West Bank Quotes

#1. Based on the Gaza precedent, Israel should not simply be expected to withdraw from territory and let it devolve into a state of anarchy. The West Bank is simply too close to Israel's major population centers and infrastructure to allow it to become another launching pad for rockets.

Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Israel will not and should not leave until it is clear that the West Bank can be policed by Palestinians and that the region will not be a source of terrorism against Israel, as Gaza and South Lebanon became when Israel left there.

Elliott Abrams

#5. You do know that the West Bank means the West Bank of the Jordan River, don't you?

James Martin

#6. I wish that only three residents of Tel Aviv could see what conditions on the West Bank are like. Living in such proximity, most Israelis have no idea about the adversity on the West Bank.

Zubin Mehta

#7. We use American influence with Israel not to promote economic growth in the West Bank, but to try and impede Jewish - never Arab - construction in the capital city.

Elliott Abrams

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Israel is the number one rogue state threat to Middle Eastern peace with its nuclear arms and acts of outright aggression towards its peaceful neighbours Syria and Lebanon - and genocidal actions against the marginalised Palestinians of the West Bank - and Gaza in particular.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#11. Needless to say, if the Arab-Israeli conflict is about interstate disputes and the need to resolve the future of the West Bank and Gaza, it can be solved; if it is a religious conflict, nothing but violence is ahead.

Elliott Abrams

#12. Jewish fundamentalism is teaching that Jews can fight with guns and with civil war, against being relocated off the West Bank, and disobey the orders of their government. That is the call to jihad, to several kinds of jihad.

Arthur Hertzberg

#13. Our law is a Jordanian law that we inherited, which applies to both the West Bank and Gaza, and sets the death penalty for those who sell land to Israelis.

Yasser Arafat

#14. The Oslo Accords in 1993 determined that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are a single territorial entity which cannot be divided. Immediately, the United States and Israel set about separating the two and making sure that they would not be united.

Noam Chomsky

#15. I think the gap between Israelis and Palestinians is too deep to be bridged in our generation. Politically, we are in favor of a regional solution. A part of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) should be annexed by Israel, and the other parts should be incorporated in a confederation with Jordan.

Ayelet Shaked

#16. I've just come back from Mississippi and over there when you talk about the West Bank they think you mean Arkansas.

Pat Buchanan

#17. [Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat.

Yitzhak Rabin

#18. I don't think a Palestinian state is going to be created at a conference table; it will be created on the ground in the West Bank, and some day, a peace conference will ratify that which has been built on the ground.

Elliott Abrams

#19. The poet laureate of England talked about murdering Jews on the West Bank.

Steven T. Katz

#20. This decree is very serious and we will not allow it to pass unopposed. (on Israel offers 10-month West Bank settlement freeze)

Uri Orbach

#21. 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

#22. It's very hard, for example, to justify the thirty-four-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It's very hard to justify 140 Israeli settlements and roughly 400,000 settlers.

Edward Said

#23. I went to Iraq because I wanted to see what one year of occupation had done to Iraqi society, and I went to the West Bank and Gaza Strip because I wanted to see what three generations of occupation had done to Palestinian society. I found a lot more hopelessness and despair in Palestine.

Michael Franti

#24. At Camp David in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat 94 percent of the West Bank; ten years later, Ehud Olmert offered Abbas 93.6 percent with a one-to-one land swap.

Elliott Abrams

#25. 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

#26. It doesn't serve an American interest. It really doesn't really serve Israeli interests - it serves the interests of the political party that's getting the votes of the settlers on the West Bank.

Chris Matthews

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. the people of Lebanon' were offering a 'model' and a 'strong proof that it is not only Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem which Arab armies and peoples are capable of liberating, but - with one small decision and a bit of determination - [the whole of] Palestine too, from the river to the sea'.4

David Hirst

#31. Arafat had said that the womb of the Palestinian woman was a "biological weapon," which he could use to create Palestine state by crowding people into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Yasser Arafat

#32. Israel is so tiny. It's, you know, a little less than the length of Manhattan, without the West Bank, without Judea and Samaria.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#33. We don't have a state, neither in Gaza nor in the West Bank. Gaza is under siege and the West Bank is occupied. What we have in the Gaza Strip is not a state, but rather a regime of an elected government. A Palestinian state will not be created at this time except in the territories of 1967.

Ismail Haniyeh

#34. Economic support from the rest of the Arab states to the fledgling Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is virtually non-existent.

Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

#35. When Israel says that it will recognise Palestinian rights and will withdraw from the West Bank and East Jerusalem and grant the right of return, stop settlements and recognise the rights of the Palestinians to self-determination - only then will Hamas be ready to take a serious step.

Khaled Mashal

#36. The U.S. should support the historic Gaza withdrawal as a first step toward a final settlement: a permanent Palestinian state in Gaza and nearly all of the West Bank.

Lee H. Hamilton

#37. As a child I sometimes used to travel to the West Bank to visit my family, so I know what the checkpoints felt like. I knew what it was like to live under occupation.

Queen Rania Of Jordan

#38. The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.

Noam Chomsky

#39. In terms of me being a Christian, going to Israel was really cool. Going to the West Bank, Bethlehem, floating in the Dead Sea - that was great for me.

Larry Fitzgerald

#40. The situation in the West Bank and Gaza involves a military occupation amid urban guerrilla warfare, analogous to the British security measures in Northern Island, that hopefully will end with a cease-fire.

Jack Schwartz

#41. We can also reassure our Palestinian partners that we understand the importance of territorial contiguity in the West Bank for a viable Palestinian state.

Ariel Sharon

#42. Perhaps areas of Israel where current large Palestinian populations and demographic realities exist could be exchanged for Israeli expansion into the West Bank to include most of East Jerusalem.

Geraldo Rivera

#43. You can look at the West Bank. Cities are like prisons. They can be closed quickly by the Israeli forces, and everything stops in these cities. This is the result of Oslo.

Hassan Nasrallah

#44. Israel gives the West Bank water twice a week! One way of promoting good would be not to ration water.

Zubin Mehta

#45. Louis B. Mayer came out west with $28.00, a box camera and an old lion. He built a monument to himself
the Bank of America.

Bob Hope

#46. A basic ingredient in the manufacture of perfume, the attar-a heavy, pale-yellow oil stored in small metal drums-had been put up as collateral by Bulgaria, in lieu of gold, at the Moscow Narodny Bank, a Communist finance house for East-West trade.

S.J Perelman

#47. Kotak Mahindra Bank has very significant presence in the West and the North, and our total branch network between these two regions is 80 per cent, and in case of ING Vysya Bank, their network in South is 64 per cent of their total branch network.

Uday Kotak

#48. In search of a pay phone. He found a phone inside the bus depot. He dialed his bank's number from memory. Nine-forty in the West, twelve-forty in the East. Lunch time in Virginia, but someone should be there.

Lee Child

#49. I don't think there is a sound UK bank now, at least, if there is one I don't know about it. The City of London is finished, the financial centre of the world is moving east. All the money is in Asia. Why would it go back to the West? You don't need London.

Jim Rogers