Israeli Politician Quotes

Benjamin Netanyahu

Shimon Peres

David Ben-Gurion

Golda Meir

Menachem Begin

Ariel Sharon

Yitzhak Rabin

In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.

David Ben-Gurion

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.

People can choose between the sweet lie or the bitter truth. I say the bitter truth, but many people don't want to hear it.

Avigdor Lieberman

The Left is acting like a young child, saying 'I want peace'... A child says 'I want candy right away,' an adult takes all of the factors into account and understands who he's dealing with.

Something had been done for us which, after two thousand years of hope and yearning, would at last give us a resting-place in this terrible world.

Of the Balfour declaration

My mind was by no means easy about the need to carry out a clandestine action in the sovereign territory of a friendly country, and the question of whether it was permissible to do so — from both the ethical and political points of view — had to be faced in all its gravity.

A simple way to determine whether the right to dissent in a particular society is being upheld is to apply the town square test: Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm? If he can, then that person is living in a free society. If not, it's a fear society.

Natan Sharansky

Israel must decide quickly what sort of environment it wants to live in because the current model, which has some apartheid characteristics, is not compatible with Jewish principles.

It's not that I don't have opinions, rather that I'm paid not to think aloud.

The targeted assassination policy is a correct one. It is inconceivable that terrorists could operate freely without the ground quaking under their feet.

... The ultimate test of this agreement will be a test of blood... If it becomes clear that they [the Palestinians] cannot overcome terror, this will be temporary accord and... we will have no choice but to abrogate it... And if there is no choice, the IDF will return to the places it is about to leave in the upcoming months.

Israeli Arabs must know they cannot live here and call the day of Israel's establishment the day of disaster.

While Paris gets to your heart, London to your mind, and Jerusalem to your soul, New York gets into your veins, a lifeline that becomes part of you more than you become part of it.

I will not demand that the Jewish Agency allocate a sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Jewry. And I think that whoever demands such things is performing an anti-Zionist act.

Yitzchak Gruenbaum

Salvation, the prophets tell us, is preconditioned by repentance. The redeeming act of God waits upon man's initiative.

If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we'd rather be alive and have the bad image.

Israel will not transfer Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District to any foreign sovereign authority, [because] of the historic right of our nation to this land, [and] the needs of our national security, which demand a capability to defend our State and the lives of our citizens.

We have switched from defense to offense and in this battle all the members of the Hamas leadership are legitimate targets.

For some reason the settlement enterprise is being accused of being an obstacle to peace. Personally, I explain at each possible forum that the obstacle to peace is the objection by the Arabs to it and the fact that they do not want us here.

The day will come when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights. As soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished. The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us, because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.

I will confine myself to reaffirming the Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the region.

We must think differently, look at things in a different way. Peace requires a world of new concepts, new definitions.

To subdivide this land into two unstable, insecure nations, to try to defend what is indefensible, is to invite disaster. Carving Judea and Samaria out of Israel means carving up Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu

Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.

The sea is the same sea, and the Arabs are the same Arabs.