Israel Quotes

“The story of the return of the Jewish people to its ancestral homeland became, in short, one of the great dramas in the history of humankind.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Some of Ben-Gurion’s generals wanted to take the West Bank of the Jordan River, frustrated that Israel had forfeited an opportunity to establish a secure natural frontier, but Ben-Gurion demurred. He had several reasons. The last thing Israel needed, he believed, was to control an even greater number of Arab civilians. As it was, Ben-Gurion was worried about those Arabs who remained in Israel. They were Israeli, because they had stayed inside the state, but the only thing that distinguished them at that point from Israel’s enemies on the other side of the line was that they had not fled, while their family members had. Ben-Gurion did not dare imagine that they yet had any loyalty to the new state. Ben-Gurion was also concerned that the Americans would look askance on Israel taking more territory. No less important, Ben-Gurion chose not to conquer the West Bank because his mind had moved on to other challenges. He was, as Anita Shapira notes, “already immersed in the vital mission of bringing in masses of new immigrants and absorbing them.”48 THE”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“THE BEGIN YEARS HAD not been easy ones for Israel, but they had been important. Israel had made peace with its once most potent enemy, Egypt. It had made clear that it would not tolerate weapons of mass destruction in the hands of its sworn enemies. It had shown that it would go to war—even a war that many Israelis eventually opposed—to protect the rights of its citizens and children to live normal lives and not to sleep in bomb shelters.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“He had an impeccable sense of timing, knew when to wait and when to move, and declared the state even before it was ready, because he knew that another opportunity might never arise. Not”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Yet if mere Israeli survival was going to evoke Arab anger, Dayan then warned both his listeners and his entire newborn nation, Israelis had better be prepared to live by the sword. In language filled with biblical imagery, as if to remind his listeners that the battle to stay in the land was not new but was a story that had begun thousands of years earlier, Dayan continued, “We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. That is the decree of our generation. That is the choice of our lives—to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists, and our lives severed.”17 It was a worldview that would guide not only Dayan, but the country he was helping to found, for decades to come. AS”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“comfortable division has been made. The Arab states unilaterally enjoy the “rights of war” [while] Israel has the unilateral responsibility of keeping the peace. But belligerency is not a one way street. Is it then surprising if a people laboring under this monstrous distinction should finally become restive and at last seek a way of rescuing its life from the perils of the regulated war that is conducted against it from all sides?27”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Amos Oz, who would become one of Israel’s greatest novelists and was several times considered a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, later recalled that night in his autobiographical memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He told how, merely eight years old, he rode on his father’s shoulders in a surging crowd of celebrants in Jerusalem, and at three or four in the morning, still wearing his dirty clothes, crawled into bed.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Herzl promised the readers of Altneuland not only a Jewish safe haven, but a Jewish state that would be a source of progress and continuous growth. That dream, too, has been fulfilled.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Micah Goodman, a popular teacher on the Israeli scene and one of its young public intellectuals, wrote his first three books on Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed, Rabbi Yehudah Halevi’s medieval classic, The Kuzari, and the biblical book of Deuteronomy—hardly subjects one would expect to attract mass attention. Yet all three of Goodman’s books hit the Israeli bestseller list. Israelis were buying, reading, and thinking about books on subjects their grandparents had tried to evict from the Israeli conversation”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Nasser was dead. Israel’s military superiority had effectively neutralized any Syrian threat. Pan-Arabism was a thing of the past. Yet once again, Israel found itself arrayed against another enemy sworn to its destruction.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Dayan and Eshkol were against taking the Golan Heights from the Syrians. Syrian troops, they both insisted, had thus far made no effort to cross the northern border, and both feared that extending the war to the north would provide the Soviets with an excuse to intervene. But others disagreed. On June 8, David Elazar (commander of Israel’s northern front) went to Eshkol to try to convince him to take the Golan.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“They often unfavorably compared Holocaust victims to the new, powerful Jews of the Yishuv who dislodged the British and fought off the Arabs with strength and military might. Tellingly, “[t]hose killed in the Holocaust were said to have ‘perished,’ while Jews who died fighting in Palestine had ‘fallen.’”27 Tommy”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Zionism was centered around the Jewish future and the subject of a Jewish national home—but precisely how those needs ought to be met would remain the subject of often messy and acrimonious disagreement. As much as it was a movement, Zionism was actually a complex and often feisty conversation.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“To be sure, for religious Jews, the Bible was God’s revealed word, filled with commandments about how they were to live their lives. For secular Jews, the Bible was one of the greatest works of literature of all time. For all, though, the Bible was the book that told the story of their people: what they had loved, where they had lived, how they had succeeded, and when they had failed. It was the story of their family. And central to the story of that family was the Land of Israel, the land to which Theodor Herzl was now urging them to return.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“several months had elapsed and it would”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Застосування військової сили - це завжди складний моральний вибір, особливо коли терористи умисно розташовують свою інфраструктуру серед житлових кварталів і прикриваються мирним населенням.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“In 164 BCE, a small band of Jews known as the Maccabees initiated a successful revolt against the Greeks. The Maccabees managed to create the first autonomous Jewish state in the Land of Israel in more than four hundred years, and Jews would forever celebrate that success through the holiday of Hanukkah.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“In Yavetz’s story, the Diaspora Jew refuses to join the pioneer men, women, and children sitting on the ground and taking pleasure in the view since it would mean getting his trousers wet. Unlike the “Tourist,” the “Resident” is earthy and active; he is dressed simply in Arabic style clothing, holds a weapon for self-defense (instead of a parasol), and rides a white horse. He embodies health, confidence, and a passion for life. He is Bialik’s new Jew who would not hide behind a cask during a pogrom, a new Jew who is determined to break with his victimlike past, the new Jew intent on taking control of his destiny. Now, thanks to Yavetz, that literary discussion of the new Jew had moved from Europe to Palestine, from exile to the budding Yishuv.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn