CLASSIC QUOTES ON ZIONISM
"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist." -- Golda Meir Statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.
"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." -- Golda Meir (quoted in Chapter 13 of The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace by Alfred Lilienthal )
"We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries,while denying it any employment in our own country .... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." -- Theodore Herzl (from Rafael Patai, Ed. The Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl, Vol I)
"... it is the duty of the [Israeli] leadership to explain to the public a number of truths. One truth is that there is no Zionism,no settlement, and no Jewish state without evacuating Arabs, and without expropriating lands and their fencing off." -- Yesha'ayahuBen-Porat, (Yedi'ot Aharonot 07/14/1972) responding to public controversy regarding the Israeli evictions of Palestinians in Rafah, Gaza, in 1972. (Cited in Nur Masalha's "A Land Without APeople" 1997, p.98)
Speaking about Zionism, and its effects on the indiginous Palestinians: (quotes from Alfred Lilienthal's The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace)
"We seem to have thought of everything -- except the Arabs" -- Judah Magnes
"If this be the Messiah, then I do not wish to see his coming" -- Ahad Ha'am speaking of Zionism.
"I have learned that the state of Israel cannot beruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism."-- Moshe Sharett, Israel's first Foreign Minister and later a Prime Minister(p.51 Simha Flapan, "The Birth of Israel", 1987).
"The very point of Labor's Zionist program is to have as much land as possible and as few Arabs as possible!" --Yitzhak Navon ("moderate" ex-Israeli president and a leading labor party politician.) Cited on p.179 of Nur Masalha's A Land without a People who cites Bernard Avishai's The Tragedy of Zionism 1985 p.340.