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Quotes About Israel

To win a truly great life for the people of Israel, a great peace is necessary, not a fictitious peace, the dwarfish peace that is no more than a feeble intermission, but a true peace with the neighboring peoples, which alone can render possible a common development of this portion of the earth as the vanguard of the awakening Near East.
~ buber martin ii
22 Emily's Letters After the Suez fiasco, Great Britain and France were no longer serious players in the Middle East, and Israel was tarred as their co-conspirator in a failed last gasp of imperialism.
~ Herman Wouk
What did they care if the rabbis who found them with the books of haskala, of enlightenment, called them epicureans, atheists, breakers of the wall? These old epithets they began to take as names of honor. Out of their ranks came the minds and spirits that created modern Zionism. The fact that Zionism was cradled against the separatist learning of the old yeshivas colors the state of Israel to this hour.
~ Herman Wouk
All the prophecy of Israel turns on one simple but extremely effective idea: namely that all Israel, living and dead, from Sinai to the present hour, stands in its relation to God as a single immortal individual.
~ Herman Wouk
To sum up: whatever fictional liberties have been taken in weaving the phantoms of my invention through real events, The Hope is presented to my readers as an honest account of Israel's early history, as true and responsible as research could make it. As to whether the tale itself pleases, only they can judge.
~ Herman Wouk
States should [...] vet agreements, cooperation schemes, and all forms of trade and dealing with Israel to screen for those directly contributing to the commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians, mitigate the human rights impacts, and, where not possible, end the activities and funding found to facilitate these serious crimes.
~ Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch found that the Israeli government has pursued an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians throughout the territory it controls. In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.
~ Human Rights Watch
These policies create a reality where a Jewish citizen of any other country who has never been to Israel can move there or to a West Bank settlement and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian refugee expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country cannot move to either Israel or the OPT.
~ Human Rights Watch
The finding of crimes against humanity should prompt the international community to reevaluate its approach to Israel and Palestine.
~ Human Rights Watch
States should impose individual sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against officials and individuals responsible for the continued commission of these serious crimes and condition arms sales and military and security assistance to Israel on Israeli authorities taking concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.
~ Human Rights Watch
80 percent of the Mountain Aquifer's water recharge area lies beneath the West Bank, Israel directly extracts about 90 percent of the water that is withdrawn from the aquifer annually, leaving Palestinians only the remaining 10 percent or so to exploit directly.
~ Human Rights Watch
After seizing the West Bank in 1967, Israel unilaterally annexed 72 square kilometers, including the eastern part of Jerusalem and land that belonged to 28 surrounding West Bank villages, to the Jerusalem municipality. Human Rights Watch is not aware of any other country, with the recent exception of the United States under President Donald Trump, that recognizes Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem, which remains occupied territory under international law.
~ Human Rights Watch
The litmus test of any democracy is the level of tolerance it is willing to extend towards the minorities living in it. In this respect, Israel falls far short of being a true democracy.
~ Ilan Pappe
as demanded in the famous UN Security Council Resolution 242 very shortly after the war ended. As readers probably know, a Security Council resolution is more binding than a resolution by the General Assembly. And this was one of the few Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel that was not vetoed by the United States.
~ Ilan Pappe
one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.
~ Ilan Pappe
The geographer Oren Yiftachel from Ben-Gurion University, depicted Israel as an ethnocracy, a regime governing a mixed ethnic state with a legal and formal preference for one ethnic group over all the others. Others went further, labeling Israel an apartheid state or a settler colonial state. In short, whatever description these critical scholars offered, democracy was not among them.
~ Ilan Pappe
I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was 'Never Again.'
~ Ayelet Waldman
The present Arab uprising didn't stem from Israel. The old guard is trying to keep down the young chickens. The old guard is better organized. They may win elections, but unless they have a solution to poverty, to corruption, to oppression, they will not last. I am with the young people.
~ Shimon Peres
People often ask why I remain so optimistic, even in the face of the complex challenges we are facing in the Jewish world, in Israel and beyond. It's because I am so impressed and inspired by the young people I meet.
~ Lynn Schusterman
Israel, contrary to most of the West, has a high fertility rate, so there's a lot of young people in Israel. Most families have three kids as opposed to one or two, so a big proportion of the population is under 30.
~ Naftali Bennett
I was a member of the Haifa City Council when I was 23 years old, which made me the youngest city councilman in Israel.
~ Ayman Odeh
From the day I started to think politically and to develop my own moral values, from my earliest youth, I have been an ardent defender of Israel.
~ Steven Spielberg
Arab youth are taught to wonder, 'Since the Holocaust was a European affair, why are the Palestinians being forced to pay for the creation of Israel?'
~ Edgar Bronfman, Sr.
When I made my first trip to Israel as a member of Congress, not only did I meet with the Israeli president and prime minister, but I also traveled to Ramallah to meet with the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. That's what being a member of Congress is about.
~ Lee Zeldin