Yitzhak Shamir Quotes
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.
Shamir, Yitzhak. "Address by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir at the Madrid Peace Conference." Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 31 Oct. 1991.
This is the first statement of a Jewish nation since Biblical Times.
He also expressed his pleasure with the British Balfour Declaration granting the Jews their own country in part of Palestine ({594001}). Wilson had earlier committed himself to support the Zionist claim for Palestine. See {585124}.
Wilson did so later: {585123}. Wilson was not the only early American President who had “Zionist” aspirations for Palestine. See John Adams quotation: {585141}.
There was a strong movement among the early religious Christian Americans to go to the Holy Land to reclaim the Kingdom God promised in the Bible. American missionaries went to the Middle East. See {585147} for another early American politicians view.
Churchill was an enthusiast for the creation of a Jewish State. See {597652}.
The recommendation for partition was the basis of the decision of the United Nations in 1949 to partition Palestine.
of the Jewish refugees from the German concentration camps
at the First World Zionist Congress, 1897
Prior to 1948 and the establishment of the state of Israel, there were large number of Jewish refugees who were stateless and, regardless of whatever moral rights they may have had, there was no politi.cal mechanism to enforce or claim these rights. For example, in 1956 Nassar expelled most of the Egyptian Jewish population. It was only the existence of Israel that gave these people the right to come to Israel and not depend on the good will of the world to help them as refugees. The difficulty for most refugees is that there is no state to demand, support, and enforce their rights.
This quotation is very surprising for most people. Reading the text alone, most of us would assume that it came from someone when the Zionist movement was fighting for a Jewish homeland in what is now Israel. Or just before the UN decision in 1947 to partition Palestine. However, it came from one of our founding fathers in Colonial times. Adams was by no means the only Founding Father with this point of view. Fundamentalist Protestants have put much credence in God’s granting the area for the Jewish People—then as today.
Yitzhak Shamir was an Israeli politician and the seventh Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms, 1983–84 and 1986–1992. Before the establishment of the state of Israel, Shamir was a leader of the Zionist militant group Lehi. After the establishment of the Israeli state he served in the Mossad between 1955 and 1965 and as a Knesset Member. He served as the 6th Speaker of the Knesset and as Foreign Affairs Minister. Shamir was the country's third-longest-serving prime minister after David Ben-Gurion and Benjamin Netanyahu.
