Israeli Quotes

#1. When the Israeli leaders launched their expansionist war in June 1967 they never envisaged that 40 years later they would still be haunted by the consequences.

Ismail Haniyeh

#2. When I was a kid you always heard about the Israeli army and you always heard about this tiny little country and how everyone around them wants them gone, and every time somebody comes after them they take care of business. And so as a Jewish kid you were proud of that.

Adam Sandler

#3. And this would normalize the existence of the Israeli and the Jew: a majority of Jews in the Land of Israel and a majority of Israelis among the Jewish People.

Shimon Peres

#4. West Bank women's groups argued that the time wasn't right, that the struggle for independence from Israeli rule had to come before questions of women's rights could be raised. The

Geraldine Brooks

#5. The issue [Israeli-Palestinian conflict], already lasting more than half a century, has brought deep suffering to the Palestinian people and remains an important reason of extended turbulence in the Middle East region.

Xi Jinping

#6. Jordan has a very important part in any Arab-Israeli peace process.

King Hussein

#7. Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.

Haruki Murakami

#8. It was actually an Israeli cartoonist, Nurit Karlin, who made me think that I could draw for 'The New Yorker.' I saw her work published in the magazine in the early 1970s - she was the only woman working as a cartoonist at 'The New Yorker' at the time.

Liza Donnelly

#9. In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce. The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just don't want them.

Noam Chomsky

#10. Israel is a country of six million people. They need the U.S. It used to be bipartisan on Israeli politics. You never messed with that relationship. The fact that [ Benjamin] Netanyahu is willing to do that, I thought would horrify voters more than it turned out it did.

David Brooks

#11. In a speech at Bar Ilan university, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time endorses the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Martin Bunton

#12. I am an Israeli-born American citizen.

Guy Oseary

#13. Israeli government & the neocons want US to bomb Iran.

Ron Paul

#14. The Israeli people are skeptical about the chances of a long-term peace, but if they saw it, they'd grab it. Any Israeli government that wants to be reelected should be interested in a lasting peace.

Jonathan Powell

#15. America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.

Barack Obama

#16. I was a witness to lots of death ... Saving a human life was something really, really beautiful ... no matter who they are. Not only Israeli people owe me their lives. I guarantee many terrorists, many Palestinian leaders, owe me their lives - or in other words, they owe my Lord their lives.

Mosab Hassan Yousef

#17. I'm very pro-Israel. In fact, I was the head of the Israeli Day Parade a number of years ago, I did a commercial for [Benjamin] Netanyahu when he was getting elected, he asked me to do a commercial for him, I did a commercial for him.

Donald Trump

#18. The obvious path to a two-state solution would be for the United States and the rest of the world to simply recognize the State of Palestine, regardless of Israeli objections, but no president has seriously contemplated taking that step.

Charles Kurzman

#19. We're going to make sure, regardless of disagreements we have on policy, that our military and intelligence cooperation to keep the Israeli people safe continues and that cooperation also helps the American people stay safe.

Barack Obama

#20. My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies.

Norman G. Finkelstein

#21. I was critical of the Israeli government, however, for not being prepared for the move. One does not uproot thousands of people without planning in advance what will be done with them. This was a political and human error in which the government functioned poorly.

Norman Lamm

#22. Our main battle has always been against Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers.

Ahmed Yassin

#23. In the Middle East, it is clear that peace will never be reached without solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A two-state solution must be found and enforced.

Ahmed Zewail

#24. The military operation in Lebanon was the most successful military operation in recent Israeli history. Many in Israel don't recognise that.

Ehud Olmert

#25. The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel's existence, every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state.

John Podhoretz

#26. Finding the right form of debate regarding Israeli policies will remain a challenge in Germany. Even with every conceivable and warranted criticism, the danger always arises that it will be exploited by those who consciously or unconsciously present anti-Semitism in a new guise.

Sigmar Gabriel

#27. Jordan recognizes that east Jerusalem is the capital of the Palestinian state and Jordan rejects foreign sovereignty
Israeli sovereignty
over the holy sites

Yasser Arafat

#28. As an Israeli, I have come to understand: there is no way to love Israel and reject a two-state peace, no way to love Israel and reject Palestine.

Yael Dayan

#29. American leaders worry about the security of their country. Israeli leaders worry about the survival of their country.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#30. The first time someone tried to share the Gospel with me, I naively explained that I was Jewish and born in Israel, thank you ... This was a big mistake. In certain parts of Christian America, admitting I was an Israeli-born Jew turned me into walking catnip.

Hanna Rosin

#31. The security of the citizens of Israel, the future of the state of Israel, this is the Israeli government's responsibility.

Avigdor Lieberman

#32. Somehow Chinese toxins fit right in with the Don's taste in gear. Austrian shotgun shells, Cuban baseball bats, Israeli silencers, Russian things he could only guess at - the Don was known for his upscale mob accessories.

Bruce Rousseau

#33. The American people and the Israeli peoples share a faith in the future and believe that democracies can shape their own destinies and that opportunities should be available to all. Throughout its own extraordinary history, Israel has given life to that promise.

Barack Obama

#34. This is the reason why there are currently about 6,000 startups in Israel. And the nature of the Israeli entrepreneur - who is not afraid and is resourceful, motivated and fast moving - all give us an advantage.

Yossi Vardi

#35. We will consider every hand who will try to take our weapons, as an Israeli hand.

Hassan Nasrallah

#36. I can't tell you how much I appreciate these young [Israeli] designers. There's too much strife in the world. If we become united in our creativity, not only in what we wear, but what we do, we will change the world. It's truly an honor to be around such inspiration.

Donna Karan

#37. My closest friends from Israel make fun of me for becoming an American, and my American friends make fun of how Israeli I am ... I can't win.

Alona Tal

#38. The arrival of thousands of Muslim infiltrators to Israeli territory is a clear threat to the state's Jewish identity. The refugees' place is not among us, and the initiative to transfer them to Australia is the right and just solution.

Danny Danon

#39. From 1949 to the present, for every dollar the US spent on an African, it spent $250.65 on an Israeli, and for every dollar it spent on someone from the Western Hemisphere outside the US, it spent $214 on an Israeli.

Ahdaf Soueif

#40. The so-called 'Palestinian autonomous areas' are bantustans. These are restricted entities within the power structure of the Israeli apartheid system.

Nelson Mandela

#41. Like most Eastern Europeans, he was not amenable to the socialist ethic so many Israeli leftists still romanticized, despite the proven failure of Communism to solve any of the world's problems and its unenviable success in inventing many new ones.

Naomi Ragen

#42. If the [captured Israeli] soldiers are not returned, we will turn Lebanon's clock back 20 years.

Dan Halutz

#43. All the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they're not Palestinians. There is no 'Palestinian.' This is Israeli land.

Rick Santorum

#44. Tens of thousands have been killed or wounded by the Israeli army since 1967. During 2006, the number of Palestinians killed reached 650. Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967, more than 650,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israel - about 40% of the male population.

Ismail Haniyeh

#45. I love meeting Israeli people. They look at me like a son

Jerry Seinfeld

#46. Now, the other pillar of Israeli power - Western support and complicity - is starting to crack. We must do all we can to push it over.

Ali Abunimah

#47. This rally must send a message to the Israeli people, to the Jewish people around the world, to the many people in the Arab world, and indeed to the entire world, that the Israeli people want peace, support peace. For this, I thank you.

Yitzhak Rabin

#48. I'm Israeli and gay.

Gideon Raff

#49. Many occasions I've sat down with Israelis to say, where do you see your country in 10 years time, and work me back, so we can figure out the synergies and the connections between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. No Israeli has ever been able to answer that question.

Abdallah II Of Jordan

#50. A senior Israeli intelligence officer explained that the IDF attacked "both aspects of Hamas - its resistance or military wing and its dawa, or social wing," the latter a euphemism for the civilian society.

Noam Chomsky

#51. Our priority is still the liberation of our land and the protection of Lebanon from the Israeli threat.

Hassan Nasrallah

#52. Yes. I'm an Israeli citizen living in a dream world; a Jewish princess in Arabia, I should have listened to my own children. For God's sake. Egypt is not my country!

Linda Ruth Horowitz

#53. There are two phases of the redeployment of the Israeli forces in the West Bank: One, to allow elections. Second, after the elections, to help further redeployment.

Yitzhak Rabin

#54. If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.

Salman Rushdie

#55. The claim that Israel seeks to annihilate the Palestinians is simply a lie. Israel seeks to stop rocket attacks and tunnel invasions, and as long as Hamas is dedicated to those actions, they can expect a forceful Israeli reaction.

James Howard Kunstler

#56. An Israeli man's life was saved when he was given a Palestinian man's heart in a heart transplant operation. The guy is doing fine, but the bad news is, he can't stop throwing rocks at himself.

Jay Leno

#57. We want to end this misery of the Palestinian people in order for us really to live with dignity as human beings in an independent state side by side with the Israeli state.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#58. The Israeli people must be free to live in peace and security.

Chuck Hagel

#59. I know the power of the Israeli lobby and the other lobbies, but we need a foreign policy that puts our own country first.

Pat Buchanan

#60. Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower.

Ryan Kavanaugh

#61. The Israeli military plays more than a critical role in defending the citizens of the Jewish state. It also plays an important social, scientific and psychological role in preparing its young citizens for the challenging task of being Israelis in a difficult world.

Alan Dershowitz

#62. Whether [the 1993 World Trade Center bombing] was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little.

Ron Paul

#63. What I, as the prime minister of the present government of Israel, started to do, is first to tackle the longest part of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Yitzhak Rabin

#64. I am saying that I am trying to minimize the donations to these groups by talking to diplomats. The transparency bill also has the purpose of enabling the Israeli public and members of Knesset to know whose interests certain organizations represent.

Ayelet Shaked

#65. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him.

Ariel Sharon

#66. In Arab capitals, the failure of the United States to stop Iran's nuclear program is understood as American weakness in the struggle for dominance in the Middle East, making additional cooperation from Arab leaders on Israeli-Palestinian issues even less likely.

