Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians QUOTES

1 " Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

2 " Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

3 " The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

4 " The Palestinians were offered two options: 1) to accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers’ rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

5 " international community”—a technical term referring to the U.S. government and whoever goes along with it. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

6 " The seventh myth was that Israel intended to conduct a benevolent occupation but was forced to take a tougher attitude because of Palestinian violence. Israel regarded from the very beginning any wish to end the occupation—whether expressed peacefully or through struggle—as terrorism. From the beginning, it reacted brutally by collectively punishing the population for any demonstration of resistance. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

7 " Any attempt to solve a conflict has to touch upon its very core; the core, more often than not, lies in its history. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

8 " In the case of Israel-Palestine, a one-state solution will arise only on the U.S. model: with extermination or expulsion of the indigenous population. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

9 " While Arab governments and Palestinian leaders were willing to participate in a new and more reasonable UN peace initiative in 1948, the Israelis assassinated the UN peace mediator, Count Bernadotte, and rejected the suggestion of the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), a UN body, to reopen negotiations. This intransigent view would continue; Avi Shlaim has shown in The Iron Wall that, contrary to the myth that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss peace, it was Israel that constantly rejected the peace offers that were on the table. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

10 " Since 1949, the United States has passed to Israel more than $100 billion in grants and $10 billion in special loans.36 Other bodies not part of the administration annually transfer to Israel $1 billion. This is larger than the amount of money transferred by the United States to North Africa, South America, and the Caribbean put together. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

11 " Of the approximately nine hundred thousand Palestinians living in the territories designated by the UN as a Jewish state, only one hundred thousand remained on or near their lands and homes. Those who remained became the Palestinian minority in Israel. The rest were expelled, or fled under the threat of expulsion, and a few thousand died in massacres. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

12 " there is a crucial difference between a one-state solution and a binational state. In general, nation-states have been imposed with substantial violence and repression for one reason—because they seek to force varied and complex populations into a single mold. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

13 " If American opinion has been uninformed, misinformed and prejudiced, the missionaries are largely to blame. Interpreting history in terms of the advance of Christianity, they have given an inadequate, distorted, and occasionally a grotesque picture of Moslems and Islam. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

14 " Though it is obligatory to hail our leaders for their sincere dedication to bringing democracy to a suffering world, perhaps in an excess of idealism, the more serious scholar/advocates of the mission of “democracy promotion” recognize that there is a “strong line of continuity” running through all administrations: the United States supports democracy if and only if it conforms to U.S. strategic and economic interests. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

15 " It can be seen, then, that a public debate on the issue of the Nakbah, whether conducted in Israel itself or in the United States, its imperial protector, could open up questions concerning the moral legitimacy of the Zionist project as a whole. The mechanism of denial, therefore, was crucial, not only for defeating the counter-claims made by Palestinians in the peace process, but, far more importantly, for disallowing any significant debate on the very essence and moral foundations of Zionism. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

16 " But the imperial mentality is so deeply embedded in Western culture that this travesty passes without criticism, even notice. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

17 " A few days after my new state occupied my village, I became a prisoner of war rather than a citizen. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

18 " Cyrus Scofield, a preacher from Dallas, Texas, was another link in the chain that connected missionary theology on both sides of the Atlantic. This violent priest produced an annotated, fundamentalist version of the Bible that was published by Oxford University Press in 1909. It was, in a way, the most explicit sketch of the three prongs that form the basis for U.S. policy today: the return of the Jews, the decline of Islam, and the rising fortunes of the United States as a world power. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

19 " The report defines acts of ethnic cleansing as including the separation of men from women, the detention of men, and the destruction of houses and their repopulation by another ethnic group later on. This was precisely the repertoire of the Jewish soldiers in the 1948 war. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

20 " The 1948 war’s diplomatic maneuvers and military campaigns are well engraved in Israeli Jewish historiography. What is missing is the chapter on the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Jews in 1948. As a result of that campaign, five hundred Palestinian villages and eleven urban neighborhoods were destroyed, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were expelled, and several thousand were massacred.2 Even today, it is hard to find a succinct summary of the planning, execution, and repercussions of these tragic results. "

― Noam Chomsky , Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians