Jewish State Israel Quotes

#1. A solution of two national states - a Jewish state, Israel; an Arab state, Palestine. The Palestinians are our closest neighbors. I believe they may become our closest friends.

Shimon Peres

#2. One of the things that feels so challenging is how questioning Israel and the idea of a Jewish state somehow opens the door for other sorts of questions - and wounds.

Jill Soloway

#3. I am deeply concerned that, without peace and a two-state solution, the Jewish and democratic nature of Israel is in danger. That's why I have opposed Israel's settlement policy since 1973, and that's why I have favored a two-state solution since 1967.

Alan Dershowitz

#4. Nothing would do more to improve Israel's security or its relations with its neighbors than to bring about a sovereign and contiguous Palestinian state alongside a secure, democratic, Jewish Israel.

Denis McDonough

#5. Were I to sum up the Basle Congress in a word- which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly- it would be this: 'At Basle, I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. If not in 5 years, certainly in 50, everyone will know it.'

Theodor Herzl

#6. We regard it as our duty to declare that Jewish Jerusalem is an organic and inseparable part of the State of Israel, as it is an inseparable part of the history of Israel, of the faith of Israel.

David Ben-Gurion

#7. For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights.

David Novak

#8. It is impossible to have a Jewish, democratic state and at the same time to control all of Eretz Israel. If we insist on fulfilling the dream in its entirety, we are liable to lose it all. Everything. That is where the extremist path takes us.

Ariel Sharon

#9. The P.L.O., and later the Palestinian Authority, never truly accepted that Israel, as the national state and homeland of the Jewish people, was here to stay.

Danny Danon

#10. The only holiday of independence which I can never leave out is the celebration of the independence of the Jewish State of Israel.

Milos Zeman

#11. As a Jew, it is my historic responsibility to defend the Jewish people. I feel this responsibility for the survival of the Jewish people. We're not going to accept any decision by anybody else about security of the State of Israel. It is our role and only our role.

Ariel Sharon

#12. 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

#13. A challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people only if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive or that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of Israel in its current or traditional forms.

Judith Butler

#14. Hebrew Confederate Cemetery on Shockoe Hill, which is the only Jewish military cemetery in the world outside the state of Israel. The

Maureen Egan

#15. Our forces saved the remnants of the Jewish people of Europe for a new life and a new hope in the reborn land of Israel. Along with all men of good will, I salute the young state and wish it well.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#16. We want Israel as a democratic and Jewish state. So you have to maintain a Jewish majority, and you want to do that by legal means, by democratic means.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#17. I would like Israel to be a Jewish state, and therefore not to annex over 2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to Israel, which will make Israel a bi-national state.

Yitzhak Rabin

#18. The state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote, while at the same time consigning the non-religious to political oblivion.

Richard Dawkins

#19. I believe the Palestinians have never indicated a willingness to meet our minimum requirements, which are recognition of Israel's permanence and legitimacy as a Jewish state and end of claims and end of conflict.

Michael Oren

#20. Being raised a Jew in southern California in the 1950s and 1960s, my religious training emphasized learning the Hebrew language and Jewish festivals, history, and culture. We also remembered the Holocaust and supported the newly formed Jewish state of Israel.

Rick Strassman

#21. I think it is essential for Israel's survival as a Jewish and democratic state that we end the status quo. The preferred way to end the status quo would be on the basis of a two-state solution. We don't want the Palestinians to be citizens of Israel, nor do we want them to be subjects.

Michael Oren

#22. Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial.

Ariel Sharon

#23. What should be the future of Israel? Is the land the most important choice, and for that reason to keep the whole of the land at any cost, or to have a partition and build the Jewish state on part of the land? And the other part?

Shimon Peres

#24. 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

#25. Israel, as the Jewish state, must disappear from the map.

Ahmed Yassin

#26. All the other members of the U.N. were admitted, at the outset or subsequently, but Israel was created by the U.N. as a Jewish state, on the motion of Stalin's ambassador, seconded by President Truman's.

Conrad Black

#27. 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

#28. If I, as a human being and artist represent anything in the world, it is my Jewish people, and therefore Israel is the only state on our planet which I want to represent with my art and all my public activities, no matter where I live.

Evgeny Kissin

#29. The United States is proud to be the first country to recognize the existence of a Jewish State - just 11 minutes after Israel's independence was declared.

Denis McDonough

#30. There is no question that Israelis - indeed, all concerned Jews - have to continue to work out a Jewish public philosophy that truly justifies a Jewish state in the land of Israel.

David Novak

#31. The reality is that Israel is a multi-ethnic, multireligious society, and it makes no sense to insist as a precondition for peace that its neighbors recognize it as 'the Jewish state.'

Kai Bird

#32. We continue to believe that a two-state solution is the only way for the long-term security of Israel, if it wants to stay both a Jewish state and democratic.

Barack Obama

#33. First of all, Arafat is wrong. Jerusalem is Israel's capital, will never be divided, and will remain the capital of the State of Israel, the capital of the Jewish people, for ever and ever.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#34. My privilege as a white Jewish American in Israel is a major factor in getting me so much access to the key institutions of the Jewish state.

Max Blumenthal

#35. Everybody had one thing in common: we were all taught to hate Israel and the Jews. In the universal hatred that was preached against Jews, virtually no distinction was made between the Jewish religion and the Israeli state. In my Christian private school, we studied only the New Testament.

Brigitte Gabriel

#36. Only if we accept the proposition that the state of Israel is the exclusive and legitimate representative of the Jewish people would a movement calling for divestment, sanctions and boycott against that state be understood as directed against the Jewish people as a whole.

Judith Butler

#37. Israel, the Jewish state, the only democracy in the Middle East, continues to shine as a beacon of light in the darkest region of the world.

Brigitte Gabriel

#38. 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.

Ariel Sharon

#39. I enter negotiations with Chairman Arafat, the leader of the PLO, the representative of the Palestinian people, with the purpose to have coexistence between our two entities, Israel as a Jewish state and Palestinian state, entity, next to us, living in peace.

Yitzhak Rabin

#40. I believe that the only alternative Israel has to save itself as a Jewish state - and let's be frank about that: the Jewish state is predicated on having a Jewish majority - the only way we can do that is by unilaterally withdrawing our border and withdrawing our settlements in the West Bank.

Michael Oren

#41. The purpose of the Jewish state is to secure the Jewish future. That is why Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, against any threat.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#42. We [Israel] already have two very strong democratic tools - the two basic laws of personal liberties and human rights. I think we should also provide the judiciary with another tool so that they can rely on the fact that Israel is a Jewish state in verdicts.

Ayelet Shaked