#israeli

Blowing up buses will not induce the Israelis to move forward, and neither will the killing of Palestinians or the demolition of their homes and their future. All this needs to stop. And we pledge that Jordan will do its utmost to help achieve it. ↗

— King Abdullah II

#blowing #buses #forward #future #help

Our response has been, 'Well, let's then make an effort to get the Israelis and the Palestinians to sit around the table.' That hasn't happened. So we only have ourselves to blame for this crisis. ↗

— King Abdullah II

#been #blame #crisis #effort #get

Philosophers and theologians have argued for centuries over the morality of targeted assassinations - a technique that the Israelis use with some frequency - without ever reaching anything approaching consensus. ↗

— Eric Alterman

#approaching #argued #assassinations #centuries #consensus

It is natural that we should always expect an Israeli attack, even when it does not threaten. ↗

— Bashar al-Assad

#attack #does #even #expect #israeli

Most recently, terrorist forces have captured Israeli soldiers and fired rockets into Israeli cities - both unprovoked. These acts of aggression deserve the rapid and decisive response they received. ↗

— John Boehner

#aggression #both #captured #cities #decisive

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#analogies #arabs #colonialism #crusades #europe

Israelis can be proud of the vibrant democracy that they have created, and I know that many Rhode Islanders share my deep appreciation for the close friendship between our two nations. ↗

— Lincoln Chafee

#between #close #created #deep #democracy

For decades, the violence in the Middle East has claimed a multitude of innocent civilian victims: Men, women and children, Arab and Israeli. ↗

— John Conyers

#children #civilian #claimed #decades #east

From the sea came a boat with some Israeli commando soldiers who took me by the commando boat to the yacht and put me on the yacht. In the yacht I asked people, who are you. And they said we are Israelis, French and British. ↗

— Mordechai Vanunu

#boat #british #came #french #i

The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#al-qaeda #antisemitism #dictatorship #freedom-flotilla-ii #gaza