Moshe Dayan posthumously speaks out on the Golan Heights

"Moshe Dayan, the celebrated commander who, as Defense Minister in 1967, gave the order to conquer the Golan said: `many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel, and the kibbutz residents who pressed the Government to take the Golan Heights did so less for security than for the farmland. They didn't even try to hide their greed for the land. We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot...

...And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was... The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us'."  "The New York Times"  May 11, 1997.

"The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan; one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today. But the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them."  David Ben Gurion, quoted in Noam Chomsky's "The Fateful Triangle"

Did the Egyptians actually start the 1967 war, as Israel originally claimed?

"The former Commander of the Air Force, General Ezer Weitzman, regarded as a hawk, stated that there was `no threat of destruction' but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was nevertheless justified so that Israel could 'exist according the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies'... Menahem Begin had the following remarks to make: `In June 1967, we again had a choice; The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him'."  Noam Chomsky  "The Fateful Triangle"

World opinion on the legality of Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza

"Under the UN Charter there can lawfully be no territorial gains from war, even by a state acting in self-defense. The response of other states to Israel's occupation shows a virtually unanimous opinion that even if Israel's action was defensive, its retention of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was not... The General Assembly characterized Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as a denial of self determination and hence a 'serious and increasing threat to international peace and security'."  John Quigley  "Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice"

Jewish settlements in territories occupied in 196

"The Geneva Convention requires an occupying power to change the existing order as little as possible during its tenure. One aspect of this obligation is that it must leave the territory to the people it finds there. It may not bring its own people to populate the territory. This prohibition is found in the convention's Article 49, which states, 'The occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies'."  John Quigley  "Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice"

But wasn't the occupation of Arab lands necessary to protect Israel's security?

"Senator J.William Fulbright proposed in 1970 that America should guarantee Israel's security in a formal treaty, protecting her with armed forces if necessary. In return, Israel would retire to the borders of 1967. The UN Security Council would guarantee this arrangement, and thereby bring the Soviet Union (then a supplier of arms and political aid to the Arabs), into compliance. As Israeli troops were withdrawn from the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank they would be replaced by a UN peacekeeping force. Israel would agree to accept a certain number of Palestinians and the rest would be settled in a Palestinian state outside Israel...

...The plan drew favorable editorial support in the United States. The proposal, however, was flatly rejected by Israel. `The whole affair disgusted Fulbright', writes his biographer Randall Woods. `The Israelis were not even willing to act in their own self-interest'."  Allan Brownfield in "Issues of the American Council for Judaism"

Playing Yiddish music on a French piano in the Algerian desert

Anyone can see that Mr Sharon has a very lousy and mediocre long term policy for Israel. With his arrogance and greed, he must be aware that when the day comes for him to leave the Occupied Territories, and this day will eventually come, he'll be unable to carry the land, the roads and the settlements in his suitcase... Surely he knows that France occupied Algeria for more than 130 years (1830-1962), but when the time came to say "Au revoir", no farm, no house, not even a piano was taken back... Today the Algerians have re-tuned all the pianos and are playing their own music.