for a long time,”
Weizmann said,
“It's not going to be simple. One
day they may have to leave and let us
have the
country. They're ten to one, but don't we Jews
have ten times their
intelligence?”
~ Chaim Weizmann in 1919 at the Paris
peace conference, quoted in Ella Winter,
“And Not to Yield”
• I will not drive them out before you
in a single year, lest the land become
desolate and the wild beasts multiply to
your detriment, I will drive them out
before you little by little, until you have
increased and possess the land.
~ Book of Exodus ["Israeli poet Haim
Guri once noticed that Ben-Gurion
(a self-proclaimed athiest - ML)
kept on his desk a piece of paper
with a verse from the book of Exodus,
in which God promises to drive out
the inhabitants of the Land of Israel
and give it to the Jewish people”]
• If your history has
imposed a burden and
an obligation upon
you, it is to defend
justice not Israel.
This is what Judaism,
not Zionism, demands.
~ Dr. Sara Roy, senior
research scholar
[Harvard] and author
• Last night, I tell you, to
watch that [United Nations]
thing on television as I did,”
Reagan said. “Yeah,” Nixon
interjected. Reagan forged
ahead with his complaint: “To see
those, those monkeys from those
African countries—damn them,
they’re still uncomfortable wearing
shoes!” Nixon gave a huge laugh.
~ Ronald Reagan, then
governor of California, to
President Richard Nixon
• Before [the Palestinians’] very eyes
we are possessing the land and the
villages where they, and their
ancestors, have lived...We are the
generation of
colonizers, and
without the steel helmet and the
gun barrel we cannot plant a
tree
and build a home.
~ Moshe Dayan, quoted in Benjamin
Beit-Hallahmi, “Original
Sins:
Reflections on the History of
Zionism and Israel”
• Whatever you
may be sure of,
be sure of this:
that you are
dreadfully
like
other people.
~ James Russell Lowell
(American poet)
• I do not think Nasser wanted war. The
two divisions he sent to The Sinai
would
not have been sufficient to launch an
offensive war. He knew it and we
knew it.
~ Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s Chief of Staff in
1967, in Le Monde, 2/28/68
• Having lived through
apartheid in South Africa.
there’s no doubt in my mind
that Israel is an apartheid
state. I cannot allow in my
name, the same kind of
oppression to go on against
the Palestinians. I have to
speak out against it. And
I have to try and speak out
against it in a rational and
calm voice when really I’m
very angry about it […]
when [Israeli] people say,
well, you South Africans,
you’re biased against us.
We’re not. We’re talking
international law…The
pro-Israeli lobby, the SA
Jewish Board of Deputies
and SA Zionist Federation
try to say that it [the
Palestinian Israeli issue] is
not a simple matter, [they
say that] it’s complicated.
It’s not complicated! It’s
very simple, the simplicity
is that a dominant group
[Jewish Israelis] exclude
the indigenous Palestinian
people from equal rights”.
~ Denis Goldberg, veteran
South African anti-apartheid
freedom fighter, who was
tried alongside Nelson Mandela
• Growing up, my grandparents
being some of the only ones in their
entire family to survive the Holocaust
in Austria,’Never again’ is something
I heard a lot and resonate strongly with.
To me, ‘Never again’ isn’t just for Jews,
it means never again should anyone in
the world have to suffer because of their
religion, race, or what they were born
into. That’s why I came to volunteer in
Palestine. Israel claims to be ‘a
homeland for Jewish people around the
world’, yet by banning and deporting
me and other Jews with differing
political opinions, they have shown
that Israel is a home for Jews only if
they don’t question or speak up about
the government’s apartheid policies.
My ban and deportation from Israel
only confirms what I have seen again
and again in Palestine: that the Israeli
government will do anything to keep
people from seeing its brutal
Occupation, ethnic cleansing, and
daily violations of Palestinians' basic
human rights.
~ Edmond Sichrovsky, grandson of
Holocaust survivors, deported from
Israel for volunteering in Palestine
with the International Solidarity
Movement
• Moshe Dayan, the celebrated
commander who, as Defense Minister in
1967, gave the order to conquer the
Golan...[said] many of the firefights
with the Syrians were deliberately
provoked by Israel, and the kibbutz
residents who pressed the Government
to take the Golan Heights did so less for
security than for the farmland...[Dayan
stated] “They didn’t even try to hide their
greed for the land...We would send a
tractor to plow some area where it wasn't
possible to do anything, in the
demilitarized area, and knew in advance
that the Syrians would start to shoot. If
they didn't shoot, we would tell the
tractor to advance further, until in the
end the Syrians would get annoyed and
shoot. And then we would use artillery
and later the air force also, and that's
how it was...The Syrians, on the fourth
day of the war, were not a threat to
us.”
~ Moshe Dayan, quoted in The New
York Times, May 11, 1997
• Madeline Albright was one of
my earliest lessons in the bankruptcy
of identity politics. It doesn't
matter if you are the first anything
if your politics perpetuate the
status quo of racial violence,
imperial warmaking, and capitalist
extraction/exploitation.
~ Noura Erakat
• Dr. Weizmann [first president of
Israel] told me once how he received
the Balfour Declaration. And I asked
him: “At the time, what did you think
about the Arab question?” He answered,
“As far as the Arab question, the
British told us, that there are
hundreds of thousands of blacks
[kushim] and apparently there
is no value.”
~ Arthur Ruppin, “father of
Zionist settlement,” and proponent
of a "pseudosciertific race theory”
holding that the realization of
Zionism required “racial purity”
among the Jews
• There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’.
There are only the deliberately silenced, or the
preferably unheard.
~ Arundhati Roy, Indian author and human
rights activist
• Israelis like to believe, and tell
the world, that they are running an
'enlightened' or 'benign' occupation,
qualitatively different from other
military occupations the world has
seen. The truth was radically different.
Like all occupations, Israel’s was
founded on brute force, repression
and fear, collaboration and treachery,
beatings and torture chambers, and
daily intimidation, humiliation and
manipulation.... Abuse and torture
of Palestinian prisoners by the GSS
and other security bodies had been
routine at least since the
early 1970's.
~ Benny Morris, Israeli historian,
“Righteous Victims”
• The Israelis made a fence
around the settlement, then they put
in a small gate so we could get to our
olive trees. They gave us the key and
let us come and go for the first year.
Then they changed the lock and
put a guard on. But he doesn't come
on the Sabbath and holidays and when
he is sick. Then one day he doesn't come
at all and you can't get to your land.
Then they declare you are not working
on your land and seize it.
~ Abdul Karim Ahmad, Palestinian
farmer, from Chris McGreal, Villagers
Fear Being Forced Out by Being Locked
In, The Guardian (UK), May 14, 2003.
• Divestment from
apartheid South Africa was
certainly
no less justified because there was
repression elsewhere on the
African
continent. Aggression is no more
palatable in the hands of a
democratic
power. Territorial ambition
is equally illegal whether it occurs
in slow
motion, as with the Israeli
settlers in the occupied territories,
or in
blitzkrieg fashion, as with the
Iraqi tanks in Kuwait. The United
States has a
distinct responsibility
to intervene in atrocities committed
by its client
states, and since Israel
is the single largest recipient of US
arms and foreign
aid, an end to the
occupation should be a top concern
of all Americans.
Almost instinctively, the Jewish people
have always been on the side of the
voiceless. In their history, there is painful
memory of massive roundups, house
demolitions and collective punishment.
In their scripture, there is acute empathy
for the disfranchised. The occupation
represents a dangerous and selective
amnesia of the persecution from which
these traditions were born.
~ Desmond Tutu
• In the 1850’s there was the
Dred Scott decision that said
that black people had no rights
that whites were bound to
respect. The Israelis have taken
the Dred Scott decision and
essentially made it a national
mandate- that Palestinians have
no rights that the Israeli
authorities are bound to respect-
and this is something that you
are confronted with at every
moment that you’re there.
~ Bill Fletcher, Jr.
• Just because you’re too powerful to be
prosecuted doesn’t mean you’re not a murderer.
~ Ferrari Sheppard
• The beauty of anti-racism
is that you don’t have to pretend
to be free of racism to be anti-racist.
Anti-racism is the commitment
to fight racism wherever you find
it, including in yourself. And it’s
the only way forward.
~ Ijeoma Oluo
• Every empire, however, tells itself
and the world that it is unlike all other
empires, that its mission is not to plunder
and control but to educate and liberate.
~ Edward Said
• These [the Ukranian refugees]
are not the refugees we are used
to … these people are intelligent,
they are educated people….This
is not the refugee wave we have
been used to, people we were not
sure about their identity, people
with unclear pasts, who could have
been even terrorists...
~ Kiril Petkov, Bulgarian
Prime Minister
• Podrán cortar
todas las flores,
pero no podrán
detener
la primavera.
[ You can cut
all the flowers,
but you cannot
keep spring
from coming. ]
~ Pablo Neruda