Quotes on Judaism, Zionism, Israel, Jewish Apartheid...

Selected Quotes
from and about Judaism, Zionism, Israel, Jewish Apartheid...

"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."
-- Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.

"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to."
-- Golda Meir (quoted in Chapter 13 of The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace by Alfred Lilienthal).

"We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country .... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
-- Theodore Herzl (from Rafael Patai, Ed. The Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl, Vol I).

"... it is the duty of the [Israeli] leadership to explain to the public a number of truths. One truth is that there is no Zionism, no settlement, and no Jewish state without evacuating Arabs, and without expropriating lands and their fencing off."
-- Yesha'ayahu Ben-Porat, (Yedi'ot Aharonot 07/14/1972) responding to public controversy regarding the Israeli evictions of Palestinians in Rafah, Gaza, in 1972. (Cited in Nur Masalha's "A Land Without A People", 1997, p.98)

Speaking about Zionism, and its effects on the indiginous Palestinians: (quotes from Alfred Lilienthal's The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace):

"We seem to have thought of everything -- except the Arabs" -
- Judah Magnes

"If this be the Messiah, then I do not wish to see his coming"
-- Ahad Ha'am speaking of Zionism.

"I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism."

-- Moshe Sharett, Israel's first Foreign Minister and later a Prime Minister (p.51 Simha Flapan, "The Birth of Israel", 1987).

"The very point of Labor's Zionist program is to have as much land as possible and as few Arabs as possible!"
--Yitzhak Navon ("moderate" ex-Israeli president and a leading labor party politician.) Cited on p.179 of Nur Masalha's A Land without a People who cites Bernard Avishai's The Tragedy of Zionism, 1985, p.340.

"Israel must decide on the source of the authority of the Israeli state and society: either democracy or theocracy. The corrupt combination of state and religion had corrupted both the state and the religious establishment"
-- Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg quoted in The Jerusalem Post of Oct 7, 1999. (http://www.jpost.com/com/Archive/07.Oct.1999/).

"We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel.... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours ... When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle."
-- Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan (Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 4/13/1983, N.Y. Times 4/14/1983).

"Arabs tend to confess; it's part of their nature"
-- Moshe Etzioni, an Israeli high court justice, in an interview with Amnesty International, when asked about the unusually high rate of confessions from Palestinians (indicating Israel's use of torture), 1977. Quote from a Noam Chomsky interview in the progressive.

"One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail."
-- Rabbi Ya'acov Perin in his eulogy at the funeral of mass murderer Dr. Baruch Goldstein (Cited in N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1).

Discrimination Against Non-Jews (Israeli-Arabs) citizens of Israel:

Israeli-Arabs are discriminated against based on military service. Israeli-Arabs don't serve in the Israeli Army and most job applications require, implicitly at least, army service for employment. Also,
"Arab towns and villages have been disadvantaged in the allocation of budgets and services, leading to wide gaps in development between most Arab localities and their Jewish neighbors"
-- Alouph Hareven, Near East Report (AIPAC newsletter), 10/11/1993.

The Christian population of (the ever expanding) Jerusalem was 30,000 in 1948; today it is 2000, due to the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from that and other areas around Israel. (Paul Findley's Deliberate Deceptions, 1996) Unlike Jews, Arabs are always denied a permission to build and expand.

92% of the land in Israel falls under the Administration of the Jewish National Fund, where the land can not be sold to non-Jews. Result: the 18% Israeli-Arabs own only 4% of the land.

If, say, a Peruvian converts to Judaism and emigrates to Israel, he immediately has more rights than Israeli-Arabs who have lived in the land for many centuries.

"Israel was among the countries cited for discrimination in the U.S. State Department's first annual assessment of religious persecution around the world. While Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Serbia and Burma were subject to some of the report's harshest criticism, Israel was cited for denying its Arab population the same quality of social services that the nation's Jews receive."
-- The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (9/13/1999).

"The long-standing gap in levels of income between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens continues.... The Arab minority still does not share fully in the rights granted to, and the obligations imposed on, Jewish citizens... The authorities continue to hold and mistreat Palestinian security detainees, and detention and prison conditions, particularly for Palestinians, are poor."
-- U.S. Department of State, Israel and the Occupied Territories: Report on Human Rights and Practices for 1996.

"[My] awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state."
-- Albert Einstein, quoted in an article by Mordecai Briemberg published in The Outlook, 04/01-0/15, 1998.

"We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state."
-- The Pittsburgh Platform, 1885, the classic statement of the protestant or Reform Judaism)

Zionism had roots in Jewish Messianism. It, however, translated this Messianism into plans for colonization. Most Jews (reform and orthodox) opposed Zionism until WWII. Even though Orthodox Jews wanted to live in Jerusalem, they still considered Zionism a heresy, as the return of Jewish political control of the land of Israel would take place only by the Messiah in his coming. Their desire to live in Israel was only for the purpose of more effective prayer in the Holy land. Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews in addition were offended by Zionism's effort to transform Hebrew into a modern secular language.
(-- Paraphrased from "The Wrath of Jonah " by Rosemary and Herman Ruether, 1989)

Zionist-Nazi-Fascist Alliance

"In working for Palestine, I would even ally myself with the devil"
-- Vladimir Jabotinsky founder of Revisionist Zionism (Likud party roots) responding to condemnation for his alliance with Ukranian pogromist Petlyura.

"If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel."
-- Ben-Gurion (Quoted on pp 855-56 in Shabtai Teveth's Ben-Gurion in a slightly different translation).

In 1941, Yitzhak Shamir committed:
"an unforgivable crime from the moral point of view: he preached an alliance with Hitler, with Nazi Germany, against Great Britain."
-- Bar Zohar "Le prophète armé: Ben Gourion." (Fayard. Paris 1966, p.99.).

"The saving of the Jews in Europe did not figure at the head of the list of priorities of the ruling class. It was the foundation of the State which was primordial in their eyes."
-- Tom Segev. "Le septième million" (the Seventh Million) Ed. Liana Levi, Paris, 1993, p.539.

Zionism emerged in response to anti-Semitism. However, Zionism then turned to anti-Semitism as a means to achieve its goals. Zionists looked at anti-Semites as allies in helping them get the Jews out of Europe. This alliance indicates that the Zionists were not really interested in eliminating the suffering of the Jews.

Vladimir Jabotinsky
Despite his alliance with Ukranian pogromist Petlyura, it wasn't Jabotinsky who perpetrated the worst alliance with the Nazis, but the Labor Zionists: Ben-Gurion and Weizmann. In 1933 a world boycott German goods spontaneously emerged. Had this boycott been supported by all Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists, some believe that the German economy would have cracked and Hitler toppled. However, it was thanks to Labor Zionist and their "transfer" (ha'avara) agreements with the Nazis, that led to many trade agreements which resulted in the failure of the world boycott against the Nazis. Jabotnisky opposed the transfer agreement, and wanted to champion the boycott. However, during WWII, his heirs (e.g. Begin, Stern, Shamir) attempted their own alliance with the Nazis against the British who were occupying Palestine at the time.
(Paraphrased from "The Wrath of Jonah" by Rosemary and Herman Ruether, 1989). This information can also be found in Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the Dictators; 1983.

Zionism's Indifference to the Genocide of Jews.
Pointing fingers at the world for its indifference to the genocide of the Jews, while busy using the Holocaust for political gains at the expense of the Palestinians, Zionists have a lot to hide about their indifference, even collaboration, with the Nazis and the Fascists, as their fellow Jews were being sent to concentration camps. It seems that this finger-pointing by the Zionists is nothing more than a smoke screen to hide their dark past of allowing other Jews to die, while the Zionists were lobbying to rob Palestinians of their country. Excellent books on the topic are Zionism in the Age of the Dictators by Lenni Brenner and The Seventh Million by Tom Segev; (both authors are Jews).

From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (10/23/2000) www.jta.org:

"The U.S. House of Representatives dropped a resolution that would have blamed Turkey for a genocide of Armenians 85 years ago. The Turkish Jewish community asked U.S. lawmakers to consider the ramifications of the resolution after Turkey, an ally of Israel and the United States, threatened trade sanctions and withdrawing military cooperation with the United States."

John Roth U.S. Holocaust Museum director-elect, was going to become director in 08/1998, but resigned due to a fiasco resulting from a "controversial" comment he made in 1988 where he compared treatment of the Palestinians by Israel to that of the Jews by the Nazis. Here's a portion of an article by Jacqueline Trescott in the June 18, 1998 issue of the Washington Post.

"The storm that erupted around Roth started when the Forward, a Jewish weekly, reported that the scholar [Roth] had compared the treatment of the Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II to the present-day treatment of the Palestinians by Israel. The article in question first appeared in 1988, and when the essay was resurrected Roth publicly apologized. Still the opposition escalated last week when two congressmen told the museum officials that they were offended by that view and others of Roth and that the museum should reconsider its choice." (my emphasis)

The leaders of opposition to Roth were pro-Zionist/pro-Israel organizations who benefit politically from the Holocaust such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Zionist Organization of America. Conclusion: it is not allowable to be both anti-Israel and a Holocaust scholar simultaneously (hence, equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism). Here again is a fine example of the Zionists' effort of hiding their dark ideology of racism and history of alliance with anti-Semites and racism against Palestinian (manifested as the state of Israel), behind the motto of fighting the persecution of Jews. At least Hitler didn't hide his racism behind a human rights front!

"In our country there is room only for the Jews. We shall say to the Arabs: Get out! If they don't agree, if they resist, we shall drive them out by force."

-- Professor Ben-Zion Dinur, Israel's First Minister of Education, 1954, from History of the Haganah.

"After the Palmach men left [Deir Yassin], the men of the [Irgun and Stern Gang] started a shameful massacre of the inhabitants...[The massacre] was carried out...when the village was in Jewish hands, and without the inhabitants having taken any provocative action..."
-- Meir Pa'il, official Haganah observer on the scene, Yediot Ahranot, April 29, 1972)

"All of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women or children. The dead we found were all unjust victims, and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands."
-- Eliyahu Arieli, Haganah member who arrived at Deir Yassin shortly after the massacre, O Jerusalem, Collins and Lapierre, 1972.

"There is no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young girls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested."

-- General Richard Catling, British Army Assistant Inspector after interrogating several female survivors (The Palestinian Catastrophe, Michael Palumbo, 1987).

Hebron Massacre

" Here lies the saint, Doctor Baruch Kapal Goldstein, blessed be the memory of the righteous and holy man, may the Lord revenge his blood, who devoted his soul for the Jews, Jewish religion and Jewish land. His hands are clean and his heart is clear. He was killed as a martyr of God on the 14th of Adar, Purim, in the year 5754. "

-- Thus goes the inscription on the grave, (made as a shrine visited by pilgrims), of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein. An American Physician and an Israeli settler of Hebron, Goldstein indiscriminately murdered 29 worshipers kneeling in a mosque in 1994.

Few notes on the Hebron Massacre by Baruch Goldstein:

Allowing the extremists and settlers to crown Goldstein a hero, by building him a shrine, Israel is giving a "green light" to other extremists -- all heavily and legally armed, with extensive criminal record-- to follow suit.

The American media was careful to label Goldstein an extremist rather than a terrorist.

Still the U.S. and Israel continue to ignore the security needs of the Palestinians

Don't expect the Israeli authorities to demolish the house of the family of this terrorist.
Only recently (May 1998) the Israeli government voted to remove the memorial at the site, (octagonal stone plaza, candles, book holders, water fountain), but not the grave itself or the tombstone. The reason for Israel's sudden conscientious action is, in my opinion, due to the shrine attracting some world attention, which could mean the attention of U.S. public, a major source of Israel's income. The shrine was finally dismantled on December 29, 1999, almost six years after the massacre.

As of June 1998, the Hebron Massacre was the last time, a U.N. resolution passed condemning Israel (all others were shot down by U.S. vetos)

Graveside Party Celebrates Hebron Mass

"Because we Jews know what it is to suffer, we must not oppress others." -- Felicia Langer, Israeli Jew human rights activist.

UN Human Rights Commisson "declares that Israel's greave breaches of the Geneva Convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in the time of war of 12 August, 1949, are war crimes and an affront against humanity."

In Israel, torture, (or as Israel calls it "moderate physical and psychological pressure" to avoid world/U.S. outcry), is legal and systematic. Some of the methods used are: tie detainees into a kindergarten chair for many hours; shake them violently; cover their heads with a rag bag soaked in vomit (or other foul odored substances); expose them to painfully loud music for extended periods of time; hang them in contorted positions; deprive them from sleep. Attractive methods of torture also include anything that will leave little or no immediately visible markings recognizable by an average reporter.

On September 6, 1999, Israel "banned torture". However, since the "culture of torture" is deeply-ingrained in Israel, then a serious punishment of interrogators who violate this law must be instituted. Sadly, signs indicate otherwise, as interrogators are already given a wink, since "a court might accept the argument that physical force was necessary." (AP, Sep 6).

Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State recommended that Israel put down the Palestinian uprising "as quickly as possible--overwhelmingly, brutally and rapidly. The insurrection must be quelled immediately, and the first step should be to throw out television, a la South Africa. To be sure, there will be international criticism of the step, but it will dissipate in short order." He added: "There are no awards for losing with moderation."
-- Quoted in 12/1997 article by Donald Neff in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

When the subject is torture, there can be no "middle-of-the-road" policy, no compromise, no putting our head in the sand, no flexible and lenient formulas. The considerable experience that has been accumulated on this issue clearly demonstrates the need for a vigilant and uncompromising moral stance.
-- Ha'aretz Editorial, 12/13/1999, on Israel's attempt to find ways to allow torture under "special circumstances".

"It's not a matter of maintaining the status quo. We have to create a dynamic state, oriented towards expansion."
-- David Ben Gurion, Israel´s first Prime Minister.

"Take the American declaration of Independence. It contains no mention of territorial limits. We are not obliged to fix the limits of the State."
-- Moshe Dayan, "Jerusalem Post", 08/10/1967.

"Every school child knows that there is no such thing in history as a final arrangement -- not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements."
-- Ben Gurion, War Diaries, 12/03/1947 following Israel's "acceptance" of the U.N. Partition of 11/29/1947 (Simha Flapan, "Birth of Israel", 1987, p.13).

"The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple."
-- Yitzhak Shamir, Ma'ariv, 02/21/1997.

Purpose of Settlement, in pure and simple language:

"In strategic terms, the settlements (in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza) are of no importance." What makes them important, he added, was that "they constitute an obstacle, an unsurmountable obstacle to the establishment of an independent Arab State west of the river Jordan."
--Binyamin Begin, (son of the late Menahem Begin and a prominent voice in the Likud party writing in 1991, Quoted on page 159 of Findley's Deliberate Deceptions)

"Without them [the settlements] the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] would be a foreign army ruling a foreign population."
-- Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (quoted in Geoffrey Aronson's Settlements and the Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, Institute for Palestinian Studies).

Moshe Dayan:
"the settlements established in the territories are there forever, and the future frontiers will include these settlements as part of Israel"

Dayan also stated that he "preferred Sharm el-Sheikh without peace to a peace without Sharm el-Sheikh".

"From the point of view of the security of the state, the establishment of the settlements has no great importance.".
-- Dayan's statements all quoted in Chomsky's "The Fateful Triangle" pp. 104-5.

"Our fathers had reached the frontiers recognized in the partition plan; the Six-Day War generation has managed to reach Suez, Jordan, and the Golan Heights. This is not the end. After the present cease-fire lines, there will be new ones. They will extend beyond Jordan ... to Lebanon and ... to central Syria as well."
-- Moshe Dayan to Zionist youth at a meeting in the Golan Heights July, 1968.

"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 Yehushu'a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
-- Moshe Dayan, addressing the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), Haifa. Quoted in Ha'aretz, 04/04/1969.

