On Palestine Quotes

“How, then, does one become an activist?

The easy answer would be to say that we do not become activists; we simply forget that we are. We are all born with compassion, generosity, and love for others inside us. We are all moved by injustice and discrimination. We are all, inside, concerned human beings. We all want to give more than to receive. We all want to live in a world where solidarity and companionship are more important values than individualism and selfishness. We all want to share beautiful things; experience joy, laughter, love; and experiment, together.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“European settlers coming to a foreign land, settling there, and either committing genocide against or expelling the indigenous people. The Zionists have not invented anything new in this respect.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve. Indeed, the story of Palestine has been told before: European settlers coming to a foreign land, settling there, and either committing genocide against or expelling the indigenous people. The Zionists have not invented anything new in this respect.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“Not all evils can be rectified, but ongoing evils surely should stop.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“We live in a society where the “nothing” (shopping, watching TV) has become a “something” and the “something” (relaxing, meditating, sharing) has become a void in need of being filled.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“There is no demonstration against Zionism, because even the European Parliament regards such a demonstration as anti-Semitic.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“From Ferguson to Athens, via Mexico, it is clear that many governments are reproducing the tools that Israel uses to repress and oppress the Palestinians. The replication of those same tactics, methods, and often weapons serves as proof that the Palestinians are now used as guinea pigs for experimentation.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“The fact that Israel actually benefits from violating international law and receives “red carpet” treatment from the West means that we all have a role to play in ending the injustice that the Palestinians are facing.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“The Nakba took place where Israel is today, not in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. Any conversation about reconciliation with both communities should take this fact as a starting point.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“I started with reading Chomsky and slowly became very interested in anything that had to do with Israel/Palestine. Reading Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, John Berger, Tanya Reinhart, Ilan Pappé, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Kurt Vonnegut, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein . . . all became part of my daily routine.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“It's quite standard for those who hold the clubs to say: "Forget about everything that happened and let's just go on from here." In other words, "I've got what I want, and out forget about what your concerns are. I'll just take what I want.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“NC: You’re right, but I think it tells you something very interesting about Western culture. When they went to the concentration camps and were appalled, they did not say, “Let’s save the survivors”; they said, “Let someone else pay for saving the survivors.” IP: Exactly.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“This impulse, never condemned or rebuked by a world that watched by and did nothing, led to the massive expulsion of 750,000 people (half of the region’s population), the destruction of more than five hundred villages, and the demolition of a dozen towns in 1948.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“Settler colonialism is a conceptual fine-tuning on the theories and histories of colonialism. Settler movements that sought a new life and identity in already inhabited countries were not unique to Palestine.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“When they went to the concentration camps and were appalled, they did not say, “Let’s save the survivors”; they said, “Let someone else pay for saving the survivors.” IP: Exactly. NC: This tells you something about the West, the deeply rooted imperial mentality that affects the West like a plague. Yes, there are these people living in misery. We are the ones able to help them, but we are not going to even raise that possibility. Somebody else, who does not have the capacity, they have to suffer for it.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“Where the Israelis find it difficult is actually in escaping the description of the reality as colonialist when trying to do this in Hebrew. Any translation into another language of the Israeli terminology of settlement is bound to expose the colonialist nature of the project.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“If you take a look at the international support for Israeli policies, it’s of course primarily the USA, but secondarily it’s the Anglosphere. Australia, Canada. . . . I suspect that there is a kind of intuitive feeling on the part of the population. Look, we did it, it must be right. So they are doing it, so it must be right.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“Partition signifies international complicity in the crime of destruction, not a peace offer.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“President Obama says: “Well let’s forget about the crimes that were committed, the invasion of Iraq, let’s just go on.” In others words, let’s continue the same way we’ve been proceeding. That’s the weapon of the powerful.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“How, then, does one become an activist? The easy answer would be to say that we do not become activists; we simply forget that we are. We are all born with compassion, generosity, and love for others inside us. We are all moved by injustice and discrimination. We are all, inside, concerned human beings.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“The reason they do not accept the return has nothing to do with practicalities. It has to do with Jewish supremacy and Jewish exclusivity.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“The impulse to allow, indeed to push, Jews to settle in Palestine was motivated also by British, and Western, Islamophobia.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“When the colonizers are already a third generation and even succeeded in founding their own state, the native population has to strategize differently and find ways of coexisting with this generation of colonizers. The reason the colonialist impulse of the Zionist movement did not end at a certain historical moment lies in the territorial appetite and greediness of these settlers.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“So the past becomes an obstacle in the eyes of the so-called mediators, but the past is everything in the eyes of the occupied and the oppressed people.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“ethnic cleansing does not end because it peters out. It ends either when the job is completed or is stopped by a more powerful force.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“There is a book in 1935 (by Joachim Prinz, Wir Juden). This is a humanist Zionist who said that Jews should recognize that they should be sympathetic to the Nazis because they have the same kind of ideology we do. Blood and land and so on. We agree with that, if we can only explain to them that we are really on the same side, they will stop persecuting us.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“A book will accompany you and will stay with you, it will mark you like nothing else. You will go back to it, quote it, argue about it. You will borrow one and lend one. The written word, in my opinion, is therefore more effective and long lasting than the spoken one as a tool for change.”
― Frank Barat, On Palestine

“It clarifies the connection between Zionist ideology and the movement’s polices in the past and Israeli policies in the present: both aim to establish a Jewish state by taking over as much of historical Palestine as possible and leaving in it as few Palestinians as possible. The desire to turn the mixed ethnic Palestine into a pure ethnic space was and is at the heart of the conflict that has raged since 1882. This impulse, never condemned or rebuked by a world that watched by and did nothing, led to the massive expulsion of 750,000 people (half of the region’s population), the destruction of more than five hundred villages, and”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“Since the reference to apartheid has become common in the corridors of power as well as among activists, one can see why the inventive group of activists in Canada who initiated Israel Apartheid Week on their own university campus inspired so many others in the world to follow suit. The phenomenon has become so widespread (now also in Israel and Palestine) because it resonates with what people knew is happening on the ground due to the growth of the ISM (the international solidarity movement). It has provided an alternative source of information to the distorted reports of the mainstream media in the West, in particular grabbing public attention in the United States when Rachel Corrie, a young activist in the ISM, was brutally killed by the Israeli army.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine