Palestine Quotes

‘The victory march will continue until the Palestinian flag flies in Jerusalem and in all of Palestine.’ – Yasser Arafat

‘The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.’ – Mahmoud Darwish

‘I believe the land of Palestine will be returned to owners of the land with the help of God.’ – Hassan Rouhani

‘The Arab population of Palestine are victims of genocidal actions; their lands are confiscated or deprived of water supplies in the semi-desert areas, and their homes are destroyed with heavy wrecking equipment.’ – Fidel Castro

‘I prefer being penetrated by iron to seeing Palestine is loose.’ – Theodor Herzl

‘Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.’ – Mahatma Gandhi

‘The Zionists have no right to the land of Palestine. There is no place for them on the land of Palestine.’ – Mohammed Morsi

‘The government of the United States doesn’t want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war. It wants peace, but what’s happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? Palestine? What’s happening? What’s happened over the last hundred years in Latin America and in the world?’ – Hugo Chavez

‘Palestine is the issue, and until this issue is resolved, there can be no peace.’ – Hamza Yusuf

‘Peace in Palestine is inevitable. The question is how do we make it happen today.’ – Darrell Issa

‘There is no more Palestine. Finished.’ – Moshe Dayan

‘I think freedom for Palestine could be an incredible source of hope to people struggling all over the world. I think it could also be an incredible inspiration to Arab people in the Middle East, who are struggling under undemocratic regimes which the U.S. supports.’ – Rachel Corrie

‘I have no fear that the candle lighted in Palestine years ago will ever be put out.’ – William Inge

‘I would like go to Palestine and interview people there about what their lives are like; same thing in Iran.’ – Henry Rollins

‘I believe that Palestine is an occupied land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, and this is the right of the entire Palestinian people, this land.’ – Hassan Nasrallah

‘We promise you that we will not cede a single part of Palestine, we will not cede Jerusalem, we will continue to fight and we will not lay down our arms.’ – Ismail Haniyeh

‘As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states – no more, no less.’ – Noam Chomsky

‘People think that the Middle East is very complex but I have an analogy that sums it up quite well. If you imagine that Palestine is a big cake, well… that cake is being punched to pieces by a very angry Jew.’ – Frankie Boyle

‘If you want to boycott Israel because of Palestine, I don’t think you actually care, because you’re also boycotting 2 million Muslim Palestinian Israelis.’ – Nuseir Yassin

‘Apartheid was in South Africa; now it has been transferred to Palestine.’ – Yahya Jammeh

‘A solution of two national states – a Jewish state, Israel; an Arab state, Palestine. The Palestinians are our closest neighbors. I believe they may become our closest friends.’ – Shimon Peres

‘Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care for its forests, and so must we if waste and destruction are not to go on to the bitter end, leaving America as barren as Palestine or Spain.’ – John Muir

‘I feel like the history between Israel and Palestine has a lot in common with the history between India and Pakistan.’ – Freida Pinto

‘You can’t be a feminist in the United States and stand up for the rights of the American woman and then say that you don’t want to stand up for the rights of Palestinian women in Palestine. It’s all connected.’ – Linda Sarsour

‘The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim – or wish to, at least – that Lord Balfour’s Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn’t just mean the left-hand bit that became Israel.’ – Robert Fisk

‘I tell my brethren in Palestine: be patient and continue your blessed struggle. We did not forget you. We are still healing another wound in the Muslim nation, which is the occupation of our land by the Americans. Your battle and ours are one and the same.’ – Mohammed Omar

‘Prior to the United Nations even being formed, Palestine was a country. But the right of the Palestinian people were trampled, and unfortunately, international organizations contributed to those rights being trampled.’ – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

‘The time has come to end the suffering and the plight of millions of Palestine refugees in the homeland and the Diaspora, to end their displacement and to realize their rights, some of them forced to take refuge more than once in different places of the world.’ – Mahmoud Abbas

‘Peace between Israel and Palestine would be a giant step toward greater regional stability, and it would finally let both Israelis and Palestinians benefit from the Middle East’s growing wealth.’ – Zbigniew Brzezinski

‘The battle between two men over a girl is the same as the fight for two men over a piece of land. It is all about desire. There is no difference between a love triangle and the conflict between Israel and Palestine.’ – Bruno Dumont

‘It is our hope that Palestine will soon be welcomed to the community of nations with full – in my opinion – full membership in the United Nations.’ – Mwai Kibaki

‘I would like to see real peace and a state of Israel living peacefully alongside a state of Palestine.’ – Elie Wiesel

‘I went to Iraq because I wanted to see what one year of occupation had done to Iraqi society, and I went to the West Bank and Gaza Strip because I wanted to see what three generations of occupation had done to Palestinian society. I found a lot more hopelessness and despair in Palestine.’ – Michael Franti

‘A lasting solution to this problem will have an exceptionally positive influence foremost on the peoples of Palestine and Israel, as well as on the region and the international community.’ – Recep Tayyip Erdogan

‘Some friends of Israel believe that the Palestinians will never, in their hearts, accept a Jewish state in Palestine. Yet Germans and French, Chinese and Japanese, Mexicans and Americans have overcome their once insurmountable differences. Palestinians and Jews also have much to gain from peaceful coexistence.’ – Antony Blinken

‘It is a sad but undeniable reality that people have died in the line of duty since the earliest days of the United Nations. The first was Ole Bakke, a Norwegian member of the United Nations guard detachment, shot and killed in Palestine in 1948. The toll since then has included colleagues at all levels.’ – Ban Ki-moon

‘The ‘New Testament’, now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood – a material that couldn’t have been widely available in Palestine.’ – Terry Pratchett

‘Zionism demands a publicly recognized and legally secured homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people. This platform is unchangeable.’ – Theodor Herzl

‘It’s very hard to talk about Palestine to Jewish people – they see me as a betrayer.’ – Miriam Margolyes

‘California is a tragic country – like Palestine, like every Promised Land.’ – Christopher Isherwood

‘It would behoove the world to become used to this fact: that without a just solution to the Palestine tragedy, there can be no stable peace in the Middle East.’ – Hussein of Jordan

‘Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or it is the explosive that blows it apart.’ – Yasser Arafat

‘The PLO and the Palestinian people adhere to the renouncement of violence and rejection and condemning of terrorism in all its forms, especially State terrorism, and adhere to all agreements signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel.’ – Mahmoud Abbas

‘The real danger to the world’s resistance movements is the attempt to distort reality and to place the blame on the resistance groups’ actions without allowing them to portray their perspective, thus ignoring the reality of the occupation and the siege, like the situation in occupied Palestine.’ – Hassan Nasrallah

‘The more Israel sinks into the West Bank, the more it is delegitimized and isolated, the more the world focuses on Israel’s colonialism rather than Iran’s nuclear enrichment, the more people call for a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine.’ – Thomas Friedman

‘The truth about Hamas and Islamic Jihad is that they don’t prevent Israel from existing or even flourishing, they prevent Palestine from coming into existence.’ – Michael Medved

‘An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism.’ – Daniel Barenboim

‘The U.N. did not create Israel. The Jewish state came into being because the tiny Jewish community in what was mandatory Palestine rebelled against foreign imperialist rule. We did not conquer a foreign land.’ – Yitzhak Shamir

‘Every country in the world should follow the example of President Trump and move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. But simultaneously, there should be an embassy of all countries in the world in East Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Palestine.’ – Amos Oz

‘I don’t want to make people hate Israel or hate Palestine or hate Jews or hate Muslims.’ – Nuseir Yassin

‘Before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Jewish leaders were intent on discovering and laying claim to their heritage in the region. They took an intense interest in archaeology, embarking on quests to bring significant items of Judaica to Palestine.’ – Ronen Bergman

‘You can’t ignore reality. You won’t wake up one morning and find that the Arabs of Umm al-Faham have become part of Palestine and are no longer in Israel.’ – Ami Ayalon

‘I grew up in Palestine, West Virginia, which is mostly a farming community; there aren’t a lot of jobs.’ – Jessica Lynch

‘The increasing mistrust between the Arab-Muslim peoples and the western world is rooted in the conflict in Palestine.’ – Ismail Haniyeh

‘Israeli ingenuity was never more evident than in the Ayalon bullet factory built during the British occupation of Palestine. It was constructed underneath an urban kibbutz. The workers had a bakery and laundry which provided constant clatter to disguise the work carried on below ground.’ – Richard Edelman

‘Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She’s not a symbol.’ – Mahmoud Darwish

‘It goes without saying that the Jewish people can have no other goal than Palestine and that, whatever the fate of the proposition may be, our attitude toward the land of our fathers is and shall remain unchangeable.’ – Theodor Herzl

‘I would like to go and dance in Palestine one day, with great pleasure, great pleasure.’ – Mikhail Baryshnikov

‘My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.’ – Kai Bird

‘Every Westerner is jubilating that the Berlin Wall has fallen. Something worst than the Berlin Wall is in Palestine; and nobody is talking about it.’ – Yahya Jammeh

‘There are two distinctly, almost surreally different narratives in Israel and Palestine… and to a great extent, both are right and both are wrong. Both peoples have suffered greatly and both have legitimate grievances against the other.’ – Marianne Williamson

‘The core issue here is that the Israeli government refuses to commit to terms of reference for the negotiations that are based on international law and United Nations resolutions, and that it frantically continues to intensify building of settlements on the territory of the State of Palestine.’ – Mahmoud Abbas

‘In order to obtain the goal of returning to Palestine, all of us sometimes have to grit our teeth.’ – Yasser Arafat

‘We repeat today that we are with the establishment of a Palestinian state on any liberated part of Palestinian land that is agreed upon by the Palestinian people, without recognizing Israel or conceding any inch of historical Palestine.’ – Ismail Haniyeh

‘Palestine is our unforgettable historic home. The very name would be a force of marvelous potency for summoning our people together.’ – Theodor Herzl

‘Anyone seeking a real solution in Israel and Palestine rejects the us-versus-them mentality entirely.’ – Marianne Williamson

‘People express support for Palestine all the time. Huge parts of the Democratic party, in fact, now make it one of their baseline beliefs. And this is certainly not a big issue to most Americans, who spend little to no time thinking about Israel or Palestine on a regular basis.’ – Clay Travis

‘Here, I declare that the Palestine Liberation Organization is ready to return immediately to the negotiating table on the basis of the adopted terms of reference based on international legitimacy and a complete cessation of settlement activities.’ – Mahmoud Abbas

‘Palestine is not a country, so there should be no embassy here.’ – Jair Bolsonaro

‘It seems like the whole world is either with Israel or with Palestine. It seems like there is nobody who is actually in the middle, because the only loud people are the ones in the extreme.’ – Nuseir Yassin

‘Jordan is Palestine. The capital of Palestine is Amman. If Palestinian Arabs want to find their political expression, they will have to do it in Amman.’ – Ariel Sharon

‘Recent action in Syria and Palestine also tell us that the awakening voices of democracy in those regions are occurring, and that those in that region are able to pursue it without being stifled by terrorists that are despotic.’ – Judd Gregg

‘President George W. Bush is the first American president to call openly for two-states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.’ – Lee H. Hamilton

‘Today, the Iraqi citizen sees that America is coming and wants to occupy his country and kill him, and he is willing to experience for himself what happened in Palestine.’ – Bashar al-Assad

‘The Palestinians need more help from the Arab countries. Since 1967, the world has learned that there is not going to be real progress in the region until Palestine gets something back that they had.’ – Bruce Dern

‘I have drawn inspiration from the Marine Corps, the Jewish struggle in Palestine and Israel, and the Irish.’ – Leon Uris

‘Muslim delegates concerned about rights in Palestine could have brought their enthusiasm closer to home by addressing the fate of black Christians being slaughtered and enslaved in the Sudan.’ – Jack Schwartz

‘The evidence of a Jewish civilization going back more than two millennia is overwhelmingly borne out in the archaeology of the region. The heritage of the Jews in Palestine is documented.’ – Jack Schwartz

‘Among them, there were Muslims, Christians, and Jews living together. But then violent organizations came, bringing with them many large groups of people from various parts of the world to Palestine.’ – Hassan Nasrallah

‘If you are asking for my point of view, I would say that the Palestinians should go back to Palestine.’ – Hassan Nasrallah

‘Today the eyes of orthodox Jews of earth are fixed upon Palestine.’ – Joseph Franklin Rutherford

‘My guide had a copy of Palestine on my last trip to Gaza. He’d bring it out and show people what I was trying to do. That usually went over pretty well.’ – Joe Sacco

‘Hamas, also elected to governmental leadership in Palestine, includes the jihadists, people who have declared war on the United States of America and its ally, Israel.’ – Zach Wamp

‘Fear is the main factor in Arab politics… There is no Arab who is not harmed by Jews’ entry into Palestine.’ – Moshe Sharett

‘There are a lot of other terrorist targets we ought to be focusing on. Well, there is Syria, for example, which is pumping through – because of Iran, is pumping weapons on into Hezbollah and so forth – which is then producing a lot of agony in Palestine and in Israel. We ought to be doing a bit to try to stop that.’ – Lawrence Eagleburger

‘There’s Hezbollah, there’s Hamas, there is a whole range of terrorist targets out there related to Palestine and to Israel that we ought to be trying to deal with. And there’s a great deal of targets in the Philippines, Indonesia. You name it, there are a number of places where there are targets that we ought to be trying to deal with.’ – Lawrence Eagleburger

‘Our efforts are not aimed at isolating Israel or de-legitimizing it; rather we want to gain legitimacy for the cause of the people of Palestine. We only aim to de-legitimize the settlement activities and the occupation and apartheid and the logic of ruthless force, and we believe that all the countries of the world stand with us in this regard.’ – Mahmoud Abbas

‘Mr. President, prime ministers, let us have ambitions: ambitions to move beyond the violence and occupation, to the day when two states, Palestine and Israel, can live together side by side in peace and security.’ – Abdullah II of Jordan

‘The issue of Palestine has been there since more than 60 years. But more important since 1967 when the war was, ended in the defeat of some Arab countries.’ – Al-Waleed bin Talal

‘Imagine the situation between Israel and Palestine. It’s such a big mess. You can be on one side or the other. But what’s clear is that there’s an urgent need for a solution there and that’s been dragging on for so long.’ – Javier Bardem

‘It is time to end the western policy of malign neglect. It is in the interest of the whole world to help tackle the actual grievances in Palestine, Kashmir, and in central and southern Iraq, and to help the region out of its economic backwardness.’ – James Buchan

‘The native Jewish families in Jerusalem, as well as those in other parts of Palestine, present a marked difference to the Jews of Europe and America. They possess the same physical characteristics – the dark, oblong eye, the prominent nose, the strongly-marked cheek and jaw – but in the latter, these traits have become harsh and coarse.’ – Bayard Taylor

‘In the glory which overhangs Palestine afar off, we imagine emotions which never come, when we tread the soil and walk over the hallowed sites.’ – Bayard Taylor

‘Those who elected Hamas in Palestine did so on the basis of its political platform.’ – Hassan Nasrallah

‘I’m not trying to convert the entire nation of Israel and the entire nation of Palestine to Christianity. But at least if you can educate them about the ideology of love, the ideology of forgiveness, the ideology of grace. Those principles are great regardless, but we can’t deny they came from Christianity as well.’ – Mosab Hassan Yousef

‘I’m very much tied to the state of Israel, but I am against their policy of settlements in Palestine.’ – Zubin Mehta

‘I believe the Obama administration, from the president on down, has taken a very weak position regarding granting Palestine statehood at the United Nations.’ – Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

‘In September 1993, President Clinton presided over a handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn – the climax of a ‘day of awe,’ as the press described it.’ – Noam Chomsky

‘Palestine, as Icelanders see it, includes the Western Wall of the Second Temple, Judaism’s holiest site.’ – Elliott Abrams

‘The long conflict between Israel and Palestine has, for better or worse, become the world’s conflict. It permanently destabilizes the Middle East, blocks the settlement of urgent crises, and intensifies looming threats to the West.’ – Stephen Kinzer

‘There’s no fun in a bag if it’s not kicked around so that it looks as if the cat’s been sitting on it – and it usually has. The cat may even be in it! I always put on stickers and beads and worry beads. You can get them from Greece, Israel, Palestine – from anywhere in the world.’ – Jane Birkin

‘Nobody has trusted the Iranian government from day one, but the idea of just refusing to have any kind of talks is dangerous in the extreme. Every administration says at least that we’re trying to have talks between Israel and Palestine and solve the Middle East peace problem.’ – Douglas Brinkley

‘The history of Israel-Palestine conflict cannot be understood without its underlying emotional meanders. The emotional frameworks of the loss of Palestine for the Arab-Islamic world touched deep scars that go back to the Crusades, symbolizing a proof of Arab-Islamic decay, political impotence, and perceived (British/French) betrayal and antagonism.’ – Nayef Al-Rodhan

‘Jesus discouraged the accumulation of wealth, worried about its effects on those who had it, and took special pleasure in helping the poor, dedicating his efforts to them. He must have shaken his head at the large gaps between rich and poor throughout ancient Palestine in the first century.’ – Jay Parini

‘The borders of Israel and an independent Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps. Each state needs secure and recognized borders, and there must be robust provisions that safeguard Israel’s security.’ – Denis McDonough

‘Strong Islamist trends make a fundamentalist Palestine more likely than a small state under a secular government.’ – Ian Lustick

‘Anybody that’s ever been to Israel and to Palestine knows that you can’t look at a person and tell if they’re Israeli or Palestinian. You can assume. But I’ve seen Palestinians who look Swedish, and I’ve seen Israelis who are black.’ – Keith Ellison

‘I feel that the Jews have always had a special connection to this part of the world, which in geographical terms was called Palestine for so many centuries.’ – Daniel Barenboim

‘I spent my summers in a war zone because my parents were afraid that if we didn’t go back to Palestine every single summer, we’d grow up to be Madonna.’ – Maysoon Zayid

‘It is easy to go vegan in Palestine, which is where I quit eating food with a face. The vegetables and spices are one of a kind, and you don’t even miss the meat.’ – Maysoon Zayid

‘The Palestine I know is a place where Christians and Muslims are equal. My mother, a Muslim village girl, attended a Catholic girls’ school in Ramallah, and my refugee husband spent the Second Intifada side by side with his Christian brothers from Bethlehem.’ – Maysoon Zayid

‘I get it that the media is going to show the worst part, because that’s the part that people want to see. But they have not represented Israel or Palestine, however people want to call it, they haven’t represented it well at all. Go to the beach! You won’t know this place from California.’ – GloZell

‘Peace between Israel and Palestine is a top priority for the European Union, and it will remain a top priority in our political agenda.’ – Federica Mogherini

‘Palestine isn’t a state when it concerns statehood. When it comes to warring, it’s a state, yes? The Palestinians, they live in a country, for the purpose of war.’ – Nathan Englander

‘In 1982, Israel began an invasion across its northern border, seeking to root out elements of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Israeli military wreaked destruction all the way up to Beirut and forced the P.L.O. out of Lebanon. It also defeated the Syrian Army and, particularly, the Air Force wherever it engaged them.’ – Ronen Bergman

‘The first to grasp how sensitive Israeli public opinion was on the issue of hostages and M.I.A.’s – and therefore what a powerful weapon abduction could be – was Ahmed Jibril, the leader of a faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.’ – Ronen Bergman

‘I’m not at all sure that Israel can determine what happens in Palestine, the Palestinian territories.’ – James Wolfensohn

‘Anti-U.S. sentiment has been born out of many grievances – support and weapons for such dictators as Mubarak, unquestionable support for Israel in its occupation of Palestine, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen that kill more civilians than intended targets.’ – Mona Eltahawy

‘Muslim anger has, of course, been stoked by America’s war in Iraq and by Israel’s brutal policies toward Palestine and Lebanon.’ – Amitava Kumar

‘At the same time as we were seizing the lands that we turned into Iraq, we were devising an interesting future for our new protectorate in Palestine, and simultaneously trying to pacify Ireland, where we hit upon the solution of partition in 1921, thereby securing a peaceful resolution to the conflict only 86 years later.’ – Jeremy Hardy

‘My family is originally from Palestine, who came here to the United States, you know, from an occupied land to find a better life and find security and safety.’ – Linda Sarsour

‘As a teenager I became a boat person – a refugee – as I made my way to Palestine.’ – Frank Lowy

‘So whether that’s taking a bunch of people from Chicago down to Standing Rock or being in Flint, Michigan, or being in Palestine or Baton Rouge after Alton Sterling’s killing, I’ve been trying to, just as a man, be present and stand with the struggling and oppressed people around the world.’ – Vic Mensa

‘At the age of 16 I immigrated to Palestine from Europe, where I became a member of the Haganah, the main underground army of the Jews.’ – Ruth Westheimer

‘There are differences of opinion that come up naturally within parties. And certainly Israel and Palestine is one that has demonstrated the differences of opinion.’ – Annamie Paul