Occupation Effects Quotes

When someone tries to take over a country or a culture, they destroy the art.

What kind of people will these ghettos of Palestinians produce? What form of morality, national consciousness and hope will people be left with after so many years of stifling occupation and a sense of hopelessness?

We must reduce as far as possible our establishment in Germany; for the residence of large numbers of representatives of a victor nation in a devastated conquered area is never a helpful factor, particularly when their living standards are as conspicuously different as are those of Americans in Germany.

You can look at the West Bank. Cities are like prisons. They can be closed quickly by the Israeli forces, and everything stops in these cities. This is the result of Oslo.

Some Libertarians argue that Western occupation fans the flames of radical Islam; I agree. But I don't agree that, absent Western occupation, that radical Islam 'goes quietly into that good night.'

In some of the Israeli media, but not all, they read about very nasty things done by Israeli settlers and soldiers to Palestinian Arabs. This is a pain in the neck for many Israelis. They say: Leave us alone, what can we do about it? Or they say: Look at Syria, look at Iraq, the West Bank is paradise by comparison. I was one of the first to say, shortly after the Six-Day War, that occupation is corrupting. It corrupts the occupier and, in a different way, it corrupts the occupied.

Most Iraqis, even if they hated Saddam and suffered, say life was much better under him than it was under the occupation and what's going on today.

A number of Iraqis told us they had welcomed the U.S. forces as liberators initially but in the intervening months, they had come to feel that they had swapped one oppressive regime for another. The Iraqis did exchange one oppression for a lighter kind, in some ways.

The truth about Hamas and Islamic Jihad is that they don't prevent Israel from existing or even flourishing, they prevent Palestine from coming into existence.

After a foreign invasion, there has to be a sort of feeling of musical inadequacy in the country.

I lived next to Russian soldiers. We had Russian army guys in our house when I grew up. We made lemonade for them; they were everywhere. I had a Russian school. I grew up with Russian traditions, I know Russian songs... it infiltrates me a lot. I even speak a little Russian.

The Americans invaded a country without understanding what eight years of a war with Iran had meant, how that traumatized Iraq. They didn't appreciate what they support for a decade of sanctions in Iraq had done to Iraq and the bitterness that it created and that it wiped out the middle class.

A year and a half after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere I went, I sensed the tracks of the wolf that had tried to devour the city. But Paris proved inedible, as it had been ever since its tribal beginnings on an island in the Seine, the Ile de la Cité.

In Iraq, until before the war, the women were scientists, museum directors, doctors. I'm not valourising Saddam Hussein or the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which was brutal and killed hundreds of thousands of people - it was the Soviet Union's Vietnam. I'm just saying that now, in these new wars, whole countries have slipped into mayhem - the women have just been pushed back into their burqas - and not by choice.