Save Palestine Quotes

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.

NC: You’re right, but I think it tells you something very interesting about Western culture. When they went to the concentration camps and were appalled, they did not say, “Let’s save the survivors”; they said, “Let someone else pay for saving the survivors.” IP: Exactly.

A book was published in 2021 that had received financial backing from Elbit. The Bulgarian Army and the Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews, 1941–1944 is a revisionist history that falsely claims that the Bulgarian state saved Jews during World War Two. Elbit wanted to get a foothold in the Bulgarian arms market. Raz Segal and Amos Goldberg, “Distorting the Holocaust to Boost the International Arms Trade,” Nation, July 26, 2022.

Pilgrims in better circumstances are often stricken down by the sun and the fevers of the country, and then their saving refuge is the Convent. Without these hospitable retreats, travel in Palestine would be a pleasure which none but the strongest men could dare to undertake. Our party, pilgrims and all, will always be ready and always willing, to touch glasses and drink health, prosperity and long life to the Convent Fathers of Palestine.

Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation – none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy. Who will say it? Will America say, We have stolen it, or France step down? Will Russia confess, or Poland say, We have sinned? All bloated on their scraps of destiny, all swaggering in the immunity of superstition. Ishmael, who was saved in the wilderness, and given shade in the desert, and a deadly treasure under you: has Mercy made you wise? Will Ishmael declare, We are in debt forever? Therefore the lands belong to none of you, the borders do not hold, the Law will never serve the lawless. To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation’s sweetest dreams of itself. The Covenant is broken, the condition is dishonoured, have you not noticed that the world has been taken away? You have no place, you will wander through yourselves from generation to generation without a thread. Therefore you rule over chaos, you hoist your flags with no authority, and the heart that is still alive hates you, and the remnant of Mercy is ashamed to look at you. You decompose behind your flimsy armour, your stench alarms you, your panic strikes at love. The land is not yours, the land has been taken back, your shrines fall through empty air, your tablets are quickly revised, and you bow down in hell beside your hired torturers, and still you count your battalions and crank out your marching songs. Your righteous enemy is listening. He hears your anthem full of blood and vanity, and your children singing to themselves. He has overturned the vehicle of nationhood, he has spilled the precious cargo, and every nation he has taken back. Because you are swollen with your little time. Because you do not wrestle with your angel. Because you dare to live without God. Because your cowardice has led you to believe that the victor does not limp.

The United States, Canada, and Australia had formidable immigration barriers in place, and while the British had admitted 80,000 Jewish refugees, all of that essentially ended after the declaration of war.[33] British-controlled Palestine also began to turn back ships of Jewish immigrants, a policy they would continue all throughout the war and beyond, sticking to strict Jewish immigration quotas to appease the non-Jewish residents there.

THE WAITING HARVEST Matthew 9:37–8 Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is great, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers for his harvest.’ HERE is one of the most characteristic things Jesus ever said. When he and the orthodox religious leaders of his day looked on the crowd of ordinary men and women, they saw them in quite different ways. The Pharisees saw the masses as chaff to be destroyed and burned up; Jesus saw them as a harvest to be reaped and to be saved. The Pharisees in their pride looked for the destruction of sinners; Jesus in love died for the salvation of sinners. But here also is one of the great Christian truths and one of the supreme Christian challenges. That harvest will never be reaped unless there are reapers to reap it. It is one of the blazing truths of Christian faith and life that Jesus Christ needs us. When he was upon this earth, his voice could reach so few. He was never outside Palestine, and there was a world which was waiting. He still wants the world to hear the good news of the gospel; but they will never hear unless others tell them. He wants all men and women to hear the good news; but they will never hear it unless there are those who are prepared to cross the seas and the mountains and bring the good news to them. Nor is prayer enough. Some people might say: ‘I will pray for the coming of Christ’s kingdom every day in life.’ But in this, as in so many things, prayer without

Four days into the St. Louis’s voyage, the British government published the McDonald White Paper on Palestine. The document, named after Colonial Secretary Malcolm McDonald, limited Jewish immigration in Palestine to a total of seventy-five thousand over a five-year period, with the number of Jews in the country not to exceed one-third of the total population. In repudiating the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the White Paper limited immigration to the one place seemingly most logical. “This White Paper,” Rabbi Stephen Wise would later write, “issued shortly before Hitler was to begin his mass annihilation of European Jewry, was in effect a death sentence for scores of hundreds of thousands of Jews who could have found life and safety in Palestine rather than death in Maideneck [sic] and Auschwitz.

The Jewish communities of Europe are seen by the public as extensions of and advocates for a regime in Israel that is rapidly losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the intelligentsia, the media, the left, and the anti-globalization crowd,” according to David Harris, head of the American Jewish Committee. “So the question really becomes, how do you fight anti-Semitism in France or Belgium if the image of their Jewish citizens is inextricably linked to Israel?”6 Israel, with the only freely elected government in the Middle East, with the only free press, with a citizenry still decidedly in favor of a two-state solution with Palestine, has become a pariah.

Brandeis thought that the British should allow more Jews into Palestine. It was not only their obligation under the Balfour Declaration; it was the only way Jews could be saved from Hitler. When

But the ensemble’s greatest legacy can be found in the lives it saved during the Holocaust. By helping the musicians as well as their family members immigrate to Palestine, Huberman saved an estimated one thousand lives between 1935 and 1939. The

Not in the slightest. In fact he told me about it very soon after we first met. I think it weighed heavily on his conscience. He needed to get it off his chest. He told me he would have done anything to save Rebekah. But it always puzzled him how the SS made the connection between the two of them, one an English graduate student stranded in Palestine and the other the daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman. We never did manage to figure it out.

As president of the Swedish Red Cross, Bernadotte had been instrumental in saving Jews from the Nazis during the Second World War and this was why the Israeli government had agreed to his appointment as a UN mediator: they had not expected him to try to do for the Palestinians what he had done for the Jews only a few years before.

Don’t you know gods only succumb to purity?” He lifts his coated fingers and paints them across my lips. “Drinking from your pussy is like being blessed with holy water. I’ll confess my sins if it means you’ll be the one to save me.

decision the president would make in 1948 would prove to be equally profound on the shape of world history when Truman decided to recognize Israel’s existence following Britain’s rapid withdrawal in 1948 from Palestine.

The British government briefly considered the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Uganda, to avoid antagonizing the Arabs in Palestine.

Jews continued moving into Palestine and their Zionist dream began looking more like a possibility than ever before. On November 29, 1947, amid much controversy, the United Nations announced the “partition” of Palestine into two states, one for Jews and the other for Arabs already living in the country. Truman had lobbied quietly for this partition, despite opposition from the Arab states, the British, and his own State Department. He wrote later of his belief that partition “could open the way to peaceful collaboration between the Arabs and the Jews.” Six months later, the British formally withdrew, and the partition went into effect in May 1948. Jews around the world rejoiced, but Arab leaders were understandably enraged and threatened war. Despite his support for partition and sympathy for the plight of Jews, Truman was cautious about offering public support for Zionism. Given the growing tension in the region, he thought it was in America’s best interest for their president to be seen as an honest broker in the conflict.

At six p.m., Washington time, the new state was declared in Palestine, and given the name of Israel. It could not survive without the recognition and support of the most powerful country in the world. At 6:11, the White House announced that the United States would do just that by recognizing Israel’s existence. The Israeli nation was born, and America was the first to acknowledge it.

NC: You’re right, but I think it tells you something very interesting about Western culture. When they went to the concentration camps and were appalled, they did not say, “Let’s save the survivors”; they said, “Let someone else pay for saving the survivors.” IP: Exactly. NC: This tells you something about the West, the deeply rooted imperial mentality that affects the West like a plague. Yes, there are these people living in misery. We are the ones able to help them, but we are not going to even raise that possibility. Somebody else, who does not have the capacity, they have to suffer for it.

Some kids have invented a new, clever way of making sure their story is told, or at least recorded, even after they’ve been torn to pieces by an Israeli missile. To make sure their bodies are recognised they have taken to writing their names, with markers, on their hands and legs. They are sharing this practice on social media. Some are even writing their family’s mobile numbers so they can be called and informed of their death. It is almost impossible to think about the world carrying on after we die, but these kids are doing it: putting their loved ones first, hoping to lessen their suffering by saving them from the purgatory of not knowing. They do it also, I think, for themselves: the idea of dying and not being mourned by anyone is unbearable.

I want to give you something that has helped me to survive so far: all the guilt and shame I have carried for all these years is a small price to pay if it saves even one innocent human life.

My father’s hopes were high for his return to Jaffa when the Swedish nobleman Count Folke Bernadotte was appointed on May 20, 1948 as the UN mediator in Palestine, the first official mediation in the UN’s history. He seemed the best choice for the mission. During the Second World War Bernadotte had helped save many Jews from the Nazis and was committed to bringing justice to the Palestinians. His first proposal of June 28 was unsuccessful, but on September 16 he submitted his second proposal. This included the right of Palestinians to return home and compensation for those who chose not to do so. Any hope was short-lived. Just one day after his submission he was assassinated by the Israeli Stern Gang. Bernadotte’s death was a terrible blow to my father and other Palestinians, who had placed their hopes in the success of his mission. Three months later, on December 11, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, which states that: refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

When they went to the concentration camps and were appalled, they did not say, “Let’s save the survivors”; they said, “Let someone else pay for saving the survivors.” IP: Exactly. NC: This tells you something about the West, the deeply rooted imperial mentality that affects the West like a plague. Yes, there are these people living in misery. We are the ones able to help them, but we are not going to even raise that possibility. Somebody else, who does not have the capacity, they have to suffer for it.

Concerns had been growing about the rising levels of Jewish immigration to Britain, with the numbers arriving from Russia alone rising by a factor of five between 1880 and 1920. At the turn of the twentieth century, there had been discussions about offering land in East Africa to encourage Jewish émigrés to settle there, but by the time of the war attention had shifted to Palestine. In 1917, a letter from the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild was leaked to The Times that spoke of ‘His Majesty’s Government [viewing] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. 7 Known as the Balfour Declaration, the idea of designating territories for Jews to settle was what Balfour later described to the House of Lords as ‘a partial solution to the great and abiding Jewish problem’. 8 Although the championing of a homeland for European Jews has understandably attracted attention, Britain also had its eye on Palestine for its position in relation to the oilfields and as a terminus for a pipeline linking to the Mediterranean. This would save a journey of a thousand miles, planners later noted, and would give Britain ‘virtual control over the output of what may well prove to be one of the richest oil fields in the world’.

Not the historic right but the necessity to save those who lived was the moral basis of the conquest of the land. Hence it was the natural right of all human beings to ensure their existence by means of erecting an independent political framework that justified taking over the area, which permitted the establishment of Israel. Since as we know the land was not empty . . . The Arabs’ long, bitter opposition [to the creation of Israel] has not left any doubt about their awareness of the danger which confronts them.” Even