Palestine quotations

Page 3

◆ 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 Gandhi99

◆ They had bombed and burned,killed and maimed,plundered and looted.Now they had come to claim the land.

- Susan Abulhawa98

◆ It is human nature to seek revenge in the face of relentless suffering. You can't expect an unhealthy person to think logically.

- Izzeldin Abuelaish98

◆ Well, I myself am a 100% atheist. And I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which dominates our entire life, is assuming a more and more religious character.

- Uri Avnery98

◆ The border between the State of Israel and the occupied Gaza Strip had always reminded him of the line between Tijuana and greater San Diego. There, too, ragged men the color of earth waited with the mystical patience of the very poor on the pleasure of crisply uniformed, well-nourished officials. Some months before, Lucas had come down for the dawn shape-up at the checkpoint, and he had not forgotten the drawn faces in the half-light, the terrible smiles of the weak, straining to make themselves agreeable to the strong.

- Robert Stone98

◆ Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation.

- Susan Abulhawa98

◆ I know she is crying. Her tears fall on the wrong side, into the bottomless well inside her.

- Susan Abulhawa98

◆ Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian?

- Susan Abulhawa98

◆ How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors' toil, without mortal consequence?

- Susan Abulhawa98

◆ Many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.

- Roméo Dallaire98

◆ We can't just run away. It's our land. Our people. We have a duty.

- Selma Dabbagh98

◆ Ghetto living is more than just a feeling of confinement; it is a sense of suffocation too.

- Susan Nathan98

◆ We would do well to remember that the success of any struggle depends on the determination of its leaders and the clarity of its purpose, not the doubts of naysayers.

- Saree Makdisi98

◆ You are insistent, calling again. You want me to tell you the story of Scheherazade, who rocks the sad king on her knees as she sings him tales from wonderland. Yet you know that I am not Scheherazade, and that one of the world's greatest wonders is that I am unable to enter my country or pass through the region around it.

- Liana Badr98

◆ He could never go back to that place, it had been sealed off to him for ever, blown to the sky with explosives then flattened to the ground with bulldozers, built over with tarmac, lived on top of by other people.

- Selma Dabbagh98