Elliott Abrams

#67. I'm a United States senator. I'm not an Israeli senator.

Chuck Hagel

#68. We have a close, unshakable bond between the United States and Israel, and between the American and Israeli people. We share common values and a commitment to a democratic future for the world, and we are both committed to a two-state solution. But that doesn't mean that we're going to agree.

Hillary Clinton

#69. I don't hide my being Israeli. I say it in every interview. I put out a record with songs in Hebrew. The people who signed me have no connection to Judaism or Israel.

Yael Naim

#70. I have seen for the first time in 100 years of conflict, the two peoples - the Israeli people and the Palestinian people - are ahead of their leaderships.

Amos Oz

#71. Lebanon was under Israeli occupation, up to its capital, but we did not consider that a disaster. Why? Because it was very clear that there are ways to resist.

Bashar Al-Assad

#72. They've (Israel) lost the battle for public opinion. They claim it's because American Jews know too little.. I claim it's because they know too much about the conflict, and young liberal Jews have difficulty defending the use of cluster bombs in Lebanon or supporting the Israeli settlements.

Norman Finkelstein

#73. There are people who think I am Israeli. That's rubbish.

Zubin Mehta

#74. Close to 80 percent of all terrorist activity in Samaria was directed and financed either by Hizbullah or the Iranians. Iran continues to increase its involvement in terror attacks inside Israel, particularly through a small but radical minority of Israeli Arabs which Iran supports and directs.

Ariel Sharon

#75. The Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington and meets with the puppet in the White House. He then goes down Pennsylvania Avenue and meets with the puppets in Congress. The Israeli leader then 'brings back millions of dollars' in aid to Israel.

Ralph Nader

#76. The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit has suggested that the important thing is not a person's identity but his or her identifications.

Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life

David Kaufmann

#77. I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#78. If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars (and from their Israeli equivalents), it's this: victory is a chimera.

Andrew Bacevich

#79. Just as we send young American Jews to Israel through the Birthright program, we need to also consider a 'reverse Birthright' for Israeli kids to come see America.

Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

#80. The United States-Israeli relationship is based on the broadest conception of American national interest in which our two nations are bound forever together by common democratic values and traditions. This will never change.

Colin Powell

#81. Extol Jewish virtue, modern Zionism and the Israeli Defense Forces.

Geraldo Rivera

#82. Another touchy point: the inability of successive Israeli governments to deal with the propaganda war. Israel has a brilliant instrument in the IDF. We have a cyber-war unit which may become the best unit in the world to fight cyber problems. On the propaganda war ... it is a large failure.

Manfred Gerstenfeld

#83. The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill civilians, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their

Noam Chomsky

#84. The Israeli accent wasn't one that I was overly familiar with so had to learn from scratch but I was very fortunate I had the right amount of time.

Eric Bana

#85. To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews.

Ken Livingstone

#86. I always have believed that we should not call it an Arab-Israeli issue or a Palestinian-Arab dispute or a peace negotiation. I think we should call it what it is: an occupation of Palestine, full stop. This is not a popular position in mixed company.

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

#87. Moreover, resolving the mother of all problems - the Israeli-Palestinian question - requires cooperation between Europe and the U.S.

Romano Prodi

#88. With the common Iranian threat bringing the Sunni Arab world and Israel closer together, an Israeli-Palestinian peace would go a long way in improving relations and rebuffing Iran's regional ambitions.

Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

#89. A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a region free of Iranian nukes are worthy goals that should be able to withstand public scrutiny in every Middle Eastern capital.

Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

#90. We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation.

Osama Bin Laden

#91. It took me many years to understand that my identity is more Israeli than Jewish.

Mili Avital

#92. I also believe that US backing for Israeli policies of expansion of the Israeli state and oppression of the Palestinian people is the major cause of bitter division and violence in the world.

Clare Short

#93. Newly released transcripts reveal that President Nixon was drunk during the Arab-Israeli crisis of 1973. After hearing this, President Bush said, 'Hey, so was I!'

Conan O'Brien

#94. On a crowded bus in Israel, a mother was speaking to her son in Yiddish. An Israeli woman reprimanded her. "You should be speaking Hebrew. Why are you talking to him in Yiddish?" The mother answered, "I don't want he should forget he's a Jew."

Kirk Douglas

#95. The chances of Israeli science competing with big American science are small. For almost 15 years, we had no competition.

Aaron Ciechanover

#96. Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory.

Pat Buchanan

#97. It is wrong to say the U.S. should 'not take sides' in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Howard Berman

#98. I don't know of any army that does more than an Israeli army does to avoid civilian casualties. But incidental and unintended casualties accompany every war.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#99. So long as there is an Israeli occupation in Palestine and so long as U.S. policy is biased, the so-called terrorism that the United States fears will escalate because the mistakes of U.S. foreign policy are pouring oil on fire.

Khaled Mashal

#100. Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters and-most unforgivably-increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault.

Norman Finkelstein