Yitzhak Shamir Quotes

The Jewish State Der Judenstaat

Zionism demands a publicly recognized and legally secured homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people. This platform is unchangeable.

When modern political Zionism emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, most Orthodox Jews opposed it.

Jewish sovereignty and governance over our ancestral home are, I believe, important goals that every Jew ought to support.

I take satisfaction ... in the progress of the Zionist movement.

If ever I have the occasion to help in the restoration of the Jewish people to Palestine, I shall surely do so.

Zionism

It would be unjust to deny the rights of the Jewish people to realize their aspirations to establish their own state.

In Basle I founded the Jewish State. If I said it today, it would be greeted with laughter; but in five years, perhaps, certainly in fifty years, everyone will see it. A State is founded essentially on the will of the people for a State.

Zionism aims to create for the Jewish people a publicly recognized and legally secured home in Palestine.

They [Zionists] have no thought of building up a Jewish state in Palestine, so that they might inhabit it, but they only want a central organization of their own international world … withdrawn from the seizure of others: a refuge for convicted rascals and a high school for future rogues.

I really wish the Jews again in Judea, an independent nation.

There should be a Zionist state around Jerusalem.

If the Jewish people want to have an independent state, they must always have the sword in one hand.

The Jewish people remember the dramatic vote in the U.N. Assembly on November 29, 1947, when representatives of the nations recognized our right to national revival in our historic homeland.

The U.N. did not create Israel. The Jewish state came into being because the tiny Jewish community in what was mandatory Palestine rebelled against foreign imperialist rule. We did not conquer a foreign land.

For those who share my view that the Jews as a people have a right to self-determination, Zionism as a national movement of the Jewish people is the embodiment of this very right, which its opponents want to deny.

The Zionist movement gave political expression to our claim to the land of Israel. And in 1922, the League of Nations recognized the justice of this claim.

Something happened to the State of Israel. What was morally obvious in 1948 is not so obvious anymore. When the State of Israel was established, it was, for the parents and grandparents of these young Jews, a miracle. It was David and Goliath. We were the just cause. It was about values. We were small, but we were the good guys in the world!

I don't accept the Zionist idea.

But we wish to give the Jews a Homeland. Not by dragging them ruthlessly out of their sustaining soil, but rather by removing them carefully, roots and all, to a better terrain.

You are either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist.

The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple.

I don't think that when Zionism began there was a claim that we were losing - even in part - our capacity to contribute to other peoples.

A challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people only if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive or that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of Israel in its current or traditional forms.