Quotes from Zionists

Quotes from Zionists

There are some pretty choice quotes from shockingly honest Zionists. You can find them in places like here and here. A few samples (emphasis in red; if you wonder about my continuing concerns about the Zionist Empire, see 12 to 16; 11 is so accurate a statement of Israeli negotiating procedure it is almost funny):

1. "We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab Village." – Moshe Dyan, March 19, 1969, speech at the Technion in Haifa, quoted in Ha’aretz, April 4, 1969.


2. "Among ourselves, it must be clear that there is no place in the country for both peoples together. With the Arabs we shall not achieve our aim of being an independent people in this country. The only solution is Eretz-Israel, at least the west part of Eretz-Israel, without Arabs . . . And there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries. Transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain . . ." –Joseph Weitz, entry in his diary for 1940 (quoted in his article: ‘A solution to the Refugee Problem: An Israeli State with a small Arab Minority’, published in Davar, 29 September, 1967.


3. "I gathered all of the Jewish mukhtars, who have contact with Arabs in different villages and asked them to whisper in the ears of some Arabs that a great Jewish reinforcement has arrived in Galilée and that it is going to burn all of the villages of the Huleh. They should suggest to these Arabs, as their friends, to escape while there is still time . . . The tactic reached its goal completely. The building of the police station at Halsa fell into our hands without a shot. The wide areas were cleaned . . ." – Yigal Allon, Ha Sepher Ha Palmach, Vol. 2, p. 268, 1948.


4. "...as uncontrolled panic spread through all Arab quarters, the Israelis brought up jeeps with loudspeakers which broadcast recorded 'horror sounds'. These included shrieks, wails and anguished moans of Arab women, the wail of sirens and the clang of fire-alarm bells, interrupted by a sepulchral voice calling out in Arabic: ‘Save your souls, all ye faithful: The Jews are using poison gas and atomic weapons. Run for your lives in the name of Allah'.” – Leo Heiman, Israeli Army Reserve Officer who fought in 1948. Marine Corps Gazette, June 1964.


5. "Because we took the land this gives us the image of being bad, of being aggressive. The Jews always considered that the land belonged to them, but in fact it belonged to the Arabs. I would go further: I would say the original source of this conflict lies with Israel, with the Jews – and you can quote me." – Yehoshofat Harkabi, former Israeli Chief of Military Intelligence, in ‘Peace Won't be a Plane Ticket to Cairo,’ International Armed Forces Journal, October 1973, p.30.


6. "It is unacceptable that nations made up of people who have only just come down from the trees should take themselves for world leaders . . . How can such primitive beings have an opinion of their own?" – Yitzhak Shamir, in reference to the black African nations who voted in support of the 1975 U.N. resolution, which denounced Zionism as a form of racism, in Yediot Ahronot, November 14, 1975.


7. "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." – Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.


8. "Let us not today fling accusations at the murderers. Who are we that we should argue against their hatred? For eight years now they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their very eyes, we turn into our homestead the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers have lived." – Moshe Dyan, 1953, quoted by Uri Avneri in Israel without Zionists, p. 134.


9. "I don't understand your optimism. Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country." – David Ben Gurion, 1956, quoted by Nahum Goldmann in The Jewish Paradox, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p.99.


10. "We take the land first and the law comes after." – Mr. Palmon, Arab affairs adviser to the Mayor of Jerusalem, quoted in The Guardian, 26 April 1972.


11. "We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should manoeuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise solution. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism." – General Yehoshafat Harkabi, Ma'ariv, 2 November 1973.


12. "To maintain the status quo will not do. We have to set up a dynamic state bent upon expansion." – David Ben Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel, The Philosophical Press, New York, 1954, p. 419.


13. "During the last 100 years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road." – Moshe Dyan, Ma'ariv, 7 July 1968.


14. "Palestine is a territory whose chief geographical feature is this: that the river Jordan does not delineate its frontier but flows through its centre." – Vladimir Jabotinsky, at the 16th Zionist Congress (1929), quoted by Desmond Stewart in The Middle East: Temple of Janus, p.304.


15. "Take the American Declaration of Independence for instance. It contains no mention of the territorial limits. We are not obliged to state the limits of our State." – Ben Gurion's diary, 14 May 1948, quoted by Michael Bar Zohar in The Armed Prophet, p.133.


16. "The Achilles heel of the Arab coalition is the Lebanon. Muslim supremacy in this country is artificial and can easily be overthrown. A Christian State ought to be set up there, with its southern frontier on the river Litani. We would sign a treaty of alliance with this State. Thus when we have broken the strength of the Arab Legion and bombed Amman, we could wipe out Transjordan; after that Syria would fall. And if Egypt still dared to make war on us, we would bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo. We should thus end the war and would have but paid to Egypt, Assyria and Chaldea on behalf of our ancestors." – Ben Gurion's Diary, 21 May 1948, quoted by Michael Bar Zohar in The Armed Prophet, p.139.


17. "I shall not be ashamed to confess that if I had the power, as I have the will, I would select a score of efficient young men – intelligent, decent, devoted to our ideal and burning with the desire to help redeem Jews – and I would send them to the countries where Jews are absorbed in sinful self-satisfaction. The task of these young men would be to disguise themselves as non-Jews, and plague Jews with anti-Semitic slogans such as 'Bloody Jew', 'Jews go to Palestine' and similar intimacies. I can vouch that the results in terms of a considerable immigration to Israel from these countries would be ten thousand times larger than the results brought by thousands of emissaries who have been preaching for decades to deaf ears." – Davar, 1952, Editor Sharan, quoted by Alfred Lilienthal in The Other Side of the Coin, Devin-Adair, New York, p.47.


18. "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." – Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces – Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.


19. "We must do everything to ensure they (the Palestinian refugees) never do return." – David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.


20. "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" – Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.


21. "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument: . . . the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish . . . with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." – Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.


22. "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours . . . Everything we don't grab will go to them." – Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.


23. "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." – Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.


24. "We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not . . .You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." – Chaim Weizmann, in Judische Rundschau, No. 4, 1920.


25. “The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more.” – Ehud Barak, current Israeli Minister of Defense, in the Jerusalem Post, Aug. 30, 2000.


26. "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." – Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 in N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1.


27. "I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel." – mega-political donor, mostly to the Democratic Party, Haim Saban explaining how to make your political donations go further in NYT, September 5, 2004.