Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman

“It would be better to drown these prisoners in the Dead Sea if possible, since that’s the lowest point in the world.” (Deputy PM Avigdor Lieberman on a potential amnesty to be offered to 350 Palestinian prisoners, 7 July 2003)

“We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II. Then, too, the occupation of the country was unnecessary.” (Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, January 2009)

“They have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost” (Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Arab Israelis, May 2004)

On the Occupied Territories
“We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years, neither the United Nations, nor the USA, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” (Ariel Sharon, in a letter written in 1973)

“[The] formula for the parameters of a unilateral solution are: To maximize the number of Jews; minimize the number of Palestinians; not to withdraw to the 1967 border and not to divide Jerusalem.” (Ehud Olmert, 5 December 2003)

“In the course of the years, Israeli settlements have been established in the Gaza District and the areas of Judea and Samaria… The status of these settlements derives from the status of the territory, which is held in ‘belligerent occupation’… When the petitioners settled in Gaza Strip and northern Samaria, they did so in full knowledge that they were settling in territory held by Israel in belligerent occupation…” (Israeli government before the Supreme Court, spring 2005)

“Settlements can be built, but there is no need to talk about it and come out dancing every time a building permit is given. Let them build but without talking.” (Ariel Sharon, 22 June 2003)

“It is thanks to the disengagement that we can make certain that… the major Israeli population centres in Judea and Samaria will remain an integral part of the State of Israel and will have territorial contiguity with Israel in any final status agreement.” (Ariel Sharon, May 24, 2005, Speech to AIPAC conference)

“We decided what our priorities were – we are withdrawing from the Gaza Strip – an area where there was no chance of establishing a Jewish majority, and which would clearly, in any final agreement, not be part of the State of Israel. At the same time, we are directing the majority of our efforts to areas which are most crucial to ensuring our existence – the Galilee, the Negev, Greater Jerusalem, the settlement blocs and the security zones.” (Ariel Sharon, June 30, 2005, Address to the Caesarea 2005 Conference)

“If we are evacuated, we’ll return the night after and establish 10 new outposts.” (Yehoshua Mor-Yosef, YESHA Settlement Council 10 June 2003)

“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, 15 November 1998)

“Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.” (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 1989)

“I will not keep Olmert’s commitments to withdraw and I won’t evacuate settlements. Those understandings are invalid and unimportant.” (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, January 2009, quoted in Ha’aretz)

On Palestinians
“It’s like a meeting with a dietician. We have to make them much thinner, but not enough to die.” (Dov Weissglas, Bureau Chief to the Israeli Premier explaining the logic behind Israel’s refusal to transfer the tax revenues that it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, March 2006)

“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimetre of Eretz Israel… Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” (Rafael Eitan, former chief of staff, Agriculture and Environment Minister and Deputy Prime Minister April 1983)

“It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” (Prime Minister Golda Meir, 15 June 1969)

“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” (Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969)

“Drugged cockroaches scurrying in a bottle” (Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan on how Palestinians would react to Israeli settlement building, 1983)

General Policy

“In the next war, if we do it right we’ll have a chance to get all the Arabs out…We can clear the west Bank, sort out Jerusalem.” (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted in ‘Going to the wars by Max Hastings)

“They’re okay as long as they’re led by white officers.” Netenyahu on the Golani Brigade, the Israeli infantry force containing many North African or Yemenite Jews. Quoted in ‘Going to the wars’ by Max Hastings

“You don’t simply bundle people onto trucks and drive them away…I prefer to advocate a positive policy, to create, in effect, a condition that in a positive way will induce people to leave.” (Ariel Sharon, 24 August 1988)

“How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.” (Prime Minister Golda Meir, 8 March 1969)

“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process . . . . Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda . . . . All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.” (Dov Weissglas, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Bureau Chief, October 2004)

“Irrelevant” (Zipi Livni on Mahmoud Abbas, quoted on Al Jazeera)

“We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’” (Yitzhak Rabin remembering the establishment of Israel in 1948, 23 October 1979)

“My solution for maintaining a Jewish and democratic state of Israel is to have two distinct national entities. And among other things I will also be able to approach the Palestinian residents of Israel, those whom we call Arab Israelis, and tell them: ‘your national aspirations lie elsewhere.” (Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni December 08 to a group of secondary school students in Tel Aviv)

On the Dec 08 – Jan 09 Gaza attack
“We try all we can to avoid harming civilians, but it happens.” (Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Washington Press Conference 17th Jan 09)

“We’ve said that if there is rocket fire against the south of the country, there will be a severe and disproportionate Israeli response to the fire on the citizens of Israel and its security forces,” (Ehud Olmert, Cabinet meeting Feb 1st 2009)

“harms the Israeli strategic goal, empowers Hamas, and gives the impression that Israel recognises the movement” (Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on the possibility of an extended ceasefire with Hamas, early December 2008)

“At peace” (Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on how she felt about the Israeli attack on Gaza, 19th Jan 09)

“In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the Secretary of State wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favor. I said ‘get me President Bush on the phone’. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now’. He got off the podium and spoke to me.

I told him the United States could not vote in favor. It cannot vote in favor of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favor.

She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favor.” (Prime Minister Ehud Olmert 12th January 09 on how he influenced the US vote in the UN on a resolution pertaining to the Gaza war)

“My understanding of the situation would suggest that there was no situation at the border that required military action and the ceasefire that had been established in 2008 had reduced the rocket fire practically to zero. Hamas had proposed extending that ceasefire for up to ten years. Israel neglected to respond even to such a proposal. And there was a diplomatic alternative to force which undermines the argument that this was really legitimate self-defence. And even if there was no ceasefire, it seems that Israel was engaged in provocative acts in the weeks before it attacked Gaza, creating a situation in which they would be in a condition where they could seem to justify attacking Gaza because they themselves had been retaliated against after these provocative attacks”

Richard Falk, Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,

17^th September 2009, Flashpoints