Palestine Quotes

“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit”
― Edward Said

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”
― Edward W. Said

“I heard you in the other room asking your mother, 'Mama, am I a Palestinian?' When she answered 'Yes' a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its noise exploding, then - silence. Afterwards...I heard you crying. I could not move. There was something bigger than my awareness being born in the other room through your bewildered sobbing. It was as if a blessed scalpel was cutting up your chest and putting there the heart that belongs to you...I was unable to move to see what was happening in the other room. I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child...Do you believe that man grows? No, he is born suddenly - a word, a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood onto the ruggedness of the road.”
― Ghassan Kanafani

“There's a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word "occupation" is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty?”
― Bertrand Russell

“While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.
It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.”
― Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“كيف يمكن ألا يستطيع الإنسان أن يسير إلى ملكه الخاص؟ أن يزور قبر زوجته؟ أن يأكل ثمار أربعين جيلاً من كدح أسلافه من دون أن يعاقب بالموت رمياً بالرصاص؟ على نحو ما، لم يكن هذا السؤال الفجّ القاسي قد نفذ سابقاً إلي وعي اللاجئين الذين شوشتهم أبدية الانتظار، معلقين آمالهم على قرارات دولية نظرية”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“ليس وطني دائماً على حق. ولكنني لا استطيع ان امارس حقاً حقيقياً الا في وطني .”
― محمود درويش

“Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.”
― Refaat Alareer, Gaza Writes Back

“Palestinian and Israeli leaders finally recover the Road Map to Peace, only to discover that, while they were looking for it, the Lug Nuts of Mutual Interest came off the Front Left Wheel of Accommodation, causing the Sport Utility Vehicle of Progress to crash into the Ditch of Despair.”
― Dave Barry, Dave Barry's History of the Millennium

“One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption in hindsight of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. While the terrible thing is happening, while the land is still being stolen, and the natives still being killed, any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight. I tell stories for a living and there’s a thick thread of narrative by well-meaning white Westerners that exalts the native populations in so many parts of the world for standing up to the occupiers. Makes of their narrative a neat, reflexive arc in which it was always understood by the colonized and, this part implied, the descendants of the colonizer, that what happened was wrong.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Occupation, curfew, settlements, closed military zone, administrative detention, siege, preventive strike, terrorist infrastructure, transfer. Their WAR destroys language. Speaks genocide with the words of a quiet technician.

Occupation means that you cannot trust the OPEN SKY, or any open street near to the gates of snipers tower. It means that you cannot trust the future or have faith that the past will always be there.

Occupation means you live out your live under military rule, and the constant threat of death, a quick death from a snipers bullet or a rocket attack from an M16.

A crushing, suffocating death, a slow bleeding death in an ambulance stopped for hours at a checkpoint. A dark death, at a torture table in an Israeli prison: just a random arbitrary death.

A cold calculated death: from a curable disease. A thousand small deaths while you watch your family dying around you.

Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water.

And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and YOU refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.”
― Suheir Hammad

“How, then, does one become an activist?

The easy answer would be to say that we do not become activists; we simply forget that we are. We are all born with compassion, generosity, and love for others inside us. We are all moved by injustice and discrimination. We are all, inside, concerned human beings. We all want to give more than to receive. We all want to live in a world where solidarity and companionship are more important values than individualism and selfishness. We all want to share beautiful things; experience joy, laughter, love; and experiment, together.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“The first thing you notice, coming to Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest. The difference is so profound that you're left wondering when the mutation in Semitic blood occurred, as though God parted the Red Sea and said: "Okay, you rude ones, keep wandering toward the Promised Land. The rest of you can stay here and rot in the desert, saying 'welcome, most welcome' and drowning each other in tea until the end of time.”
― Tony Horwitz, Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

“Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. "Never let them know they hurt you" was their creed”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“The west need someone to tell the man who walks around with the biggest stick in the world, that that stick can`t bring down God`s house.”
― Saddam Hussein

“فلسطين بلادنا"، يرددها أطفالنا، ربما دون وعي لكنها، بل باندفاع عاطفي هو آفة الكبير قبل الصغير، ينقله الآباء للأبناء. ثم ماذا؟ ما هي فلسطين ومن نحن؟ عدا تلك الخرائط الصماء التي تزين أعناق الصبايا، والتي يتفنن الحرفيون في "سكِّها"
تارة من ذهب وأخرى من فضة، وحينا من معادن اقل غلاءً. مكتفين "بسحر الرمز" وألوان العلم الأربعة.”
― أنور حامد, يافا تعد قهوة الصباح

“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say "these horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day." To repeat the famous phrase about "who they came for first" and "who they'll come for next." But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted upon them, they would tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.
No, there is no terrible thing happening coming for you in some distant future. But know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity. Forget even the dead, if you must. But at least fight against the theft of your soul.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“يا موطناً في ثراه غاب سادته* لوكان يخجل من باعوك ما باعوا”
― إبراهيم طوقان, الأعمال الشعرية الكاملة: إبراهيم طوقان

“Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.”
― Edward W. Said

“In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.”
― George Clooney

“Man, not the tank, shall prevail.”
― Adania Shibli, Minor Detail

“لسنا شعب الخامس من شهر حزيران
نحن ككل شعوب الأرض
نملك أيام السنة الشمسية
والسنة القمرية
نعرف كل فصول الحب ونعرف كل فصول البغض
نعرف حزن الجَزْر
ونعرف عنف المد
لـسـنــا شعب الخـامـس من شهر حـزيـران
فليفهم مستر هولاكو
وليفهم مستر جنكيزخان
وليفهم كل قراصنة التاريخ
في الماضي، والحاضر، والمستقبل
وليفهم كل الأسياد وكل الأعوان :
أقوى من كل الجنرلات
وكل الدبابات
وكل النفاثات
وكل الغواصات
وكل الرادارات.. الخ..
أقـــوى مـنــهـا
كــف إنــســـان علـى مقبض منجـل
هـذا درس المــاضي والحـــاضر ..
فلنتعلــم .. للمستقـبـل !”
― سميح القاسم, الموت الكبير

“In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“استغرب كيف تتحول الأشياء الضعيفة، حتى الكلمات إلى أشياء شريرة، من دون رحمة، من أجل بلوغ السلطة على الرغم من المنطق والتاريخ.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“في محنة تاريخ دُفن حياً, سقط العام 1948 في فلسطين من الرزنامة إلى المنفى متوقفاً عن حساب العد السائر للأيام والشهور والسنوات, ليصبح بدلا من ذلك ضبابياً لا نهاية له! الشهور الاثنا عشر لتلك السنة أعادت ترتيب نفسها، والتفَّت كالدوامة بلا هدف في قلب فلسطين!”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“Whose non existence is necessary to the self conception of this place?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“كان مؤسس الدولة العبرية، دافيد بن غوريون، قد أعلن في اول كنيست شاركتُ في عضويتها -الكنيست الثانية في العام 1952 - عن دهشته من استمرار اللاجئين الفلسطينيين في اجتياز الحدود محاولين العودة إلى مدنهم وقراهم وبيوتهم وحقولهم، "مع أننا -قال - نطلق الرصاص عليهم ونقتلهم".
فوجدتني اقاطعه باللغة العبرية لأول مرة في حياتي في الكنيست.
أجبته ،مندهشاً أنا أيضاً : ألا تعرف معنى حب الوطن؟!”
― إميل حبيبي, سراج الغولة: النص/ الوصية