Christopher Hitchens on Israel and Zionism: "I think Zionism is a stupid idea to begin with, it's a bad idea, a Messianic idea, a superstitious idea. And it guaranteed a quarrel with the Arabs because it meant we're going to take away from you what is most precious, your land. It guaranteed an injustice to the Arabs which now anyone can see and is now entering its fourth generation of Palestinians brought up either in exile or dispossession or under occupation and humiliation, and now we know something has to be done to address what is part of the original sin." "I've been writing in favor of a Palestinian homeland all my life, and I'm now no less or more in favor of it than I was before. It's a matter of principle." "If Jews born in Brooklyn have a right to a state in Palestine, then Palestinians born in Jerusalem have a right to a state in Palestine. Anyone who doesn't agree with that principle is suspect." "Everybody knows that if you want to occupy people against their will, if you want to be the governor of another people who haven't chosen you, you will end up visiting terrible cruelty on them. There certainly cannot be a humane occupation." "I think the securely recognized borders should not allow for Israeli colonization or occupation of the territory of its neighbors, which is what it's doing now. The right to exist argument has been used now to the point where what it's going to mean is that the Israel you're talking about will include the annexed and illegally occupied West Bank." "When George Bush senior said to the Israelis: If you go on like this I will ask Congress to suspend your loan guarantees, I thought that was extremely impressive, and so did everyone else in the Middle East. It led to the nearest we've ever had to a proper peace conference that was in Madrid. Bill Clinton chose to run that year from the right against Bush, saying that he thought Bush was being soft on Cuba, and also from the right on Israel, saying if he was President the Israelis would not be subjected to this kind of pressure. So the last time that there was an impressive American policy it was a Republican administration, and it was undone by the hero of every liberal in this room."