Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Quotes
Israel must be wiped off the map.
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud. "World Without Zionism." 26 Oct. 2005, Ministry of Interior, Tehran.
This clause has been the cause of immense problems in the Mid-East. Hamas castigates any Palestinian who even suggests that there should be negotiations with Israel that are sincere as nothing less than the end of Israel is consistent with their charter. Anyone who uses the peace process for anything else but tactical advantage and buying time to strike again is a traitor. Meanwhile, the clause is taken be Israel to demonstrate that there is no point to any negotiations so long as the Palestinian Authority allows such an organization with this charter clause to be legal and operate in the open. The Palestinian Authority leadership are not willing to risk a civil war, and thus little or no progress is made.
The Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the PLO were preparing a coordinated attack on Israel. After statements like this, the Israeli’s preempted the attack, routed the Egyptian Airforce and Army, and then defeated the other three. The Arab “War of Liberation” resulted in the Arabs losing more with Israel tripling it’s control of area. The quotation however cast a pall over attempts thereafter to create a Palestinian State as in effect the PLO had announced a policy of a Holocaust—the extermination of the Israelis. The dispute over land was not for the Jewish state a land negotiation amenable to compromise and give and take, but instead was an existential threat to Israel whereby any compromise might result in the death of the entire population. As the ultimate intention of the PLO had been revealed.
”Palestine” to the Arabs of the area meant the territory of the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself. They wanted to expel the Jews and or take over the whole area as a single state—Palestine—with an Arab majority. With the Israeli Defense Forces successes under Dayan, this notion of Palestine was “finished”. The notion of a Palestinian State which included the West Bank and Gaza but not Israel was then negotiated and these negotiations were ongoing for years. Minorities of Arabs and Israelis did not want to see a any Palestinian state that did not include Israel proper, and they blocked it whenever they could.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Persian: محمود احمدینژاد, romanized: Mahmūd Ahmadīnežād [mæhmuːd(-e) æhmædiːneʒɒːd] (listen)), born Mahmoud Sabbaghian, is an Iranian conservative politician who served as the sixth President of Iran from 2005 to 2013. He was also the main political leader of the Alliance of Builders of Islamic Iran, a coalition of conservative political groups in the country, and served as mayor of Tehran from 2003 to 2005.
