Israel Quotes

“Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and the fountains, but the water itself.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“I summarize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as two peaceful peoples who form the majority, caught in the crossfire between extremists who are the minority—each dreaming of annihilating the other they call enemy and danger, and extending their control from the water to the water, fueled by hate, revenge and anger.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“But what choice does it have? As long as Israel is perceived by its enemies to be vulnerable, many Arabs and radical Muslims will continue to make Israelis kill them... When Israeli soldiers kill Arabs by accident, they mourn—and it causes psychological damage to those soldiers, and to all of Israeli society. The wars the Arab states have instigated are bloody and cruel, and a heavy price is paid by Israel, even when it wins. And win it must, because one loss means the loss of Israel.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide, ever. No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide, ever. There is no justification for a genocide. I can’t believe this even needs to be said or is even considered the least bit controversial to state.”
― Candace Owens

“At the end of the day, many people in the twenty-first century cannot continue to accept a colonisation project requiring military occupation and discriminatory laws to sustain itself. There is a point at which the lobby cannot endorse this brutal reality and continue to be seen as moral in the eyes of the rest of the world. I believe and hope this point will be reached within our lifetimes.”
― Ilan Pappé, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic

“I got in trouble many times for saying you don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist. I make no apologies for that. That’s a reality.”
― Joe Biden

“Summud se puede traducir como entereza, firmeza, perseverancia. Es aguantar con firmeza y paciencia frente a una situación muy dura y oprimente que uno no puede cambiar de inmediato. Para los palestinos, summud es una ideología y una estrategia política que consiste en resistir a ser desenraizados y en reafirmar constantemente su presencia en su tierra. Summud es la actitud de estar para quedarse, tomar acción; es un arte de vida, de existir, de trabajar.”
― Irmgard Emmelhainz, Cielo está incompleto, El

“Scrivi, racconta, ogni giorno sprecato è un delitto.”
― David Grossman, Che tu sia per me il coltello

“The Zionist strategy of branding its brutal policies as an ad hoc response to this or that Palestinian action is as old as the Zionist presence in Palestine itself. It was used repeatedly as a justification for implementing the Zionist vision of a future Palestine that has in it very few, if any, native Palestinians.”
― Ilan Pappé, On Palestine

“To Hamas, duly elected by the Palestinians – yet subverted by Fatah – nothing short of the destruction of Israel is an acceptable final outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s in their charter. They do not hide it. They proclaim it with full candor: “Israel with exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated all others before it.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“Ultimately, if the Israeli-Palestinian problem cannot be solved without risking Israel’s demise, then the problem, as viewed with conventional wisdom, and taking into account current international constraints, cannot be successfully solved.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“The first predicament Israel faces is that the majority of Palestinians wish to push it into the sea, and hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims worldwide wish Israel the same deadly fate. To put it plainly, minimizing the size of a Jewish homeland is unlikely to end the large conflict, even if local Palestinians were appeased by this action.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“If one views the problem as a dispute between Israel and only the Arabs living in and around Israel, one may incorrectly conclude that the stateless Palestinians just wish Israel harm because they are being oppressed. These Arabs will be viewed as victims of the military stronger Israelis. But if one uses a wider scope, the global context of the conflict become crystal clear. The overwhelming majority of Arabs, Sunni and Shi’a alike, in twenty-one separate Arab states and in the West Bank and Gaza, together with Muslims in Iran and beyond, wish to eliminate Israel – albeit some in an extended time frame. Through this lens, the tiny Jewish state, which must fend off political, military and economic onslaught, is fairly views as the aggrieved party.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“The problem is not 1967. The problem is the profound nonrecognition by the Arab world of Israel’s birthright.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“Abba Eban, Israel's first ambassador to the United Nations.
He said, “Nobody does Israel any service by proclaiming its ‘right to exist.’ Israel's legitimacy is not suspended in midair awaiting acknowledgment... There is certainly no other state, big or small, young or old, that would consider mere recognition of its ‘right to exist’ a favor, or a negotiable concession.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“Israel is often accused of applying a “disproportionate use of force” against people who publicly call for its annihilation. What could be disproportionate when faced against such an enemy? There is no middle ground. There is no room for negotiation. Such an enemy must be destroyed before it destroys. A more reasonable question is this: Why isn’t it considered a “disproportionate use of force” by so many in the international community when terrorists bomb teenagers eating in pizza parlors?”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“With the exception of the United States—from time to time—and perhaps one or two other small countries, it seems that every nation on earth, plays international politics strictly as a game of real politic. And this they do at everyone else’s expense. The question they ask is not, “Is it right?” The question they ask is, “Is it good for my country economically and politically?”
Today it is never in any other country’s perceived self-interest to take Israel’s side when the competing interests are a block of 21 states that run from the western tip of Africa to the middle of Asia, and the full 57 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“If Israel defends itself too fully from people who joyfully wish it harm—people who behead others as a negotiating tactic—the world will choke Israel economically. If they don’t defend vigorously enough, more of its citizens get killed. The world has imposed the Vietnam standard on Israel: it isn’t currently allowed to end local terrorism by winning! And so, there will be a next war”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“Take Jordan—arguably the friendliest government to Israel in the region. Jordan provides that citizenship is open to any person who is not Jewish.’ Jews once lived in the area that became Jordan, but they are not allowed to live there now-—and this on land that the international community had once set aside to form a Jewish state. Ever wonder why there is never a call to divest assets from Jordan? It is not in the political interest of the leaders of great economies to upset the Arabs.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“Israel must not be larger just to be larger. It must be larger to be economically self-sustaining. It must be larger so that it is strong enough to win political allies. It must be larger so that it will be in a better position to do more good for more people throughout the world.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“literally. They suffer little international wrath for their crimes against civilians—civilians oftentimes in their midst to lend a helping hand. Israel does not enjoy the same luxury. Most of the free press in the Middle East operates out of Jerusalem. This makes sense since Israel is the only democracy in the region. Only in Israel can the press freely operate. It is easier and much safer for a journalist to question Israel than to challenge any other entity in the region.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“Jews are painted by the brush strokes of thousands of years of persecution. Repeatedly reminding the world of the pogroms and the holocaust is both tiresome and has worn thin. But these atrocities are worth remembering. For when Arab fanatics and radical Muslims call for all Muslims to fulfill their duty to kill all Jews wherever they may be found, they are talking about each and every Jew, everywhere, and they are not joking. They are deadly serious.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“If one called this entire zone Arab-Judeo land, and then split it fairly between its residents—289 million Arabs, and 5.4 million Jews—the Jews would be entitled to a state that is at least 10 times the current size of Israel and the territories. To arrive at this figure one must simply divide the number Jews in Arab-Judeo land by the number of Arabs and Jews combined living in Arab-Judeo (5,400,000 Jews divided by 294,400,000). The result is that Jews total only 1.834% of the people of Arab-Judeo land. But 1.834% x 6,155,939 square miles yields nearly 113,000 square miles, a landmass nearly 14 times the size of pre-1967 Israel, and over 10 times the size of Israel and the territories taken together. Apportioning the land evenly on a per person basis is fair and moral in light of the fact that until the de facto expulsion of Jews in the middle of the last century, there were Jews all over Arab-Judeo land.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“What is important here is not to establish the exact size of a future Israel, but rather to refocus the international debate away from how to implement an unworkable two state
solution within the confines of Israel and the territories and toward a debate about the size Israel should be to be a self-sustaining, viable state.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“The question is: How large does Israel need to be in order to be a viable state? All other questions are not matters of life and death. It is not a prerequisite that Arabs and Muslims love Israel for it to prosper. As for Palestinian Arabs, they can live happy full lives in a Jewish state if they accept that they live in a Jewish state. They can resettle and live happy full lives in any one of a number of states with Arab and Muslim majorities. They can also live happy full lives in a new state that can be created for them from within the other Arab states. The Jews of Israel, on the other hand, have nowhere else to go: It is the only state in which Jews are the majority, and so, Israel must be viable.”
― David Naggar, The Case for a Larger Israel

“From the very beginning the idea of an Israeli state was sold to the Western powers as a wedge to keep the Arabs divided.”
― Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revolutionary as Told to George Hajjar

“...I have a strong gut feeling that God won’t be giving us peace any time soon; we’re going to have to make an effort to achieve it on our own. And if we succeed, neither we nor the Palestinians will receive it free of charge.

Peace, by definition, is compromise between sides, and in that kind of compromise, each side has to pay a genuine, heavy price, not just in territories or money but also in a true change of worldview.

That’s why the first step might be to stop using the debilitating word “peace,” which has long since taken on transcendental and messianic meanings in both the political left and right wings, and replace it immediately with the word “compromise.” It might be a less rousing word, but at least it reminds us that the solution we are so eager for can’t be found in our prayers to God but in our insistence on a grueling, not always perfect dialogue with the other side.

True, it’s more difficult to write songs about compromise, especially the kind my son and other kids can sing in their angelic voices. And it doesn’t have the same cool look on T-shirts. But in contrast to the lovely word that demands nothing of the person saying it, the word “compromise” insists on the same preconditions from all those who use it: They must first agree to concessions, maybe even more — they must be willing to accept the assumption that beyond the just and absolute truth they believe in, another truth may exist. And in the racist and violent part of the world I live in, that’s nothing to scoff at.”
― Etgar Keret

“Today we know too much about life under occupation, before and after Oslo, to take seriously the claim that non-resistance will ensure less oppression.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Musa succeeded to leave a great school, one of the greatest heritages in history, to humankind: Zionism, the passionate love to Lord Almighty and motherland.”
― Jeyhun Aliyev Silo, The Quranic Israel The Islamic Zionism

“Finally, Moses Kalimullah gathered an Israeli army and initiated the Zionist war to conquer the whole Holy Land.”
― Jeyhun Aliyev Silo, The Quranic Israel The Islamic Zionism