Israel Quotes

437 Sourced quotes

Let me first tell you one thing: It doesn't matter what the world says about Israel; it doesn't matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here on the land of our forefathers. And unless we show the Arabs that there is a high price to pay for murdering Jews, we won't survive.

David Ben-Gurion

The Biblical view of the law, the courts, and the state is profoundly radical. The Bible looks upon the state as a kind of rebellious artifice; it is spurious, a human creation in rebellion against God.
In the Old Testament, when the first state is proposed in the person of Saul, the first King of Israel, God tells the prophet Samuel that this project spells rejection of God. The state and its legislature are in rebellion against, or rejection of, God. Its courts are a human fabrication, cannot promote justice and peace; they are founded in violence, and legalize violence.
The state holds together through police power, against the citizenry.
The state, conceived in violence, and backed by violence, will never achieve true peace.

Philip Berrigan

I came to share with many NSA colleagues a kind of unease, a sense that something was awry. What seemed out of place was the strong and open pro-Israel and anti-Arab orientation in an ostensibly apolitical policy-generation staff within the Pentagon.

Karen Kwiatkowski

Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and degraded. Allah willing, before they die, they will experience humiliation and degradation every day. America will be of no avail to them. Their generals will be of no avail to them. The last of their generals has been forgotten. Allah has made him disappear. He's over. Gone is that Sharon, behind whose back they would hide and find shelter, and with whom they would feel relatively secure. Today they have frail leaders, who don't even know where our Lord placed them. Allah willing, we will make them lose their eyesight, we will make them lose their brains.

It is crystal clear to me that if Arabs put down a draft resolution blaming Israel for the recent earthquake in Iran it would probably have a majority, the US would veto it and Britain and France would abstain.

I certainly agree that many factions within Islam are very, very violent. I mean, how can we deny that? The war against the west and against Israel certainly didn't start with 9/11. For us, it began really in 1979 when the Iranians, you know, invaded the embassy there. And from that point on, they've been doing things like this, so there's a lot of violence within the Islamic faith.

My honorable task is to strengthen the authority of our country in the world. I would be glad if other states respected us for showing understanding, tolerance and love for peace. I would be happy if Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama of Tibet could visit our country before the elections, if only for a day. I would be happy if our friendly relations with all nations were strengthened. I would be happy if we succeeded before the elections in establishing diplomatic relations with the Vatican and Israel.

In Islam's golden age, so much progress was made that it became the basis of the European Renaissance. We Muslims have to change ourselves, that's the main difference. We can't keep blaming America or Israel for our misery.

O the chimneys
On the ingeniously devised habitations of death When Israel's body drifted as smoke Through the air—
Was welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep,
A star that turned black Or was it a ray of sun?

Amos Regev, the editor-[in-chief] of Israel HaYom, is a personal friend and my conversations with him are not within the framework of my job.

Benjamin Netanyahu

I whole-heartedly believe that the land of Israel is ours in its entirety.

No army in the history of warfare has done more to avoid harming civilians in a combat zone than the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza.

Palestinians living in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria have been massacred both by Bashar al-Assad's troops and throat-cutting mujahideen from ISIS. The massacre of Christians, Yazidis and Druze minorities by Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq contrasts with the safety those groups enjoy in Israel.

Out of the Armana Age synthesis emerged the earliest traditions of Israel and Greece.

Cyrus H. Gordon

- Report...

When Israel was in Egypt land,
Let my people go,
Oppressed so hard they could not stand,
Let my people go.
Go down, Moses,
Way-down in Egypt land,
Tell old Pharaoh
To let my people go.

I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation, revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.

The religious ideal of Israel was the theocracy. But the theocracy meant the complete penetration of the national life by religious morality. It meant politics in the name of God.

Walter Rauschenbusch

Since I was 18 years old, I have taught the Bible. For the last fifteen or twenty years, I have taught every Sunday when I was home or near my own house, so that would be 35 or 40 times per year. Half of those Sundays, the text comes from the Hebrew Bible. I have had a deep personal interest in the Holy Land and in the teachings of the Hebrew people. God has a special position for the Jewish people, the Hebrews, or whatever. I know the difference between ancient Israel and Judaea, and I know the history. I don't have any problem with the Jewish people.

From my upbringing and the Bible I learned people should stand up for rights just as the children of Israel stood up to the Pharaoh.

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation.

I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus Christ have preached if He had taken a poll in the land of Israel?

Harry S. Truman

If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.

Right now, [the Israel lobby] has become a subject that you can barely talk about without people immediately trying to silence you, immediately trying to discredit you in various ways, such that no American politicians will touch this, which is quite remarkable when you consider how much Americans argue about every other controversial political issue. To me, this is a national security priority for us, and we ought to be having an open debate on it, not one where only one side is being heard from.

The establishment of the state of Israel, accomplished through the expulsion of several hundred thousand Palestinians and the immigration of several hundred thousand Jews from Africa and Asia, introduced the 'Jewish Question,' hitherto essentially a European question, into the heart of the tragedy of the Arab people of Palestine dispossessed of their space. From this irruption there arose the 'Palestinian Question.'

Until the Yom Kippur War, in 1973, until then Israel didn't have a chance but to fight for her life. We were attacked five times, outgunned, outnumbered, on a small piece of land, and our main challenge was to remain alive.