“How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty?”
―
Bertrand Russell
“While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.
It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.”
―
Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf
“The first thing you notice, coming to Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest. The difference is so profound that you're left wondering when the mutation in Semitic blood occurred, as though God parted the Red Sea and said: "Okay, you rude ones, keep wandering toward the Promised Land. The rest of you can stay here and rot in the desert, saying 'welcome, most welcome' and drowning each other in tea until the end of time.”
―
Tony Horwitz,
Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia
“كيف يمكن ألا يستطيع الإنسان أن يسير إلى ملكه الخاص؟ أن يزور قبر زوجته؟ أن يأكل ثمار أربعين جيلاً من كدح أسلافه من دون أن يعاقب بالموت رمياً بالرصاص؟ على نحو ما، لم يكن هذا السؤال الفجّ القاسي قد نفذ سابقاً إلي وعي اللاجئين الذين شوشتهم أبدية الانتظار، معلقين آمالهم على قرارات دولية نظرية”
―
Susan Abulhawa,
Mornings in Jenin
“Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do
not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.”
―
Christopher Hitchens,
Hitch-22: A Memoir
“In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.”
―
George Clooney
“We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”
―
Edward W. Said
“I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the day when 'it happens again' and the Jew-baiters take over. (And I don't pretend not to know what they are talking about: I have actually seen the rabid phenomenon at work in modern and sunny Argentina and am unable to forget it.) So then, they seem to think, they will take refuge in the Law of Return, and in Haifa, or for all I know in Hebron. Never mind for now that if all of world Jewry
did settle in Palestine, this would actually necessitate further Israeli expansion, expulsion, and colonization, and that their departure under these apocalyptic conditions would leave the new brownshirts and blackshirts in possession of the French and British and American nuclear arsenals. This is ghetto thinking, hardly even fractionally updated to take into account what has changed. The important but delayed realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are
a part of the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it. Why else does Israel daily beseech the often-flourishing Jews of other lands, urging them to help the most endangered Jews of all: the ones who rule Palestine by force of arms? Why else, having supposedly escaped from the need to rely on Gentile goodwill, has Israel come to depend more and more upon it? On this reckoning, Zionism must constitute one of the greatest potential non sequiturs in human history.”
―
Christopher Hitchens,
Hitch-22: A Memoir
“فلسطين بلادنا"، يرددها أطفالنا، ربما دون وعي لكنها، بل باندفاع عاطفي هو آفة الكبير قبل الصغير، ينقله الآباء للأبناء. ثم ماذا؟ ما هي فلسطين ومن نحن؟ عدا تلك الخرائط الصماء التي تزين أعناق الصبايا، والتي يتفنن الحرفيون في "سكِّها"
تارة من ذهب وأخرى من فضة، وحينا من معادن اقل غلاءً. مكتفين "بسحر الرمز" وألوان العلم الأربعة.”
―
أنور حامد,
يافا تعد قهوة الصباح
“There's a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word "occupation" is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with.”
―
Refaat Alareer,
Gaza Writes Back
