The Iron Wall Quotes

“bombings stopped suddenly in April 2004 as a result of a strategic choice by its leadership and a subsequent secret deal with Israel.33”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“known as the Land of Israel.” Kimmerling regarded Sharon as the most brutal, deceitful, and unrestrained of all Israeli generals and politicians and as one of the most frightening leaders of the third millennium.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“In 1982, as minister of defense in Menachem Begin’s government, Sharon was the driving force behind the invasion of Lebanon, an act that left 17,825 dead and around 30,000 wounded and led to Israel’s eighteen-year occupation of southern Lebanon. The most infamous episode in Sharon’s war was the massacre committed by Christian militiamen in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, which were under Israeli control. At least 800 Palestinians were killed in horrific circumstances. The Kahan Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut stated in its report of February 1983 that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon bore personal responsibility “for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge” and “for not taking appropriate measures to avoid the bloodshed.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“killed and 1,885 were wounded. Within a very short time, the riots had become a full-scale uprising—the al-Aqsa intifada.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Sharon’s worldview was rigidly ethnocentric. From day one in office he called himself “the prime minister of the Jews.” He usually spoke about “Jews,” not about “Israelis.” Although he was a secular Jew, he was proud to be a son of the Jewish people and made frequent references to their history and legacy. He genuinely believed that the Jews were a chosen people with a unique culture, extraordinary talents, and superior moral standards. The other side of this belief consisted of a very low opinion of the Arabs in general and of the Palestinians in particular. For him the Palestinians were not a partner on the road to peace but a bitter and implacable enemy and, to use his own words, a “murderous and treacherous people.”2 His callousness and his indifference to their suffering were displayed on innumerable occasions.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“the incitement that led to the assassination of her husband. Leah was moved by the sincerity and warmth that Arafat exuded during his visit.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Rabin was not unduly troubled by the prospect of a Palestinian entity with most of the attributes of an independent state. But first he wanted the Palestinian leaders to prove that they could be relied upon to act responsibly, especially in dealing with Islamic terror. A gradualist approach was in tune with his temperament. The right-wing opposition parties, on the other hand, felt that their initial fears were now confirmed. The dream of the undivided Land of Israel was clearly dying. The Knesset ratified the Oslo II agreement by the narrowest of majorities: 61 votes for, 59 against.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“you are doing it to your own people.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Arafat Palestinian fighters, was to be imported to maintain internal security in Gaza and Jericho, with Israel retaining overall responsibility for external security and foreign affairs. At the same time, elsewhere in the West Bank, Israel undertook to transfer power to “authorized Palestinians” in five spheres: education, health, social welfare, direct taxation, and tourism. Within nine months the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were to hold elections for a Palestinian council that was to take office and assume responsibility for most government functions except defense and foreign affairs. Israel and the Palestinians agreed to commence, within two years, negotiations on the final status of the territories, and at the end of five years the permanent settlement was to come into force.18 In short, the Declaration of Principles promised to set in motion a process that held out the promise of ending Israeli rule over the two million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“The deportations boosted Rabin’s domestic popularity but did not stem the tide of violence. In March 1993 thirteen Israelis were murdered by knife-wielding fanatics. Most of these attacks were carried out by members of the military wing of Hamas, and some of them involved the use of firearms, especially against Israeli settlers and soldiers in the occupied territories. Rabin’s response was one of massive retaliation. On 30 March he ordered the closure of Israel’s pre-1967 border to workers from the occupied territories. Nearly 120,000 families were punished for the deeds of a handful of killers. The closure achieved its immediate aim of reducing the incidence of violence, but it also had a much deeper significance.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“surrounded by a sea of Arab hostility. Their answer to this sense of permanent threat was to build up Greater Israel as a citadel for the entire Jewish people. Rabin not only discarded this policy but directly challenged the thinking behind it. “No longer are we necessarily ‘a people that dwells alone,’ ” he declared in his historic address to the Knesset, “and no longer is it true that ‘the whole world is against us.’ We must overcome the sense of isolation that has held us in its thrall for almost half a century.” These words constituted a sharp departure from what the American-Jewish historian Salo Baron once called the lachrymose view of Jewish history. It was probably more than a coincidence that they were uttered by the first prime minister born not in the diaspora but in Israel.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“To this series of difficult questions, the Israeli electorate gave an uncharacteristically clear-cut reply. It returned Labor to power with a decisive mandate to put its program into action and relegated the Likud to the opposition. Labor increased its seats in the Knesset from 39 to 44, while Likud’s fell from 40 to 32. One has to go back to the 1977 election for a comparable landslide victory.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Sinai. This was the meaning of the principle of exchanging land for peace. The Israeli government’s argument was that by returning Sinai to Egypt, it”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“the $10 billion loan guarantee requested by Israel, he forced Shamir to the negotiating table. America had given Israel aid totaling $77 billion and was continuing to subsidize the Jewish state to the tune of $3 billion a year. Never in the annals of human history had so few people owed so much to so many. Bush himself felt he owed no debt either to Israel or to American Jewry. He had been vice-president for eight years in the most pro-Israeli administration in American history, yet he won only 5 percent of the Jewish vote in the 1988 presidential election. Bush was thus in a strong position domestically to present Shamir with a choice: keep the occupied territories or keep U.S. support.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“him with his only deterrence against a possible move by the Likud to realize its thesis that Jordan was Palestine. During the Gulf crisis Jordan assumed ever greater importance as a buffer and potential battleground between Iraq and Israel.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“theory of change in Arab-Jewish relations leading to reconciliation and peaceful coexistence, whereas Shamir was fixated on the iron wall as an instrument for preventing any change in Arab-Israeli relations.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“killed four residents of Jabaliya, the largest of the eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. It was falsely rumored that the driver deliberately caused the accident to avenge the stabbing to death of his brother in Gaza two days earlier. The two men were unrelated. Nevertheless, the rumor inflamed Palestinian passions and set off disturbances in the Jabaliya camp and in the rest of the Gaza Strip. From Gaza the disturbances spread to the West Bank. Within days the occupied territories were engulfed in a wave of spontaneous, uncoordinated, and popular street demonstrations and commercial strikes on an unprecedented scale. Equally”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, had become a compelling spokesman for a tough counterterrorist policy for the West. In 1986 Netanyahu published the proceedings of a conference held in Washington by Israel’s Jonathan Institute under the title Terrorism: How the West Can Win. By its scathing attacks on the PLO, Libya, and Syria, this book fostered the impression that Israel’s enemies were also America’s, that the Arabs who used violence against Israel were terrorists, that the countries that sponsored violence against Israel were terrorist states, and that brute force against them was not only legitimate but desirable. “If”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“up their attacks on Israel. He, for his part, asked for Israel’s help in strengthening the economic and institutional links between the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Jordanian government.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Far from relegating the Palestinian problem to the sidelines, the war in Lebanon, and especially the massacre in Sabra and Shatila, served to focus international attention on the need to find a solution to this problem. Far from reducing international pressure on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, the war triggered a shift in American policy from acceptance of autonomy for the Palestinians in accordance with the Camp David Accords to the Reagan plan, which called for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza to make way for a Palestinian homeland in association with Jordan. And far from adding a peace treaty with Lebanon to the one with Egypt, the invasion of Lebanon strained the relations with Egypt almost to the breaking point.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“On 14 September, three weeks after his election, Bashir Gemayel was assassinated in his party headquarters, most probably by agents of Syrian intelligence. The assassination knocked out the central prop from underneath Israel’s entire policy in Lebanon. With Gemayel’s violent removal from the scene, Sharon’s plan for a new political order in Lebanon—a plan predicated from the start on Bashir Gemayel personally—collapsed like a house of cards.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“large majority of his fellow parliamentarians.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“sacrifice.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“The destruction of the PLO would break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The resulting influx of Palestinians from Lebanon and the West Bank into Jordan would eventually sweep away the Hashemite monarchy and transform the East Bank into a Palestinian state. Sharon reasoned that Jordan’s conversion into a Palestinian state would end international pressures on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“The emptying of the autonomy concept of any political content, the building of new Jewish settlements in the most densely populated areas of the West Bank, the expropriation of Arab land and the displacement of its owners, and the strong-arm policy of military repression instituted by the IDF in the occupied territories combined to scotch any possibility of continuing the peace process. “Western Eretz Israel is entirely under our control,” proclaimed Begin at the graveside of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. “It will never again be divided. No part of its territory will be given over to alien rule, to foreign sovereignty.”8”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“The attack on the Iraqi reactor was greeted by a chorus of condemnation from many countries, including the United States. President Reagan suspended the delivery of aircraft to Israel and announced that he was considering additional sanctions. Begin responded with a personal letter to Reagan, replete with references to the Holocaust: “A million and a half children were poisoned by the Ziklon gas during the Holocaust. Now Israel’s children were about to be poisoned by radioactivity. For two years we have lived in the shadow of the danger awaiting Israel from the nuclear reactor in Iraq. This would have been a new Holocaust. It was prevented by the heroism of our pilots to whom we owe so much.”5”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“But before issuing any peace feelers to Egypt, Dayan arranged a secret meeting with King Hussein in London on 22 August. Dayan asked Hussein about his intentions regarding the Palestinians of the West Bank. Hussein was still bitter about the decision of the Rabat summit to recognize the PLO as the sole authorized representative of the Palestinians and to withdraw that role from him. He explained that he was now concentrating on administering his own kingdom and that he had no intention of taking any initiative in matters relating to the Palestinians. He felt a deep obligation to help them but was no longer their representative and would not try to force himself upon them.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Personal problems came on top of Rabin’s political problems. An Israeli newspaper revealed that he and his wife had kept a dollar account in Washington since his days as ambassador there. This was an offense against Israeli currency regulations. The account was formally owned by Rabin’s wife, Leah, but he felt responsible for it. On 7 April he announced his resignation. Three days later the Alignment’s central committee unanimously elected Peres to take over from Rabin as the head of the caretaker government and as party leader in the approaching general election. The election of 17 May 1977 resulted in the greatest upheaval in Israel’s political history. It put an end to nearly three decades of Labor domination and brought to power the right-wing Likud under the leadership of Menachem Begin. Labor’s”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“lobby mounted a public relations campaign in support of Israel. Seventy-six senators signed a letter to the president calling for “defensible borders” for Israel and large-scale economic and military assistance. Ford presented Rabin with two options: a return to the Geneva conference to work out an overall settlement for the Middle East or another attempt at an interim agreement between Israel and Egypt. Rabin preferred the latter but sought payment in American currency for the concessions he knew Israel would have to make to Egypt.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Mainstream political and military leaders shared this smug satisfaction with the status quo. Abba Eban continued to make speeches about the need to balance Israel’s historic rights with the rights of others, about the dangers of the status quo, and about the moral imperatives of continuing to work for peace, but his was a lone voice in the wilderness. As he himself recalled, “By 1973 the diplomatic deadlock, the failure of the Jarring mission, the strong support given by the Nixon-Kissinger administration to an attrition policy, all created a climate of exuberant self-confidence that began to border on fantasy. There was an obsession with the physical frontiers of the country without regard to its political or moral frontiers.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World