Moshe Sharett Quotations

Fear is the main factor in Arab politics... There is no Arab who is not harmed by Jews' entry into Palestine.

So we need people who will remain steadfast in any hardship and who have a high degree of resistance.

What is our vision on this earth - war to the end of all generations and life by the sword?

I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism.

We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture.

I am against intervention by a foreign power against us.

Once the return tide starts, it will be impossible to stem it, and it will prove our undoing.

Even of if a certain backlash is unavoidable, we must make the most of the momentous chance with which history has presented us so swiftly and so unexpectedly.

A reprisal of this magnitude... has never been carried out before. I paced back and forth in my room perplexed and completely depressed, feeling helpless.

An there is always the question: is it really proven that retaliatory actions solve the security problem?.

When the Jewish state is established - it is very possible that the result will be transfer of Arabs.

I explained that we would like to adjust our position on the Syrian question to theirs, as, in our view, they are the decisive factor in our relations with our neighbors, and Syria is unimportant.

Israel would not do that, both because we cannot afford to be accused by the world of aggression and because we cannot, for security and social reasons, absorb in our midst a substantial Arab population.

As for now, we must not forget who would have to exchange the land? those villages which live more than others on irrigation, on orange and fruit plantations, in houses built near water wells and pumping stations, on livestock and property and easy access to markets.

As for the future, we are equally determined to explore all possibilities of getting rid, once and for all, of the huge Arab minority which originally threatened us.

As for the long-term future: I am prepared to see in this a vision, not a mystical way but in a realistic way, of a population exchange on a much more important scale and including larger territories.

Curious people who have become accustomed to think that one cannot sustain the moral of the army without giving it the freedom to shed blood from time to time.

The state of Israel must, from time to time, prove clearly that it is strong, and able and willing to use force, in a devastating and highly effective way. If it does not prove this, it will be swallowed up, and perhaps wiped off the face of the earth.

I imagine that the intention is to get rid of them. The interests of security demand that we get rid of them.

I am against preventive war because it means measures by the UN against us.

Our role in Israel is a pioneering one, and we need people with certain strength of fiber.

We don't know what may yet happen to us, what military and political defeats we may yet have to face.

I saw clearly how those who saved the state so heroically and courageously in the War of Independence would be capable of bringing a catastrophe upon it if they are given the chance in normal times.

By the reduction of the Arabs on the one hand and Jewish immigration in the transition period on the other, we will ensure an absolute Hebrew majority in a parliamentary regime.

The opportunities which the present position open up for a lasting and radical solution of the most vexing problem of the Jewish state are so far-reaching as to take one's breath away.

We are very anxious to bring the Jews of Morocco over and we are doing all we can to achieve this. But we cannot count on the Jews of Morocco alone to build the country, because they have not been educated for this.

Arabs respect only the language of force.