"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist." -- Golda Meir Statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.

"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." -- Golda Meir (quoted in Chapter 13 of The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace by Alfred Lilienthal )

"We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries,while denying it any employment in our own country .... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." -- Theodore Herzl (from Rafael Patai, Ed. The Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl, Vol I)

"... it is the duty of the [Israeli] leadership to explain to the public a number of truths. One truth is that there is no Zionism,no settlement, and no Jewish state without evacuating Arabs, and without expropriating lands and their fencing off." -- Yesha'ayahuBen-Porat, (Yedi'ot Aharonot 07/14/1972) responding to public controversy regarding the Israeli evictions of Palestinians in Rafah, Gaza, in 1972. (Cited in Nur Masalha's "A Land Without APeople" 1997, p.98)

Speaking about Zionism, and its effects on the indiginous Palestinians: (quotes from Alfred Lilienthal's The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace)

"We seem to have thought of everything -- except the Arabs" -- Judah Magnes

"If this be the Messiah, then I do not wish to see his coming" -- Ahad Ha'am speaking of Zionism.

"I have learned that the state of Israel cannot beruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism."-- Moshe Sharett, Israel's first Foreign Minister and later a Prime Minister(p.51 Simha Flapan, "The Birth of Israel", 1987).

 "The very point of Labor's Zionist program is to have as much land as possible and as few Arabs as possible!" --Yitzhak Navon ("moderate" ex-Israeli president and a leading labor party politician.) Cited on p.179 of Nur Masalha's A Land without a People who cites Bernard Avishai's The Tragedy of Zionism 1985 p.340

 "Israel must decide on the source of the authority of the Israeli state and society: either democracy or theocracy. The corrupt combination of state and religion had corrupted both the state and the religious establishment" -- Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg quoted in the Jerusalem Post
of Oct 7, 1999.

 "Arabs tend to confess; it's part of their nature"
-- Moshe Etzioni, an Israeli high court justice, in an interview with Amnesty International, when asked about the unusually high rate of confessions from Palestinians (indicating Israel's use of torture), 1977. Quote from a Noam Chomsky.

 "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail."
--Rabbi Ya'acov Perin in his eulogy at the funeral of mass murderer Dr. Baruch Goldstein.

 Israeli-Arabs are discriminated against based on military service. Israeli-Arabs don't serve in the Israeli Army and most job applications require, implicitly at least, army service for employment. Also,"Arab towns and villages have been disadvantaged in the allocation of budgets and services, leading to wide gaps in development between most Arab localities and their Jewish neighbors"-- Alouph Hareven, Near East Report (AIPAC newsletter), 10/11/1993

 The Christian population of (the ever expanding) Jerusalem was 30,000 in 1948; today it is 2000, due to the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from that and other areas around Israel. (Paul Findley's Deliberate Deceptions, 1996) Unlike Jews, Arabs are always denied a permission to build and expand.

92% of the land in Israel falls under the Administration of the Jewish National Fund, where the land can not be sold to non-Jews. Result: the 18% Israeli-Arabs own only 4% of the land.

If, say, a Peruvian converts to Judaism and emigrates to Israel, he immediately has more rights than Israeli-Arabs who have lived in the land for many centuries.

"Israel was among the countries cited for discrimination in the U.S. State Department's first annual assessment of religious persecution around the world. While Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Serbia and Burma were subject to some of the report's harshest criticism, Israel was cited for denying its Arab population the same quality of social services that the nation's Jews receive."The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (9/13/99)

 "The long-standing gap in levels of income between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens continues.... The Arab minority still does not share fully in the rights granted to, and the obligations imposed on, Jewish citizens... The authorities continue to hold and mistreat Palestinian security detainees, and detention and prison conditions, particularly for Palestinians, are poor."-- U.S. Department of State, Israel and the Occupied Territories: Report on Human Rights and Practices for 1996.

 "[My] awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state."-- Albert Einstein, quoted in an article by Mordecai Briemberg published in The Outlook, 04/01-0/15, 1998.

 "We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state." -- The Pittsburgh Platform, 1885, the classic statement of the protestant or Reform Judaism).

 Zionism had roots in Jewish Messianism. It, however, translated this Messianism into plans for colonization. Most Jews (reform and orthodox) opposed Zionism until WWII. Even though Orthodox Jews wanted to live in Jerusalem, they still considered Zionism a heresy, as the return of Jewish political control of the land of Israel would take place only by the Messiah in his coming. Their desire to live in Israel was only for the purpose of more effective prayer in the Holy land. Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews in addition were offended by Zionism's effort to transform Hebrew into a modern secular language.

Paraphrased from "The Wrath of Jonah " by Rosemary and Herman Ruether, 1989).

 "In working for Palestine, I would even ally myself with the devil"-- Vladimir Jabotinsky founder of Revisionist Zionism (Likud party roots)responding to condemnation for his alliance with Ukranian pogromist Petlyura.

 "If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel."
-- Ben-Gurion (Quoted on pp 855-56 in Shabtai Teveth's Ben-Gurion in a slightly different translation).

 In 1941, Yitzhak Shamir committed:"an unforgivable crime from the moral point of view: he preached an alliance with Hitler, with Nazi Germany, against Great Britain."
-- Bar Zohar "Le prophète armé: Ben Gourion." (Fayard. Paris 1966, p.99.)

 "The saving of the Jews in Europe did not figure at the head of the list of priorities of the ruling class. It was the foundation of the State which was primordial in their eyes."
-- Tom Segev. "Le septième million" (the Seventh Million) Ed. Liana Levi, Paris, 1993, p.539"

 "The saving of the Jews in Europe did not figure at the head of the list of priorities of the ruling class. It was the foundation of the State which was primordial in their eyes."
-- Tom Segev. "Le septième million" (the Seventh Million) Ed. Liana Levi, Paris, 1993, p.539"

 Vladimir Jabotinsky Despite his alliance with Ukranian pogromist Petlyura, it wasn't Jabotinsky who perpetrated the worst alliance with the Nazis, but the Labor Zionists: Ben-Gurion and Weizmann. In 1933 a world boycott German goods spontaneously emerged. Had this boycott been supported by all Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists, some believe that the German economy would have cracked and Hitler toppled. However, it was thanks to Labor Zionist and their "transfer" (ha'avara) agreements with the Nazis, that led to many trade agreements which resulted in the failure of the world boycott against the Nazis. Jabotnisky opposed the transfer agreement, and wanted to champion the boycott. However, during WWII, his heirs (e.g. Begin, Stern, Shamir) attempted their own alliance with the Nazis against the British who were occupying Palestine at the time. (Paraphrased from "The Wrath of Jonah" by Rosemary and Herman Ruether, 1989). This information can also be found in Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the Dictators; 1983.

 Zionism's Indifference to the Genocide of Jews.

Pointing fingers at the world for its indifference to the genocide of the Jews, while busy using the Holocaust for political gains at the expense of the Palestinians, Zionists have a lot to hide about their indifference, even collaboration, with the Nazis and the Fascists, as their fellow Jews were being sent to concentration camps. It seems that this finger-pointing by the Zionists is nothing more than a smoke screen to hide their dark past of allowing other Jews to die, while the Zionists were lobbying to rob Palestinians of their country. Excellent books on the topic are Zionism in the Age of the Dictators by Lenni Brenner and The Seventh Million by Tom Segev; (both authors are Jews).

 From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (10/23/2000) www.jta.org :

"The U.S. House of Representatives dropped a resolution that would have blamed Turkey for a genocide of Armenians 85 years ago. The Turkish Jewish community asked U.S. lawmakers to consider the ramifications of the resolution after Turkey, an ally of Israel and the United States, threatened trade sanctions and withdrawing military cooperation with the United States."

 John Roth U.S. Holocaust Museum director-elect, was going to become director in 08/1998, but resigned due to a fiasco resulting from a "controversial" comment he made in 1988 where he compared treatment of the Palestinians by Israel to that of the Jews by the Nazis. Here's a portion of an article by Jacqueline Trescott in the June 18, 1998 issue of the Washington Post.

"The storm that erupted around Roth started when the Forward, a Jewish weekly, reported that the scholar [Roth] had compared the treatment of the Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II to the present-day treatment of the Palestinians by Israel. The article in question first appeared in 1988, and when the essay was resurrected Roth publicly apologized. Still the opposition escalated last week when two congressmen told the museum officials that they were offended by that view and others of Roth and that the museum should reconsider its choice." (my emphasis)

The leaders of opposition to Roth were pro-Zionist/pro-Israel organizations who benefit politically from the Holocaust such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Zionist Organization of America. Conclusion: it is not allowable to be both anti-Israel and a Holocaust scholar simultaneously (hence, equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism). Here again is a fine example of the Zionists' effort of hiding their dark ideology of racism and history of alliance with anti-Semites and racism against Palestinian (manifested as the state of Israel), behind the motto of fighting the persecution of Jews. At least Hitler didn't hide his racism behind a human rights front!

 "In our country there is room only for the Jews. We shall say to the Arabs: Get out! If they don't agree, if they resist, we shall drive them out by force."--Professor Ben-Zion Dinur Israel's First Minister of Education, 1954 from History of the Haganah

 "After the Palmach men left [Deir Yassin], the men of the [Irgun and Stern Gang] started a shameful massacre of the inhabitants...[The massacre] was carried out...when the village was in Jewish hands, and without the inhabitants having taken any provocative action..."Meir Pa'il, official Haganah observer on the scene, Yediot Ahranot, April 29, 1972)

 "All of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women or children. The dead we found were all unjust victims, and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands."--Eliyahu Arieli, Haganah member who arrived at Deir Yassin shortly after the massacre, O Jerusalem, Collins and Lapierre, 1972.

 "There is no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young girls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested."

General Richard Catling, British Army Assistant Inspector after interrogating several female survivors (The Palestinian Catastrophe, Michael Palumbo, 1987)

   " Here lies the saint, Doctor Baruch Kapal Goldstein, blessed be the memory of the righteous and holy man, may the Lord revenge his blood, who devoted his soul for the Jews, Jewish religion and Jewish land. His hands are clean and his heart is clear. He was killed as a martyr of God on the 14th of Adar, Purim, in the year 5754. "

Thus goes the inscription on the grave, (made as a shrine visited by pilgrims), of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein. An American Physician and an Israeli settler of Hebron, Goldstein indiscriminately murdered 29 worshipers kneeling in a mosque in 1994.

 Few notes on the Hebron Massacre by Baruch Goldstein:

·         Allowing the extremists and settlers to crown Goldstein a hero, by building him a shrine, Israel is giving a "green light" to other extremists -- all heavily and legally armed, with extensive criminal record-- to follow suit.

·         The American media was careful to label Goldstein an extremist rather than a terrorist.

·         Still the U.S. and Israel continue to ignore the security needs of the Palestinians

·         Don't expect the Israeli authorities to demolish the house of the family of this terrorist.

Only recently (May 1998) the Israeli government voted to remove the memorial at the site, (octagonal stone plaza, candles, book holders, water fountain), but not the grave itself or the tombstone. The reason for Israel's sudden conscientious action is, in my opinion, due to the shrine attracting some world attention, which could mean the attention of U.S. public, a major source of Israel's income. The shrine was finally dismantled on December 29, 1999, almost six years after the massacre.

As of June 1998, the Hebron Massacre was the last time, a U.N. resolution passed condemning Israel (all others were shot down by U.S. vetos)

 "Because we Jews know what it is to suffer, we must not oppress others." - Felicia Langer, Israeli Jew human rights activist.

UN Human Rights Commisson "declares that Israel's greave breaches of the Geneva Convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in the time of war of 12 August, 1949, are war crimes and an affront against humanity."

  In Israel, torture, (or as Israel calls it "moderate physical and psychological pressure" to avoid world/U.S. outcry), is legal and systematic. Some of the methods used are: tie detainees into a kindergarten chair for many hours; shake them violently; cover their heads with a rag bag soaked in vomit (or other foul odored substances); expose them to painfully loud music for extended periods of time; hang them in contorted positions; deprive them from sleep. Attractive methods of torture also include anything that will leave little or no immediately visible markings recognizable by an average reporter.

On September 6, 1999, Israel "banned torture". However, since the "culture of torture" is deeply-ingrained in Israel, then a serious punishment of interrogators who violate this law must be instituted. Sadly, signs indicate otherwise, as interrogators are already given a wink, since "a court might accept the argument that physical force was necessary." (AP, Sep 6).

 Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State recommended that Israel put down the Palestinian uprising "as quickly as possible--overwhelmingly, brutally and rapidly. The insurrection must be quelled immediately, and the first step should be to throw out television, a la South Africa. To be sure, there will be international criticism of the step, but it will dissipate in short order." He added: "There are no awards for losing with moderation."-- Quoted in 12/97 article by Donald Neff in The Washington Report on Middle East

When the subject is torture, there can be no "middle-of-the-road" policy, no compromise, no putting our head in the sand, no flexible and lenient formulas. The considerable experience that has been accumulated on this issue clearly demonstrates the need for a vigilant and uncompromising moral stance.
-- Ha'aretz Editorial, 12/13/1999, on Israel's attempt to find ways to allow torture under "special circumstances".

"It's not a matter of maintaining the status quo. We have to create a dynamic state, oriented towards expansion."
--Ben Gurion

 "Take the American declaration of Independence. It contains no mention of territorial limits. We are not obliged to fix the limits of the State."-- Moshe Dayan, "Jerusalem Post" 08/10/1967

 "Every school child knows that there is no such thing in history as a final arrangement -- not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements."-- Ben Gurion, War Diaries, 12/03/1947 following Israel's "acceptance" of the U.N. Partition of 11/29/1947 (Simha Flapan, "Birth of Israel," p.13)

 "The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple." -- Yitzhak Shamir, Maariv, 02/21/1997.

 "In strategic terms, the settlements (in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza) are of no importance." What makes them important, he added, was that "they constitute an obstacle, an unsurmountable obstacle to the establishment of an independent Arab State west of the river Jordan."
--Binyamin Begin, (son of the late Menahem Begin and a prominent voice in the Likud party writing in 1991, Quoted on page 159 of Findley's Deliberate Deceptions)

 "Without them [the settlements] the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] would be a foreign army ruling a foreign population."
-- Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (quoted in Geoffrey Aronson's Settlements and the Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, Institute for Palestinian Studies.)

 Moshe Dayan:

"The settlements established in the territories are there forever, and the future frontiers will include these settlements as part of Israel"

Dayan also stated that he "preferred Sharm el-Sheikh without peace to a peace without Sharm el-Sheikh".

"From the point of view of the security of the state, the establishment of the settlements has no great importance.".
Dayan's statements all quoted in Chomsky's "The Fateful Triangle" pp. 104-

"Our fathers had reached the frontiers recognized in the partition plan; the Six-Day War generation has managed to reach Suez, Jordan, and the Golan Heights. This is not the end. After the present cease-fire lines, there will be new ones. They will extend beyond Jordan ... to Lebanon and ... to central Syria as well." -- Moshe Dayan to Zionist youth at a meeting in the Golan Heights July, 1968

 "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 exist, 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, addressing the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), Haifa. Quoted in Ha'aretz, 04/04/1969

 Israel presents Jerusalem as a "unified" city whose indivisibility derives from its role as the Jews' sacred and historical capital. It is true that the Jews have a claim to the holy places in and around the Old City. But that historical core represents only three percent of the area of municipal Jerusalem. The other 97 percent was by no means exclusively Jewish. "West" Jerusalem, the 38 square kilometers ruled by Israel as its capital from 1948-67, was built only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although West Jerusalem is almost exclusively Jewish (the main exception being part of Beit Safafa village), before 1948 about 40 percent of it was owned by Palestinians. As for "East" Jerusalem, although 70 square kilometers was annexed in 1967, only 6.5 square kilometers thereof actually constituted the Jordanian part of the city. The other 63.5 square kilometers -- 90 percent of the land annexed by Israel as "East Jerusalem" -- in fact belonged to 28 Palestinian West bank villages which suddenly found themselves part of an "indivisible," "historic" and "sacred" Jewish city. Wallejeh, Sawakhreh and Kafr 'Amr, Palestinian villages which until today Israelis have never heard of, suddenly acquired the same historical significance for the Jewish people as the Western Wall, making Israeli claims to the entire area of "municipal" Jerusalem seem unassailable. An "inner ring" of settlements has been built on the land of this fictitious "East Jerusalem" since 1967. This series of large satellite cities -- Ramot, Rekhes Shuafat, Pigat Ze'ev, Neveh Ya'akov, East Talipot, Har Homa and Gilo, not to mention the incipient Israeli "neighborhoods" in Ra's al-Amud, Silwan and Shaykh Jarrah -- means that "East Jerusalem" now contains more Israelis (about 200,000) than Palestinians. Municipal Jerusalem is an artificial entity, the product of recent military conquest and settlement, rather than an organic city of historic value to the Jewish people.--Professor Jeff Halper from Merip article (Fall 2000)

Ha'aretz Editorial 09/24/1998: on settler violence: "The old cry of the late Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz that "the occupation corrupts" is today correct in the full sense of the word. Israel can no longer live with the illusion that it is maintaining a democratic way of life while at the same time a separate normative system exists for the settlers that tramples human rights in the territories to the point where those who kill are treated forgivingly".

"They [Israel] have typically concealed the continually expansionist nature of their project from their western sponsors and pursued a "step by step" process toward these goals. While pointing to militant Arab rhetoric to frighten Jews and convince them that the Arab world is genocidal against Jews and that no peace is possible with them, Israeli leaders have been quite aware of the actual inability of the Arab world to deliver on this militant rhetoric. " --Rosemary and Herman Ruether in "The Wrath of Jonah" (1989)

 "The main difference between Bosnia and Palestine is that ethnic cleansing in the former took place in the form of dramatic massacres and slaughters which caught the world's attention, whereas in Palestine what is taking place is a drop-by-drop tactic in which one or two houses are demolished daily, a few acres are taken here and there every day, a few people are forced to leave"--Edward Said (Washington Report 09/1998)

The human rights organization Amnesty International said in a report in December that Israel has made about 16,700 Palestinians homeless by destroying at least 2,650 houses since 1987"--From an AP report on home demolitions by Israel dated 04/23/2000

"The demolition and sealing of houses are among the most severe methods of punishment used by the authorities against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. To our knowledge, this harsh form of punishment is unique to Israel and is not employed by any other nation. Demolition and sealing of houses in the territories contravene international law that prohibits collective punishment and arbitrary injury to property."-- B'Tselem, an Israeli Human Rights Organization.

 "... we have no solution, that you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wants to can leave -- and we will see where this process leads? In five years we may have 200,000 less people -- and that is a matter of enorous importance."
-- Moshe Dayan encouraging the transfer of Gaza strip refugees to Jordan (from Noam Chomsky's Deterring Democracy, 1992, p.434, quoted in Nur Masalha's A Land Without A People, 1997 p.92).

 "It is an open secret that Israeli policy makers hoped for a massive emigration of Palestinians as a result of economic and demographic pressure. Therefore, they also developed a clever system which caused numerous Palestinians born here to lose their residency rights when they went to work or study abroad." -- Amira Hass in 08/26/1998 Ha'aretz Op'Ed titled The Settlers are Not to Blame.

 While campaigning for the prime ministership, Binyamin Netanyahu Criticized his Labor party opponents for missing an opportunity during the Tiannamen Square massacre. "Had he been prime minister, he said, he would have seized the chance then, while the world was watching China, to carry out the transfer of the Palestinians." -- p. 137 Washington Report 09/1998.