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

“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