Israel Quotes

“By 1914 there were 90,000 Jews living in Palestine, of whom 75,000 were immigrants.”
― Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History

“In 1909 a Jewish town was established on the sand dunes just north of Jaffa—it was called Tel Aviv, the Hebrew for ‘Hill of Spring’. It came to be known as ‘the first all-Jewish city’.”
― Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History

“Central to Zionist thinking was the Socialist concept of cooperative ventures, in which there would be neither owner nor manager, but in which the workers would share equally in the profits of their collective enterprise.”
― Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History

“His book was later to influence the most vicious anti-Semite of all, Adolf Hitler, with whom Houston Chamberlain developed a personal friendship.”
― Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History

“1899 by the publication of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Born in Britain, Chamberlain had chosen to live in Germany where he married Richard Wagner’s daughter. In his book he developed the theory of the ‘blond’ Nordic race, the originators of all that was noble in Western civilization. All that was bad, Chamberlain asserted, came from racial mixing, and particularly from any ‘Nordic’ intermarriages with Jews. The Jews, he wrote, were a ‘mongrel’ people incapable of creativity; they were the universal corruptors. According to Chamberlain’s so-called researches, not only King David and the biblical Prophets, but also Jesus, were not Jews at all but of ancient Germanic origin.”
― Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History

“first twenty years of its existence.”
― Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History

“In 1909 a Jewish town was established on the sand dunes just north of Jaffa—it was called Tel Aviv, the Hebrew for ‘Hill of Spring’. It came to be known as ‘the first all-Jewish city’. The Jewish population of nearby Jaffa, originally about 1,000 strong, had risen by immigration to more than 8,000. As a result, conditions of life in Jaffa had become as crowded and uncomfortable as in the Russian towns from which most of the immigrants had come—sometimes even more so. The new town provided welcome space. It also freed the immigrants from dependence on Arab landlords, who could raise rents at whim.”
― Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History

“The British offered Herzl a territory in Uganda, to be under the sovereignty of the British crown, into which a million Jews could immigrate and settle. The territory would be administered by the Jews and have a Jewish governor. When Nordau protested that Uganda was not Palestine, Herzl replied that, like Moses, he was leading the people to their goal via an apparent detour.”
― Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History