The Biggest Prison on Earth Quotes

“The third generation of inmates are still there waiting for the world to acknowledge their suffering and to realize that, as long as their oppression continues, it will be impossible to engage constructively with oppression elsewhere in the Middle East, and in particular in Syria. The immunity Israel has received over the last fifty years encourages others, regimes and oppositions alike, to believe that human and civil rights are irrelevant in the Middle East. The dismantling of the mega-prison in Palestine will send a different, and more hopeful, message to everyone living in this troubled part of the world.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“The Palestinians faced demolition of their houses (unlike before, this time without prior warning); the destruction of their rural infrastructure – the uprooting of olive trees and the ruination of crops; and probably the most sinister of all in this list of evils, the redirection of water away from their towns and villages, in many cases to the benefit of Jewish settlements (which, after the Intifada, sold that water for a higher price back to the Palestinians from whom the water had been stolen in the first place”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“The Hashud (‘suspect’) came to refer to any Palestinian the Israeli disliked; he was the ‘bad Arab’. Being a ‘suspect’ already meant guilty until proven otherwise even in those early days, and therefore a ‘suspect’ was someone who was likely to be arrested without trial and then remain listed on a kind of ‘criminal’ register that would then bar him or her later on from working in Israel, passing through checkpoints, getting permits to open a business and all other normal aspects of life. The only way of avoiding this, or of being taken off the register, was by becoming an informer for the internal Israeli security service, the Shabak.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“The head of the Israeli military intelligence, Shlomo Gazit (whom we met as the first coordinator of the military rule after 1967), explained that this destruction of the infrastructure was intentional. Israel wanted the Palestinians to ‘face unemployment and a shortage of land and water and thus we can create the necessary conditions for the departure of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza’.32
On top of all of these measures during the period when the official mentality in Israel was that the occupied people had to be punished, there was yet more licence for the settlers’ violence and intimidation. In periods like this, the courts were particularly lenient in their attitude to the killing of Palestinians by settlers. Of the forty-eight cases concerning the killing of Palestinians between 1988 and 1992 by settlers only one culprit was charged with murder.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“How to have the cake and eat it, therefore, was the question. The answer was to decide on continued colonization while leaving the question of the status of the Palestinian residents open for a future meeting, which never happened.7
The colonization effort was a triple enterprise: the constant grabbing of land, moving Jewish settlers into new colonies and limiting by force any natural growth of the Palestinians inside the Occupied Territories.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“While George W. Bush was in office, the killing of women and babies in Gaza could be accepted even by the American administration as part of that holy war against Islam.
The worst month in 2006 for the Gazans was September, when this new pattern in the Israeli policy became all too obvious. Almost daily, civilians were killed by the IDF: 2 September 2006 was one such day. Three citizens were killed and an entire family injured in Beit Hanoun. This was just the morning’s harvest; before the end of the day many more were killed. In September an average of eight Palestinians died every day in Israeli attacks on the Strip, many of them children. Hundreds were maimed, wounded and paralysed”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“In 2009 the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence published a report of its members’, reserve soldiers’ and other soldiers’ preparation for Operation Cast Lead, when the attack on the dummy city was replaced by an assault on the real Gaza. The gist of the testimonies was that the soldiers had orders to attack Gaza as if they were attacking a massive enemy stronghold: this became clear from the firepower employed, the absence of any orders or procedures about acting properly within a civilian environment, and the synchronized effort from land, sea and air. Among the worst practices they rehearsed were the senseless demolition of houses, the spraying of civilians with phosphorus shells, the killing of innocent civilians by light weaponry and obeying orders from their commanders generally to act with no moral compass. ‘You feel like an infantile child with a magnifying glass that torments ants, you burn them,’ one soldier testified.4 In short, they practised the total destruction of the real city as they trained in the mock city”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“In their turn, since 2005 the settlers have become even more brutal and barbarous in their treatment of the people of the West Bank, culminating in the burning alive of a teenager and an entire family.
The Palestinians’ steadfastness in the West Bank continues. Popular resistance is a daily occurrence but with limited resources it is easily quashed by the Israeli occupation. However, in its tenacity it suggests that the final chapter to what began in 1967 has yet to be written.
Today there are nearly three million Palestinians in the West Bank and almost 400,000 settlers. Zionism as a settler colonial movement was able to colonize Palestine almost in its entirety regardless of its demographic minority. These settlers, however, are much more powerful than the early Zionists and it is unlikely that anyone will prevent them from taking over the rest of the West Bank, by one way or another.
During that same period, Israel subjected the Gaza Strip to even harsher oppression and the most callous version of the maximum security prison to date.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“Target killing of Palestinian leaders, including moderate ones, was not a new phenomenon in the conflict. Israel began this policy with the assassination of Ghassan Kanafani in 1972, a poet and writer, who could have led his people to reconciliation. The fact that he was targeted, a secular and leftist activist, is symbolic of the role Israel played in killing those Palestinians it ‘regretted’ later for not being there as partners for peace.
In May 2001 President George Bush Jr appointed Senator George J. Mitchell as a special envoy to the Middle East conflict. Mitchell produced a report about the causes for the second Intifada. He concluded: ‘We have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the [Government of Israel] to respond with lethal force.’13 On the other hand, he blamed Ariel Sharon for provoking unrest by visiting and violating the sacredness of the al-Aqsa mosque and the holy places of Islam.
In short, even the disempowered Arafat realized that the Israeli interpretation of Oslo in 2000 meant the end of any hope for normal Palestinian life and doomed the Palestinians to more suffering in the future. This scenario was not only morally wrong in his eyes, but also would have strengthened, as he knew too well, those who regarded the armed struggle against Israel as the exclusive way to liberate Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“We have a better understanding today of what triggered such a furious Israeli reaction. In their book Boomerang, two senior Israeli journalists, Ofer Shelah and Raviv Drucker, interviewed the General Chief of Staff and strategists in the Ministry of Defence and offered inside knowledge on the way these officials and generals were thinking about the issue.12 Their conclusion was that in the summer of 2000 the IDF was a frustrated outfit following its humiliating defeat by Hezbollah in Lebanon, who had forced the army to withdraw totally from Lebanon. There was a fear that this retreat made the army look weak. And so a show of strength was much needed.
The reassertion of dominance within the occupied Palestinian territories was just the kind of display of sheer power the ‘invincible’ Israeli army needed”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“The town of Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, like all the other towns and villages in the West Bank and the Strip, was placed under military curfew for three days. This short period was enough for the army to perform its routine devastation. Muhammad Ahmad al-Astal, who was then twenty-four years old, recalled how the soldiers burst into the house where his friends usually gathered, about ten Palestinian men in all. The soldiers took four of them to another room. He remained with three other members of the family. Two of them were taken by the soldiers to a corner of the room and beaten with rifle stocks; they were also punched, slapped and kicked. He and another family member were ordered to empty the cupboard of its contents, clothing and other household items.
In his own words: ‘The soldiers called me over, slapped me on the face and told me, ‘You are Hamas’. I returned to empty the cupboard but I was called over again. This time they told me, ‘You are Islamic Jihad’, and slapped me again.’ There was a third round of abuse in which he was told, ‘You are PLO’. Another man in the room was treated in a similar way. Then they were both summoned: ‘one soldier held me by the neck and banged our heads together’.
It turned out that in the next room the same abuse was taking place and then they were united with two men from the other room and ordered to stand facing the wall with their hands up in the air: ‘the soldiers gave us back our ID cards to hold up in the air and told us to remain like this’. After half an hour the older members of the family told them the soldiers had left”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“Fatmah Hassan Tabashe Sufian, sixty-one years old, married and a mother of four, was woken up on 6 April 1993 at three o’clock in the morning. Soldiers broke into her house, pushed her up against the wall and asked her where her children were; they are asleep, she replied. They woke up her son Saad, thirty years old, kicking him and beating him with their hands and rifle stocks, until he was spitting blood all over the place. Her other son, Ibrahim, was badly beaten, and the B’Tselem researcher who took Fatmah’s evidence testified that long after the incident he could still see signs of ecchymosis – subcutaneous bleeding – on his back. Both sons were taken out to the yard and put against a wall. The soldiers found two toy guns and began slashing the two men with them until the toys broke. Then they gathered everyone in the complex, twenty-seven people, into one room and threw in a shock grenade. Saad and Ibrahim were ordered to empty the cupboard while they were continuously beaten by the soldiers shouting at them, ‘You are Hamas and we are Golani [the name of the military brigade to which they belonged].’ Nor did they spare Fatmah’s old, blind brother who was a hundred years old. He too was abused by the soldiers, who threw mattresses and blankets at him.25
Thus, every April from 1987 until 1993 this was the routine of the collective punishment. But it was not only these three days that mattered. Collective punishment in March–May 1993 robbed 116,000 Palestinian workers of their source of living, bisected the Occupied Territories into four disconnected areas and barred any access to Jerusalem.26 Seen from that perspective, when the Oslo Accord was implemented as a territorial and security arrangement, it was just official confirmation of a policy already in place since 1987.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“The units spearheaded the operations of mass arrests and the systematic abuse and torture of those arrested. It is very disappointing that the world continued to remain silent at that point, because that particular activity was investigated by a few American congressmen, a rarity in the history of the occupation. Paul Findley reported in 1991 that human rights groups had published ‘detailed credible reports of torture, abuse and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees in prisons and detention centres’.29 Although this was totally ignored by Western governments, it did generate for the first time a far wider response from what one might call Western civil societies. A more genuine and widespread movement of solidarity emerged – to this day still unable to impact the policies of the governments and hence the reality on the ground.
Needless to say, this kind of treatment reported by Findley was not unique to 1991. The people arrested during the punitive years were added to the thousands who had already been in jail since June 1967”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“And, indeed, once the first Intifada broke out in 1987, settler provocation against the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip increased and became more brutal by the day. At the time, the settlers were mercilessly using their own children to provoke aggression, as happened in the village of Beita, a few miles south-east of Nablus. There, in January 1988, a battalion commander rounded up a large number of youths from Beita and the nearby village of Hawara, tied their hands behind their backs and ordered his soldiers to ruthlessly beat them with sticks and rocks.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“Sharon participates in these searches himself. He orders the soldiers to perform a full body search on all males and sometimes imposes curfews on refugee camps in order to conduct a search. The clear goal of the mission is finding terrorists and killing them. The soldiers have orders not to try and capture the terrorists alive. Sharon instructs them to be rough with the local population, to perform searches in the streets and even to strip suspects naked if necessary; to shoot to kill any Arab who holds a gun; to shoot to kill any Arab who does not obey a Stop! call; and to diminish the risk to their lives by employing a big volume of fire, by uprooting trees from orchards which makes it difficult to capture terrorists, by demolishing houses and driving out their owners to other houses in order to pave secure roads.
Haider Abd al-Shafi, Senior Palestinian leader, says: ‘Sharon took a decision to open roads in Al Shateya camp and in Rafah for security. That led to removing houses, the houses of refugees, which is an action not to be taken lightly, but there was no objection neither from Dayan nor from the Israeli government. They let Sharon realize his aim and he really destroyed a lot of refugees’ houses.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“Marie Thereze, a Catholic nun, wrote in her church’s paper: ‘Here is what the Israelis do not want us to see. Three villages destroyed systematically by TNT and bulldozers.’22 She noted that the villagers were forced to leave in a hurry, unable to take anything with them. Their fields were deserted in the middle of work and she could see ‘tractors from nearby Kibbutzim that were quick to cultivate the villages’ lands’. An Israeli journalist, Amos Kenan, had also witnessed the expulsion, but his report was only published thirty years later in Haaretz. Kenan was one of the soldiers who took part in the demolition of Beit Nuba, and he wrote: ‘We were told the three villages have to be destroyed for strategic reasons.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“The very last moment of Beit Nuba’s existence comes to life in his articulate writings (Kenan would become one of Israel’s foremost novelists in later years):
Elegant stone houses, orchards of fruit trees around each house – olives, peach and vine trees – and next to them cedars. All the orchards nicely cultivated and maintained . . . In the morning the first bulldozer arrived and demolished the first house. In ten minutes, the house, the orchard and the trees were all gone. The house and its contents were destroyed . . . After the third house was destroyed, the refugees’ convoy began to make its way towards Ramallah.
