Year Zero of the Arab Israeli Conflict 1929 Quotes

“Only within a world shut off from the view of the other side can each side mourn its dead and celebrate its heroes.”
― Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab Israeli Conflict 1929

“We make ourselves out to be innocent victims of attack. It’s true that in August the attackers were Arabs. Since they have no army, they cannot observe the rules of the game. They availed themselves of all the barbaric means typical of an anticolonialist rebellion. But we need to look at the deepest sources of the uprising. We have spent twelve years in Palestine without having even once asked the Arabs’ consent, without conducting any sort of discussion with the people living in this land. We have trusted solely to British power. We have set ourselves goals that must inevitably lead to conflict. (Lavsky 1990, 204)”
― Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929

“We state it with a pure heart and full confidence that no Jew has ever thought and is not thinking now in any way whatsoever of impinging on Muslim rights and their holy places.”
― Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929

“In a conflict between peoples, each side feels the pain of its losses more strongly than it does the pain of the other side. Each side mourns its own dead, not the dead of its enemies. This is not deliberate or malicious disregard—it is natural and understandable. Consequently, each side feels and displays elemental gratitude toward those who risked their lives to defend their compatriots.”
― Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab Israeli Conflict 1929

“No victim, and certainly not the Jews, can accept that they were legitimately attacked. The year 1929 thus marks the beginning of the greatest Jewish-Arab rivalry of all — the competition over who is the aggressor and who the victim, who the overlord and who the underdog.”
― Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab Israeli Conflict 1929

“In every society different views exist in parallel, and individuals revise their positions over time or waver between positions, among emotions, and between logic and emotion.”
― Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab Israeli Conflict 1929

“Comparisons can offer a view of the common parameters of different events. While massacres committed by Arabs, Jews, Latin American dictators, American forces in Vietnam, or the Stalinist regime might all be different, they all have one thing in common: the slaughter of defenseless people. And in general, the slaughterers present their actions as necessary for their self-defense. For the most part, they seem to really believe this. And that is connected to the reason why the massacre in Hebron is not and cannot be a seminal event in Palestinian consciousness.”
― Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab Israeli Conflict 1929

“Each side remembers primarily its own dead; the killings its own members committed, and under what circumstances they did so, are repressed. That might be quite natural, but it is important to stop for a moment to consider it. Other than in exceptional cases, nations do not perpetuate the memory of massacres they committed, only those committed against them.”
― Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab Israeli Conflict 1929

“explanations of events are generally complementary rather than mutually exclusive.”
― Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab Israeli Conflict 1929

“Life consists of great events and the little things that happen around them — and vice-versa.”
― Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab Israeli Conflict 1929

“Life consists of great events and the little things that happen around hem —and vice-versa.”
― Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab Israeli Conflict 1929