Arab-Israeli conflict

They [Americans] have allowed unremitting violence between Israel and the Palestinians with hardly an effort to stop that through U.S. leadership. And now, it’s almost too late. ~ Wesley Clark

These quotations relate to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Quotations

Organized alphabetically by author.

• Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or it is the explosive that blows it apart.
  • Yasser Arafat, Palestinian leader, as quoted in Time (New York, 11 November 1974).

• We are not asking for the moon.
  • Yasser Arafat, Palestinian leader, as quoted in the Observer (London, 7 February 1982).

• Whoever thinks of stopping the uprising before it achieves its goals, I will give him ten bullets in the chest.
  • Yasser Arafat, Palestinian leader, as quoted in the Daily Telegraph (London, 19 January 1989), on the Intifada.

• My generation, dear Ron, swore on the Altar of God that whoever proclaims the intent of destroying the Jewish state or the Jewish people, or both, seals his fate.
  • Menachem Begin, Israeli politician, prime minister in a letter to US President Ronald Reagan, as quoted in the Observer (London, 2 January 1983).

• It is … undeniable that no settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged by the hazards and strategy of the armed conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The majority of these refugees have come from territory which … was to be included in the Jewish State. The exodus of Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion. It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.
  • From the "Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine" by Folke Bernadotte. 16 September 1948. United Nations General Assembly Doc. A/648. Part one, section V, paragraph 6.

• These discussions with the Palestinians.... this administration has failed to lead. They came into office basically determined not to do anything that Bill Clinton did. I think that was the basic guideline. And so, they have allowed unremitting violence between Israel and the Palestinians with hardly an effort to stop that through U.S. leadership. And now, it’s almost too late.
  • Wesley Clark, Gen. Wesley Clark Weighs Presidential Bid: “I Think About It Every Day” (2 March 2007)

• The pre-eminent obstacle to peace is Israel’s colonization of Palestine.
  • Jimmy Carter, March 10, 2006 [1].

• We came to a region that was inhabited by Arabs, and we set up a Jewish state. In many places, we purchased the land from Arabs and set up Jewish villages where there had once been Arab villages. You don't even know the names [of the previous Arab villages] and I don't blame you, because those geography books aren't around anymore. Not only the books, the villages aren't around...
  • Moshe Dayan Address at Technion University (19 March 1969) A transcription of the speech appeared in Ha'aretz (4 April 1969).

• We, the people of Palestine, stand before you in the fullness of our pain, our pride, and our anticipation for we long harbored a yearning for peace and a dream of justice and freedom. For too long, the Palestinian people have gone unheeded, silenced and denied, our identity negated by political expedience, our right for struggle against injustice maligned, and our present existence subsumed by the past tragedy of another people
  • Haidar Abd El-Shafi, head of the Palestinian Delegation to the Madrid Peace Conference, Opening Remarks (Madrid, 30 October 1991) [2]

• The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
  • Abba Eban, quoted in The Jerusalem Post (18 November 2002); often misquoted as "Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." The quote is attributed to Abba Eban after the Geneva Peace Conference with Arab countries (21 December 1973).

• In the hyper-sensitized reality of the region in which any criticism of Israel is swiftly and often unfairly branded as anti-Semitic, it can become counterproductive to inflame rather than explain and this means to hear the narratives of both sides, to articulate the suffering on both sides, not just the Palestinians.
  • Jane Fonda, Jane Fonda expresses regret over film fest protest, by Cassandra Szklarski, September 14, 2009.

• The most important departure from determinism during the Cold War had to do, obviously, with hot wars. Prior to 1945, great powers fought great wars so frequently that they seemed to be permanent features of the international landscape: Lenin even relied on them to provide the mechanism by which capitalism would self-destruct. After 1945, however, wars were limited to those between superpowers and smaller powers, as in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, or to wars among smaller powers like the four Israel and its Arab neighbors fought between 1948 and 1973, or the three India-Pakistan wars of 1947-48, 1965, and 1971, or the long, bloody, and indecisive struggle that consumed Iran and Iraq throughout the 1980s.
  • John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2005), p 261
• Palestinians and Israelis were connected by a fatalistic dialectic towards an apocalyptic conclusion. One might argue this dialectic enveloped a land, mythical and actual, spiritual yet earth-bound, ancient yet very much poised towards unfolding actualities. This land conjures images of return and redemptive possibilities. Palestine and Israel are two strands intertwined in our collective imagination. They are linguistically exclusive and yet reference a singular place.
  • [R.F. Georgy] quoted from Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story. May 26, 2014

• Peace is not a discrete event; rather it is a renewable proposition, filled with affirmations designed to mitigate against the collective distrust of two people who knew little beyond hatred, suspicion, blame and counter blame, intellectual gamesmanship, fear, paranoia, historical necessity, retribution, and a host of other deeply engrained emotional projections that are constantly lurking beneath the surface.
  • [R.F. Georgy] quoted from Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story. May 26, 2014.

• If there's something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it's the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016.
• [The Holocaust] must make us think deeply about the responsibility of leadership, the quality of society, and it must lead us to fundamental thinking about how we, here and now, treat the stranger, the orphan and the widow, and all who are like them.
• There is nothing easier than hating the stranger, nothing easier than to stir fears and intimidate. There is nothing easier than to behave like an animal and to act sanctimoniously.
• On Holocaust Remembrance Day we ought to discuss our ability to uproot the seeds of intolerance, violence, self-destruction and moral deterioration.
  • Yair Golan, as quoted in "IDF Deputy Chief Likens 'Revolting Trends' in Israeli Society to pre-Holocaust Germany", Haaretz, 4 May 2016.

• We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon — no alternative.
  • Golda Meir, Israeli politician, prime minister. Life (New York, 3 October 1969).

A man lives in an upper floor of a house that catches fire. In desperation the man jumps out of the window and lands on a passer-by down below, who is grievously injured and becomes an invalid. Between the two, there erupts a deadly conflict. Who is right?
~ Isaac Deutscher

• Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.
  • Golda Meir, Statement to the National Press Club in Washington, D. C. in 1957, as quoted in A Land of Our Own : An Oral Autobiography (1973) edited by Marie Syrkin, p. 242

• The truth is that if Israel were to put down its arms there would be no more Israel. If the Arabs were to put down their arms there would be no more war.
  • Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister. Speech at the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) at the end of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. (August 14 2006). [3]

• [When asked about Peace negotiations] I'll be honest with you. A) This is just really hard. Even for a guy like George Mitchell, who helped bring about the peace in Northern Ireland. This is as intractable a problem as you get. B) Both sides — the Israelis and the Palestinians — have found that the political environment, the nature of their coalitions or the divisions within their societies, were such that it was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation. And I think that we overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran contrary to that. From [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas' perspective, he's got Hamas looking over his shoulder and, I think, an environment generally within the Arab world that feels impatient with any process. And on the Israeli front — although the Israelis, I think, after a lot of time showed a willingness to make some modifications in their policies, they still found it very hard to move with any bold gestures. And so what we're going to have to do — I think it is absolutely true that what we did this year didn't produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted, and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high. Moving forward, though, we are going to continue to work with both parties to recognize what I think is ultimately their deep-seated interest in a two-state solution in which Israel is secure and the Palestinians have sovereignty and can start focusing on developing their economy and improving the lives of their children and grandchildren.
  • Barack Obama, interview with Time, 21 January 2010. [4]

• It will be a war of annihilation. It will be a momentous massacre in history that will be talked about like the massacres of the Mongols or the Crusades.
  • Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League. Interview in Akhbar Al-Yom Newspaper, on the impending Arab attack on the fledgling state of Israel, 29 November 1947

• Whatever the outcome, the Arabs will stick to their offer of equal citizenship for Jews in Arab Palestine and let them be as Jewish as they like. In areas where they predominate they will have complete autonomy.
  • Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, Palestine Post, 21 May 1948, p. 3.

• We, the soldiers who have returned from battles stained with blood; we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes; we who have attended their funerals and cannot look in the eyes of their parents; we who have come from a land where parents bury their children; we who have fought against you, the Palestinians-we say to you today, in a loud and a clear voice: enough of blood and tears. Enough.
  • Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli prime minister. Excerpts of PM Rabin Knesset Speech (21 September 1993)

• Not only [are] our states . . . making peace with each other,. . . you and I, your Majesty, are making peace here, our own peace, the peace of soldiers and the peace of friends.
  • Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Prime Minister. The New York Times, (July 27 1994), after signing a peace declaration with Jordan's King Hussein.

• The greatest security for Israel is to create new Egypts.
  • President Ronald Reagan as quoted in the Observer (London, 27 February 1983).

• We cannot here analyze the entire contradictory and tragic history of the events of the last twenty years, in the course of which the Arabs and Israel, along with historically justified actions, carried out reprehensible deeds, often brought about by the actions of external forces. Thus, in 1948, Israel waged a defensive war. But in 1956, the actions of Israel appeared reprehensible. The preventive six-day war in the face of threats of destruction by merciless, numerically vastly superior forces of the Arab coalition could have been justifiable. But the cruelty to refugees and prisoners of war and the striving to settle territorial questions by military means must be condemned.
  • Andrei Sakharov, Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968)
• Should there be maniacs who raise the idea, they will encounter an iron fist which will leave no trace of such attempts.
  • Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli politician, prime minister, as quoted in the The Times (London, 11 August 1988), on advocates of Palestinian self-government.

• Our image has undergone change from David fighting Goliath to being Goliath.
  • Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli politician, prime minister, as quoted in the Daily Telegraph (London, 25 January 1989).

• It’s true that this conflict is not special in how bad the violations are. What is special is how much the liberal west actively supports [Israel].
  • Kobi Snitz, Israeli mathematician and activist, as quoted in "BDS: how a controversial non-violent movement has transformed the Israeli-Palestinian debate," The Guardian, 16 August, 2018.
• It was a psychological turning point in the history of the Middle East. The speed and decisiveness of the Israeli victory in the Six Day War humiliated many Muslims who had believed until then that God favored their cause. They had lost not only their armies and their territories but also faith in their leaders, in their countries, and in themselves. The profound appeal of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and elsewhere was born in the shocking debacle. A newly strident voice was heard in the mosques; the voice said that they had been defeated by a force far larger than the tiny country of Israel. God had turned against the Muslims. The only way back to Him was to return to the pure religion The voice answered despair with a simple formulation: Islam is the solution.
  • Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), p 45

• A man lives in an upper floor of a house that catches fire. In desperation the man jumps out of the window and lands on a passer-by down below, who is grievously injured and becomes an invalid. Between the two, there erupts a deadly conflict. Who is right?
  • Isaac Deutscher's description of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as quoted by Uri Avnery.