Israel Quotes

437 Sourced quotes

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.

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

Cyrus H. Gordon

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.

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.

The International Islamic Front for Jihad against the U.S. and Israel has, by the grace of God, issued a crystal-clear fatwah calling on the Islamic nation to carry on jihad aimed at liberating holy sites. The nation of Muhammad has responded to this appeal. If the instigation for jihad against the Jews and the Americans in order to liberate al-Aksa Mosque and the Holy Ka'aba is considered a crime, then let history be a witness that I am a criminal. Our job is to instigate and, by the grace of God, we did that, and certain people responded to this instigation.

Osama bin Laden

The cosmology of the ancient world was telling you about the nature of life here and now. Genesis is not about the origins of life. There were many other creation stories current in Israel at that time and no one was required to believe in that one.

Karen Armstrong

You know who isn't in frenemy territory? The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. Only in an upside-down world does it make any kind of sense to pal around with Erdogan and slam Netanyahu, as Obama has done.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

- 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.

Thou comest to me with a sword, and with A spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. [...] And all this assembly shall know that the Lord saveth not with the sword and spear: for the battle is the Lord's, and he will give you into our hands.

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?

The central problem of the Greek tragedies is why we suffer so at the hands of God. The movement that evoked Greek tragedy in the fifth century B. C. was spread over the East Mediterranean evoking a parallel response in Israel.... And as in Greek tragedy, Job deals with the problem of why man suffers so at the had of God.

Cyrus H. Gordon

President (Truman) observed (that) 'to assure the Arabs that they would be consulted (prior to official US recognition of Israel) was by no means inconsistent with my generally sympathetic attitudes toward Jewish aspirations.' The Arabs may be forgiven for believing that this did not exactly state the inconsistency as they saw it.

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

When Israel was from bondage led,
Led by the Almighty's hand
From out of foreign land,
The great sea beheld and fled.

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

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.

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.

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.'

I used to be one of those people who took issue with the label of apartheid as applied to Israel. I was one of those people who could be counted on to argue that, while the country's settlement and occupation policies were anti-democratic and brutal and slow-dose suicidal, the word apartheid did not apply. I'm not one of those people any more.

Bradley Burston