Menaḥem Ussishkin: Difference between revisions

* The Hebrew nation will either exist on its land with its language, or degenerate without a land and without a language.

* [https://biblehub.com/topical/h/haman.htm Haman] of our time (Hitler) tried to destroy the Jewish people, to break its spirit and body. But he awakened great heroism among us, unparalleled in history... The Jews announce: We will not surrender! The Torah of Truth is our Torah, the culture of Truth is our culture. We will not give up our heritage. We will continue the fight until victory comes.

** In “[https://benyehuda.org/read/10854 The Yishuv and The War].”

* There is no fear for an Arab minority in the land when we become a majority in it - I wish the fate of the Arabs in their own lands were as good as their fate in the Jewish Land of Israel.

* In the building of our ancient land, we will redeem our people, who has given and continues to give their share to human culture.

** In “[https://benyehuda.org/read/10854 The Yishuv and The War].”

* We redeem our people physically, by giving them land under our feet, but we also redeem them spiritually, by reviving our language and culture.

*The Hebrew revival movement stands on two eternal foundations: faith and will. Faith that the time of our redemption has come, and the will to make all the sacrifices necessary for the work of redemption.

**In “[https://benyehuda.org/read/10807 Will and Faith]”

* Arabs fear the law prohibiting land purchases more than we fear this decree.

* The complete liberation of the nation will come only if it stands on its two feet on our land.

** In “[https://benyehuda.org/read/10783 Teenage, Land and Faith]”

* If Israel redeems the Land of Israel, then the Land of Israel will redeem the people of Israel.

* Many have claimed that our work here is expensive, that with the money spent in the Land of Israel, it would be possible to help all the unfortunate Jews in the world. But is there any value in everything that is done in the Diaspora? We must concentrate all our strength and means on building Israel, because here is our only refuge, from here we will not move.

* Our movement is the movement of redemption—and its time span is two thousand years, from the day our Temple was destroyed and the people were exiled from their land

* This is the ideology that has emerged recently regarding the ‘dispossession’ of Arabs from their land. Here, our enemies have created, with full knowledge that this is a false accusation, a claim that could strike us in the wider world. Even in our camp, good Zionists arose who, out of a hypertrophy of justice and fairness, began to doubt the righteousness of our actions toward the Arabs.

* What exactly is ‘dispossession’? If someone is sitting on their land, living their own life, with their material situation stable and secure, and one clear day they are expelled from their workplace and collapse, with no other source of income to support themselves – that is dispossession.

* One nation (Arabs) has everything, and not only here, but also in Syria, in Egypt, in Iraq, on the Arabian Peninsula and in the Arab states of North Africa. And on the other hand, there is a nation standing on a high spiritual and cultural level, which in all the countries of the world is struggling between life and death, and behold, it comes and argues that a place must also be found for it in its historic land, and for this, it is prepared to pay in blood, sweat, and labor, and for every patch of land acquired by it, on which a poor and isolated Bedouin previously sat, it pays with its best money compensation such as he never dared to dream of—is '''this''' to be called dispossession?"

* The Zionist aspiration includes not only the return to the Land of Israel, but also the return to the soil.

* But what? The Arab leaders want to take power into their own hands, not only in Syria and Iraq and Egypt and other countries, but also in the Land of Israel.... I ask: What nation is there in the world that has one hundred percent of its people concentrated in its national state? How many millions of Germans, French, Italians and even English are there in the world who are scattered throughout all countries, and why is it forbidden for a small part of the Arabs to live as a minority in a country neighboring them? There is no other answer to this than the old rule: for one nation – everything, and for the other – nothing.

* Even the Arabs, who are so insistent on their rights in the land, do not have an Arabic name for the Land of Israel. They use the name of the Philistines. Some have tried to call the Land of Israel by the name of southern Syria – but they do not have a special name in the Arabic language. And at the same time, they abuse us and do not want to acknowledge the Hebrew name of the land – Eretz Israel.