In Israel Quotes

#1. The scale of time for a politician runs between one primary and the next, and in Israel, this means two to three years because elections almost never take place once every four years as stipulated by law. The timetable for a system of research is completely different.

Aaron Ciechanover

#2. I believe that if Israel were to put an end to the settlements in the West Bank tomorrow, as it did in Gaza, there would still be reluctance on the part of the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish secular democracy.

Alan Dershowitz

#3. Israel is our friend, that we will assist in their security.

Barack Obama

#4. Israel claims it needs nuclear weapons as a deterrent against any threat to its existence. The Arab world in return feels that this is an imbalanced system; there is a sense of humiliation and impotence.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#5. I think in Israel there is so much talent in the TV world because there's less movies done.

Ayelet Zurer

#6. I guess this is gonna sound kind of weird, but I'm not scared for myself for dying. Because I believe all these places are temporary. This is just one shell. Because we Hawaiians live in both worlds.

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

#7. Current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by 'post-World War I British and French imperialism and post-World War II creation of the state of Israel.

Rodney Stark

#8. I grew up in Wakefield, Mass., and there were only a couple of Jewish families in the town.

Israel Horovitz

#9. Any actor, any playwright who's worked a life in the theater knows how to do things cheaply and quickly. It's just all by necessity. Invention is everything.

Israel Horovitz

#10. No, the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you - he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.

Israel Zangwill

#11. The Israeli lobby has clout in the U.S., which means that re-arranging the region and controlling its resources one way or another, will serve Israel through its control over the American administration.

Bashar Al-Assad

#12. 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

#13. Look, we have existed for 4,000 years - 2,000 years in diaspora, in exile. Nobody in the Middle East speaks their original language but Israel. When we started 64 years ago, we were 650,000 people. So, you know, we are maybe swimming a little bit against the stream, but we continue to swim.

Shimon Peres

#14. I don't think the Palestinians are in this position they're in, divided with Hamas and the P.A., unwilling to allow - or recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

David Brooks

#15. The greatest king of Israel, King David, the author of the Psalms, sent a man out to die in battle so that he could sleep with his wife.

Robert Duvall

#16. A favorite Palestinian tactic was to set up a couple of cannons or rocket launchers in a Christian village, fire a few rounds into Israel, and then quickly withdraw, knowing that Israel's return fire would fall on innocent Christian civilians.

Brigitte Gabriel

#17. My first name, Benjamin, dates back a thousand years earlier to Benjamin - Binyamin - the son of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. Jacob and his 12 sons roamed these same hills of Judea and Sumeria 4,000 years ago, and there's been a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#18. I learned Hebrew from a high school teacher named Mr. Cohen. We would drive down the highway to meet his car, and Jewish boys from these Massachusetts towns would sit in his car and learn the lessons.

Israel Horovitz

#19. I look forward to my first visit to Israel. Music is a universal language that is meant to unify audiences in peace and love, and that is the spirit of our show.

Alicia Keys

#20. The idea that you can make love and not war really is pretty neat. That thing in Korea, the thing in Israel - that's all over the world. There must be a new way of thinking.

F. Murray Abraham

#21. Bashar al-Assad and those who still stand by him are now responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 in Syria.

Susan Rice

#22. There was an opinion expressed in the newspapers that, after 20 years, maybe the Israel Philharmonic should consider asking me to leave. I thought they might have a point, so I asked my orchestra. They told me overwhelmingly that they wanted me to stay.

Zubin Mehta

#23. Israel's willingness to cooperate closely with the U.S. in protecting American interests in the region altered her image in the eyes of many officials in Washington.

Yitzhak Rabin

#24. The God of Israel is sometimes a God who hides Himself, but never a God who absents Himself; sometimes in the dark, but never at a distance.

Matthew Henry

#25. Well I haven't seen any free elections in the Arab world. They may be coming someday, except for in Israel. In Israel, Arabs have a chance to participate in free elections. Nowhere else really.

