Over the years, the US has proceeded to implement its unilateral rejectionist program. ibid.
The US veto effectively terminated any UN role in the peace process. ibid.
The Israeli rejection clearly showed that the basic problem is not Palestinian rights per se, but rather the fact that recognizing them would end Israeli control over the territories. ibid.
The available evidence indicates that the US kept to the international consensus until February 1971, when it rejected the Jarring-Sadat initiative. US isolation increased in the mid-1970s as the consensus shifted to recognition of a Palestinian right of self-determination. Coincidentally, it was in February 1971 that George Bush became part of the executive apparatus as UN Ambassador. A compliant bureaucrat, Bush has adhered to US rejectionism throughout, and gives no indication of any departure today. ibid.
Intifada: in its first month Israel killed 75 Palestinians … in response mostly to stone-throwing using US helicopters to attack apartment complexes and other civilian targets. Clinton responded by making the biggest deal in a decade to send new military helicopters to Israel. The US population was protected from that information by the press. Noam Chomsky, Failed States audio
It was not the villain Arafat who was the prime obstacle to the realization of a Palestinian state but rather the United States and Israel. ibid.
At a time when the United States was becoming an object of international ridicule – late ’80s – because of its unwillingness to hear that the PLO was calling for negotiations and political settlement with increasing intensity while the United States and its Israeli ally were refusing on the alleged grounds that the PLO had not renounced terrorism unlike say the United States and Israel. Noam Chomsky, lecture Northeastern University April 2002, ‘The Emerging Framework of World Power’, Youtube 1.29.03
The Palestinians committed a serious crime: there was a free election in Palestine in January 2006 and they voted the wrong way. Now, that’s not acceptable. You can do all kind of things but not that. You don’t vote the wrong way in a free election. So the United States quite openly – Israel too of course – turned to punishing the Palestinians for this crime. Noam Chomsky, lecture Brown University April 2010
The pretext was that Israel was defending itself against rockets from Gaza. That pretext is accepted by the human rights groups, by the Goldstone Commission, by about 100% of commentary: it doesn’t have a particle of credibility. Israel and the US knew exactly how to stop the rockets. There had been a ceasefire and during the ceasefire Israel admits there was not a single Hamas rocket. Israel violated the ceasefire. ibid.
You’re going to live like dogs and whoever wants to leave can leave. ibid.
Israel uses sophisticated attack jets, naval vessels to bomb densely crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques and slums … to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanised armour, no command in control, no army, and calls it a war. It is not a war. It is murder. Noam Chomsky
You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back. Noam Chomsky
I do not deny the Palestinians any place to stand or opinion in every matter. But certainly I am not prepared to consider them as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner. Haim Herzog, former president
I hope that Americans will give careful and well-informed thought to root causes and historical realities, in which case I think they will question why a supposedly ‘legitimate’ state such as Israel has had to conduct decades of war against a subject refugee population without ever achieving its goals. Ismail Haniyeh
Tens of thousands have been killed or wounded by the Israeli army since 1967. During 2006, the number of Palestinians killed reached 650. Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967, more than 650,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israel – about 40% of the male population. Ismail Haniyeh
Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs ... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. Mahatma Gandhi
If every single Jew born anywhere in the world has the right to become an Israeli citizen, then all the Palestinians who were chucked out of Palestine by the Zionist Government should have the same right, very simple. Tariq Ali
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-Qaeda. 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
I am not one of those who believes – as Obama is said to believe – that a solution to the Palestinian statehood question would bring an end to Muslim resentment against the United States. (Incidentally, if he really does believe this, his lethargy and impotence in the face of Netanyahu’s consistent double-dealing is even more culpable.) The Islamist fanatics have their own agenda, and, as in the case of Hamas and its Iranian backers, they have already demonstrated that nothing but the destruction of Israel and the removal of American influence from the region will possibly satisfy them. No, it is more the case that justice – and a homeland for the Palestinians – is a good and necessary cause in its own right. It is also a special legal and moral responsibility of the United States, which has several times declared a dual-statehood outcome to be its objective. Christopher Hitchens
Arab nationalism in its traditional form was the way in which secular Arab Christians like Edward had found and kept a place for themselves, while simultaneously avoiding the charge of being too ‘Western’. It was very noticeable among the Palestinians that the most demonstrably ‘extreme’ nationalists – and Marxists – were often from Christian backgrounds. George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh used to be celebrated examples of this phenomenon, long before anyone had heard of the cadres of Hamas, or Islamic Jihad. There was an element of overcompensation involved, or so I came to suspect. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
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? ibid.
The forces of Hamas, who claim the whole of Palestine as an Islamic waaf or holy dispensation sacred to Islam, have begun to elbow aside the Christians of Bethlehem. Their leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar, has announced that all inhabitants of the Islamic state of Palestine will be expected to conform to Muslim law. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p24
You can’t have occupation and human rights. Christopher Hitchens
He takes a harsh line with Palestinians in the occupied territories when they mount demonstrations against the Israeli authorities, ordering his troops to ‘break their bones’. Infamous Assassinations: Yitzhak Rabin
There have been periods where almost no Israelis have been killed and large numbers of the Palestinians have been killed. Those periods have been referred to routinely by the American press as periods of ‘relative calm’. Hussein Ibish, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League USA
Within a few years the wars of consolidation and expansion began. Ironically enough, the horrors of the Holocaust became the rationalization for the preparation by Zionists of acts of genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine. Those of us who, in the years that were to follow, raised our voices publicly against the violent apartheid of the Israeli state were vilified by the Zionist press. It is ironic, too, that the Jew-haters in South Africa – those who worked and prayed for a Hitler victory – have been linked in close embrace with the rulers of Israel in a new axis based on racism. Joe Slovo