Let's be clear -
Israel does not claim the duck analogy as a native Hebrew saying.
It's a phrase that Israel has consciously borrowed from the United States in order to use with English-speaking audiences.
The saying, sometimes referred to as "the duck test" :
was popularised in the US in the first years of the Cold War,
when it was used to describe suspected Communists...........
"I can't prove you are a Communist," :
Emil Mazey of the United Automobile Workers at a labour meeting in 1946. ::redcard::
"But when I see a bird that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, has feathers and webbed feet, and associates with ducks -
I'm certainly going to assume that he is a duck. "
Richard Cunningham Patterson Jr, US ambassador to Guatemala in 1950 :
"Suppose you see a bird walking around in a farmyard. This bird has no label that says 'duck'.
But the bird certainly looks like a duck,"
"Also, he goes to the pond and you notice that he swims like a duck.
Then he opens his beak and quacks like a duck.
Well, by this time you have probably reached the conclusion that the bird is a duck, whether he's wearing a label or not."
To some English speakers, this phrase now sounds firmly stuck in the 1940s and 50s.
But the saying has taken on a second life in Israel -
where it is routinely deployed in statements made to foreign reporters.
"Listen, let's not fool ourselves, OK?"
said Avraham Burg, the speaker of Israel's parliament during negotiations for a two-state solution in July 2000.
"If it walks like a duck, if it talks like a duck, if it sounds like a duck, it's a Palestinian state."
Ehud Barak :
"Yasser Arafat happens to behave like a terrorist, he looks like one, he walks like one, he quacks like one,
so maybe he is really a terrorist "