Moshe Arens

#26. What Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Yasser Arafat

#27. The only times during my religious instruction I remember hearing God's name invoked with any sincere conviction at all was in the oft-repeated and breathtakingly chauvinistic claim that Israel's 'miraculous' military victories over much-stronger enemies proved that He was ever on Zion's side.

Rick Perlstein

#28. Mainstream Jewish intellectuals became 'pro'-Israel after the June 1967 war when Israel became the U.S.A.' s strategic asset in the Middle East, i.e., when it was safe and reaped benefits. To credit them with ideological conviction is, in my opinion, very naive.

Norman Finkelstein

#29. Iran's arms exports to the murderous Assad regime in Syria are of particular concern. As the Panel of Experts has concluded, Syria is now the central party to illicit Iranian arms transfers.

Susan Rice

#30. We've never been to Israel. I'd like to play in Israel.

Chris Squire

#31. Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?

Elie Wiesel

#32. For an artist to go and play in a country that occupies other people's land and oppresses them, the way Israel does, is plain wrong. They should say no.

Roger Waters

#33. If it is gay, ribald and lascivious night-life you are after, Israel is not the place for you. The night clubs you do find are nearer in spirit to a YMCA than to dens of iniquity.

George Mikes

#34. It [our best show] was this year, the 7th of January in Eilat, Israel; 6,000 people in the desert going absolutely mad!

Tiesto

#35. If history remembers me at all, in any way, I hope it will be as a man who loved the Land of Israel and watched over it in every way he could, all his life.

Yitzhak Shamir

#36. I have no sentiments for nationality or for soil. But I grew up in Israel, so those things are in my blood, and I want to be part of Israeli culture.

Mili Avital

#37. In order to restore security for Israeli citizens, every home, mother and child in Israel, and to establish a stable and strong government that will unite the nation ... I hereby declare my candidacy for the Likud party leadership and premiership of Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#38. Not all Modern Orthodox Jews, at the present juncture, identify with what the Israeli government does. In Israel many religious Zionists strongly oppose the government because of the disengagement.

Norman Lamm

#39. I feel like the history between Israel and Palestine has a lot in common with the history between India and Pakistan.

Freida Pinto

#40. In no text or archaeological finding do we find the term "Land of Israel" used to refer to a defined geographic region. This

Shlomo Sand

#41. Christianity emerged from the religion of Israel. Or rather, it has as its background a persistent strain in that religion. To that strain Christians have looked back, and rightly, as the preparation in history for their faith.

Kenneth Scott Latourette

#42. In ancient Jewish tradition, as far back as we can tell, the Song of Songs was not interpreted as a love poem or as an allegory of the individual soul; it was interpreted as an allegory of God's spousal love for the people of Israel.

Brant Pitre

#43. The notion that we would condition Iran not getting nuclear weapons in a verifiable deal on Iran recognizing Israel is really akin to saying that we won't sign a deal unless the nature of the Iranian regime completely transforms. And that is, I think, a fundamental misjudgment.

Barack Obama

#44. Let every girl, let every woman, let every mother here [in Israel]-and there in my country [Egypt]-know we shall solve all our problems through negotiations around the table rather than starting war.

Anwar Sadat

#45. If every single Jew born anywhere in the world has the right to become an Israeli citizen, then all the Palestinians who were chucked out of Palestine by the Zionist Government should have the same right, very simple.

Tariq Ali

#46. We may need to change the way we think. As in Israel, I think there should be a mandatory draft, where you go away for the service of your country for three years.

Steven Tyler

#47. Sharing love and light while in Israel.

Ashton Kutcher

#48. You don't have people chanting 'Death to America' in Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#49. The more Israel sinks into the West Bank, the more it is delegitimized and isolated, the more the world focuses on Israel's colonialism rather than Iran's nuclear enrichment, the more people call for a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine.

Thomas Friedman

#50. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has denounced negotiation with Iran as a 'historic mistake' that is making the world 'a more dangerous place.' His partners in Washington vigorously echo that view.

Stephen Kinzer

#51. The Israeli regime is a tool in the hands of Zionists to control the Middle-East and the entire world.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

#52. Iran should not be denied the human right to knowledge ... the fear of America is Iran's attitude to Israel, and the cornerstone of America's foreign policy is the protection of Israel ... If Iran believes in Allah, and if Iran believes in the power of Allah, Iran can't be frightened by America.

Louis Farrakhan

#53. In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Anonymous

#54. Just a recognition of the reality of decision-making and the state of play in the government of Israel.

Richard Boucher

#55. There is no way around the contradictions and dangers inherent in Israel's decision to free over 1,000 prisoners in order to liberate Gilad Shalit.

Elliott Abrams

#56. Israel has its attractions. It's the most dramatic country in the world. Everybody's engaged. Everybody argues. When I leave Israel, I get a little bit bored, you know?

Shimon Peres

#57. At the same time as we clearly condemn actions of violence by groups in Palestinian against Israel.

Jane Harman

#58. Lebanon, Israel, Ireland, South Africa - wherever there is a bleeding sore on the body of the world, the same hard-eyed narrow-minded fanatics are busy, indifferent to life, in love with death.

J.M. Coetzee

#59. If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.

Arthur Koestler

#60. I heard an Israeli speaking on Palestinian human rights issues, an interesting guy, and he said 'There's no military solution to terrorism. If there were, Israel would be the safest place in the world. But there's no military solution.'

Bradley Whitford

#61. You cannot have humane Zionism, it is a contradiction in terms.

Israel Shahak

#62. For the people of Israel and America are historic partners in the global quest for human dignity and freedom. We will always remain at each other's side.

Ronald Reagan

#63. Israel, in general, should learn from other nations. We have a tendency to teach the world. In many cases, we should learn from the world, because they make advances.

Dan Shechtman

#64. Tel-Aviv airport is still the only airport in the world where each passenger is met by ten relatives.

George Mikes

#65. My dream is to have a small company in France.

Israel Horovitz

#66. Well, this is an unfortunate part of the UN institution. It's the - the theater of the absurd. It doesn't only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi's Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights; Saddam's Iraq headed the UN Committee on Disarmament.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#67. I wanted to be a musician, either a guitarist or a drummer. I guess my dreams were in the entertainment industry, and I landed somewhere along there.

Israel Broussard

#68. Of course, Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with anyone who is dedicated to its destruction. But while I know you have had differences with the Palestinian Authority, I believe that you do have a true partner in President Abbas ...

Barack Obama

#69. It would be better to drown these prisoners in the Dead Sea if possible, since that's the lowest point in the world.

Avigdor Lieberman

#70. Bible is a window into the life and practices of the people who lived in Israel and bordering nations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and Judea.

Sudhir Ahluwalia

#71. I never thought that Syria and Israel should engage in a violent confrontation because I don't think that there is any particular interest for any of us to do it.

Ehud Olmert

#72. When Israel, of the Lord belov'd, Out of the land of bondage came, Her fathers' God before her mov'd, An awful guide in smoke and flame.

Walter Scott

#73. Israel has no interest in destroying Hamas; it seeks merely to weaken and isolate it. Hamas gives Israel an out, a convenient villain, someone to blame.

Anonymous

#74. In Israel, a land lacking in natural resources, we learned to appreciate our greatest national advantage: our minds. Through creativity and innovation, we transformed barren deserts into flourishing fields and pioneered new frontiers in science and technology.

Shimon Peres

#75. The nations which have put mankind and posterity most in their debt have been small states Israel, Athens, Florence, Elizabethan England.

Bill Vaughan

#76. But there is a difference here: When Jewish children are murdered, Arabs celebrate the deed. The death of an Arab child is no cause for celebration in Israel.

Theodore Bikel

#77. 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.

Theodor Herzl

#78. Playing on the streets of Iraq, or in Israel or the Gaza strip, I'd sing angry protest songs against war. People would say, 'Make us clap, make us dance, and laugh and sing.' It really made me think about the importance of happy music.

