I’m indebted to Jeremy Hammond (author of the excellent piece, “The Simplicity of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”) for the compilation of these quotes:

“I know how at least 80 percent of all of the incidents there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let’s speak about 80 percent. It would go like this: we would send a tractor to plowin the demilitarized area, and we would know ahead of time that the Syrians would start shooting.

If they did not start shooting, we would inform the tractor to progress farther, until the Syrians, in the end, would get nervous and would shoot. And then we would use guns, and later, even the air force, and that is how it went… We thought that we could change the lines of the cease-fire accords by military actions that were less than a war. That is, to seize some territory and hold it until the enemy despairs and gives it to us.”

— Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (Norman Finkelstein review of Oren)

“They didn’t even try to hide their greed for that land… We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was… The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.”

— Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (The New York Times, May 11, 1997; Yediot Aharanot, May 6, 1997)

“This policy continued well into the 1950s. Most of the 2,000 Arabs living in the zone had been forced out by 1956. Many moved to the sloping land below the Golan Heights. In response to the expulsion of Arabs from the zone, the otherwise helpless Syrian forces on the Heights began firing on Israelis, particularly when, each year, their tractors plowed further into the demilitarized zone. General von Horn was convinced the instances of firing would not have occurred without the specific Israeli provocations.”

— Sheldon L. Richman of the Cato Institute, The Golan Heights: A History of Israeli Agression

“Most of the border clashes before the 1967 war] were a result of our security policy of maximum settlement in the demilitarized area.”

— General Matityahu Peled (Cited in Richman, Sheldon L., ‘The Golan Heights: A History of Israeli Aggression’, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, November 1991, p. 23.)

“They repeatedly obstructed the operations of the UN observers, on one occasion even threatening to kill them. They refused to cooperate with the Mixed Armistice Commission, and when it suited them they simply rejected the rulings and requests of the observers. They expelled, or otherwise forced out, Arab inhabitants, and razed their villages to the ground. They transplanted trees as a stratagem to advance the frontier to their own advantage. They built roads against the advice of the UN. They carried out excavations on Arab land for their own drainage schemes.”

– David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch

“To solidify their gains after the 1967 war, according to UN figures, the Israelis destroyed during the period between June 11, 1967 and November 15, 1969 some 7,554 Palestinian Arab homes in the territories seized during that war; this figure excluded thirty-five villages in the occupied Golan Heights that were razed to the ground. In the two years between September 1969 and 1971 the figure was estimated to have reached 16,312 homes.”

— Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II

“The Egyptian buildup in Sinai lacked a clear offensive plan, and Nasser’s defensive instructions explicitly assumed an Israeli first strike.”

— Avraham Sela, Shalem Center

“In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

— Menachem Begin (Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, p. 100; New York Times, August 21, 1982)

“There was no danger of annihilation. Israeli headquarters never believed in this danger.”

— General Chaim Herzog, Commanding General and first Military Governor of Israeli Occupied West Bank (Ma’ariv, April 4, 1972)

“There was no threat of destruction against the state of Israel”

— Ezer Weizman (Ha’aretz, March 20, 1972)

“There was never a danger of extermination. This hypothesis had never been considered in any serious meeting.”

— General Ezer Weizman, Chief of Operations (Ma’ariv, April 4, 1972)

“We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the six-day war, and we had never thought of such possibility.”

— Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev (Ma’ariv, April 4, 1972)

“The Jews of the Diaspora would like, for reasons of their own, to see us as heroes, our backs to the wall. This desire of theirs, however, will not affect the reality of the situation.”

— Ezer Weizman (June 3, 1972)

“The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail, and exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory.”

— Mordechai Bentov, Israeli Minister of Housing (Al-Hamishmar, April 14, 1971)

“I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai would not have been sufficent to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it.”

— Yitzhaq Rabin (Le Monde, February 28, 1968)

“The Yom Kippur War was not fought by Egypt and Syria to threaten the existence of Israel. It was an all out use of their military force to achieve a limited political goal. What Sadat wanted by crossing the canal was to change the political reality and, thereby, to start a political [peace] process from a point more favorable to him than the one that existed.”

– Yitzhak Rabin (Israeli hostorian Professor Benny Morris, “A Personal Assessment of the Zionist Experience”, Tikkun, March-April 1998)