A Liberal Jew's View of Israel

Avraham Burg, former Knesset president, does not have kind words to say about the actions of his country over the past several years. Some quotes:

"so many of my fellow countrymen are in love with war -- as the solution for everything"

Avigdor "Lieberman doesn't talk about the West Bank and the borders of 1967. He brings us back to 1948, when tens of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes. Now Lieberman wants the remaining Israeli-Arabs to leave the Jewish state."

"The Israeli society has been kidnapped by the settler movement, which follows a one-state solution of the biblical Eretz Israel. Likewise, the Palestinians were kidnapped by Hamas, which follows the Greater Palestine vision on the basis of the Islamic sharia law. And in both societies there is kind of a Stockholm syndrome: We have affection for our abusers."

"Oslo itself was a great event. For the first time, the two sides met on the basis of a vision of a two-state solution. The mistake behind the creation of the Palestinian entity was that it was more a real estate arrangement and not the beginning of a reconciliation between two enemies. And between the time of Oslo in 1994 and Camp David in 2000, Israel doubled the presence of the settlements in the occupied territories. For the Palestinians, that's the icon of occupation. At the same time, the Palestinians did not put an end to incitement and the culture of hatred in the mosques and schools -- so the collision was inevitable."

"if everything is compared to the Holocaust, then you would also have to reject the alternative offered by US President Barack Obama for a diplomatic process and take immediate harsh measures to prevent the next Holocaust. Moreover, when you use the Holocaust as a total example to compare everything against, by the end of the day you annihilate so many things. You say to yourself, Gaza? Well, it was not nice, but it wasn't the gas chambers, either. This is the logic: Because nothing is the Holocaust, everything is permitted."

"You ask what the actual difference is between the Nazi's, who screamed "Juden raus" (Jews get out), and Israelis who are yelling "Arabs get out."