A Quote by Noam Chomsky
The western mantra is that Israel seeks negotiations without preconditions, while the Palestinians refuse. The opposite is more accurate.
Related Quotes
The claim that Israel seeks to annihilate the Palestinians is simply a lie. Israel seeks to stop rocket attacks and tunnel invasions, and as long as Hamas is dedicated to those actions, they can expect a forceful Israeli reaction.
It seems Palestinians can't win. The language of peace negotiations has always been predicated on a representation that Palestinians are violent and that is why Israel behaves as it does.
It is our responsibility as the stronger party [Israel], as the occupying power, to convince the Palestinians that they can achieve their basic national aims, their just national aspirations, without violence. Unfortunately, the behavior of the Sharon administration, and before this of the Barak administration, has shown the Palestinians the opposite: namely, that they will achieve nothing without violence.
As long as there are no negotiations with the Palestinians, Israel is and will continue to be in a difficult situation.
While in Israel, Mitt Romney said something every sane person knows to be true: There is great cultural and political meaning in the fact that Israel has prospered while the Palestinians have festered.
Palestinians have been banned since forever. And nobody - and it's an unhuman act, and it's a - for me, it's a crime issue. So, nobody has punished Israel ever since they were banning Palestinians. And so, Israel right now feels the power that they can just move on with it, and now they are trying to ban other people that are not Palestinians.
If Palestinian Authority refuse to join the US-run negotiations, their basis for support would collapse. They survive on donations essentially. Israel has made sure that it's not a productive economy.
I think placing preconditions before negotiations is the quickest way to undermine peace.
For the Palestinians' efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Palestinian leaders will not achieve peace or prosperity if Hamas insists on a path of terror and rejection. And Palestinians will never realize their independence by denying the right of Israel to exist.
You know, I think, I think the Palestinians are trying to get away without negotiating. They're trying to get a state to continue the conflict with Israel rather than to end it. They're trying to basically detour around peace negotiations by going to the U.N. and have the automatic majority in the U.N. General Assembly give them, give them a state.
I tried to eliminate the need for Israel to strike out, militarily, by removing its major threat and attacker, and that was Egypt. I've written a few books on the subject. There's no doubt that the best way to resolve Israel's problems is to negotiate peace between Israel and its immediate neighbors, particularly the Palestinians. And that's something that's not going to be achieved, in my opinion, without the strong involvement of the American president.
Every administration has this idea to talk tough to Israel and make nice to the Arabs and the Palestinians, and that's the way to bring about peace. It's counter-productive - it's actually the opposite.
There is no way Israel will deal with the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not understand the suffering of the Jewish people.
The US and Israel have demanded further that Palestinians not only recognize Israel's rights as a state in the international system, but that they also recognize Israel's abstract right to exist, a concept that has no place in international law or diplomacy, and a right claimed by no one. In effect, the US and Israel are demanding that Palestinians . . . formally accept the legitimacy of their expulsion from their own land. They cannot be expected to accept that, just as Mexico does not grant the US the right to exist on half of Mexico's territory, gained by conquest.
The Arabs could have peace tomorrow if sufficient numbers of Palestinians were not content to be used as cannon fodder in fruitless assaults on Israel, even as the surrounding Arab powers distract the Arab masses with the red herring of Israel while retarding their countries with their repression and corruption.
My colleagues and I have gone in the footsteps of our predecessors since the very first day we were called by our people to care for their future. We went any place, we looked for any avenue, we made any effort to bring about negotiations between Israel and its neighbors, negotiations without which peace remains an abstract desire.
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