During the last 100 years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and a… - Moshe Dayan

It is not in our hands to prevent the murder of workers… and families… but it is in our hands to fix a high price for our blood, so high that the Arab community and the Arab military forces will not be willing to pay it.

Let's say "we don't have a solution, and you will continue living like dogs, and whoever wants will go, and we'll see how this procedure will work out." For now, it works out. Let's say the truth. We want peace. If there is no peace, we will maintain military rule and we will have four to five military compounds on the mountains, and they will sit ten years under the Israeli military regime. Whoever wants to go, will want. It's possible that in five years, there will be 200,000 fewer people, and that's an enormous thing.

The Israeli army is called a "defense force" but it is not a defensive army. . . . The Sinai campaign (1956), the reprisal acts and the raids across the border were purely offensive operations, and were of decisive value. . . . Not only the actions which were actually carried out but also the IDF's prevailing conception is offensive. . . . The most significant technical expression of the new approach . . . is the absence of fortifications and fencing along the country's borders. Although the Government's policy is, politically speaking, essentially defensive – those responsible for the armed forces have refrained from adopting defensive measures. Their response to Arab provocation has been counter-attacks, raids on enemy bases, transferring the war to the Arab countries . . . to put it simply: the IDF is a characteristically offensive army as regards theory, planning and execution, in body and spirit.