"It is undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years, they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many await in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighbouring lands, for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations that come with occupation. So, let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn its back on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own". Barak Obama , 44th President of the United State - His speech at Cairo University (Thursday June 4 2009) soon after he became president.
The [1917] Balfour Declaration "is one of the most important letters in history...It demonstrates Britain's vital role in creating a homeland for the Jewish people. [2017] is an anniversary we will be marking with pride".
Theresa May, PM of Great Britain at a dinner for Conservative Friends of Israel, London 12 December 2016.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable ".John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United State - on the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress, The White House, March 13 1962.
"Israel's existence is a priori protection for American oil interests in the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Iran ".
I L Kenan , Chief Propagandist of the Israeli Lobby in testimony before the [U.S.] Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives (July 22-23, 1970).
"You cannot teach a man anything...you can only help him find it within himself".
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Italian anstronomer, philosopher, physicist, engineer and mathematician.
"The problem with Israel...is that it arrived too late. The very idea of...a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded, is rooted in another time and place".
Tony Judt (1948-2010), British historian and essayist, writing in the NY Review of Books 50, no. 16 (2003): "Israel, The Alternative".
"What can we learn today from looking back at the fateful decision made in the late 1940s by a small group of American officials to recognise Israel as a predominantly Jewish state...The events must seem far away to many Americans. Historical memories or reinventions of history are part and parcel of the narrative of current conflicts. So Americans who wish to undersatnd the present problems...would do well to brush up on their history".
William B Quandt, Professor of Politics, University of Virginia (USA) in his Foreword to the book "A Calculated Risk" by Evan Wilson.
"News is what someone, somewhere is trying to suppress; the rest is just advertising".
The Press British Magnate Alfred Harmsworth (1965-1922), later Lord 1st Viscount Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail during the WW1 decade.
"Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence, and only gives in when confronted with greater violence".
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), Philosopher, Revolutionary and Writer in "The Wretched of The Earth".
"You think there is a magic wand here? I disagree. I am asked if we will forever live by the sword - YES".
B Netanyahu addressing the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee - 26 October 2015
"The US has vetoed 42 UN Security resolutions that are critical of Israel. It has exercised its veto 83 times in total. And the resolutions that have been passed [against Israel] are being flouted".
Alan Duncan, Conservative British MP. in a speech at The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), London 14 October, 2014.
"The strong take what they can and the weak grant what they must".
Thucydides, Athenian Historian, Political Philosopher and General circa 460BC - circa 400BC.
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not a lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought".
John F Kennedy (1917-1963). 35th US President
"'War of Production' sounds the note of reality for today, and tomorrow. But in our world, there is still a role to be played by magic".
Salvador Dali (1904-1989) writing in 1942 while in New York about the idea of this magic called 'camouflage' which hid all the instruments of war. This process called upon all architects, landscape architects and designers to participate in creating this 'magic'.
"Revolution we ever bear in mind but its name we never utter".
A French saying.
George Orwell (1903-1950), English Novelist, Journalist and Critic.
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth".
Oscar Wilde (1853-1900), Irish Playright, Novelist, Essayist and Poet.
The Balfour Declaration "has also been interpreted as giving priority to a small minority of Jews over the mass of people in Palestine. It is idle to propose that preference should be given to one-tenth who have gone to the country [Palestine] only lately over the nine-tenths who have been there, from father to son, for generations".
Commenting on the possible appointment of Herbet Samuel as the first British High Commissioner to Palestine: "there is no doubt that the people of the country [Palestine], when you select a man of the religion of only one-tenth of the inhabitants and send him to rule the whole country, must feel suspicious".
Lord Sheffield (1875-1931) as quoted in a FO document, June 1920.
"The state I took part in founding had ended long ago and I am not interested in what it has become. It is ludicrous, blunt, vile, dark, sick and it will not last”.
Yoram Kaniuk, Israeli writer (1930-2013). In 2011, Kaniuk won a milestone ruling in Israel's constitutional law when the district court in Tel Aviv accepted his appeal to change the clause in his Israeli identity card from "Jewish" to "No Religion". His grandson followed suit.
"Without preparation, I told [Michael von] Newlinsky that we imagine that Palestine would be given to us for £20 million ($100 million [in 1896]). Two million would be given to Palestine on the basis of the capitalisation of its present [1896] yield of £80,000 annually. With the other £18 million, we should free Turkey from the Control Commission”.
Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), founder of political Zionism, from a Personal Diary entry 18 May 1896.
"We shall endeavour to expel the poor population [of Palestine] across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for it in the transit countries, but denying it any employment in our country”.
Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), founder of political Zionism, from a Personal Diary entry 12 June 1895.
"If we keep these lands, popular [Palestinian] resistance to the occupation is sure to rise, and Israel's army will be used to quell that resistance, with disastrous and demoralising results”.
Israeli General Matityahu Peled (1923-1995), addressing Israeli Cabinet meeting under Levi Eshkol immediately after the June 1967 war.
"The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomenon of the late 20th century. Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in. This makes historians, whose business it is to remember what others forget, more essential...”
Eric Hobsbawn, CH FBA FRSL (1917-2012), British Marxist Historian.
"Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and in-human 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.”
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948).
"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty”
Thomas Jefferson (1762-1826), 3rd U.S. President (from1801-1809) and the author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
"A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Russian Novelist, Dramatist and Historian.
The worst falsification of history is "the replacement of a genuine history of the people with religious narrative that pretends to be history”
Professor Basem Ra'ad of Al-Quds University and author of "Hidden Histories: Palestine and The Eastern Mediterranean" - in an interview in Electronic Intifada 16 August 2010.
"The history of 1948 especially of the ethnic cleansing, is directly connected to the peace process today [2010] and to the shape of any future solution".
Dr Ilan Pappe in 'Out Of The Frame' Pluto Press 2010.
"Apartheid was an extension of the colonial project to dispossess people of their land. That is exactly what has happened in Israel and the occupied territories; the use of force and the law to take the land. That is what apartheid and Israel have in common.
Ronnie Kasrils, the Jewish South African cabinet minister and former ANC guerrilla, on a visit to Jerusalem, February 2009.
"The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state."
Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African prime minister from 1958 until his assassination in 1966, and architect of the "grand apartheid" vision of the Bantustans.
"A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory".
Definition of ‘Nation’ (Oxford dictionary) Origin:Middle English: via Old French from Latin natio(n-), from nat- 'born', from the verb 'nasci'. This definition does not include ‘religion’.
"If the Israelis and others want to know why the conflict still persists today, they can review the information here [The Atlas of Palestine 1948] and wake up from their collective amnesia about what really happened in Palestine in 1948".
Dr Salman Abu-Sitta, author of the impressive 400-page "Atlas of Palestine, 1948" published by The Palestine Land Society, (2004).
"Except for the extermination of the Tasmanians, modern history recognises no cases in which the virtually complete supplanting of the indigenous population of a country [the Palestinians] by an alien stock has been achieved in as little as two generations...Our natural tendency to assume that what exists today has always been, may afford us psychic peace but only at the terrible cost of denying reality. And once historic reality has been denied, our capacity to understand and react meaningfully to the present is similarly destroyed”
Dr Janet L. Abu-Lughod, American Sociologist/Demographer, with major contributions to World-systems Theory and Urban Sociology. Extracted from "The Demographic Transformation of Palestine".
"The Zionists have not changed their objectives since the Basel Conference of 1897”
Dr Haider Abdul-Shafe'e, Former Head of The Palestinian Delegation to The Madrid Peace Conference - In Conversation with Professor Francis Boyle (just before Dr Haider died September 2007).
"No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another”
George Antonius (1891-1942), Lebanese-Palestinian Historian, Diplomat and Author of the seminal book "The Arab Awakening" (1939).
"Every new conquest [by Israel] becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression”
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Philosopher, Historian & Social Critic - Excerpt from his last letter written in 1970 just before he died.
"It's really quite an amazing fact that [the Palestinians] are such a household name but we know so little about them: who they are, how they came to be, what do they want, how they live."
Bishara Doumani, Associate Professor of History at UCLA - California.
"The Arabs have been there [in Palestine] for thirteen centuries - that is to say, for as long as the Jews during their first occupation of a patch of the country and for nearly twice as long as the Ten Tribes that constituted the ancient Kingdom of Israel”
Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), Universal Historian - from the foreword to "The Transformation of Palestine".
"We [Israelis] possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets...most European capitals are targets of our air force.
The Palestinians should be deported. Two years ago, only 7% or 8% of Israelis were of the opinion that this would be the best solution. Two months ago [January 2010] it was 33%. Now, according to a Gallup Poll, the figure is 44%.”
Martin Levi van Crevel (b. 1946) Israeli Military Historian and Theorist.
"Erect a Jewish State at once, even if it is not in the whole of the land [of Palestine]. The rest will come in the course of time. It must come.”
Ben Gurion accepting Lord Peel's Commission recommending the Partition of Palestine in 1936.
"No return to the 1967 borders. No discussion on the Permanent Status [of a Palestinian State]. No withdrawal from the Jordan Valley. No negotiations with the PLO. No to a Palestinian State”
Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995), Israeli Prime Minister.
"If we move into a region where there are wild animals to which Jews are not accustomed – big snakes etc. – I shall use the natives, prior to giving them employment in the transit countries [read: expulsion], for the extermination of these animals.”
Theodore Herzl from his unpublished diary.
"The question of the Holy Places [Jerusalem]. These places have lost forever the faculty of belonging exclusively to one faith, to one race or to one people.”
Theodore Herzl in a letter March 1899 to Y. Zia Al-Khalidi, Palestinian Member for Jerusalem in the Ottoman Parliament.
"What we are proposing...is to prosecute a purely defensive economic boycott that will undermine [Germany] and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends. They have flaunted and persisted in flaunting and defying world opinion”
Samuel Untermeyer (1858-1940), President of the World Jewish Economic Federation, from his 'Holy War' speech as published in the N.Y.Times on 7 August 1933.
"Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
Lord Arthur James Balfour, born in 1848 excatly 100 years before the establishment of Israel (d.1930), British Foreign Secretary (1916-1919). The 'Balfour Declaration' was named after him.
“Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice.”
“We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house”
“There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population”
Moshe Dayan (1915-1981), Israeli General.
"My dear Palestinian brothers and sisters, I have come to your land and I have recognised shades of my own."
Farid Esack (b.1959), South African Writer and Political Activist - Minister in Nelson Mandela's Government.
"My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no traveller"
Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), Palestine's National Poet.
“Go back where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came ”
James Baldwin (192401987), American Novelist and Playwright.
“There will be times when nations - acting individually or in concert - will find the use of force not only necessary but also morally justified.”
No, not Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld, but President Barack Obama in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize 2009.
“It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth ”
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel de Tocqueville (1805-1859), French Political Thinker and Historian.
“The pre-eminent obstacle to peace is Israel's colonisation of Palestine. Israel's occupation of Palestine has obstructed a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land, regardless of whether Palestinians had no formalised government, one headed by Yasser Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas, or with Abbas as president and Hamas controlling the parliament and cabinet."
Jimmy Carter, U.S. President who negotiated the Camp David peace accord, 1979.
“More than twenty years ago, we in the United Nations took the lead from civil society when we agreed that sanctions were required to provide a non violent means of pressuring South Africa to end its violations.
Today, perhaps we and the United Nations should consider following the lead of a new generation of civil society who are calling for a similar non violent campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel to end its violations.”
Miguel D'Escoto Brockman, President of the U.N. General Assembly, 29th November 2008.
The U.S. gave $2.4 billion in aid to Israel in 2008. However, "the cash does not entitle a U.S. President to tell us how to live."
Israel Katz (Efrat Illegal Settlement), 2009.
"Let me be clear: the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla was completely unacceptable...we will expect the Israeli inquiry to be swift, transparent and rigorous.
"Let me also be clear that the situation in Gaza has to change. Humanitarian goods and people must flow in both directions. Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp."
British PM David Cameron, 27 July 2010 Ankara.
"We build small havens here. We are the people of the Bible. If Obama fights what God has done in bringing the people of the Bible here...he will fall. Now the question is: Who is the boss? God? or Obama?"
Arie Lipo, Spiritual Leader of Havat Gilad Illegal Settlement, 2009.
"The settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward"
Barack Obama, 44th U.S. President. Quote from 2009.
"Grab the hilltops and stake your claim. Everything we don't grab will go to them [The Palestinians]"
Ariel Sharon (1928-2014), Israeli General and Prime Minister. Quote from 1998.
“The reason that Israel has been able to appropriate Palestine unto itself with American aid and support is that Israel controls the explanation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At least 90% of Americans, if they know anything at all of the issue, know only the Israeli propaganda line. Israel has been able to control the explanation, because the powerful Israel Lobby brands every critic of Israeli policy as an anti-semite who favours a second holocaust of the Jews.”
Paul Craig Roberts, economist, 2007.
"The public almost automatically associates Jews and Israel. The press continues to refer to "the Jewish State." Israeli politicians often speak "in the name of the Jewish people." Yet the Zionist movement and the creation of the State of Israel have caused one of the greatest schisms in Jewish history."
Yakov M. Rabkin, professor of history at the University of Montreal, 2006.
“Yesterday’s South African township dwellers can tell you about today’s life in the Occupied Territories... More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail... If apartheid ended, so can the occupation. But the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined. The current divestment effort is the first, though certainly not the only, necessary move in that direction.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 1984.
“The so-called ‘Palestinian autonomous areas’ are Bantustans. These are restricted entities within the power structure of the Israeli apartheid system.”
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), 1st President of free South Africa. Quote from 2001.
"Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans are capable of reacting as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid, which finally changed the balance of forces inside South Africa."
Edward Said (1935-2003), Palestinian-American Literary Theorist, Cultural Critic and Political Activist. Quote from 2002.
“I imagine that if I were a Palestinian of the right age, I would, at some stage, have joined one of the terror organisations.”
Ehud Barak, Israeli General and Prime Minister from 1999 - 2001.
"If Jews in France were required to carry identification cards designating them Jews (even though French citizens), could not acquire land or buy or rent homes in most of the country, were not eligible for service in the armed forces, and French law banned any political party or legislation calling for equal rights for Jews, would France be widely praised in the United States as a "symbol of human decency" (New York Times) and paragon of democracy? Would there be a huge protest if France, in consequence of such laws and practices, was declared by a UN majority to be a racist state?"
Edward S. Herman, economist and media analyst, 1994.
“What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.”
Moshe Dayan (1915-1981), Israeli General. Quote from 1956.
“No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate?”
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British Philosopher, Mathematician, Historian, Social Reformer, and Pacifist, 1970. Today's Russell Tribunals are named in his honour.
"Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people"
Theodor W Adorno (1903-1969), International Sociologist, Philosopher, Musicologist and Composer.
"For the simple reason, we, who have not been through the horrors of an occupation by a foreign power, have no right to pronounce judgment upon what that country does which has been through all that"
Anthony Eden (1897-1977), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 7 April 1955 to 10 January 1957, interviewed in the "Sorrow and the Pity", a Documentary on WWII directed by Marcel Ophuls).