Michael Franti

#79. I am the most popular man in Israel.

Arcadi Gaydamak

#80. I imagine, like all his predecessors, Barak Obama would like to achieve greatness in bringing peace in the Middle East. I hope it will not be at the expense of Israel.

Elie Wiesel

#81. The most important thing in the Land of Israel is to build, build, build. Its important that there will be an Israeli presence everywhere. Our principal problem is still Israels leaders unwillingness to say in a simple manner that the Land of Israel belongs to the People of Israel.

Naftali Bennett

#82. It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians. If they did so, they couldn't be reelected.

Jimmy Carter

#83. The Egyptian military and the government of Israel have long had a common interest in maintaining order and fighting terrorism in Sinai.

Elliott Abrams

#84. As is typical of this God [of Israel], he calls his people into freedom in the most unlikely place.

Mark Galli

#85. From the Israeli perspective, the fear is that if pressure is off of Iran, Israel would be left having to accept the balance of power in the region significantly shifting toward Iran. It's not an existential threat, but it would definitely be a problem for Israel.

Trita Parsi

#86. The actions of the terrorist organizations, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Hamas, in Gaza, against Israel are unconscionable. Instead of working towards peace, these terrorist organizations have chosen to perpetuate the violence.

Alcee Hastings

#87. Although their parents died in the wilderness for their stubbornness, Israel could profit from the older generation's failure by remembering that God had used adversity to train them.

Max Anders

#88. Israel reoccupied the cities of the West Bank by a unilateral action, and reestablished the civil and military occupation by a unilateral action, and it is the one that determines whether or not a Palestinian citizen has the right to reside in any part of the Palestinian Territory.

Mahmoud Abbas

#89. Israel should withdraw from all the areas which it won from the Arabs in 1967, and in particular Israel should withdraw completely from the Golan Heights, from south Lebanon and from the West Bank.

Nelson Mandela

#90. Rahm Emanuel seems to think he knows Israel very well, and that the way to treat that country and its democratically-elected government is the way he treats all opponents in politics: by attacking and attacking.

Elliott Abrams

#91. The ultimate goal is two states for two people: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people and the State of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people - each state in joined self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace.

Barack Obama

#92. Tel Aviv is the most exciting place to eat in Israel.

Yotam Ottolenghi

#93. My commitment to the security and future of Israel is based upon basic morality as well as enlightened self-interest. Our role in supporting Israel honors our own heritage.

Gerald R. Ford

#94. I got 'Munich' after I had done 'In Treatment' in Israel, which was very successful. But, when I actually shot it, nobody knew it was going to be sold all over the world and be so successful.

Ayelet Zurer

#95. It is time for the rest of the world to join ... in demanding that ALL the nuclear weapons states -including Israel, India and Pakistan, but above all the US and Russia - negotiate concrete steps on a definite time-table toward the global, inspected abolition of nuclear weapons.

Daniel Ellsberg

#96. It was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. I got to see firsthand the sacrifices that Israelis make in the name of security because of the dangerous state of affairs there. I will always be a strong supporter of Israel.

Gabrielle Giffords

#97. If I have to advise our brothers in France, I'll tell them one thing - move to Israel, as early as possible. I say that to Jews all around the world, but there I think it's a must and they have to move immediately.

Ariel Sharon

#98. If we wish that the name Israel be not extinguished, then we are in duty bound
to create something which may serve as a center for our entire people, like the
heart in an organism, from which the blood will stream into all the arteries of
the national body and fill it with life.

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda

#99. While in Israel, Mitt Romney said something every sane person knows to be true: There is great cultural and political meaning in the fact that Israel has prospered while the Palestinians have festered.

John Podhoretz

#100. I've always thought that if Israel really wanted to solve the problem, they'd just start tomorrow and push right to the Jordan River, and anything in their way goes. They don't need America or someone else to help.

Bruce Dern