Palestine (region)

To be buried in Palestine is like being buried under the altar ~ Rabbi Anan Ben-David

Palestine is a geographic region in Western Asia between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The name was used by Ancient Greek writers, and was later used for the Roman province Syria Palaestina, the Byzantine Palaestina Prima, and the Islamic provincial district of Jund Filastin. It is usually considered to include Israel and the State of Palestine, though some definitions also include parts of northwestern Jordan. Historical names for the region include Land of Israel, the Holy Land, and Canaan. As the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, the region has a long and tumultuous history as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. ~ Hannah Arendt
  • Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or it is the explosive that blows it apart.
    • Yasser Arafat, addressing an Arab Summit in 1974, as quoted in TIME (11 November 1974), Vol. 104, No. 20.
  • It pains our people greatly to witness the propagation of the myth that its homeland was a desert until it was made to bloom by the toil of foreign settlers, that it was a land without a people, and that the colonialist entity caused no harm to any human being. No: such lies must be exposed from this rostrum, for the world must know that Palestine was the cradle of the most ancient cultures and civilizations.
    • Yasser Arafat, text of his speech to the UN General Assembly on November 13, 1974, archived by Al-Bab
  • If the immigration of Jews to Palestine had had as its objective the goal of enabling them to live side by side with us, enjoying the same rights and assuming the same duties, we would have opened our doors to them, as far as our homeland's capacity for absorption permitted. Such was the case with the thousands of Armenians and Circassians who still live among us in equality as brethren and citizens. But that the goal of this immigration should be to usurp our homeland, disperse our people, and turn us into second-class citizens — this is what no one can conceivably demand that we acquiesce in or submit to. Therefore, since its inception, our evolution has not been motivated by racial or religious factors. Its target has never been the Jew, as a person, but racist zionism and undisguised aggression.
    • Yasser Arafat, text of his speech to the UN General Assembly on November 13, 1974, archived by Al-Bab
  • After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.

B

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people... ~ Arthur James Balfour
When you recognize the concept of 'Palestine', you demolish your right to live in Ein Hahoresh. If this is Palestine and not the Land of Israel, then you are conquerors and not tillers of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it belongs to a people who have lived here before you came. ~ Menachem Begin
  • My friend, take care. When you recognize the concept of 'Palestine', you demolish your right to live in Ein Hahoresh. If this is Palestine and not the Land of Israel, then you are conquerors and not tillers of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it belongs to a people who have lived here before you came. Only if it is the Land of Israel do you have a right to live in Ein Hahoresh and in Deganiyah B. If it is not your country, your fatherland, the country of your ancestors and of your sons, then what are you doing here? You came to another people's homeland, as they claim, you expelled them and you have taken their land.
  • Upon you, upon the youth, will it depend whether Palestine is to be come the center of mankind or a Jewish Albania, the salvation of nations or the toy of the Powers. Zion will not arise in the physical world if you do not prepare for it in your souls.
  • We come to Zion only by way of Zion.
  • Zion is greater than a piece of land in the Near East. Zion is greater than a Jewish commonwealth in this land. Zion is memory, admonition, promise. Zion is . . . the foundation stone of the messianic upbuilding of humanity. It is the unending task of the Jewish people.

C

  • I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

D

E

  • Palestine is not only a place of refuge for the Jews of Eastern Europe, but the embodiment of the reawakening corporate spirit of the whole Jewish nation.

F

  • I sometimes fantasize vacationing in Greece or Italy but never do. If I have time and cost isn't prohibitive, I always return to Palestine. I do so mostly from a sense of duty – do I have a right to be elsewhere? – relieved by the authentic affection I've developed for friends. I cannot say I enjoy going back. From the moment I arrive, even before arriving, I count the minutes left before I depart. The eminent Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has described Gaza as "the largest concentration camp ever to exist." The West Bank ranks only a mite less awful. Once the Israeli wall currently under construction is finished, the West Bank will replace Gaza with top honors. Bordered on both sides by four meter deep trenches, fortified with guard towers at regular intervals, and topped with barbed wire, this massive barricade will stretch across fully 347 kilometers – twice the size of the Berlin Wall.

G

  • Building a State means for us a return to the soil. We found hundreds of Arab villages. We didn’t take them away. ... We established hundreds of new Jewish villages on new soil. ... We didn’t merely buy the land, we recreated the land. We did that in rocky hills like Motza. ... In the swamps of Hedera hundreds of Jews died of malaria, and they refused to leave that place until it was made healthy. ... We did it on the sand dunes of Rishon le-Zion. With our toil, our sweat, and with our love and devotion, we are remaking the soil to enable us to settle there, not at the expense of anybody else.
    • Ben Gurion, to Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, March 19, 1946. Quoted in Unified Jewish religious education curriculum, p. 167.
  • The real miracle of Palestine is the Jew who masters the labor of orchard and garden, field and vineyard, quarry and harbor, water and power, factory and craft, highway and byway. That sort of Jew the Diaspora never made.
    • Ben Gurion, March 2, 1932. Rebirth and Destiny, p. 49.
  • If Palestine is to be restored ... it must be by settling Jews on its soil. The condition to which the land has been reduced ... is such that restoration is only possible by a race that is prepared for sentimental reasons to make and endure sacrifices for that purpose.
  • The Jews cannot receive sovereign rights in a place which has been held for centuries by Muslim powers by right of religious conquest. The Muslim soldiers did not shed their blood in the late War for the purpose of surrendering Palestine out of Muslim control. I would like my Jewish friends to impartially consider the position of the seventy million Muslims of India. As a free nation, can they tolerate what they must regard as a treacherous disposal of their sacred possession?
  • The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood? Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French....The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French. If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled? Or do they want a double home where they can remain at will? This cry for the national home affords a colourable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews.

H

  • The heart of the people—that is the foundation on which the land will be regenerated.
    • Ahad HaAm, “The Wrong Way,” 1889. Ten Essays, 14.
  • In Palestine we can and should found for ourselves a spiritual center of our nationality.
  • Violence...will achieve nothing because the Palestinians really are not "out to get us," and in any case are unable to do so. They are fighting for their identity. As a girl student in Gaza told me, "Please understand that in order to co-exist with you, first we must exist."
    • Shulamith Hareven, 1985 interview included in We Are All Close: Conversations with Israeli Writers by Haim Chertok (1989)
  • Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvellous potency. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.

I

  • As long as in our heart of hearts
    There throbs a Jewish soul,
    And in the Orient, in Zion,
    We envision our goal,
    Our cherished hope is not yet lost,
    The ancient hope not damped—
    To regain our fatherland,
    Where David once encamped.

K

  • History is no longer enough for the Jews—history, the heroic fatherland of time. They are yearning for a small, simple home on earth. More young Jews are returning to Palestine. This is a return to self, to one's own roots, to growth.
    • Franz Kafka, quoted in The Jewish Frontier, March 1953, p. 33.
  • Palestine is the center of the world, Jerusalem the center of Palestine, and the Temple the center of Jerusalem. ... In the Holy of Holies there was a stone, the foundation of the world.
  • The idea in itself is only natural, beautiful and just. Who can contest the rights of the Jews on Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!
    • Yousef al-Khalidi, Quoted in Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter, p. 51.
  • There is no greater service for the pious Jew to perform than to rebuild the ruins of the Holy Land

N

  • We will return to Zion as we went forth, bringing back the faith we carried away with us.
    • M. M. Noah, 1824. Quoted in J. H. Hertz. A Book of Jewish Thoughts, 123.
  • Gentiles outside of Palestine are not to be condemned as idolaters, for they only follow their fathers' practices.

M

  • The very name Palestine stirs within us the most elevated sentiments. ... All find consolation in that land, some by its memories, others by its hopes.
    • Solomon Munk, 1863. Quoted in J. H. Hertz. A Book of Jewish Thoughts. London, 1917.
  • Hail to the spot Heaven favoured, land divine,
    Revered, long-suffering, beauteous Palestine!

O

  • Perhaps it is the great world-historical task of the Jewish settlement in Palestine to effect a synthesis of Europeanism and Orientalism.

R

  • It is the psychological problem of how to reconcile two powerful movements — the time-old yearning of the Jews to return to the Promised Land and to possess a home which is theirs as of right, and the Palestinian Arab desire for promotion to national status.
    • Great Britain and Palestine: 1915–1939 (Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1937)

S

  • I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip.
  • Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
    Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
  • Palestine is not the original home of the Jews. It was acquired by them after a ruthless conquest, and they have never occupied the whole of it, which they now openly demand. They have no more valid claim to Palestine, than the descendants of the ancient Romans have to this country. The Romans occupied Britain as long as the Israelites occupied Palestine, and they left behind them in this country far more valuable and useful work. If we are going admit claims based on conquest thousands of years ago, the whole world will have to be turned upside down.

T

  • The future will not change if we continue to think with the same concepts of the past... If we believe we have a right to this land and the Israelis believe they are the ones who have a right to this land, we must build a new model. If both of us believe that God gave us this land, we must put history aside and begin to think about the future in different terms.
    • Bassem Tamimi, Palestinian West Bank Protest Leader: "Israel Killed the Two-state Solution", Haaretz (17 February 2013)

W

  • To bring water to the thirsty earth, shade to the sun-parched sands, the laughter of children to a countryside where only jackals howl; to unearth the good soil under the rocks, to push back the desert, and remove the last swamps—these are among the tasks of the Jewish National Fund in its second fifty years.
    • Weizmann, message, Jan. 19, 1951. Quoted in the N.Y. Times, Jan. 20, 1951.
  • The chief merit of your leadership is that it seeks to restore or create the self-respect of the Jewish people. ... In Palestine the Jew is on horseback, head up, free from the care what others think of him.
  • If before I die there are half a million Jews in Palestine, I shall be content because I shall know that this "saving remnant" will survive. They, not the millions in the Diaspora, are what really matter.
    • Haim Weizmann, to McDonald, 1933, quoted in McDonald, My Mission, 251.
  • It was the Jewish genius that bestowed its radiance upon Palestine.

Z

  • Both the Germans and the Zionists wanted as many Jews as possible to move to Palestine. The Germans preferred to have them out of Western Europe, and the Zionists themselves wanted the Jews in Palestine to outnumber the Arabs as quickly as possible. [...] In both cases, the purpose was a kind of 'ethnic cleansing', that is, a violent change in the ratio of ethnic groups in the population.

See also

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