Balcony Over Jerusalem Quotes

“Around Tehran, I watched a regime prepare for war against its own people. Riot police stood on every corner. Snipers took up positions on rooftops. And the most feared unit of all, the paramilitary Basij militia, roamed with batons, knives and truncheons.”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond

“When I covered human rights abuses in Iran or Lebanon or Syria, I was a leading Australian journalist; when I reported what I had seen done by the Israeli Army, I was an unreliable reporter.”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond

“The only reason Israel is getting away with this is because it has one of the most formidable public-relations machines ever seen, and enormous support from its diaspora communities.”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond

“But in 2017, the Israeli Government dropped all artifice when the Knesset passed the Regularisation Bill. This law allows Israel to retroactively legalise Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It allows Israel to expropriate private Palestinian land and give it to Jewish settlements for their exclusive use. In effect, it makes ‘theft’ an official Israeli policy.”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond

“We arrived back in Australia on 10 January 2015. Shortly after our return, we were invited to a Bar Mitzvah in the northern Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay. The son of some friends of ours had come of age. Something occurred at the event that surprised me. Towards the end of the ceremony, the rabbi asked us all to pray for the Israeli Defence Forces. He drew on Deuteronomy 20:4: ‘For the Lord, your God, is the one who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.’ I was surprised both by the explicit message and the fact that it was being delivered in Australia. I’d heard many such exhortations in Israel, but hearing this in Sydney jarred. My reading of the prayer was that virtually anything the IDF do in battle is justified because, after all, God is not just with them, but fighting against the enemy to save them. I’d covered three Gaza wars and found it hard to believe that any god could justify the dropping of white phosphorus onto heavily populated areas. The fact that we were being asked in a relatively modern Jewish community in Sydney to pray for a foreign army confirmed how deeply the propaganda of ‘the most moral army in the world’ had seeped into Australia.”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond

“Akiva Eldar told me: ‘I think history will look at Netanyahu’s first term as the beginning of the end of the two-State solution. It started when he was taped saying he would destroy Oslo. The turning point was the incitement that led to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond

“Not realising he was being filmed, he boasted about how as Prime Minister he had sabotaged the 20-year peace process set in place by the Oslo Accords. ‘I know what America is,’ Netanyahu told the settlers. ‘America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get their way [in terms of a two-State solution]. They asked me before the [1996 Israeli] election if I’d honour [the Oslo Accords]. I said I would but … I’m going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the ’67 borders.”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond

“To check for explosives, soldiers walk around each car with a black machine – if it detects explosives it will vibrate. Supposedly. The problem is that everyone, including the soldiers using it, knows this is a fraud. The British man who sold these to Iraq was imprisoned for fraud – he had bought parts from China and made the wands in his back shed. But even though everyone knows that, people go along with the sham. What it means is that there is no protection at all against someone going through a checkpoint with a boot full of explosives.”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond

“Agret said he was shocked by what he found in Israel. ‘For me the best example is the one you see the first time and which you see every day – it is young Israeli soldiers, new migrants, “Boris and Galina” coming from, say, Russia and Ukraine, checking, body searching and taking the identity cards of Khaled and Ahmed who have been farming in Nablus for many generations. This is the basic proof, the daily evidence that there is something wrong. Why are Galina and Boris checking, pestering and humiliating Ahmed and Khaled whose fathers and grandfathers have been in this place for centuries? There is something wrong.”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond

“As Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, I’d had long conversations with Jewish leaders who’d argued strongly that Israel was a victim of unfair media reporting. I’d always found it strange that a country exercising military authority over 2.9 million Palestinians in occupied territory could be a victim. This would make Israel simultaneously an occupier and a victim. Nonetheless, Israel’s lobby groups had convinced the majority of the media to present that perspective, at least in the US and Australia.”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond

“I only learnt later that once you have ‘deputy’ in your title or are perceived as being on the rise within your media organisation you become a target for cultivation by the fiercely efficient pro-Israel lobby.”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond

“unauthorised outposts; Hurricane Wilma came as the US froze Israel’s financial aid in response to settlement construction and Bush hosted Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas at the White House; Hurricane Ivan came as the ‘Bush administration continued pressure on Israel’; Hurricane Rita was retribution for Bush’s hosting of Jordan’s King Abdullah at the White House. William Koenig even linked the September 11”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond

“Most Israelis are deeply convinced that international law applies to any country in the world except Israel because Israel is special. These are all things you get here from childhood.”
― John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and Beyond