Palestine

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Palestine is a geographic region in Western Asia between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The name was used by Ancient Greek writers, and was later used for the Roman province Syria Palaestina, the Byzantine Palaestina Prima, and the Islamic provincial district of Jund Filastin. It is usually considered to include Israel and the State of Palestine, though some definitions also include parts of northwestern Jordan. Historical names for the region include Land of Israel, the Holy Land, and Canaan. As the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, the region has a long and tumultuous history as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics.

Map of Palestine
Flag of Palestine
Palestine acceded to the Rome Statute, thereby becoming a member of the States Parties of the International Criminal Court. The International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) filed an amicus brief on March 16, 2020, urging the ICC to confirm its jurisdiction over Palestine. ~Marjorie Cohn
Recently, hundreds of PBS stations around the United States were scheduled to broadcast a powerful new Frontline documentary: One Day in Gaza. But viewers tuning in found that it had been replaced...~View the Frontline Documentary on Gaza that PBS pulled, Alison Weir, Council for the National Interest (23 May 2019)
What was all of this area before the First World War when Britain got the Mandate over Palestine? What was Palestine, then? Palestine was then the area between the Mediterranean and the Iraqian border. Eastern West Bank was Palestine. ~ Golda Meir

See Also: 2023 Israel–Hamas war

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

Quotes about[edit]

A[edit]

  • All the regimes in the world have taken advantage of the Palestinian situation. The Arabs have exploited it to cement their authority and the West has taken advantage economically. Everyone has played around with us. When you’re a card, you can never fully know who’s holding you.
  • People don't feel that safe being part of something that will be associated with the U.S. They get intimidated because they think they'll be on some type of grid.
  • The Hamas attack... shook the Middle East and shattered many assumptions and misconceptions about the region. It’s not that Israel was shocked at the daring nature of the attack, but that Israel had long assumed that the Palestinian problem is dead and that there is no need to engage in a so-called peace process — even if managed by the U.S., the least neutral party in the Arab-Israeli conflict outside of Tel Aviv.
  • It pains our people greatly to witness the propagation of the myth that its homeland was a desert until it was made to bloom by the toil of foreign settlers, that it was a land without a people, and that the colonialist entity caused no harm to any human being. No: such lies must be exposed from this rostrum, for the world must know that Palestine was the cradle of the most ancient cultures and civilizations.
    • Yasser Arafat, text of his speech to the UN General Assembly on November 13, 1974, archived by Al-Bab
  • If you want to see the picture, you have to see whole picture, if you talked about violence, let's talk about 4000 Palestinians killed during the last five years while from Israeli side a few hundreds killed, So if you want to talk about the violence and you called this violence "terrorism" Israel kills more, more Palestinian than Palestinian kills on Israel, Second, You have to see both sides. You talk about Hamas, what they did in Israel but don't talk about Israel and what they did in Palestinian Territories.
If you want to talk about the violence and you called this violence "terrorism" Israel kills more, more Palestinian than Palestinian kills on Israel, Second, You have to see both sides. You talk about Hamas, what they did in Israel but don't talk about Israel and what they did in Palestinian Territories." ~ Bashar al-Assad
What do the Palestinians have to do to the Holocaust to pay the price? This is one question we asked. ~ Bashar al-Assad
  • Not there's no Holocaust, let say they exaggerated the Holocaust. We don't say many people...but they say there's Holocaust but they are exaggerating, so there's such perception of this event of this title, the Holocaust, in our region...It's not the matter how many were killed, six million or one million, or half...killing is killing, I mean how many Soviets were killed? eight million, so why didn't we talk about them? the problem is not how many were killed. How do they do use it? what do the Palestinians have to do to the Holocaust to pay the price? This is one question we asked...We know that there was massacre against Jewish and against others...what's going on in Palestine we see it the same way, but you don't see it the same way...
Where is the 'alleged' zeal and passion that they showed towards Syria or the Syrian people? Why haven't they supported Gaza with money and arms? Where are their jihadists and why didn't they send jihadists to defend our people in Palestine? ~ Bashar al-Assad
  • Had this 'Spring' been genuine, it would've started in the backward Arab countries. Were it a call for freedom, democracy, justice, it would've began in the most oppressive and tyrannical states... There is no clearer evidence than their current stand regarding the Israeli aggression against Gaza. Where is the 'alleged' zeal and passion that they showed towards Syria or the Syrian people? Why haven't they supported Gaza with money and arms? Where are their jihadists and why didn't they send jihadists to defend our people in Palestine?
His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people... ~ Arthur James Balfour

B[edit]

  • Dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet. "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
  • Among the most brutal aspects of this period for Palestinians have been the loss of support for their cause in neighboring Arab states. The Arab political party in Israel, Balad, said that by signing this pact, “the UAE has officially joined Israel against Palestine, and placed itself in the camp of the enemies of the Palestinian people.”
    The UAE’s change from supporting Palestinian dignity and freedom to supporting Israel’s never-ending occupation is a calculated move by UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, a shrewd Middle East dictator who uses his country’s military and financial resources to thwart moves towards democracy and respect for human rights under the guise of fighting Islamic terrorism.
  • The United States has played a vital and instrumental role in the decades-long catastrophe that has engulfed the people of Palestine. U.S. leaders and politicians must now confront their country's and, in many cases, their own personal complicity in this catastrophe, and act urgently and decisively to reverse U.S. policy to support full human rights for all Palestinians.
  • A lesson we ignore at our peril is that oppression undermines not only the rights, dignity, and lives of the oppressed but eventually the security of the oppressors as well. The apartheid system that’s been suffocating Palestinians for so long is now also undermining the safety of Israeli civilians.
  • I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

C[edit]

  • The ultimate purpose of my book is to present facts about the Middle East that are largely unknown in America, to precipitate discussion and to help restart peace talks (now absent for six years) that can lead to permanent peace for Israel and its neighbors. Another hope is that Jews and other Americans who share this same goal might be motivated to express their views, even publicly, and perhaps in concert. I would be glad to help with that effort.
  • There are two interrelated obstacles to permanent peace in the Middle East: Some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinian and Some Palestinians react by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories.
  • Israel will never find peace until it is willing to withdraw from its neighbors’ land and to permit the Palestinians to exercise their basic human and political rights ... The current policies are leading toward an immoral outcome that is undermining Israel’s standing in the world and is not bringing security to the people of Israel.
The only way to do it is to treat the Palestinians fairly and let them have their own state alongside Israel. ~Jimmy Carter
  • The legacies of Mandela and Arafat can never be underestimated. They were at the forefront of fighting for freedom for their people. Therefore it is important that we recognise the struggle of the Palestinian people and look at concrete ways in which we can assist them....We need to fight settler colonialism that is taking place in occupied spaces. We need action based on international law... we need your support to confront the continuous attacks that have been taking place at the UN and attacks against international legitimacy and the multilateral valued based international system.

G[edit]

  • Israelis and Palestinians live on the same piece of land namely; Palestine that is located between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. This is a disputed land. In 1948 the majority of the population, three quarters of the population were Palestinians. Less than a quarter of the population were Israelis. They managed to expel the Palestinians from their homes and unilaterally declared a state called Israel. This is inadmissible under international law. No one can legally declare a state on a disputed territory.
  • No influence, direct or indirect, over the Holy Places of Islam will ever be tolerated by Indian Mussulmans. It follows, therefore, that even Palestine must be under Mussulman control. So far as I am aware, there never has been any difficulty put in the way of Jews and Christians visiting Palestine and performing all their religious rites. No canon, however, of ethics or war can possibly justify the gift by the Allies of Palestine to Jews. It would be a breach of implied faith with Indian Mussulmans in particular and the whole of India in general.
  • The Jews cannot receive sovereign rights in a place which has been held for centuries by Muslim powers by right of religious conquest. The Muslim soldiers did not shed their blood in the late War for the purpose of surrendering Palestine out of Muslim control. I would like my Jewish friends to impartially consider the position of the seventy million Muslims of India. As a free nation, can they tolerate what they must regard as a treacherous disposal of their sacred possession?
  • The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood? Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French....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. If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled? Or do they want a double home where they can remain at will? This cry for the national home affords a colourable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews.
  • I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.
  • By 1947, as the colonial powers made their way out of the Middle East and the horrors of the Holocaust came to light, the call for a Jewish homeland, a safe haven, took on a new urgency. Tens of thousands of Jewish survivors from the Nazi death camps were refugees in Europe; their former communities had been destroyed, and third countries had closed the door to Jewish immigration during the Holocaust. A new iteration of a partition plan first put out in 1937 was put forward at the UN, creating two states: one Arab and one Jewish. A new UN census determined that the Jewish population of Palestine had grown to one-third, with the other two-thirds a mix of Muslim and Christian Arabs, but the plan divided the land in half between Jews and Arabs. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved the Partition Plan. On May 14, 1948, as the last British troops departed, Jewish leaders declared the creation of the State of Israel on the land apportioned to them by the UN plan. But Arab countries had rejected the Partition Plan, declaring they would continue to fight for an undivided Palestine. On May 15, they went to war, sending thousands of troops and tanks across the border. The new nation of Israel was already mobilized. Within a year, Israel controlled 78 percent of former British Mandate Palestine, including West Jerusalem, while Jordan now administered the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and its walled old city, and Egypt had control of the Gaza Strip.
    • Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020)
  • The Arabs had lost Palestine, it was a catastrophe, a nakba, as it became known. Several hundred thousand Palestinians had to flee, within the country or into neighboring countries. Palestinians felt they were being made to atone for Europe’s sin of the Holocaust by sacrificing their own land. They took the keys to their houses with them and never gave up on the idea of returning home one day. But in 1967, during six days of war, the Arabs lost more land: Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, including the walled old city that is home to Al-Aqsa mosque, as well as Egypt’s Sinai and Syria’s Golan Heights. Jerusalem was under Jewish rule again for the first time in two millennia. Across the Arab and Muslim world, there was disbelief, shock, and tears. Arabs had put their faith in nationalism and in Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Just a few years prior, in 1956, Nasser had emerged victorious from a war for control over Egypt’s Suez Canal, staring down not only the French and the British but also Israel. The charismatic nationalist had become a hero for millions across the Arab world. How could he have lost this time? Perhaps, some people thought, God had forsaken Muslims; perhaps a return to religion was the answer.
    • Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020)
  • Palestine continued to live in the collective consciousness of millions of Arabs, and Palestinian refugees now lived among them, in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, mostly in tented settlements and shantytowns. The Palestinians had had enough of these large Arab armies that kept losing precious land. The time had come to intensify guerrilla warfare. The man who had risen to lead them was Yasser Arafat, a Palestinian from Gaza, who had become chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969. Armed Palestinian factions that had battled the Israelis alone and alongside the Arabs began to consolidate their grip on the refugee population in Jordan and Lebanon, filling their ranks with more fighters and launching attacks into Israel. The king of Jordan would have none of it—his army crushed the PLO ruthlessly in 1970. More Palestinian fighters, and more refugees, headed to Lebanon.
    • Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020)
  • I urge the Israeli authorities to abide by the laws governing armed conflict, including the proportionate use of force. I call on them to exercise maximum restraint in the conduct of military operations. I likewise urge Hamas and other militant groups to stop the indiscriminate launching of rockets and mortars from highly populated civilian neighbourhoods into civilian population centres in Israel, also in clear violation of international humanitarian law. Densely populated civilian areas must not be used for military purposes.
    • Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General’s Remarks to the General Assembly Meeting on the Situation in the Middle East and Palestine, United Nations Secretary-General, Statements, (20 May 2021)
  • I urge Israel to cease demolitions and evictions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, in line with its obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law. All settlement activities, including evictions and demolitions, are illegal under international law. A revitalized peace process is the only route to a just and lasting solution...Only through renewing our commitment and redoubling our efforts towards a negotiated solution can we bring this cruel violence and hatred to a definitive end.
    • António Guterres, Secretary-General’s Remarks to the General Assembly Meeting on the Situation in the Middle East and Palestine, United Nations Secretary-General, Statements, (20 May 2021)

H[edit]

  • What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen. There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would.
(Balfour Declaration is) the root of the suffering of the Palestinian people... ~ Munib al-Masri
  • Palestine is a state and the International Criminal Court has jurisdiction involving its cases, the ICC prosecutor ruled Thursday, which could pave the way for a war crimes investigation against Israel. A three-judge panel of the ICC Pretrial Chamber must now affirm the decision by Fatou Bensouda. Israel has been accused of committing war crimes in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip... Under Bensouda’s 60-page decision, the ICC may exercise its jurisdiction in “territory” that “comprises the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza.”
  • Until the arrival of Arafat and the Palestinian terrorists, Lebanon was a Christian democracy. But Islamic radicalism could not tolerate either Christianity or democracy. This — not the presence of tiny Israel (one hundred times smaller than its current antagonists) is the root cause of the violence in the Middle East. The cause is Arab intolerance and Islamic hate. One Jewish state among 22 Arab states was one too many. Six million Jews among 300 million Arabs was too much to bear. A sliver of land, less than one percent of the Arab land mass, which belonged to first to the Turks and then to the British was an imperialist outrage.
    • David Horowitz, (July 24, 2006). ""Lebanon is not Innocent"". jewishworldreview.com. Retrieved on 2010-01-04.
  • We salute the Palestinian people of heroic mujahideen as well as every hero and heroine amongst the champions of self-sacrifice who confront the Zionist aggression with their lives and thus foil the wrong ideas of the American administrations which have acted in alliance with their artificial Zionist creation in the crimes they perpetrate and the shame they reap.

K[edit]

  • Anziska quotes the Israeli intellectual Amos Oz: “After Lebanon, we can no longer ignore the monster, even when it is dormant, or half-asleep, or when it peers out from behind the lunatic fringe … It dwells, drowsing, virtually everywhere...” ... Anziska reminds us that America has always shared responsibility for the lopsided competition between Israel and the Palestinians... The US has been complicit in far too many of...[Israel's] useless “victories”.
  • At the beginning of 1968, the word Palestinian was generally used to refer to members of Arab guerrilla units, which were also frequently referred to in the Western press as terrorist organizations. These groups used the label Palestinian, as in the Palestine Liberation Front, the Palestinian Revolution, the Palestine Revolutionary Youth Movement, the Vanguard for Palestine Liberation, the Palestinian Revolutionaries Front, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. At least twenty-six such groups were operating before the 1967 war.

M[edit]

  • When were Palestinians born? What was all of this area before the First World War when Britain got the Mandate over Palestine? What was Palestine, then? Palestine was then the area between the Mediterranean and the Iraqian border. Eastern West Bank was Palestine. I am a Palestinian, from 1921 to 1948, I carried a Palestinian passport. There was no such thing in this area as Jews, and Arabs, and Palestinians, There were Jews and Arabs.
    • Golda Meir, "Iron Lady of Israeli politics", Thames TV (1970)
  • The Palestinian people [do] not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism... For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.
    • Zuheir Muhsin, late Military Department head of the PLO and member of its Executive Council, in an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw (31 March 1977)
  • (Balfour Declaration is) the root of the suffering of the Palestinian people and paved the way for the violation of their rights and the confiscation of their land and capabilities...the British government and everyone who participated in the implementation of this permit, (have responsibility over) the massacres and tragedies that the Palestinian people were subjected to, especially the crime of uprooting and displacing them, which is ongoing.

N[edit]

  • Adjoining Syria is Palestine, for which the British Government holds a mandate from the League of Nations. This is an even smaller country, with a total population of less than a million, but it attracts a greal deal of attention because of its old history and associations. For it is a holy land for the Jews as well as Christians and, to some extent, even the Muslims. The people inhabiting it are predominantly Muslim Arabs, and they demand freedom and unity with their fellow-Arabs of Syria. But British policy has created a special minority problem here—that of the Jews—and the Jews side with the British and oppose the freedom of Palestine, as they fear that this would mean Arab rule. The two pull different ways, and conflicts necessarily occur. On the Arab side are numbers, on the other side great financial resources and the world-wide organization of Jewry. So England pits Jewish religious nationalism against Arab nationalism, and makes it appear that her presence is necessary to act as an arbitrator and to keep the peace between the two. It is the same old game which we have seen in other countries under imperialist domination; it is curious how often it is repeated.
  • During the World War the British armies invaded Palestine and, as they were marching on Jerusalem, the British Government made a declaration in November 1917, called the Balfour Declaration. They declared that it was their intention to establish a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine. This declaration was made to win the good will of international Jewry, and this was important from the money point of view. It was welcomed by most Jews. But there was one little drawback, one not unimportant fact seems to have been overlooked. Palestine was not a wilderness, or an empty, uninhabited place. It was already somebody else's home. So that this generous gesture of the British Government was really at the expense of the people who already lived in Palestine, and these people, including Arabs, non-Arabs, Muslims, Christians, and, in fact, everybody who was not a Jew, protested vigorously at the declaration. These people felt that the Jews would compete with them in all activities and, with the great wealth behind them, would become the economic masters of the country ; they were afraid that the Jews would take the bread out of their mouths and the land from the peasantry.

R[edit]

  • Neither Israeli nor Palestinian society is a seamless, monochrome garment: hope as well as difficulty lies in this recognition.
    • Adrienne Rich "Jewish Days and Nights" in Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, eds., Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2003) and A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008 (2009)
  • It is the psychological problem of how to reconcile two powerful movements — the time-old yearning of the Jews to return to the Promised Land and to possess a home which is theirs as of right, and the Palestinian Arab desire for promotion to national status.
    • Great Britain and Palestine: 1915 - 1939, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1937
  • When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinian homes. And every year Israel receives several billion dollars from the United States – taxpayers money.
  • September 11th has a tragic resonance in the Middle East, too. On the 11th of September 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration which imperial Britain issued, with its army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European Zionists a national home for Jewish people. (At the time, the Empire on which the Sun Never Set was free to snatch and bequeath national homes like a school bully distributes marbles.)
  • In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, I quote, “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.” That set the trend for the Israeli State’s attitude towards the Palestinians.

S[edit]

  • Since 1967, Israel has built more than 130 settlements (and helped build about 140 settler outposts) in the West Bank; today, 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the territory, about 230,000 of them in East Jerusalem...The international laws of war, as well as the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), consider the transfer of an occupying state’s civilian population into the occupied territory to be a war crime...this prohibition is designed to ensure that the occupying power does not demographically engineer the occupied territory.
Israeli settlers, who have full civil and political rights and are seamlessly connected to Israel’s infrastructure and resources, reside alongside millions of Palestinians subject to Israeli military rule who have zero say over how they are governed. Numerous leading Israeli and international nongovernmental organizations have likened this bifurcated system to apartheid.
  • The pleasure of tending, tending
    something that will not be taken away.
    A family, a tree, growing for so long,
    finally fruiting olives, the benevolence of branch,
    and not to find a chopped trunk upon return.
    Confidence in a threshold. A little green.
    And quite a modest green untouched by drama.
    Or a mound of calico coverlets stuffed with wool,
    from one's own sheep, piled in a cupboard.
    To find them still piled. Is that too much?
    Not to dominate. Never to say we are the only
    people who count,
    or to be the only victims,
    the chosen, more holy or precious.
    No. Just to be ones who matter
    as much as any other, in a common way, as you
    might prefer.
    Stones and books and daily freedom.
    A little neighborly respect.
    • Naomi Shihab Nye “What Do Palestinians Want?” in Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018)
  • Palestine is not the original home of the Jews. It was acquired by them after a ruthless conquest, and they have never occupied the whole of it, which they now openly demand. They have no more valid claim to Palestine, than the descendants of the ancient Romans have to this country. The Romans occupied Britain as long as the Israelites occupied Palestine, and they left behind them in this country far more valuable and useful work. If we are going admit claims based on conquest thousands of years ago, the whole world will have to be turned upside down.
    • Lord Sydenham, Hansard, House of Lords, 21 June 1922

T[edit]

  • The future will not change if we continue to think with the same concepts of the past... If we believe we have a right to this land and the Israelis believe they are the ones who have a right to this land, we must build a new model. If both of us believe that God gave us this land, we must put history aside and begin to think about the future in different terms.
    • Bassem Tamimi, Palestinian West Bank Protest Leader: 'Israel Killed the Two-state Solution', Haaretz, 17 February 2013
  • The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, said last month that there was a “reasonable basis” to open a war crimes probe into Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip as well as Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank...she recently told The Times of Israel that accusing her of anti-Semitism was “particularly regrettable” and “without merit... I, along with my Office, execute our mandate under the Rome Statute with utmost independence, objectivity, fairness and professional integrity. We will continue to meet our responsibilities as required by the Rome Statute without fear or favor,” she said
  • Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims.
    • Arnold J. Toynbee. Forward to The Transformation of Palestine. Northwestern University Press, USA,1971.
  • I would love to be able to be the one that made peace with Israel and the Palestinians. I would love that, that would be such a great achievement. Because nobody's been able to do it. ... I've had a lot of, actually, great Israeli businesspeople tell me, you can't do that, it's impossible. I disagree, I think you can make peace. I think people are tired now of being shot, killed. At some point, when do they come? I think we can do that. I have reason to believe I can do that.

U[edit]

  • I am deeply alarmed by developments in Gaza after Israel launched a military operation this morning targeting members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement (PIJ), said Tor Wennesland the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. Persistent drivers of conflict, including school demolitions, breed a climate of mistrust and tension between Palestinians and Israelis and undermine the prospect of achieving a political solution, he said. ... The demolition followed an Israeli court order citing safety concerns in response to a petition by a settler organization. Currently, 58 schools, serving 6,500 children, face the threat of demolition due to a lack of building permits that are almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain, Mr. Wennesland said. A child’s right to education must be respected, he said, calling on Israeli authorities to cease such demolitions and evictions, which are illegal under international law
  • The UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process on Wednesday expressed deep concern over the relentless expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. During the last three months, more than 10,000 housing units were advanced... “Settlements further entrench the occupation, fuel violence, impede Palestinian access to their land and resources, and systematically erode the viability of a Palestinian State as part of a two-State solution”, the senior envoy said. “I call on the Government of Israel to cease all settlement activity and dismantle outposts immediately, in line with its obligations under international law,” he added.

W[edit]

  • The most taboo issue on U.S. campuses these days, in many instances, has to do with the vicious Israeli occupation of precious Palestinians. It’s very difficult to have a respectful, robust conversation about that. And I am unequivocal in my solidarity with Palestinian brothers and sisters. And as you’ve heard me say on many times, you know, if there’s a Palestinian occupation of Jews, then I’m unequivocally in solidarity with Jews. I hate injustice. I hate occupation. I’m not in any way going to stop talking about the Palestinian plight and predicament.
  • The United States should have an equal and simultaneous support for both the legitimate security concerns of Israel, and the human rights, dignity and economic opportunities of the Palestinian people... I do not believe the settlements on the West Bank are legal. Also, I would rescind the president's affirmation of sovereignty of Israel over the Golan Heights. I understand the occupation of the Golan Heights, but only until there is a stable government in Syria with whom one can negotiate. According to international law, the occupation of a territory does not give the occupying country a right to annex it.

Z[edit]

  • Both the Germans and the Zionists wanted as many Jews as possible to move to Palestine. The Germans preferred to have them out of Western Europe, and the Zionists themselves wanted the Jews in Palestine to outnumber the Arabs as quickly as possible. (...) In both cases, the purpose was a kind of 'ethnic cleansing', that is, a violent change in the ratio of ethnic groups in the population.

See also[edit]

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