Some interesting opinions of famous Israeli leaders

Moshe Dayan

“Along the Syria border there were no farms and no refugee camps — there was only the Syrian army... The kibbutzim saw the good agricultural land ... and they dreamed about it... 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.”

“I made a mistake in allowing the Israel conquest of the Golan Heights. As defense minister I should have stopped it because the Syrians were not threatening us at the time [fourth day of the war].”
On pre-1967 clashes with the Syrians, in a 1976 interview with Rami Tal, as quoted in The New York Times and Associated Press reports (11 May 1997)

“[I envision] a new State of Israel with broad frontiers, strong and solid, with the authority of the Israel Government extending from the Jordan to the Suez Canal.”
Statement made in April 1973 from the peaks of Massada

“During the last 100 years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road.”

Livia Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism:

israelforum.com

Ezer Weitzman
The former Commander of the Air Force, General Ezer Weizman, 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.” [...] There was never a danger of extermination. This hypothesis had never been considered in any serious meeting.
Ha'aretz, March 29, 1972

Menachem Begin
Menachem Begin, the first Likud Prime Minister of Israel, said:
“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.”

Israel's First Fifty Years, by Robert Freedman, page 80

Izchak Rabin

“ We did not think that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai on May 14 would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.”
Le Monde, 28 February 1968 as Rabin was Chief of General Staff

General Haim Bar-Lev, Rabin’s predecessor opined later:
“We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the Six Days War, and we had never thought of such a possibility.”         Ma’ariv 4 April 1972

Mordechai Bentov

“The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail and exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory.”

Israeli newspaper, Al Hamishmar, 14 April 1971,

Izhak Shamir

“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat… First and foremost, terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play… in our war against the occupier.”

Chomsky, Noam (1999). Fateful Triangle.
South End Press.

Ariel Sharon

“Everyone there should move, should run, should grab more hills, expand the territory. Everything that's grabbed, will be in our hands. Everything we don't grab will be in their hands.”

Voice of Israel, Jerusalem, in Hebrew, 16 Nov 1998.
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