Damaging Quote Attributed to Israeli Commander Moshe Yaalon in 2002 False - He Never Said it - Newspapers Retract 5-7 Years Late
A Nov. 14, 2004, column about the death of Yasser Arafat included an unverified quotation attributed to former Israel Defence Forces chief of staff Moshe Yaalon.
Yaalon, now Israel’s strategic affairs minister, was quoted in that 2004 column as saying in 2002 that “the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
That quotation, while widely cited over the years, did not appear in the 2002 interview published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, to which it has been attributed. Alon Ofek-Arnon, a spokesman for Yaalon, told the Star in an email that Yaalon never said this. As well, in a correction about this same quote published March 6, 2009, by the Chicago Tribune, Ari Shavit, the writer of the 2002 Haaretz article, said Yaalon did not say that. The Star has been unable to reach Shavit.