Israel presents Jerusalem as a "unified" city whose indivisibility derives from its role as the Jews' sacred and historical capital. It is true that the Jews have a claim to the holy places in and around the Old City. But that historical core represents only three percent of the area of municipal Jerusalem. The other 97 percent was by no means exclusively Jewish. "West" Jerusalem, the 38 square kilometers ruled by Israel as its capital from 1948-67, was built only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although West Jerusalem is almost exclusively Jewish (the main exception being part of Beit Safafa village), before 1948 about 40 percent of it was owned by Palestinians. As for "East" Jerusalem, although 70 square kilometers was annexed in 1967, only 6.5 square kilometers thereof actually constituted the Jordanian part of the city. The other 63.5 square kilometers -- 90 percent of the land annexed by Israel as "East Jerusalem" -- in fact belonged to 28 Palestinian West bank villages which suddenly found themselves part of an "indivisible," "historic" and "sacred" Jewish city. Wallejeh, Sawakhreh and Kafr 'Amr, Palestinian villages which until today Israelis have never heard of, suddenly acquired the same historical significance for the Jewish people as the Western Wall, making Israeli claims to the entire area of "municipal" Jerusalem seem unassailable. An "inner ring" of settlements has been built on the land of this fictitious "East Jerusalem" since 1967. This series of large satellite cities -- Ramot, Rekhes Shuafat, Pigat Ze'ev, Neveh Ya'akov, East Talipot, Har Homa and Gilo, not to mention the incipient Israeli "neighborhoods" in Ra's al-Amud, Silwan and Shaykh Jarrah -- means that "East Jerusalem" now contains more Israelis (about 200,000) than Palestinians. Municipal Jerusalem is an artificial entity, the product of recent military conquest and settlement, rather than an organic city of historic value to the Jewish people.
-- Professor Jeff Halper from a Merip article (Fall 2000).

Ha'aretz Editorial 09/24/1998: on settler violence:

"The old cry of the late Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz that "the occupation corrupts" is today correct in the full sense of the word. Israel can no longer live with the illusion that it is maintaining a democratic way of life while at the same time a separate normative system exists for the settlers that tramples human rights in the territories to the point where those who kill are treated forgivingly".

"They [Israel] have typically concealed the continually expansionist nature of their project from their western sponsors and pursued a "step by step" process toward these goals. While pointing to militant Arab rhetoric to frighten Jews and convince them that the Arab world is genocidal against Jews and that no peace is possible with them, Israeli leaders have been quite aware of the actual inability of the Arab world to deliver on this militant rhetoric. "
-- Rosemary and Herman Ruether in "The Wrath of Jonah" (1989)

Ethnic Cleansing ("transfer"), the "Demography
Problem", Home Demolitions, Tree Uprooting

"The main difference between Bosnia and Palestine is that ethnic cleansing in the former took place in the form of dramatic massacres and slaughters which caught the world's attention, whereas in Palestine what is taking place is a drop-by-drop tactic in which one or two houses are demolished daily, a few acres are taken here and there every day, a few people are forced to leave"
-- Edward Said (Washington Report 09/1998).

"The human rights organization Amnesty International said in a report in December that Israel has made about 16,700 Palestinians homeless by destroying at least 2,650 houses since 1987"
-- From an AP report on home demolitions by Israel dated 04/23/2000.

"The demolition and sealing of houses are among the most severe methods of punishment used by the authorities against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. To our knowledge, this harsh form of punishment is unique to Israel and is not employed by any other nation. Demolition and sealing of houses in the territories contravene international law that prohibits collective punishment and arbitrary injury to property."
-- B'Tselem, an Israeli Human Rights Organization. (http://www2.iol.co.il/btselem/).

"... we have no solution, that you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wants to can leave -- and we will see where this process leads? In five years we may have 200,000 less people -- and that is a matter of enorous importance."
-- Moshe Dayan encouraging the transfer of Gaza Strip refugees to Jordan (from Noam Chomsky's Deterring Democracy, 1992, p.434, quoted in Nur Masalha's A Land Without A People, 1997 p.92).

"It is an open secret that Israeli policy makers hoped for a massive emigration of Palestinians as a result of economic and demographic pressure. Therefore, they also developed a clever system which caused numerous Palestinians born here to lose their residency rights when they went to work or study abroad."
-- Amira Hass in 08/26/1998 Ha'aretz Op'Ed titled The Settlers are Not to Blame.

While campaigning for the prime ministership, Binyamin Netanyahu Criticized his Labor party opponents for missing an opportunity during the Tiannamen Square massacre. "Had he been prime minister, he said, he would have seized the chance then, while the world was watching China, to carry out the transfer of the Palestinians."
-- p. 137 Washington Report 09/1998.

"I don't sign orders to destroy the houses of Jews, only of Arabs,"
-- Haim Miller, deputy mayor of Jerusalem and acting mayor in Olmert's absence, quoted in Yediot Aharonot, Feb. 7, 1998.

"[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat."
-- Yitzhak Rabin (a "Prince of Peace" by Clinton's standards), explaining his method of ethnically cleansing the occupied land without stirring a world outcry. (Quoted in David Shipler in the New York Times, 04/04/1983 citing Meir Cohen's remarks to the Kenesset's foreign affairs and defense committee on March 16.)

(Apparently, Rabin's method of "creating conditions that will prompt Palestinian migration" wasn't as efficient as desired, therefore, house demolitions and rejection of building permits to Palestinians were adopted as additional measures.In 1900 there were about 550,000 Palestinians and 50,000 Jews. Palestinians. Today, despite the extremely high birth-rate of the Palestinians, there are about 900,000 Palestinians (Israeli-Arabs, who own 4 percent of Israel) in Israel, 4.5 million Jews (owning 96 percent of Israel), and about 2.5 million Palestinians crammed in a small, highly-dense and disconnected areas in the occupied territories.)

Since its founding one of Israel's main goals was to change the demography of Palestine and Jerusalem, by luring -- even by forcing -- Jews to emigrate to Israel, (over other countries,) hence, dispossessing more Palestinians. In a visit to the U.S. in Feb 1987 Yitzhak Shamir asked secretary Shultz to stop offering special refugee status to Soviet Jews. (See New York Times article Israel Asking U.S. to Bar Soviet Jews by Ari Goldman 03/01/1987) Hence, once again Zionism is interested in Jews as number-boosters rather than caring about their well being and "freedom." In addition, there were indications that Israel's madness in forcing Jews (especially Arab Sephardic ones) to go to Israel, have reached the level of sending Israeli secret agents to terrorize some Arab Jewish communities in their countries. Examples of this are in the case of Iraqi Jews, 125,000 of whom (97%) fled to Israel in the early 50's. (See David Hirst The Gun and the Olive Branch pp. 155-64, 1984 quoted in Ruether's The Wrath of Jonah, 1989).

"Nahum Goldman, an eminent Zionist Leader, suggested in 1971 that rather than stressing the emigration [of Russian Jews to Israel] issue, the Zionist movement should concentrate on securing human rights for Jews remaining inside the USSR. His invitation to address the World Zionist Congress was promptly withdrawn"
-- p. 187, A. Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, 1991, quoting p. 737 of Howard Sacher's A History of Israel, 1988.

Rabbi Meir Kahane vs. the USSR In December 1969, a messenger from Israel, Geula Cohen, arrived to tell Kahane to cease squabbling with American blacks and to direct the JDL's (Jewish Defense League, founded by Kahane) violent energies at a more important target: the Soviet Union. (Geula Cohen once withdrew her support for Begin in his urban guerilla days because she found his policies to be "too mild." While publicly Golda Meir disassociated herself from Kahane's activities, "according to Kahane's biographer Robert Friedman, however, no fewer than three senior active-duty Mossad officers were involved in the group superintending the JDL's violent campaign.... Kahane's activities, which included in 1971 four bombings attacks in New York City alone."
-- pp. 184-6, A Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, 1991.

Israel's Aggressions

"I know how at least 80% of all the incidents with Syria started. We were sending a tractor to the demilitarized zone and we knew that the Syrians will shoot. If they did not shoot, we would instruct the tractor to go deeper, till the Syrians finally got upset and start shooting. Then we employed artillery, and later also the air-force... I did that... and Yitzhak Rabin did that, when he was there..."
-- Moshe Dayan in a 05/1997 revelation.

"Is this a way to occupy Hebron? A couple of artillery bombardments on Hebron and not a single 'Hebronite' would have remained there. Is this a way to occupy Jerusalem [without driving the Arabs out]?"
-- Yigal Allon, Labor deputy Prime minister of Israel chiding the IDF leadership. Cited on p.179 of Nur Masalha's A Land without a People who cites Shiloah Ashmat Yerushalayim pp. 53 and 281. Shiloah remarked that Allon's comment also applied to Nablus (p.54).

Aggression: "The Jews again today appeared to be on the offensive, roughly two-thirds of the incidents being initiated by them and in their operations they showed evidence of planning, something absent in general from the Arab attacks."
-- The New York Times, 12/12/1947 from p. 53 of Fallen Pillars by Donald Neff, (1995).

1967 War (Six-Day War)

"To solidify their gains after the 1967 war, according to UN figures, the Israelis destroyed during the period between June 11, 1967 and November 15, 1969 some 7,554 Palestinian Arab homes in the territories seized during that war; this figure excluded thirty-five villages in the occupied Golan Heights that were razed to the ground. In the two years between September 1969 and 1971 the figure was estimated to have reached 16,312 homes."
-- From The Zionist Connection II, by Alfred Lilienthal, p.160. 1978.

"Israeli forces occupied [the Golan Heights] during the 1967 war. With its occupation of the Golan Heights, Israel expelled over 120,000 inhabitants - mostly Syrians but also several thousand Palestinian refugees. At the same time, Israel destroyed two cities, 133 villages and 61 farms. After this devastation, only 6,396 inhabitants remained in the six villages left standing. On December 14, 1981, the Israeli Knesset unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights in clear contravention of international law. The UN Security Council subsequently declared the annexation illegal and, to date, not a single state has recognized it. Israel has so far built more than 40 settlements, housing over 15,000 settlers in the Golan Heights."
-- New Yorkers for a Just Middle East Peace (NYJMEP) from a letter dating 08/13/1998 sent to Perry Odak, Chief Executive Officer of Ben and Jerry's, protesting a reported agreement between the popular ice cream company and Eden Springs water company, based on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

1973 War (Yom Kippur War)

" The Yom Kippur War was not fought by Egypt and Syria to threaten the existence of Israel. It was an all out use of their military force to achieve a limited political goal. What Sadat wanted by crossing the canal was to change the political reality and, thereby, to start a political process from a point more favorable to him than the one that existed. ."
-- Yitzhak Rabin Quoted on p.306 of Donald Neff's Warrior Against Israel.

Israel's Terrorism
1948, Israel's Birth Myths, the "New Historians", and the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe)

"Jews came and took, by means of uprooting and expulsion, a land that was Arab. We wanted to be a colonialist occupier, and yet to come across as moral at the same time... The Arab armies -- chiefly from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Transjordan, now Jordan -- totaled just over 20,000 men. The core of the Arab nations' fighting forces remained behind, in part to ensure the internal stability of their own fledgling regimes.... Crucially, Israel had a quiet agreement with Transjordan that its Arab Legion, the strongest of the invading armies, would take over only the West Bank, which the U.N. partition plan had intended as the center of a Palestinian Arab State."
-- Ilan Pappe', Israeli Historian at Haifa University.

"Till then everyone in Israel spoke about Arabs who had just run away in 1948, but there existed no real historical research on it. There were two conflicting propaganda versions, one Arab and another Jewish. As one who received his education in Israel, I thought I knew that the Arabs had 'run away.' But I knew nothing else. The Jewish generations of 1948, however, knew the truth and deliberately misrepresented it. They knew there were plenty of mass deportations, massacres and rapes . . . . The soldiers and the officials knew, but they suppressed what they knew and were deliberately disseminating lies."
-- Israeli Historian Benny Morris in an interview with Rami Tal published in Israeli Daily Yediot Ahronot, December 1994.

"For it was precisely the unignorable plight and suffering of the Palestinian Arabs during April-May of that year that forced the hand of the reluctant Arab political and military leaders to take the plunge and invade Palestine on 15-16 May.
-- Israeli Historian Benny Morris in an 03-04/1998 article in Tikkun available here.

"in 1948, we deliberately, and not just in the heat of the war, expelled Arabs. Also in 67 after the Six-Day War, we expelled many Arabs."
-- Tzvi Shiloah, a senior veteran of the Mapai Party and a former deputy mayor of the town of Hertzeliyah. (Modelet, no.12, October 1989).

Expulsion: "Nazareth, all-Palestinian with 17,000 residents was captured on 16 July [1948]. However, Palestinian residents were allowed to remain, the only major Palestinian town where this happened. In most areas the Palestinians were actively forced to flee or deliberately panic-stricken into fleeing with reminders of Deir Yassin" This happened because "the local Jewish commander who captured Nazareth, Ben Dunkelman, two days after the city's fall he was ordered to force its civilians to evacuate [but refused to obey orders]"
-- Donald Neff in his book Fallen Pillars, (1995) p.65., p.288 and supported on pp. 201-202 of Benny Morris' Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.

