Jerusalem Conflict Quotes & Sayings

All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable. I felt this when sitting in the old Ottoman courtyards of Jerusalem, and I felt it even more when I saw the hideous 'Fort Condo' settlements that had been thrown up around the city in order to give the opposite impression. If the statelet was only based on a narrow strip of the Mediterranean littoral (god having apparently ordered Moses to lead the Jews to one of the very few parts of the region with absolutely no oil at all), that would be bad enough. But in addition, it involved roosting on top of an ever-growing population that did not welcome the newcomers. — Christopher Hitchens

Shalom is the medicine I'd prescribe for Jerusalem - a deep, God-breathed indwelling of peace and prosperity and blessing. An end to the unrest and a sense of wholeness is what the Holy City needs. It's what the Middle East needs. It's what I need. — Jared Brock

When my father was growing up inside the Old City of Jerusalem, he and his friends liked to trade desserts after diner. — Naomi Shibab Nye

I believe that people are holy because they're made in the image of God, and a place can be holy when God is present - but no place is so holy that it's worth shedding the blood of those who bear the image of God. — Jared Brock

I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the devising of ever-crueler punishments for deviance, all invoked as if this very fanaticism did not give its whole game away. — Christopher Hitchens

Gazing over the holy sites in Jerusalem, Obama wrote these words: From the promenade above Jerusalem, I looked down at the Old City, the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, and the Holy Sepulcher, considered the two thousand years of war and rumors of war that this small plot of land had come to represent, and pondered the possible futility of believing that this conflict might someday end in our lifetime, or that America, for all its power, might have any lasting say over the course of the world. I don't linger on such thoughts, though - they are the thoughts of an old man. A young man, too. — Mark Landler