Mark Shields Quotes

It is clear a Palestinian state is needed.

The fact is that you literally, by definition, cannot have a Jewish state and a democratic state and have a whole bunch of Palestinians in it who are living under military rule while the rest of the country is living under civil rule, and they have different rights and different - it's just not a democracy.

We need to see a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu supports - and he truly does support - building a Palestinian state within Israel.

Palestinians caged up like animals.

He wants a two-state solution. He doesn’t know that the two-state solution is dead: dead and buried. And then he tells us we are occupying our own land [the Palestinian West Bank]. How can we occupy what is ours?”

I spent my whole childhood being told, 'Israel is surrounded by enemies who are trying to push it into the sea.' But can't Gaza feel the same way? Personally, I'm frozen in time.

In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce. The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just don’t want them.

It simply cannot be disputed that for decades the Palestinian leadership was more interested in there not being a Jewish state than in there being a Palestinian state.

However, there is no legal and legitimate state called Israel.

We do not build new Jewish communities in Samaria, Judea and Gaza. The United States has never accepted our building of communities or of the fence. Yet, I've managed to develop relations between Israel and the United States even though President Bush never supported settlements.

We don't have a state, neither in Gaza nor in the West Bank. Gaza is under siege and the West Bank is occupied. What we have in the Gaza Strip is not a state, but rather a regime of an elected government. A Palestinian state will not be created at this time except in the territories of 1967.

Many of the Europeans who want Israel to go away don't even know why they do. Nearly a third of those interviewed concede they have no idea what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about. It's enough to know that Israelis are Jews.

I believe that if Israel were to put an end to the settlements in the West Bank tomorrow, as it did in Gaza, there would still be reluctance on the part of the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish secular democracy.

Israel reoccupied the cities of the West Bank by a unilateral action, and reestablished the civil and military occupation by a unilateral action, and it is the one that determines whether or not a Palestinian citizen has the right to reside in any part of the Palestinian Territory.

We expect President Bush to implement his own vision of a two-state solution, the birth of the Palestinian State and the ending of the occupation that started in 1967.

It's not good for Israel to govern millions of Palestinians.

It is in Israel's interest not to govern the Palestinians but for the Palestinians to govern themselves in their own state.

We need to separate the two peoples: Israeli Arabs are part and parcel of Israel, and Palestinians should be separate, as part of a two-state solution.

I've often made critical comments about settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and in east Jerusalem, and my position hasn't changed. At the same time, it's equally important to me that the two sides, both Israel and the Palestinians, work towards a durable peace settlement: that's to say a viable two-state solution.

Palestine-Israel is such a ludicrous issue.

When I visited Jerusalem and the West Bank back in 2008, I was shocked by how individual Palestinians and whole Palestinian communities were treated by the Israeli government. From the illegal settlements to daily humiliations at checkpoints, the evidence of gross injustice and the human suffering it brings is indisputable.

It's not good for Israel to have a Palestinian state in the heart of Israel.

The Palestinian issue is a national, political issue. It's not to be seen as an economic issue that would be solved or addressed by some economic approach that makes the living standard of the people under occupation better. The Palestinian people are fed up with talks that have been going on for years. We are looking for peace, but we are not looking for a new peace process. This process will fail.

If you want to be a Jewish state and you want to remain a democracy, you have to have a two-state solution.