Quotes from Larry Collins

In Arab eyes, the Balfour Declaration had been an act of pure imperialism, a mortgaging by Britain of the future of a land to which she had no rightful claim, without any effort to consult the wishes or the desires of the Arabs who had constituted ninety-two percent of Palestine's population when the declaration was issued.

They gave it the seductive name Al Fatat—"Young Girl."* Its aim was the liberation of the Arab world from Turkey's Ottoman Empire. More important, it represented the first manifestation of a renascent Arab nationalism that disputed Jewish claims to Palestine for half a century.

A secret treaty known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, for the two men who signed it, Sir Mark Sykes for Britain and Jacques Georges-Picot for France, finally awarded to the French, without the Arabs' knowledge or consent, a "sphere of influence" in much of the area in which Britain had promised to support an independent Arab state.

Feeling themselves betrayed by the British and the French, their claim to Palestine thwarted by the Balfour Declaration, the Arabs lived a rude awakening in the aftermath of World War I. As was perhaps inevitable, the focal point of their fury became the Zionist return

Feeling themselves betrayed by the British and the French, their claim to Palestine thwarted by the Balfour Declaration, the Arabs lived a rude awakening in the aftermath of World War I. As was perhaps inevitable, the focal point of their fury became the Zionist return to a land the Arabs felt had been promised to them.

was not until 1925, eight years after the Balfour Declaration, that Chaim Weizmann warned: "Palestine is not Rhodesia and 600,000 Arabs live there who . . . have exactly the same rights to their homes as we have to our National Home.

Jinnah to Lord Mountabatten in one of his many meetings before partition: "India has never been a true nation. It only looks that way on the map. The cows I want to eat, the Hindus stops me from killing. Every time a Hindu shakes hands with me he has to wash his hands. The only thing the Muslim has in common with Hindu is his slavery to the British.

On 23 June 1757, marching through a drenching rainfall at the head of 900 Englishmen of the 39th Foot and 2000 Indian sepoys, an audacious general named Robert Clive routed the army of a troublesome Nawab in the rice paddies outside a Bengali village called Plassey.

In Jerusalem, as elsewhere in Palestine, the Haganah's basic strategy reflected a philosophy propounded by David Ben-Gurion. What the Jews had, they must hold. No Jew was to leave his home, his farm, his kibbutz, his office without permission. Every outpost, every settlement, every village, no matter how isolated, was to be clung to as though it were Tel Aviv itself.

The crowned heads that leaned over his cradle were members of his family. Charlemagne was a direct ancestor; among his uncles and cousins were Kaiser Wilhelm II, Alfonso XIII of Spain, Ferdinand I of Rumania, Gustav VI of Sweden, Constantine I of Greece, Haakon VII of Norway and Alexander I of Yugoslavia. Europe's crises were family problems.

Gandhi: "My friend, I'm glad you listened to the voice of God, and not the voice of Gandhi." Mountbatten: "Well, Gandhiji, his is the only voice I'd sooner listen to than yours, but in what respect did I take God's advice against yours.

Mountbatten was stunned by the rigidity of Jinnah's position. 'I never would have believed,' he later recalled, 'that an intelligent man, well-educated, trained in the Inns of Court, was capable of simply closing his mind

our investigation led us to discover was that at the peak of the battle the Jewish soldiers owed their success less to their courage than to the sudden arrival of a most unusual ally: a swarm of bees, infuriated by the smell of gunpowder, descended on the helpless Arab legionnaires and forced them to abandon their dominating position above the monastery.

Their excesses were largely responsible for the anti-Jewish sentiment which permeated the British forces in Palestine. Those excesses had produced other fruits, however. They had helped disgust the British public with Britain's role in Palestine, and thus played an important role in leading Clement Attlee to his decision to leave.

One blessing, one sire, one womb Their being gave. They had one mortal sickness And share one grave Far from an England they never knew.

Ben-Gurion was talking about planning a war against five Arab armies and we were still being arrested by the British for carrying a pistol down the street.

Yitzhak Sadeh was the spiritual father of the Haganah and the founder of its elite striking force, the Palmach.

The General Assembly of the United Nations," the broadcaster read, "by a vote of thirty-three in favor, thirteen against and ten abstentions, has voted to partition Palestine.

Mrs Penn Montague, who spoke six languages, rose every day at four in the afternoon.

Urged by the Vatican, the Catholic nations of Latin America had made it clear to the Jews that the price of their votes for the plan to partition Palestine would be the internationalization of Jerusalem. Without them, the Jews had no hopes of mustering the ballots needed to pass partition. With a heavy heart, they had yielded, and Jerusalem's loss was the measure of the price they were willing to pay for a Jewish state.

In their prayers, in their rites, at each salient moment in the passage of a lifetime, they had reminded themselves of their attachment to that Promised Land and the transient nature of their separation from its shores.

Over two thousand people died in that vicious intramural bloodletting. While the Jews of Palestine were developing the young leaders and the social institutions that would be their greatest resource, Haj Amin Husseini methodically deprived the Arabs of theirs. Throttling progress and any drift to rational thought with his angry fanaticism, cowing with the guns of his ignorant villagers the educated elite, he reduced a generation of Arab leadership to fear and silence.

Burning in the ardor of their new faith to convert the pagan masses, the early fathers of the Christian Church strove to emphasize the differences between their religion and its theological predecessor by forcing upon the Jews a kind of spiritual apartheid. The Emperor Theodosius II gave those aspirations legal force in his code, condemning Judaism and, for the first time, legally branding the Jews a people apart.

With the Crusades, spiritual apartheid became systematic slaughter. Shrieking their cry "Deus vult! God wills it!," the Crusaders fell on every hapless Jewish community on their route to Jerusalem.