Izzeldin Abuelaish

“The thing is, you cannot ask people to coexist by having one side bow their heads and rely on a solution that is only good for the other side. What you can do is stop blaming each other and engage in dialogue with one person at a time. Everyone knows that violence begets violence and breeds more hatred. We need to find our way together. I feel I cannot rely on the various spokespersons who claim they act on my behalf. Invariably they have some agenda that doesn't work for me. Instead, I talk to my patients, to my neighbors and colleagues--Jews, Arabs--and I find out they feel as I do: we are more similar than we are different, and we are all fed up with the violence.”

“...you shouldn’t hate something you don’t know, because it may turn out to be the bearer of your greatest good fortune.”

“Tragedy cannot be the end of our lives. We cannot allow it to control and defeat us.”

“Traveling has become such a miserable experience that no Palestinian does it, except those who absolutely have to: students attending foreign universities, patients needing care unavailable in Gaza, businesspeople attempting to pretend that their world will eventually be normal.”

“No one has the luxury of deciding "when" to travel; you wait prepared to travel whenever the border is open, which could be today, tomorrow or next week or three, four months from now.”

“Anger and violence in Gaza and among Gazans is completely predictable. In a situation like ours, the absence of violence and anger would be abnormal. All of of us feel angry at least occasionally.”

“For any human being, freedom is essential, crucial, to our dignity and our ability to be fully human.”

“How come a Palestinian child does not live like an Israeli child? Why do Palestinian children have to toil at any manner of hard jobs just to be able to go to school? How is it that when we are sick. we can't get the medical help the Israeli kids take for granted?”

“was our suffering of any consequence to their consciences? Did they see us as victims> Or were we simply nameless, faceless humans who were in their way?”

“The Palestinian mother is the author of the survival story of the Palestinian people. She is the heroine, the one behind the success.”

“It is true that the sky was always beautiful but I don't remember marvelling at sunset or gazing at the dawn of a new day. Survival does not allow time for poetic reflection.”

“By the age of seven, as an eldest boy, I was expected to help the family with the money." !!!!!!!!!!”

“Your home, whatever it is, is where feel safe, or at least grounded. To be pushed out of t is to be marked with the scar of expulsion for the rest of your life.”

“Gaza 1948: "Gaza was not a refugee camp yet, just a place designated for Palestinian people when the state of Israel came begin. But day by day it filled up with people who had no place else to go to.”

“People should know that Palestinians don't live for themselves alone. They live for each other. What I do for myself and my children, I also do for all my family. We are a community.”