The three picturesque villages are now hidden by Canada Park – a pine forest of the kind planted in the aftermath of the 1948 ethnic cleansing as a means of covering such atrocities, and part of Beit Nuba’s land now forms a new colony named Beit Horon.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“Old habits die hard and it seems that, since many of the senior army commanders were veterans of the 1948 ethnic cleansing, they were falling back on the same methods they had used before when occupying villages. Dayan had to issue a special order to the army to stop dynamiting evicted villages – common practice in 1948 that was meant to prevent the return of the villagers to their homes.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“All in all, according to UN sources, Israel expelled nearly 180,000 Palestinians in those early days.40 In summing up this period in Palestine’s ethnic cleansing, I want to return to some of the plans that were not executed, or at least to one that might, unfortunately, still be relevant in the future should Israel ever have the power, the will or the need to massively depopulate the occupied population in order to satisfy what it would deem its strategic and existential requirements. This is the idea of moving the people of the Gaza Strip, or at least the refugees there, into the West Bank.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“We need to create the circumstances that would induce the people to leave. We need to pressure them, but in such a way that would not cause them to resist, but to leave. This should be encouraged among both refugees and permanent residents so that they would feel there is no hope in the [Gaza] Strip from an agricultural aspect . . . Furthermore, when UNRWA would complete a new census it would become clear they would not have enough food portions for the refugees . . . these could have severe security implications . . . we should freeze all development there [so as to encourage transfer].”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“The punishment was quick in coming and was a typically stark violation of international law and human rights. The mayor of Khalil, its Qadi (judge in a Shari’a court) and the mayor of the nearby town Halhul were expelled at the end of that month. Typical of this method of official punishment, it was accompanied by vigilante retaliation by the settlers themselves who planted bombs in the cars of Bassam Shaq’a, the mayor of Nablus, and Karim Khalaf, the mayor of Ramallah, both of whom were badly injured. This turned out to be a step too far for the government, who feared this could become a ‘Jewish Underground’, which is indeed what happened. It transpired that a group of vigilantes was operating under the name ‘The Jewish Underground’. They were caught while preparing a terrorist attack on Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount, with the intention of blowing up the mosques there.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“He was moved by the monologue of a soldier who wrote in his kibbutz journal (every kibbutz in Israel has a kind of ‘village voice’) of what he had seen and done in the occupied West Bank. The soldier told how he and his comrades entered a Palestinian school, locked about twenty eight-year-old boys in a classroom, threw in some gas grenades and kept the children in there for quite a while, causing such panic that at least half of them jumped out of the windows, breaking their legs in the fall. This was a punishment for stone throwing by students from a nearby college, who were not caught. What drew Evron’s attention was not so much the horrific story itself, but the fact that the soldier who published the story in a kibbutz publication seemed to believe that telling the story absolved him and his friends from his actions. The same applied to a group of soldiers in a famous publication, soon after the June 1967 war, entitled Conversations Between Soldiers. The uneasiness Evron felt in 1967 became a review of liberal Zionism and its role in sanitizing and disguising the horrors of Zionist colonization and occupation since 1882”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“Some of the Israelis’ punitive actions reminded one of pre-modern age incarceration and imprisonment methods – long outlawed in the civilized world. They included corporal punishment before and during arrests, a method particularly used with children and youths as part of the penalization operation. As the uprising continued the international community became more aware of the victimization of children that was taking place. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that between 23,600 and 29,900 children required medical treatment for injuries sustained from beatings in the first two years of the Intifada, a third of whom were under the age of ten”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“Alon’s afterthoughts were sometimes more telling than his more structured presentation. Exploring further the issue of a possible Palestinian mini-state as a reward for Palestinian good behaviour, he highlighted the negative demographic impact of the refugees and suggested resettling them all in the Sinai.
These thoughts were aired for the first time in the meetings in the middle of June 1967, and were articulated even more explicitly during July.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“The first step was to colonize a distant point and then claim all the area between Israel and that new Jewish settlement as exclusively Jewish, as well as applying the same exclusionary rule to the roads leading to it. The new stretch of land had to be protected; this was achieved by the erection of military camps that were hurriedly built on yet more expropriated land. The last such point in Alon’s wedge was Mitzpe Shalem on the Dead Sea. Built by the socialist kibbutzim movement, it began the production of Ahava Dead Sea cosmetics, which even today, when the European Union prohibits the buying of products from the Occupied Territories, are displayed in many fashionable shopping malls in the West.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“The Greater Jerusalem Municipal Area’, an amoeba that grows by the day and swallows whole areas, de-Arabizes them and colonizes them. Palestinians were forced exponentially out of the newly expanded amoeba as it swelled over years, and eventually by the beginning of this century it had cut the West Bank in two”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“In the Occupied Territories the CDG was in fact quick to implement the same principles of land robbery applied to the huge areas Palestinians left behind when they fled in 1948. This was the principle of custody. In the aftermath of the 1948 ethnic cleansing, the evicted properties in both urban and rural areas were transferred into the hands of a custodian according to a Knesset law from 1950. This government official had the right to decide on the fate of each property. The options were limited: it was either handed over to Jewish citizens or to the various government agencies, including the army.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“To the aesthetic crimes against the city of Jerusalem can be added those of culture and religion. One of the most important parts of the Mamilla area was its Muslim cemetery dating back to the seventh century. The graves were removed at night so that no one could witness this, and in their place the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation built a Museum of Tolerance! To ensure that Muslims could not reach this sacred site, it was surrounded by an electric fence.12 Desecrating Muslim graveyards for new constructions was nothing new, however: the old cemetery in Haifa, al-Istiqlal, was desecrated in a similar way when a highway was driven through it, scattering the gravestones to either side.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“As the veteran Zionist Burg put it: ‘We are going to have to hold on to the territories for a very long time, while claiming outside we wish to make peace.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“...the government offered both versions of the mega-prison to the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. One was an open-air Panopticon prison, the other a maximum security one. If they did not accept the former, they would get the latter.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories