Yasser Arafat: Quotes about peace

Yasser Arafat was former Palestinian President, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Explore interesting quotes on peace.

Yasser Arafat: 36 quotes10 likes

“We shall never stop until we can go back home and Israel is destroyed… The goal of our struggle is the end of Israel, and there can be no compromises or mediations… the goal of this violence is the elimination of Zionism from Palestine in all its political, economic and military aspects… We don’t want peace, we want victory. Peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else.”

Quoted in the Washington Post (29 March 1970)
1970s

“Did you follow what [General Yehoshafat] Harkabi wrote? Formerly of the Israeli military intelligence service. Remember him? Did you follow what he wrote? He said that it was for the sake of the existence of Israel that we have to accept the rights of the Palestinians to have their independent state. I’m a man of history. My vision is guiding me, my clear vision. It is not by chance that the currents of peace are increasing daily inside Israel. Many of the Israelis begin to understand and discover the realities and the facts. They can’t demolish five million Palestinians. They can’t annihilate them. We are not the Red Indians.”

In an interview published in "The New York Review of Books" (11 June 1987).
1980s and 1990s

“Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations… We shall not rest until the day when we return to our home, and until we destroy Israel.”

Quoted in The Times, UK (5 August 1980).
1980s and 1990s

“all our moves are based on four general principles: continued use of the rifle, no waiving of historical rights, no peace, and no negotiations… Whatever form of government is established in the territory when the shadow of occupation passes away, whenever I address my fighters and revolutionaries, I shall say: ‘Let our rifles be aimed at the beloved land, the land of the homeland, the land of Palestine.”

Statement from Wafa, Beirut (9 June 1974) as quoted in Journal of Palestine Studies (1974), p. 224.
1970s