Quotes from Israeli Prime Ministers regarding the Middle East conflict:
- "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that ... I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.
- David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): " If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp.121-122.
- "We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return... The old will die and the young will forget."-David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, July 18, 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's "Ben-Gurion:the Armed prophet," Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
- "We must expel Arabs and take their places." - David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.
- "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." - David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.
- "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!'? 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.
- "Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country." - David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky's Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan's "Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech
- "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, March 8, 1969.
- "This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy." - Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971
- "I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled 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 state of Israel must invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the methods of provocation and revenge...And above all, let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space." - From the diary of Moshe Sharett, Israeli's first Foreign Minister from 1948 -1956, and Prime Minister from 1954-1956.
- " [The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs."-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the 'Beasts," New Statesman, June 25, 1982.
- "(The Palestinians) would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." - Israeli Prime Minister (at the time) Yitzhak Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
- "If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke, we would use much more force...." - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, quoted in Associated Press, November 16, 2000
- "I would have joined a terrorist organization." - Ehud Barak's response to Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Ha'aretz newspaper, when Barak was asked what he would have done if he had been born a Palestinian.
- "Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories." Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, tells students at Bar Ilan University,From the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989
- 'Let me tell you what the sweetest fruit of this war in Lebanon is: It is that the Gentiles now don't just hate Israel. Thanks to us, now they also hate all those Jews in Paris, London, New York, Frankfurt and Montreal. Now the Jews there are getting it because of us, and I am telling you, it is a pleasure to watch. Their cemeteries are being desecrated, their synagogues are set on fire, all their old nicknames are being revived, they are being expelled from the best clubs, people shoot into their ethnic restaurants murdering their small children. We'll hear no more of that nonsense about the unique Jewish morality. No more talk about a unique people being a light upon the nations. No more uniqueness and no more sweetness and light. Good riddance. Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many as is necessary, to deport, expel, and burn, to have everyone hate us, to pull the rug out from underneath the feet of the rest of the world’s Jews so that they will be forced to run to us crying. Even if it means blowing up one or two synagogues here and there, I don't care...What you don't seem to understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it.'--Ariel Sharon commenting upon the war in Lebanon in 1982
- "Vengeance is a fundamental Jewish concept that is a commandment for the Jew, even though it has become (thanks to the gentilized and perplexed era in which we live) a maligned thing...Let the government of Israel, which is responsible for the lives of its citizens, make the streets, buses, shops and homes of the Ishmaelites [Palestinians] perpetual places of terror and stark insecurity...Wipe away the bitter degradation of G-d's name that is symbolized by Arab refusal to bow to Jewish sovereignty. A truly Jewish government is one that understands the need to eradicate the Arab desecration by burning out the evil that is the Arab nation in our midst. All non-Jews will one day acknowledge the superiority of the Chosen people...The Jewish people cannot ever be destroyed, but rather they and their G-d of History will emerge in days to come triumphant over the evils and foolishness of all other nations. Zion will and must emerge as the mount to which all peoples will turn and the Jewish G-d will be the One before Whom all knees bend...Let us look at events through Jewish eyes...Lebanon--A war begun by Israel that is a war unto the death...the utter destruction of the enemy, the instilling of total fear, terror, until he capitulates and acknowledges the G-D of Israel...I have said it a million times. Western democracy as we know it is incompatible with Zionism....Democracy is for people who don't have the truth. No earthly, temporal government has any relevance to the actions of the Jew when its orders and regulations are contrary to Jewish law, and Judaism has never been a democratic form of any society."--Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the misnamed terrorist organization Jewish Defense League and whose followers can be found strewn all over the Western world, America and Israel.
- "Regarding what took place on September 11, well it's very good... Well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy for Israel." -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the attacks on America as reported in The Jerusalem Post, September 12, 2001.
- The arrogant Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, once stated the following: “The Jewish “Race” is the MASTER RACE. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our “race”, other races are beasts and animals; cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves.”