The Result: "Israel's conquests included not only such major cities as Jaffa, Lydda and Acre, but also 418 Palestinian villages that were destroyed and another 100 villages that were occupied by Jews. In all Israelis took over more than 50,000 homes, 10,000 shops and 1,000 warehouses. It was estimated that about a quarter of the buildings in the new state were originally the property of the Palestinians."
-- p. 72 of Fallen Pillars by Donald Neff.

Looting: "Indiscriminate plundering of Palestinian property by Jews [in 1948] was so common that it caused Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to confide to his diary that he was 'bitterly surprised' by the 'mass robbery' in which all parts of the population participated. [...] Tom Segev reported: 'In Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem there were many civilians among the looters.' Another Israeli writer, Moshe Smilanky, reported: 'Individuals, groups and communities, men, women and children, all fell on the spoils. Doors, windows, lintels, brinks, roof-tiles, floor-tiles, junk and machine parts ...' Segev commented that Smilansky 'could have also added to the list toilet bowls, sinks, faucets and light bulbs.'"
-- p.68 of Fallen Pillars by Donald Neff.

Partition: "after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine "
-- Ben Gurion, p.22, "The Birth of Israel", 1987, Simha Flapan.

"The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan. One does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today -- but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concerns of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them."
-- p.53, "The Birth of Israel", 1987, Simha Flapan.

Arab Exodus "At no point during the war did the Arab leaders issue a blanket call to Palestine's Arabs to leave their homes and villages and wander into exile. Indeed, I have found no trace of such a campaign, and had it taken place, had there been such broadcasts, they would have been quoted or at least left traces in the documentation."
from the book 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians by Benny Morris.

Upon examining all of the British and American monitoring of broadcasts [the BBC recorded them and kept transcripts as did the American government] in the area at that time, Irish journalist, Erskine Childers concluded that "There was not a single order, or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948."

Summary "Jews came and took, by means of uprooting and expulsion, a land that was Arab. We wanted to be a colonialist occupier, and yet to come across as moral at the same time."
-- Israeli Professor Ilan Pappe (from http://www.middleeast.org/1999_01_29.htm).

"Only then [after an internal revolution] will the young and old in our land realize how great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees in whose towns we have settled from afar; whose homes we have inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest; the fruit of whose gardens, orchards and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we robbed, we put up houses of education, charity and prayer." -
-- Philosopher Martin Buber addressing fellow Jews in 1961.

Israel Murders Prisoners of War
Labor vs Likud: No Difference in Actions. Israel's "Left"

"You are exactly like the Likud. Don't you think that the Arabs need someplace to live?" member of Knesset Shulamit Aloni complained to Rabin after he made up his wide settlement plan of 1995, on 01/25/1995, Rabin Responded "I think about Israelis,".
(Quoted in Settlements and the Israel-Palestinian Negotiations by Geoffrey Aronson, 1996)

Likud vs. Labor: Any Difference? Israel's Labor Party "Cleverly Concealed" West Bank Settlements by Paul Findley (Washington Report 11/1994). Many are fooled to think that there is a real difference between Likud and Labor, as far as the Palestinians are concerned. Although Likud might have a slightly larger resume of anti-Palestinian oppression, both have similar stand on all the main issues, such as settlements, refugees, Jerusalem, Abou Ghoneim (Har Homa), and house demolition. While Likud (Netanyahu, Shamir, Begin) does things in-your-face style, Labor (Rabin, Peres, Barak) is more soothing and diplomatic in its rhetoric, says one thing but does the complete opposite, maneuvers more skillfully around the media to avoid raising many flags, and speaks with a more mellow tone, giving the false impression that it is more for peace than Likud.

Labor Worse than Likud by Israel Shahak (Middle East Realities 01/02/1997)

Lord Yehudi Menuhin (famed Jewish violinist) as quoted in "Le Figaro" in Jan 1998, Paris.

"It is extraordinary how nothing ever dies completely. Even the evil which prevailed yesterday in Nazi Germany and which is gaining ground in that country [Israel] today."

See AP article.

Ehud Barak

Ha'aretz June 3rd, 1998 issue reported a revealing slip by Ehud Barak, Rabin's Labor Party successor, sharing the frustration of the Palestinians:

"If I were Palestinian, I'd also join terror group."

Later Barak apologized for this slip.

"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. ... Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice."
-- David Ben Gurion. Quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky's Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan's "Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.

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