Lee Zeldin Quotes

The Swedish government needs to understand that relations in the Middle East are more complicated than a piece of furniture from IKEA that you assemble at home.

It's remarkable that the failures of the Obama, Clinton, Kerry foreign policy are not only uniting the Left and Right in Israel but might even be creating some common ground between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

I met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, visited our allies in the Arab Gulf, traveled to Tunisia and Iraq, met with President Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine, and visited our allies in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

Many critics of the Palestinians, especially those in Congress, think the current calm is merely the eye of the storm. That's why the House of Representatives approved a foreign aid package last week that forbade the direct financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority .

Everyone should unconditionally accept that Israel is an indispensable element of the Middle Eastern mosaic.

I do not support peace in the Middle East. And I do not support Arafat. He is a stupid, incompetent fool!

Israel's interest is all I care about.

My academic specialization is Arab-Israel relations.

We have a responsibility to ensure the Palestinian Authority is abiding by U.S. law with total transparency.

My constituents support Israel.

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Peace in the Middle East has been on the Obama administration's mind from the beginning. Two days after his inauguration, the president traveled to the State Department to announce the appointment of George Mitchell as his Middle East peace negotiator.

The sad reality is that there are no purely domestic issues in Israel. Issues that would be dealt with by municipalities in other countries - such as how to deal with a dangerous bridge or how to resolve conflicts between religious and secular bus riders - become major international issues when they occur in Israel.

I know that many in Europe are unhappy with their governments' policies toward the Palestinians.

On foreign policy, President Obama has kept our nation safe from terrorism and restored our standing in the world. When it comes to one of our closest allies - Israel - President Obama has been resolute.

I believe the government of the United States should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause.

Yes, Israel's our ally. But, are the Palestinians our enemy? No, they are not.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration.

I don't claim to know Israel. I don't speak Hebrew; my contacts are pretty limited. But I didn't know Vietnam; I didn't know Nicaragua, El Salvador or Honduras. It doesn't mean you can't reach your conclusions.

What Ottawa and Washington used to think about Turkey or Iran was not very important because we really didn't think much about either, but now what we think about them is extremely important - to ourselves and to many other peoples.

It is not possible to create peace in the Middle East by jeopardizing the peace of the world.

Public interest in most of the Middle East was slight at that time; the Arab-Israeli conflict was all that people were interested in and that was not my specialty.

Certainly he had none of a gentleman's instincts, strutting about peace conferences in Arab dress.

Be careful what you say. Words matter. Words really matter in foreign policy.

The United States cannot want peace more than the Palestinians and the Israelis.