{"quotes":[{"text":"I want to see a flowering of Arab and Jewish cultures in a country without racism or anti-Semitism, without rich or poor or spat-upon: everyone beneath the vine and fig tree living in peace and unafraid. A homeland for each and every one of us between the mountains and the sea. A multilingual, multireligious, many-colored and -peopled land where the orange tree blooms for all. I will not surrender this vision for any lesser compromise.","author":"Aurora Levins Morales","tags":["arab","culture","homeland","israel","jewish","multicultural","multilingual","multireligious","palestine"],"id":618,"author_id":"Aurora+Levins+Morales"},{"text":"We came to save the sacred writings. - Essenes to Eleazar, on collecting the Dead Sea Scrolls from the burning Temple. Jerusalem, 70 CE.","author":"Joseph Shellim","tags":["dead-sea-scrolls","israel","jerusalem","rome","war"],"id":4865,"author_id":"Joseph+Shellim"},{"text":"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.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["activism","al-qaeda","antisemitism","dictatorship","freedom-flotilla-ii","gaza","gaza-war","genocide","hamas","hezbollah","human-rights","israel","israeli-palestinian-conflict","middle-east","palestine","politics","protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion","symbolism"],"id":6195,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Strange, how the name Israel, God's own chosen nation, who don't believe Jesus to be the Messiah, sounds almost the same as saying 'is He real?","author":"Anthony Liccione","tags":["israel","jesus","jewish","messiah","nation","rejection"],"id":7804,"author_id":"Anthony+Liccione"},{"text":"In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.","author":"George Clooney","tags":["9-11","afghanistan","darfur","death","global","iraq","israel","palestine","politics","un","united-nations","war"],"id":15212,"author_id":"George+Clooney"},{"text":"My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.","author":"R.F. Georgy","tags":["arab-israeli-conflict","colonialism","identity","imperialism","israel","jewish","jewish-identity","jews","palestine","palestinian-israeli-conflict","peace-and-conflict","zionism"],"id":16979,"author_id":"R.F.+Georgy"},{"text":"Question: Which Mediterranean government shares all of Ronald Reagan's views on international terrorism, the present danger of Soviet advance, the hypocrisy of the United Nations, the unreliability of Europe, the perfidy of the Third World and the need for nuclear defense policy? Question: Which Mediterranean government is Ronald Reagan trying, with the help of George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to replace with a government led by a party which professes socialism and which contains extreme leftists?If you answered 'the government of Israel' to both of the above, you know more about political and international irony than the President does.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["1980s","caspar-weinberger","cold-war","europe","george-p-shultz","israel","israel-united-states-relations","leftism","mediterranean-sea","national-missile-defense","presidency-of-ronald-reagan","ronald-reagan","socialism","soviet-union","terrorism","third-world","united-nations","united-states"],"id":17800,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["arabs","britain","colonialism","europe","holy-land","irony","israel","israeli-palestinian-conflict","jews","land","palestine","religion","turkey","zionism"],"id":18317,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"It is America (or Israel) at war, not just any war, that disturbs the Left. That is why there have been few demonstrations, and none of any size, against the mass murder of Sudan’s blacks; the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Congo; China’s crushing of Tibet; or Saddam Hussein’s wars against Iran, Kuwait, and Iraq’s own Kurds. Though there are always admirable individual exceptions, the Left has not been nearly as vocal about these large scale atrocities as it is about America’s wars. One additional reason is that, in general, atrocities committed by non-whites rarely interest the Left—and therefore ‘world opinion,’ which is essentially the same thing as Leftist opinion.","author":"Dennis Prager","tags":["america","israel","the-left"],"id":25749,"author_id":"Dennis+Prager"},{"text":"...British appeasement of the Palestinian Arabs led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews [in the Holocaust] who might otherwise have found refuge in Palestine.","author":"Sol Stern","tags":["holocaust","israel","jewish","middle-east","political"],"id":35016,"author_id":"Sol+Stern"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":76,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}