Israel

Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in the Middle East, situated at the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and the northern shore of the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea. It shares land borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan on the east, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the east and west, respectively, which are claimed by the Palestine, and Egypt to the southwest. It contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area. Israel's financial and technology center is Tel Aviv, while Jerusalem is both its self-designated capital (though unrecognised by the United Nations) and its most populous individual city under the country's governmental administration. Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem is internationally disputed. In its Basic Laws, Israel defines itself as a "Jewish and Democratic State". Its head of state is President Isaac Herzog and its head of government is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

See Also: 2023 Israel–Hamas war

Quotes




A



 * I feel Israel should have the arms it needs, but the long-range solution for peace is in direct negotiations with the Arabs. Period."
 * Bella Abzug Bella!: Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington (1972)


 * Israel is the only place that Jews can live where they don't have always to be thinking about being Jewish.
 * Yehuda Amichai 1984 interview in We Are All Close: Conversations with Israeli Writers by Haim Chertok (1989)


 * The Jewish people have married Israel, this land. But as in a real marriage, things have cooled down. Complaining about it sounds like an old man complaining about his age. An old couple should just live together. That's all. It is, after all, perfectly normal. We have, after all, passed the honeymoon stage, passed the romance, but this is, nonetheless, a true marriage. Such is my Zionism. I am, you see, beyond illusions. In America people, without the slightest intention of doing so, every year repeat "Next year in Jerusalem." Now that is what I call true cynicism.
 * Yehuda Amichai 1984 interview in We Are All Close: Conversations with Israeli Writers by Haim Chertok (1989)

B

 * The West needed a handle in the Middle East. And they created the state as a European pawn. It is tragic that the Jews should allow themselves to be used in this fashion, because no one cares what happens to the Jews. No one cares what is happening to the Arabs. But they do care about the oil.
 * 1970 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin (1989)


 * If the Jewish state becomes a fact, and this is realized by the Arab peoples, they will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea.
 * Hassan Banna, "Aim to Oust Jews Pledged by Sheikh", New York Times (August 2, 1948)


 * It doesn't matter what the world says about Israel; it doesn't matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here on the land of our forefathers. And unless we show the Arabs that there is a high price to pay for murdering Jews, we won't survive.
 * David Ben-Gurion, as quoted by Ariel Sharon, in the documentary The 50 Years War: Israel & The Arabs (1999).


 * This life as a simple citizen and laborer has its benefits not only for the person himself but perhaps also for his country. After all, there is room for only one Prime Minister, but for those who make the desert bloom there is room for hundreds, thousands and even millions. And the destiny of the state is in the hands of the many rather than of a single individual. There are times when an individual feels he should do those things which only can and should be done by the many.
 * David Ben-Gurion, "Why I Retired to the Desert", The New York Times Magazine (28 March 1954), p. 47.


 * In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
 * David Ben-Gurion, interview on CBS (5 October 1956), as quoted in Israel: Years of Crisis Years of Hope (1973) by Roman Frister, p. 45.


 * Israel is in an existential crisis. It can wall itself off and annex what it wants on the West Bank, and leave Palestinians in tiny truncated, nonviable bantustans that will become the spawning pools of terror. Or it can give the Palestinians what Oslo, Camp David, Taba and the 'roadmap' promised; a homeland, a nation and a state of their own. Israel is free to choose.
 * Pat Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (2004)


 * It is a country in which a clear majority of the population, battered by wars and terrorism and heartbreak and frustration, still wants to see negotiations leading to a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and an end to occupation.
 * Bradley Burston, What Does 'Death to Israel' Mean to You?,  (November 03, 2011)

C

 * You mess with Israel, you are messing with the United States of America. It's that simple.
 * Herman Cain, as quoted in Real Clear Politics (20 May 2011).


 * I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
 * Winston Churchill in 1937, as quoted in Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine (1996), p. 105


 * And Israel is not only our ally; it is a beacon of what democracy can and should mean… If the people of the Middle East are not sure what democracy means, let them look to Israel.
 * In defeating terror, Israel’s cause is our cause.
 * Hillary Clinton, Hanukkah dinner speech at Yeshiva University (December 2005)

F

 * It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically-burdened land….I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives.
 * Sigmund Freud Letter to Dr. Chaim Koffler Keren Ha Yassod, Vienna (Feburary 26, 1930)

G



 * Israel is a colonialist-imperialist phenomenon. There is no such thing as an Israeli people. Before 1948, world geography knew of no state such as Israel. Israel is the result of an invasion, of aggression.
 * Muammar Gaddafi "An Interview with Gaddafi", Time (9 April 1979)

H

 * In order to start again in this land, the idealists wanted to forget, to obliterate their past. But when you amputate your past, you pay a price. Part of that is the failure of empathy.
 * Shulamith Hareven 1985 interview in We Are All Close: Conversations with Israeli Writers by Haim Chertok (1989)


 * If we ask why the Jews wouldn’t move to British Columbia if offered a home there, we can see the role that religion still plays in their thinking.
 * Sam Harris, "Why Don't I Criticize Israel?", Sam Harris Blog (27 July 2014)

I

 * We declare that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People's Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called "Israel".
 * Israeli Declaration of Independence (1948).


