Having previously discussed certain aspects of the Zionist practice that routinely rejects or tries to prove false the veracity of racist quotations (verbal or written) attributed to Israeli figures, we are going to give you a review some of these quotations.

Brief Review of Racist Zionist Quotations

• "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." [Golda Meir, March 8, 1969]¹

• "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." [Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Haaretz, 19 March 1972]¹

• "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" [David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), p. 121]¹

• "We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return." [David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet (Prentice-Hall: 1967), p. 157]¹

• "We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." [David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, (Delacorte, New York: 1978)]¹

• "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters." [Yitzak Rabin’s description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion’s special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From The Arabs in Israel by Sabri Jiryas]¹

• "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:…the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish…with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." [Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5]¹

• "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment… Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." [Theodor Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, Complete Diaries, 12 June 1895 entry]¹

• "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." [Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, 27 February 1994 Source: New York Times, 28 February 1994, p. 1]¹

• "May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them." He added: "It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones." — Haaretz, 12 April 2001. The influential Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef exclaimed during a sermon preceding the 2001 Passover holiday"²

• "The Intifada is the Palestinian’s people’s war of national liberation. We [Israel] enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the Occupied Territories, engaging in theft and funding justification for all these activities … we established an apartheid regime." — Michael Ben-Yair, Attorney General of Israel, 1993-1996.³

• "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, colonization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." — Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Ahronot, 14 July 1972.⁴

• "The only solution is Eretz Israel [Greater Israel], or at least Western Eretz Israel [all the land west of Jordan River], without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point … We must not leave a single village, not a single tribe." Joseph Weitz, Director of the Jewish National Fund, the Zionist agency charged with acquiring Palestinian land. — Machover Israca, 5 January 1973, p.2.⁵

• "Jewish blood and a goy’s blood are not the same." — Israeli Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, Inferring that killing isn’t murder if the victim is Gentile. Jerusalem Post, 19 June 1989.⁶

• "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, 15 November 1998.⁷

There is a plethora of quotations emanating from Zionist figures, and anyone interested can easily find a number of websites offering Zionist quotations. But readers must be wary and read with a skeptical mind. Important, as well, is the context within which a quotation is made. To be certain of a quotation’s authenticity, some research is required. We did check out a huge number of quotations, and we rejected many quotations. Still, some of the quotations we cite might be inauthentic, and this would be unsurprising. Given the myriad racist quotations, there is no need for people who support social justice for Palestinians to create false quotations.

The existence of false quotations best serves Zionist interests by providing a means to discredit media that publish false Zionist quotations. Nonetheless, the existence of some false purported Zionist racist quotations should not detract from the genuine quotations that adduce racism.
In the next installment, we will analyze if the Zionist media’s method in proving that racist Israeli quotations are false holds water.

Next: Part 10 of 12

Read also Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8.

1. Israeli quotes about Palestinians by IsraelForum.com # # # # # # # # #
2. "A Page of Quotations," What Really Happened.com. #
3. Michael Ben-Yair, "The war’s seventh day," Haaretz, 3 March 2002. #
4. "Sourcing Quotes the Pilger Way," HonestReportingUK, 23 August 2006. John Pilger was rebuked for use of allegedly inaccurate quotations. In this case, Pilger attributed the quotation-in-question (which, itself, was unchallenged) to Ariel Sharon in "The real threat we face is Blair," New Statesman, 21 August 2006. #
5. Wikiquote (Israel): Joseph Weitz, entry in his diary for 1940 (quoted in his article: "A solution to the Refugee Problem: An Israeli State with a small Arab Minority," Davar, 29 September 1967. #
6. Quoted in Scott McConnell, "A Real Plan," New York Press, 29 May 2001. The New York Press is a free alternative weekly in New York City that competes with Village Voice. #
7. We located this also at Samantha M. Shapiro, "The Unsettlers," New York Times, 16 February 2003. #

Kim Petersen is co-editor of Dissident Voice. B. J. Sabri is an Iraqi-American antiwar activist. They can be reached at: Petersen_sabri@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Kim Petersen.