Ô Jérusalem Quotes

“For the Arabs, and the above all for the 1.2 million Arabs of Palestine, the partitioning of the land in which they had been a majority for seven centuries seemed a monstrous injustice thrust upon them by white Western imperialism in expiation of a crime they had not committed. With few exceptions, the Jewish people had dwelt in relative security among the Arabs over the centuries. The golden age of the Diaspora had come in the Spain of the caliphs, and the Ottoman Turks had welcomed the Jews when the doors of much of Europe were closed to them. The ghastly chain of crimes perpetrated on the Jewish people culminating in the crematoriums of Germany had been inflicted on them by the Christian nations of Europe, not those of the Islamic East, and it was on those nations, not theirs, the Arabs maintained, that the burden of those sins should fall. Beyond that, seven hundred years of continuous occupation seemed to the Arabs a far more valid claim to the land than the Jews' historic ties, however deep.”
― Larry Collins, Ô Jérusalem

“Over two thousand people died in that vicious intramural bloodletting. While the Jews of Palestine were developing the young leaders and the social institutions that would be their greatest resource, Haj Amin Husseini methodically deprived the Arabs of theirs. Throttling progress and any drift to rational thought with his angry fanaticism, cowing with the guns of his ignorant villagers the educated elite, he reduced a generation of Arab leadership to fear and silence.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“The General Assembly of the United Nations," the broadcaster read, "by a vote of thirty-three in favor, thirteen against and ten abstentions, has voted to partition Palestine.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“Feeling themselves betrayed by the British and the French, their claim to Palestine thwarted by the Balfour Declaration, the Arabs lived a rude awakening in the aftermath of World War I. As was perhaps inevitable, the focal point of their fury became the Zionist return”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“In Arab eyes, the Balfour Declaration had been an act of pure imperialism, a mortgaging by Britain of the future of a land to which she had no rightful claim, without any effort to consult the wishes or the desires of the Arabs who had constituted ninety-two percent of Palestine's population when the declaration was issued.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“Urged by the Vatican, the Catholic nations of Latin America had made it clear to the Jews that the price of their votes for the plan to partition Palestine would be the internationalization of Jerusalem. Without them, the Jews had no hopes of mustering the ballots needed to pass partition. With a heavy heart, they had yielded, and Jerusalem's loss was the measure of the price they were willing to pay for a Jewish state.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“Arab-Jewish relations in the Old City had always been good. Most of the property in the quarter was Arab-owned, and one of its familiar sights was the Arab rent collector making his way from house to house, pausing in each for the rent and a ritual cup of coffee. Here the Islamic respect for men of religion had been naturally extended to the quarter's scholars in their yeshivas. As for the quarter's poor artisans and shopkeepers, the most natural of bonds, poverty, tied them to their Arab neighbors.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“Blessed art Thou, O Lord," murmured Weingarten, "Who had granted us life and sustenance and permitted us to reach this day.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“Ben-Gurion was talking about planning a war against five Arab armies and we were still being arrested by the British for carrying a pistol down the street.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“Bound together by common ties of language, history and religion, they offered a deceptive appearance of strength and solidarity. Two nations, Syria and Lebanon, were French-style republics. Three, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan, were quasi-feudal kingdoms evolved from desert tribal patterns. Two, Egypt and Iraq, had constitutional monarchies of British inspiration.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“Yitzhak Sadeh was the spiritual father of the Haganah and the founder of its elite striking force, the Palmach.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“was not until 1925, eight years after the Balfour Declaration, that Chaim Weizmann warned: "Palestine is not Rhodesia and 600,000 Arabs live there who . . . have exactly the same rights to their homes as we have to our National Home.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“Feeling themselves betrayed by the British and the French, their claim to Palestine thwarted by the Balfour Declaration, the Arabs lived a rude awakening in the aftermath of World War I. As was perhaps inevitable, the focal point of their fury became the Zionist return to a land the Arabs felt had been promised to them.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“A secret treaty known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, for the two men who signed it, Sir Mark Sykes for Britain and Jacques Georges-Picot for France, finally awarded to the French, without the Arabs' knowledge or consent, a "sphere of influence" in much of the area in which Britain had promised to support an independent Arab state.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“They gave it the seductive name Al Fatat—"Young Girl."* Its aim was the liberation of the Arab world from Turkey's Ottoman Empire. More important, it represented the first manifestation of a renascent Arab nationalism that disputed Jewish claims to Palestine for half a century.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“The ghastly chain of crimes perpetrated on the Jewish people culminating in the crematoriums of Germany had been inflicted on them by the Christian nations of Europe, not those of the Islamic East, and it was on those nations, not theirs, the Arabs maintained, that the burden of those sins should fall. Beyond that, seven hundred years of continuous occupation seemed to the Arabs a far more valid claim to the land than the Jews' historic ties, however deep.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“For the Arabs, and above all for the 1.2 million Arabs of Palestine, the partitioning of the land in which they had been a majority for seven centuries seemed a monstrous injustice thrust upon them by white Western imperialism in expiation of a crime they had not committed.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“It was Zionism. With the energy of his despair, Herzl produced its blueprint, a one-hundred-page pamphlet titled Der Judenstaat—"The Jewish State." "The Jews who will it," it began, "shall have a state of their own.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“In 1880, after the assassination of Alexander II, the mobs, aided by the Czar's soldiers, burned and butchered their way through one Jewish community after another, leaving a new word in their wake: pogrom.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“With the Crusades, spiritual apartheid became systematic slaughter. Shrieking their cry "Deus vult! God wills it!," the Crusaders fell on every hapless Jewish community on their route to Jerusalem.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“Dagobert, King of the Franks, drove them from Gaul; Spain's Visigoths seized their children as converts; the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius forbade Jewish worship.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“Burning in the ardor of their new faith to convert the pagan masses, the early fathers of the Christian Church strove to emphasize the differences between their religion and its theological predecessor by forcing upon the Jews a kind of spiritual apartheid. The Emperor Theodosius II gave those aspirations legal force in his code, condemning Judaism and, for the first time, legally branding the Jews a people apart.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“In their prayers, in their rites, at each salient moment in the passage of a lifetime, they had reminded themselves of their attachment to that Promised Land and the transient nature of their separation from its shores.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“Their excesses were largely responsible for the anti-Jewish sentiment which permeated the British forces in Palestine. Those excesses had produced other fruits, however. They had helped disgust the British public with Britain's role in Palestine, and thus played an important role in leading Clement Attlee to his decision to leave.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“Heirs to the philosophy of a Zionist zealot named Vladimir Jabotinsky, they clung to the dream of a Jewish state running from Acre to Amman, from Mount Hermon to the Suez Canal. For them, Churchill's decision to create the emirate of Transjordan with a stroke of his pen on a Sunday afternoon in Cairo had been a mutilation of the Balfour Declaration. They wanted it all, all the land that had once belonged to the Biblical kingdom of Israel, and they wanted it, if possible, without the encumbering presence of its Arab inhabitants.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“In Jerusalem, as elsewhere in Palestine, the Haganah's basic strategy reflected a philosophy propounded by David Ben-Gurion. What the Jews had, they must hold. No Jew was to leave his home, his farm, his kibbutz, his office without permission. Every outpost, every settlement, every village, no matter how isolated, was to be clung to as though it were Tel Aviv itself.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem

“our investigation led us to discover was that at the peak of the battle the Jewish soldiers owed their success less to their courage than to the sudden arrival of a most unusual ally: a swarm of bees, infuriated by the smell of gunpowder, descended on the helpless Arab legionnaires and forced them to abandon their dominating position above the monastery.”
― Larry Collins, O Jerusalem