Noa Tishby > Quotes

“The Palestinians must no longer define themselves by what they resist (the Ottomans, the British Mandate, the Zionists, etc.) but instead by what they want to create. And they need to get real with a very basic question: What is the Palestinian national ambition really about? Is it about having a state and living side by side with Israel? Or is it about wiping Israel off the map and creating a Sharia state?”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“After the 1948 war, there were approximately 700,000 displaced people. Now UNRWA has 5.6 MILLION ‘refugees’ registered in their books… (The refugee status is passed down through the generations.) ...UNRWA keeps the Palestinian people in an eternal loop of displacement. Instead of solving the problem in any meaningful way, they have overseen the problem’s exponential growth… The best way to keep the war with Israel alive is to maintain a perpetual ‘refugee problem’ under UN legitimacy, which maintains an international concept of ‘right of return,’ at the cost of so many hopeless generations.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“The BDS on campus operation is organized by, among others, a group in Chicago, Illinois, called American Muslims for Palestine, or AMP. For years, AMP, through its sponsorship of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), has been sending strategists, digital and communications experts, graphic designers, video editors, and legal advisors to colleges all over America and running flashy events in expensive hotels for the purpose of delegitimizing Israel, minimizing pro-Israel voices on campus, and harassing Jewish and pro-Israel students in order to deter them from supporting Israel. The embodiment of Cancel Culture. Managing such a sophisticated network of political operatives, extensive marketing, and (pre-COVID) ritzy gatherings at nice hotels is extremely expensive.11 So where is the money coming from? I”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“The conflict is not between the Palestinians and the Israelis. It’s between the Arab world and Israel.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“When a society turns on its Jews it is usually a sign of a wider ill-health. Hasn’t history shown us that racism never stays confined to mere ‘pockets.’ Once the virus is inside, it does not rest until it has infected the entire body.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“Israel wants peace.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“Zionism was created as a movement for Jewish liberation, it is about the Jewish people having self-determination and self-governance in their ancestral land in a Jewish, BUT NOT AN EXCLUSIVELY Jewish, state.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“it is probably best to shut up and listen.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“The kibbutz is not for everyone, but it was a genius Israeli invention created to solve one big problem: how to start a country.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“religion, peoplehood, tikkun olam, and nationhood.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“There is almost no difference between the establishment of Israel and Pakistan. They were both created as a safe haven for persecuted groups: Jews and Muslims. They are both engaged in land disputes. They both control religious sites of other religions. And they were even established only a few months apart.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“People tend to think that we use our words to describe our world. But the truth is that we actually use our words to create our world.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“shit can hit the fan at any moment,”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“recent years have shown us that antisemitism is not only still around but it also seems to have become acceptable again.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“Much like the Jewish tradition that answers a question with a question and encourages humans”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“Israel became a content powerhouse, often without anyone around the world knowing that their favorite TV show actually came from that controversial tiny sliver of land somewhere in the Middle East. A new industry was born. I don’t have enough space to credit each and every creator, writer, producer, network, and actor who’s been a part of this revolution, but I’ll mention just a few shows you may know and love. There are the shows adapted from Hebrew to English, such as the hit HBO show Euphoria; the reality TV music competition The Four: Battle for Stardom; and the comedy Beauty and the Baker. And the shows streaming in their original Hebrew, such as Shtisel, Srugim, Teheran, and”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“The bloody takeover of Gaza by Hamas happened only two short years after Israel withdrew… What israel go in exchange for unilateral disengagement was not a thriving Palestine in the making but an Islamist, radical, oppressive, and violent regime that promptly started launching rockets and mortar shells into towns and villages in the south of the country… The Gaza disengagement and the takeover by Hamas serves as the greatest deterrence of the Israeli public against any future land concessions.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“On November 21, 2017, the one-hundredth-year celebration of the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews a national home in their ancestral land, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in front of the Israeli parliament and lamented, “Sadly I must say that I have yet to meet a Palestinian Sadat who will declare out of his own will the end of the conflict, acknowledge Israel’s border, and support our rights to live peacefully and safely.” No matter what you think of Bibi, even his critics would agree that he’s not wrong about that.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“The Jews did not “take Palestine.” There was no Palestine for the taking. There was no state, no united governance, not much industry, or a healthcare system, or agriculture, economic or education systems. There was certainly no democracy, equality, safety, or prosperity for the people living there. The pioneers, my grandparents, turned much of the land from a place that was nearly uninhabitable into a flourishing community of agriculture and booming economic growth, a foundation for the state Israel is today.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel

“From 2015 to 2019, the United Nations General Assembly adopted more resolutions against Israel than against Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Russia combined.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“David Ben-Gurion understood that in order to overcome the numerical disadvantage of a tiny Jewish state surrounded by hostile Arab nations, the country must have a scientific and technological advantage.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“The entire world is experiencing some form or another of zealotry these days, and we cannot allow fanaticism, from any religion, nation, or political group, to infect any country ever again. We have a very well-documented past to learn from.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“we actually use our words to create our world. When”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“The truth is, there is absolutely nothing that can be said of Israel, that cannot be said of Pakistan.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“Palestinians and their supporters, including many of the American left, use the word NAKBA to describe a disaster that just HAPPENED to the Palestinians, like some natural disaster, a hurrican, or, dare I say, a premeditated holocaust. One that was inflicted upon a nation out of the blue and without any provocation. But that day (May 15, 1948), which was indeed disastrous for Arab Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, Egyptians, and their allies, was not an act of God. It was a military and political defeat that was the result of bad choices made by bad Arab leaders… the Nakba is a branded term, used to attribute victimhood and heroism to a loss in a war that was initiated by that same losing side. If the Arabs had agreed to the UN Partition Plan, no war would have happened, no Nakba would have happened, and maybe we would have been living in peace ever since.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“tensed towards that conversation,”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“The Arab refugee problem was caused by a war of aggression, launched by the ARab States against Israel in 1947 and 1948. Let there be no mistake. If there had been no war against Israel, with its consequent harvest of bloodshed, misery, panic and flight, there would be no problem of Arab refugees today. Once you determine the responsibility for that war, you have determined the responsibility for the refugee problem.’ -Abba Eban, 1958”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“on June 3, 1967, on the eve of the Six Day War, Israel sent a clandestine message to Jordan’s King Hussain offering to recognize the Green Line as the official border between the countries—so long as Jordan didn’t join the Arab countries’ war efforts.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“Activists from Baghdad to Berkeley to Brandeis are crying for sanctions and boycotts, effectively trying to stop Israel from helping the world and her neighbors advance in technology, healthcare, and agriculture, to stop Israelis from hiring Palestinians in Rawabi, and from helping traumatized Yazidi women.”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

“Gaza is indeed under siege. It is under siege by a terrorist Islamist organization...whose religious doctrine is the earthly manifestation of rape culture and the legalization of violence against women, infidels, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. The people of Gaza do live in an open-air prison… There are hundreds of do-gooders protesting against Israel, but where are the protests against Hamas, a group that is the real-life embodiment of exactly what they are protesting?”
― Noa Tishby, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth