One Palestine, Complete Quotes

“The Jewish state in Palestine, Theodor Herzl wrote, would be Europe’s bulwark against Asia: “We can be the vanguard of culture against barbarianism.”15 Writer Max Nordau believed the Jews would not lose their European culture in Palestine and adopt Asia’s inferior culture, just as the British had not become Indians in America, Hottentots in Africa, or Papuans in Australia. “We will endeavor to do in the Near East what the English did in India,” he said at an early Zionist Congress. “It is our intention to come to Palestine as the representatives of culture and to take the moral borders of Europe to the Euphrates River.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“The Jews were slaves in the land of their Exile, and suddenly they found themselves with unlimited freedom, wild freedom that only exists in a land like Turkey. This sudden change has produced in their hearts an inclination toward repressive tyranny, as always happens when a slave rules.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“The backdrop on the stage was composed of four cloth screens—red, green, black, and white. Each screen bore a caption explaining the color’s significance. Red symbolized blood: “In the name of Arabia we will live and in the name of Arabia we will die,” the caption read. Green symbolized liberty: “Arabia will not be divided,” it said. The white screen was an homage to Prince Faisal, the leader of the Arab revolt, and the black one represented the Zionist migration.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“necessary to warn them: the rebellion was not just terror, he said; terror was a means to an end. Nor was it simply politics, Nashashibi against the mufti. The Arabs had launched a national war. They were battling the expropriation of their homeland. While their movement may have been primitive, Ben-Gurion said, it did not lack devotion, idealism, and self-sacrifice. This, he said, was what he had learned about the Arabs in the days of al-Qassam.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“Herbert Samuel believed the tensions between Jews and Arabs could be neutralized through the benefits of effective health and education systems. He tended to view the conflict in social and economic terms, which was an illusion. The conflict between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine was not principally economic but national.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“Harry Luke, Storrs’s assistant, blamed the Balfour Declaration for having created an impossible situation. The declaration led, inevitably, to partition—not a new thing, Luke commented, in the land of King Solomon.71 The British were supposed to bring culture to Palestine, but in contrast to France’s cultural imperialism, they did not seek to impose their values or their identity on the colonies. They tended to keep their distance from the population, at most displaying folkloristic wonderment at the native heritage and some interest in preserving it.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“Manly, chivalrous, imbued with a sense of moral mission, colonial officials were supposed to carry the principles of British administration overseas—proper, fair, apolitical management.68 But their image of themselves reflected a fiction: they were hardly neutral, and they did not come from the elite of British officialdom. The salaries of government officials in the colonies were lower than those of parallel rank in England, and consequently the colonies did not attract the most talented young people.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“Instructions regarding the candidates’ physical appearance almost created a kind of pedigree breed. The criteria referred not only to a man’s style of dress and his manner of speech but also to his physique, the color of his hair and eyes, the shape of his mouth, and the state of his fingernails. “Weakness of various kinds may lurk in a flabby lip or in averted eyes,” one of the service’s veteran members enjoined his colleagues, “just as single-mindedness and purpose are commonly reflected in a steady gaze and a firm set of mouth and jaw.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“The administration officials were supposed to be “English gentlemen”—demobilized officers or university graduates. If a man had gone to private school, was an active sportsman, and looked good, he could probably get a job in the colonial service.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“Before Samuel took over from the military government, the chief administrative officer asked that he sign one of the most quoted documents in Zionist history: “Received from Major General Sir Louis J. Bols, K.C.B.—One Palestine, complete.” Samuel signed.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“The mandatory system was designed to give colonialism a cleaner, more modern look. The Allied powers refrained from dividing up the conqueror’s spoils as in the past; rather they invited themselves to serve as “trustees” for backward peoples, with the ostensible purpose of preparing them for independence. This new form of colonialism was said to incorporate international law, as well as the principles of democracy and justice, and respect the wishes of the inhabitants of each country. Awarded by the League of Nations, mandates could, theoretically, be revoked by it.42 In reality though, the postwar system was merely a reworking of colonial rule.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“He had been dispossessing Arabs for twenty-five years, Kalvarisky said. It was not easy work, especially for a man like him, who did not see the Arabs as a flock of sheep but rather as human beings with hearts and souls.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“The more he could assist in the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, the quicker he would hasten the second coming of the Lord, he once said to one of his colleagues. He believed there was an unwritten compact between the British Empire and world Jewry, and he saw the establishment of the national home as part of a common effort to bring about world peace.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“There was probably nothing the military administration disliked more than local politics. Unlike Ronald Storrs, most of the British were not interested, did not understand, and did their best to avoid the whole tangle. They had come to fight, conquer, and rule, not to engage in politics, Stirling told a representative of the Zionist movement.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“photographed dressed as an Arab sheikh, in robe and headdress. The photograph is preserved among his papers, pasted next to another picture in which he is in the same pose but dressed in a tailored suit and expensive tie. One is labeled “East” and the other “West.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“In many of his poems he fantasized about Arab love legends in terms that are sensual and violent. He also wove many Arabic terms into his writing, learned from his Arabic teacher, Khalil al-Sakakini. In one letter he wrote: “I am a foreigner in the world of Aryan culture; my place is in the East and my paths lead to the sun.” He was attracted to a stereotype—the “Arab,”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“Consul Ballobar, who considered the bishop antisemitic, teased him for having attended and wrote in his diary that the mufti hadn’t managed to hide his true feelings about the whole thing—his face was as yellow as a rotten melon. In Ballobar’s opinion, the ceremony was an unnecessary and harmful political spectacle—he was not fond of Weizmann.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“The mufti and the Anglican bishop, together with the city’s rabbis, laid a foundation stone “in the name of Jerusalem”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“The ceremony in which they were laid demonstrated what the Zionist movement was best at: public relations.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“One must go somewhere, I suppose, it is abominable to keep still in nothingness,”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“While at the university, Eder lived in bachelor’s quarters together with his cousin, the well-known writer Israel Zangwill. A Zionist, Zangwill had hosted Theodor Herzl in London;”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“In the meantime, the Zionist movement’s men in London were spinning fantasies of a provisional administration headed by a Jewish president, whose authority would resemble that of a high commissioner in a British colony”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“Many years afterward, Lloyd George described the Balfour Declaration as a prize awarded by a generous and benevolent ruler to his court Jew.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“At that time there were 50,000 people living in Jaffa, among them some 10,000 Jews; about 2,000 Jews also lived in nearby Tel Aviv.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“As with national revolutions elsewhere, both peoples in Palestine tended to put nationalism above democracy and human rights.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“The British pretended, and perhaps some of them even believed, that the establishment of a national home for the Jews could be carried out without hurting the Arabs.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

“Across the city, people quoted a prophecy the Arabs used to tell to glorify the Ottoman Empire: the Turks would leave Palestine only when a prophet of God brought water of the Nile to Palestine. The British had laid pipes that supplied their army with water in the desert, and so Allenby was called "Allah an-nabi", a prophet of God.”
― Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate