some famous statements from zionist/israeli leaders:
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the 'Beasts,"' New Statesman, June 25,1982:
"[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs."
David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff.
From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978:
"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population."
Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department.
From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5:
"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them."
Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, "Complete Diaries," June 12, 1895 entry.:
"Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, head of the Kever Yossev Yeshiva (school of Talmud) in Nablus stated:
"The blood of the Jewish people is loved by the Lord; it is therefore redder and their life is preferable."
Yitzhak Ginsburg, "Five General Religious Duties Which Lie Behind the Act of the Saintly, Late Rabbi Baruch Goldstein, May his Blood be Avenged":
"The killing by a Jew of a non-Jew, i.e. a Palestinian, is considered essentially a good deed, and Jews should therefore have no compunction about it."
In 1923, radical Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky-- spiritual father of not only of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin but of Brooklyn Rabbi Meir Kahane-- wrote:
the "sole way" for Jews to deal with Arabs in Palestine was through "total avoidance of all attempts to arrive at a settlement"-which Jabotinsky euphemistically termed the "iron wall" approach. Not coincidentally, a picture of Jabotinsky graces Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's desk. Source: The Village Voice, "Death Wish in the Holy Land," Dec. 12, 2001.
The influential Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef exclaimed during a sermon preceding the 2001 Passover holiday, :
"May the Holy Name visit retribution on the
Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them." He added: "It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones." -- Source: Ha'aretz April 12, 2001.
Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969:
"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population? Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'"
David Ben Gurion, quoted in The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldmann, Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1978, p. 99:
"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 Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, 'Begin and the "Beasts"', New Statesman, 25 June 1982:
"We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return."
Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979. Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet:
"We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters."
David Goldman wrote:
"We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours."
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's infamous quote:
"There is no such thing as a Palestinian."
Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998:
"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."
Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum":
"If I was an Arab leader I would never make [peace] with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country."
And finally:
Michael Ben-Yair, Attorney General of Israel, 1993-1996 (in Ha'aretz):
"The Intifada is the Palestinian's people's war of national liberation. We [Israel] enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the Occupied Territories, engaging in theft and funding justification for all these activities.. we [Israel] established an apartheid regime."
Ehud Barak, on Israeli TV (date undetermined, but confirmed by former Israeli Knesset Member Marsha Friedman):
"If I were a Palestinian, I would be a terrorist."
(Speaking about Sharon's policies toward the Palestinians.)
Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel (date undetermined, in an Israeli cabinet meeting):
Don't worry, we [Israel] control the United States.
(In response to concerns raised by another cabinet member about Sharon's ["the butcher of Beirut"] invasion and brutality in the West Bank.)
