The Jewish State Quotes

#1. President Obama himself has attributed the legitimacy of the Jewish State not to its historic identity as Jewish territory, but to the Holocaust.

Ben Shapiro

#2. 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

#3. I devote my life to the rebirth of the Jewish State, with a Jewish majority, on both sides of the Jordan.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky

#4. I think that peace will require two states, a Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#5. 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

#6. The disappearance of the Jewish state will not mean the disappearance of anti-Semitism.

Jack Schwartz

#7. The fact is, that with the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Arab countries, almost all of whom left behind all their property for which compensation was never paid.

Meir Kahane

#8. 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

#9. Both peoples, both nations, deserve a nation-state of their own. Palestinians, if they wish so, will go to the Palestinian state; Jews, if they so wish, can go to the Jewish state. And we'll have to have security and demilitarization agreements between us.

Benjamin Netanyahu

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

Ahmed Yassin

#11. Now, when we say we want peace, what we want is really for our Palestinian neighbours to have a demilitarized state next to us that recognizes the Jewish State. We're willing to recognize their state, the Palestinian state. But we ask them to recognize the Jewish state.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#12. Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to annihilating the Jewish state. It runs a theocratic totalitarian state in Gaza, with no individual liberty, and no freedom of speech or press.

Dennis Prager

#13. Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Gentile city, Aelia Capitolina, and with a temple dedicated to Jupiter. Jews were forbidden to enter the city on pain of death. The Jewish state, as a political entity, was not again to emerge for over eighteen centuries.

J. Julius Scott Jr.

#14. The opportunities which the present position open up for a lasting and radical solution of the most vexing problem of the Jewish state are so far-reaching as to take one's breath away.

Moshe Sharett

#15. I'm confident President Obama will continue his unambiguous commitment to the Jewish state in his second term.

Ed Koch

#16. When the Jewish state is established - it is very possible that the result will be transfer of Arabs.

Moshe Sharett

#17. The official Hamas charter calls for the murder of Jews and destruction of the Jewish state.

Aaron Klein

#18. 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

#19. Our policy is very simple. The Jewish state was set up to defend Jewish lives, and we always reserve the right to defend ourselves.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#20. I see all this and know that if we are to save the Jewish state and its three-and-a-half million Jews from terrible horrors, we must rise up and demand a fundamental change in the very system of government.

Meir Kahane

#21. The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who when they had all the territories they now demand be given to them for their state -attempted to drive the Jewish state into the sea.

Meir Kahane

#22. I know that elections must be limited only to those who understand that the Arabs are the deadly enemy of the Jewish state, who would bring on us a slow Auschwitz - not with gas, but with knives and hatchets.

Meir Kahane

#23. Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life - on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state - must be cast in the language of human rights.

Jonathan Sacks

#24. 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

#25. 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 Al-Banna

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. It is a third generation anti-Semitism. First it was religious in nature. Today, the Jewish state is attacked and that is the new anti-Semitism. What they have in common is that in all versions, Jews are seen as absolute evil.

Manfred Gerstenfeld

#29. I believe that the Jewish state will exist forever.

Ariel Sharon

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. The Zionists accepted the partition plan. The AHC and the Arab states rejected any proposal to share the land and vowed to drown the fledging Jewish state in rivers of blood.

Sol Stern

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. I should much rather see a reasonable agreement with Arabs based upon living together than the creation of a Jewish state.

Albert Einstein

#40. He held to the idea that the Jewish people, so often victims of injustice and persecution, should have a state where they could be independent and free. Think good or ill of Arik Sharon, agree or disagree with him, but that calling - a noble one - was plain and unalloyed.

Ariel Sharon

#41. What the fanatical Jewish conservatives regarded as heathen pollution, cosmopolitans saw as civilization. This was the start of a new pattern in Jerusalem: the more sacred she became, the more divided.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

#42. 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

#43. 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

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

Maureen Egan

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. It simply cannot be disputed that for decades the Palestinian leadership was more interested in there not being a Jewish state than in there being a Palestinian state.

Alan Dershowitz

#51. 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

#52. The communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation - which speculates upon the labor of people - will always find the means for its existence.

Mikhail Bakunin

#53. I don't think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state.

Noam Chomsky

#54. 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

#55. Nor was Jabotinsky enticed by the idea of Arab resettlement. People might call him an extremist, he said, but at least he had never dreamed of asking Arabs in a Jewish state to emigrate.

Hillel Halkin

#56. I prefer a powerful and proud Jewish State that is hated by the entire world than an Auschwitz that is loved by one and all

Meir Kahane

#57. But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.

Thomas Jefferson

#58. 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

#59. I don't think the area of Jerusalem should be part of a Jewish state; it belongs to all people, to Christians and Muslims and the Jewish people.

Patti Smith

#60. 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

#61. As president of the largest Jewish organization, I disposed of budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars; I directed thousands of employees, and all this, I emphasize again, not for one particular state, but within the frame work of International Jewry.

Nahum Goldmann

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. The vision I would like to see here is the entrenching of the Jewish and the Zionist state ... I very much favour democracy, but when there is a contradiction between democratic and Jewish values, the Jewish and Zionist values are more important.

Avigdor Lieberman

#68. Without a Jewish state, the iron truth of history is that the Jewish people sooner or later become even more vulnerable to the next wave of anti-Semitism.

Jack Schwartz

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states - no more, no less.

Noam Chomsky

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. There are eleven million Jews in the world. I don't say that all of them will come here, but I expect several million, and with natural increase I can quite imagine a Jewish state of ten million.

David Ben-Gurion