Elliott Abrams Quotes

Since its very inception, Israel has been a threat.

Israel's open-ended control over millions of noncitizen Palestinians ... has strained the country's otherwise robust democracy. The festering conflict and the country's lack of defined, recognized borders have encouraged extreme nationalism and divided Israelis. Indeed, Israel's continued control over Palestinian affairs has strengthened chauvinistic, racist, and violent tendencies on the fringes of the Israeli right.

The Right said, "If we only annex the West Bank, we'll be safe and sound." The Left said, "If we only hand over the West Bank, we'll have peace". The Right said, "Our dead died because of the Left's delusions", while the Left said, "Our dead died because of the Right's fantasies." Rather than face a tragic reality imposed on us from without, we chose to create a simplistic narrative of Right against Left.

The core of the conflict is their (the Palestinians’) reluctance to recognize our right to exist as a nation state of the Jewish people...

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.

I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism. These are historical facts that cannot be altered.

When the Israeli leaders launched their expansionist war in June 1967 they never envisaged that 40 years later they would still be haunted by the consequences.

The issue of Palestine has been there since more than 60 years. But more important since 1967 when the war was, ended in the defeat of some Arab countries.

It is impossible to have a Jewish, democratic state and at the same time to control all of Eretz Israel. If we insist on fulfilling the dream in its entirety, we are liable to lose it all. Everything. That is where the extremist path takes us.

During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.

As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states - no more, no less.

We want to see Israel withdraw from our territory. But we don't want to be accountable vis-a-vis Israel on the security basis, because we don't see, in the absence of a peace agreement, that Lebanon can really be accountable to Israel if anything happens.

The Jew seeks space to continue living, while the Arab defends his space to the death.

We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion.... We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.

The representative of the Jewish Agency [for Palestine] told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world we were going to fight [against an independent Israel].

Every soldier in our army feels that Israel must be wiped off the map.

Our involvement in this war is treason to the interests of international socialism.

My great hope is bringing an end to the Zionist project in Palestine.

There is a basic failure to understand the Israeli condition in its complexity. On the one hand Israel is really intimidated [threatened with extinction] like no other industrial democracy, On the other hand, it is an occupying power. People on the left … usually concentrate on occupation and ignore intimidation. People on the right concentrate on intimidation and ignore occupation. The truth is we have to wrestle with both

Israel is beginning to look as the Biblical descriptions of the country describe it. That had not come about in all the years that the British had a mandate there or that the Arabs controlled the land.

As an Englishman, particularly as an Englishman standing upon foreign soil, I am, of course, prepared to argue that every war we have ever fought was a purely defensive war. But I am obliged to take cognizance of the quite simple historical fact that for about one thousand years, since the time indeed when Norwegians ravaged our coasts and a certain Scandinavian landed at Hastings in 1066, every war we have fought happens to have been fought in other people's countries. Now if defense means merely keeping burglars out of the house, what were we doing on all those occasions in other people's houses?

Growing numbers of American Jews, even a majority now, are dissatisfied with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and deeply worried about Israel’s ability to remain a jewish and democratic state if it continues ti effectively rule over Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

I love Israel, but I don't like it very much.

Israel is in the grip of a ghetto mentality. We have a powerful army. We have the atomic bomb. But the psychology of what comes out of Israel has the tone of the Warsaw Ghetto.

I support Israel to be a Democratic, Jewish and safe country.