" 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, The Third U.S. President (from1801-1809) and The Author of The Declaration of Independence
" Except for the extermination of the Tasmanians, modern history recognizes 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"
" 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-Egyptian author and diplomat
" 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 his death
"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."
Beshara 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 [Israel] 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 Isarelis 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, in 1936, that Palestine be partitioned
"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. Israeli Prime Minister - 1993
"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 Untermyer, President of the World Jewish Economic Federation, delivery 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, 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, Israeli General
"My dear Palestinian brothers and sisters, I have come to your land and I have recognized shades of my own."
Farid Esack - 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 - 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, 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 Toqueville, 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 generatipon 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 last year (2008).
"[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 th 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, U.S. President, 2009
"Grab the hilltops and stake your claim. Everything we don't grab will go to them [The Palestininans]"
Ariel Sharon, 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 favors 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, President of South Africa, 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, Palestinian American literary theorist, cultural critic and political activist, 2002
“I imagine that if I were a Palestinian of the right age, I would, at some stage, have joined one of the terror organizations.”
Ehud Barak, Israeli general and prime minister 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, Israeli general, 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, British philosopher, mathematician, historian, social reformer, and pacifist, 1970
"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, 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 (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 7 April 1955 – 10 January 1957, interviewed in the "Sorrow and the Pity", a documentary on WWII directed by Marcel Ophuls)