Arab-Israeli conflict

From BillionQuotes

These quotes relate to the wikipedia article of the same name

• "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exists, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu'a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab Population." Moshe Dayan, Israeli military leader and politician in an address to the Technion, Haifa; as quoted in Ha'aretz (4 April 1969).
• "The greatest security for Israel is to create new Egypts." President Ronald Reagan. Quoted in: Observer (London, 27 February 1983).
• "My generation, dear Ron, swore on the Altar of God that whoever proclaims the intent of destroying the Jewish state or the Jewish people, or both, seals his fate." — Menachem Begin, Israeli politician, prime minister. Letter to Reagan. Quoted in: Observer (London, 2 January 1983).
• "We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon-no alternative." — Golda Meir, Israeli politician, prime minister. Life (New York, 3 October 1969).
• "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us" — Golda Meir, 1957
• "We, the people of Palestine, stand before you in the fullness of our pain, our pride, and our anticipation for we long harbored a yearning for peace and a dream of justice and freedom. For too long, the Palestinian people have gone unheeded, silenced and denied, our identity negated by political expedience, our right for struggle against injustice maligned, and our present existence subsumed by the past tragedy of another people" Haidar Abd El-Shafi, head of the Palestinian Delegation to the Madrid Peace Conference, Opening Remarks (Madrid, 30 October 1991)[1]
• "Our image has undergone change from David fighting Goliath to being Goliath." — Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli politician, prime minister. Quoted in: Daily Telegraph (London, 25 January 1989).
• "Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or it is the explosive that blows it apart." — Yasser Arafat, Palestinian leader. Quoted in: Time (New York, 11 November 1974).
• "We are not asking for the moon." — Yasser Arafat, Palestinian leader. Quoted in: Observer (London, 7 February 1982).
• "Should there be maniacs who raise the idea, they will encounter an iron fist which will leave no trace of such attempts." — Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli politician, prime minister. Quoted in: Times (London, 11 August 1988), on advocates of Palestinian self-government.
• "Whoever thinks of stopping the uprising before it achieves its goals, I will give him ten bullets in the chest." — Yasser Arafat, Palestinian leader. Quoted in: Daily Telegraph (London, 19 January 1989), on the Intifada.
• "We, the soldiers who have returned from battles stained with blood; we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes; we who have attended their funerals and cannot look in the eyes of their parents; we who have come from a land where parents bury their children; we who have fought against you, the Palestinians-we say to you today, in a loud and a clear voice: enough of blood and tears. Enough." — Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli prime minister. Speech at the White House, September 13 1993, after signing the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles.
• "Not only [are] our states . . . making peace with each other,. . . you and I, your Majesty, are making peace here, our own peace, the peace of soldiers and the peace of friends." — Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Prime Minister. New York Times, (July 27 1994), after signing a peace declaration with Jordan's King Hussein.
• "The pre-eminent obstacle to peace is Israel’s colonisation of Palestine." — Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, March 10, 2006 [2].

Arab Hostility

• "Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse the aggression, but to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is united....I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation." (Syrian Defense Minister Hafez Assad (May 20 1967) [3])
• "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." (by Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, in anticipation of victory over the new Jewish state in 1948 by the five invading Arab armies. This quote is described by Isi Leibler (1972) and mentioned in letters to the New York Times in 15 October 1951, and 28 August 1958.
• "I declare a holy war, my Muslim brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!" (Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, and head of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee [4], the original quote purportedly comes from a 1948 radio broadcast by the Mufti)
• After the withdrawal of the UNEF, the Voice of the Arabs radio station proclaimed (May 18 1967): "As of today, there no longer exists an international emergency force to protect Israel. We shall exercise patience no more. We shall not complain any more to the UN about Israel. The sole method we shall apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence."[5]