Quotes from Tom Segev

We could have made peace with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad a long time ago. It didn't happen, because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't want to give up the Golan (Heights).

The Jews were slaves in the land of their Exile, and suddenly they found themselves with unlimited freedom, wild freedom that only exists in a land like Turkey. This sudden change has produced in their hearts an inclination toward repressive tyranny, as always happens when a slave rules.

He had been dispossessing Arabs for twenty-five years, Kalvarisky said. It was not easy work, especially for a man like him, who did not see the Arabs as a flock of sheep but rather as human beings with hearts and souls.

In the meantime, the Zionist movement's men in London were spinning fantasies of a provisional administration headed by a Jewish president, whose authority would resemble that of a high commissioner in a British colony

The British pretended, and perhaps some of them even believed, that the establishment of a national home for the Jews could be carried out without hurting the Arabs.

The administration officials were supposed to be "English gentlemen"—demobilized officers or university graduates. If a man had gone to private school, was an active sportsman, and looked good, he could probably get a job in the colonial service.

As with national revolutions elsewhere, both peoples in Palestine tended to put nationalism above democracy and human rights.

The ceremony in which they were laid demonstrated what the Zionist movement was best at: public relations.

The mufti and the Anglican bishop, together with the city's rabbis, laid a foundation stone "in the name of Jerusalem

Consul Ballobar, who considered the bishop antisemitic, teased him for having attended and wrote in his diary that the mufti hadn't managed to hide his true feelings about the whole thing—his face was as yellow as a rotten melon. In Ballobar's opinion, the ceremony was an unnecessary and harmful political spectacle—he was not fond of Weizmann.

In many of his poems he fantasized about Arab love legends in terms that are sensual and violent. He also wove many Arabic terms into his writing, learned from his Arabic teacher, Khalil al-Sakakini. In one letter he wrote: "I am a foreigner in the world of Aryan culture; my place is in the East and my paths lead to the sun." He was attracted to a stereotype—the "Arab

photographed dressed as an Arab sheikh, in robe and headdress. The photograph is preserved among his papers, pasted next to another picture in which he is in the same pose but dressed in a tailored suit and expensive tie. One is labeled "East" and the other "West.

Across the city, people quoted a prophecy the Arabs used to tell to glorify the Ottoman Empire: the Turks would leave Palestine only when a prophet of God brought water of the Nile to Palestine. The British had laid pipes that supplied their army with water in the desert, and so Allenby was called "Allah an-nabi", a prophet of God.

Herbert Samuel believed the tensions between Jews and Arabs could be neutralized through the benefits of effective health and education systems. He tended to view the conflict in social and economic terms, which was an illusion. The conflict between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine was not principally economic but national.

Zionism required its supporters to reconsider their Jewish identities and to position themselves between the values of Jewish tradition and a new Jewish nationalism.

There was probably nothing the military administration disliked more than local politics. Unlike Ronald Storrs, most of the British were not interested, did not understand, and did their best to avoid the whole tangle. They had come to fight, conquer, and rule, not to engage in politics, Stirling told a representative of the Zionist movement.

The more he could assist in the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, the quicker he would hasten the second coming of the Lord, he once said to one of his colleagues. He believed there was an unwritten compact between the British Empire and world Jewry, and he saw the establishment of the national home as part of a common effort to bring about world peace.

The Alignment

Before Samuel took over from the military government, the chief administrative officer asked that he sign one of the most quoted documents in Zionist history: "Received from Major General Sir Louis J. Bols, K.C.B.—One Palestine, complete." Samuel signed.

Many years afterward, Lloyd George described the Balfour Declaration as a prize awarded by a generous and benevolent ruler to his court Jew.

While at the university, Eder lived in bachelor's quarters together with his cousin, the well-known writer Israel Zangwill. A Zionist, Zangwill had hosted Theodor Herzl in London;

One must go somewhere, I suppose, it is abominable to keep still in nothingness