Chaim Weizman Quotes

Israel's first President

5 Quotes by Chaim Weizman

1. All of you will remember the East Indian Charter Company. But charter companies were hard to fashion in 1918, the first quarter of the twentieth century. The Wilsonian conception of the world certainly would not have allowed a charter company. Therefore, we had to create a substitute. This substitute was the Jewish Agency which had the function of a charter company, which had the function of a body which would conduct the colonization, immigration, improvement of the land, and do all the work which a government usually does, without really being a government.

2. Palestine cannot absorb the Jews of Europe. We want only the best of Jewish youth to come to us. We want only the educated to enter Palestine for the purpose of increasing its culture. The other Jews will have to stay where they are and face whatever fate awaits them. These millions of Jews are dust on the wheels of history and they may have to be blown away. We don’t want them pouring into Palestine. We don’t want Tel Aviv to become another low-grade ghetto.

3. It [democracy in Palestine] does not take into consideration the superiority of the Jews over the Arabs, meaning the fundamental qualitative difference between Jews and Arabs.

4. Each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn’t want disorders

5. [the indigenous population was akin to] the rocks of Judea, as obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.