 * The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
 * Israeli Declaration of Independence (1948).

J

 * It had a great and lofty wall and had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and names were inscribed which are those of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel.
 * John the Evangelist, Revelation 21:12, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures

K

 * Like prosperous and peaceful Japan on the one hand, and war-torn and poverty-wracked Armenia on the other, Israel is a classic national-ethnic organism.
 * Robert D. Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy", The Atlantic (February 1994)


 * I've been to Palestine. It exists, right next to Israel. The problem is not that Palestine threatens or erases Israel. The problem is that there are Israeli soldiers all over Palestine.
 * Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz "I've been to Israel and Palestine" in The Issue is Power (1992)


 * We must remember: what is beautiful is the resistance, and that people can-and must-resist from their own authentic place in the world. We must reach out to Israelis fighting for peace, civil rights, and feminism without secretly feeling the Palestinians are more beautiful, because more besieged. One of the hardest acts of self-love for American radical Jews is to identify in this with Israelis, and I have come to believe it is a crucial stretch, for the alternative is denial of the Jewish connection. It is from this solid, self-knowing place that we can work towards peace and justice in the Middle East.
 * Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz "To Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century" (1986) in The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology


 * Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.
 * Martin Luther King, Jr. (March 25, 1968)
 * Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated on April 4, 1968


 * I want to see a flowering of Arab and Jewish cultures in a country without racism or anti-Semitism, without rich or poor or spat-upon: everyone beneath the vine and fig tree living in peace and unafraid. A homeland for each and every one of us between the mountains and the sea. A multilingual, multireligious, many-colored and peopled land where the orange tree blooms for all. I will not surrender this vision for any lesser compromise. No separate-but-equal armed camps turning their backs on each other across a pitted buffer zone. No Palestinian exile burning with dreams of return, injustice embittering generations of children who yearn always for the place of their ancestors: next year in the Galilee. No graveyard the size of a nation, Palestinian blood burning the ground and steaming up each morning, reeking of death. No fortress-state of Jews against all the rest of the world, generations of children growing up soldiers, believing themselves holy, believing there is no one outside the walls, believing fear is the only force that binds people together. I will accept nothing less than freedom.
 * Aurora Levins Morales Getting Home Alive with Rosario Morales (1986)

M

 * We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon — no alternative. The Egyptians could run to Egypt, the Syrians into Syria. The only place we could run was into the sea, and before we did that we might as well fight.
 * Golda Meir, as quoted in LIFE magazine (3 October 1969), p. 32.


 * Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!
 * Golda Meir, at a dinner honoring West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, as reported in The New York Times (10 June 1973).

N

 * We are awaiting aggression by Israel and any supporters of Israel. We will make it a decisive battle and get rid of Israel once and for all… This is the dream of every Arab.
 * Gamal Abdel Nasser, as quoted in The Washington Post (27 July 1959)


 * Ladies and gentlemen, the people of Israel have come home never to be uprooted again.
 * Benjamin Netanyahu, address to the United Nations General Assembly (1 October 2013).

O

 * "I think the word is intractable. I blame the lack of live and let live. And which side is it coming from more than the other side? I think it is coming from people who call other people infidels. That's how it strikes me." Was she moved the first time she went to Israel? "Yes. Probably not like my father, who was simply swept away. He couldn't get over that he had ascended Mount Zion. I don't see any solution here. I'm despairing. That's where I stand."
 * Cynthia Ozick Interview with The Guardian (2011)

R

 * Neither Israeli nor Palestinian society is a seamless, monochrome garment: hope as well as difficulty lies in this recognition.
 * Adrienne Rich "Jewish Days and Nights" in Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, eds., Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2003) and A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008 (2009)


 * Since Israel is a democratic state surrounded by essentially undemocratic states which have sworn her destruction, those interested in democracy everywhere must support Israel’s existence.
 * Bayard Rustin cited in "Blacks and Jews Viewed As Drawing Closer Again", The New York Times (April 14, 1975)

T

 * Israel is a very small place, as you know, there’s something that can feel very familial about it, which is both positive and not so positive at different times and different instances.
 * Ayelet Tsabari Interview (2019)


 * The sea is such a big part of life in Israel, of Israeli culture. You can actually taste it in the air.
 * Ayelet Tsabari Interview

W

 * If it is proper to 'reconstitute' a Jewish State which has not existed for two thousand years, why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.
 * H. G. Wells, Palestine Dilemma, Sakran, Frank C., p.204


 * Israel is a Western democracy … The so-called 'Middle East conflict' is not about land at all. It is not a territorial conflict. It's a conflict about ideologies; it's a battle between Islam and freedom.
 * Geert Wilders, remarks at the Free Speech Summit Columbia University, New York (21 October 2009)