37 Address by Prime Minister Netanyahu to the American Jewish Committee- Washington- 14 May 1998

Prime Minister Netanyahu: President Figueres, we take, of course, exceptional pride in the fact that Costa Rica is a country at peace. The abolition of the army is something that Bruce Reimer suggested that I call General Mordechai about from this dinner. But we have decided to wait a while. It is indeed a pleasure to see you, along with my colleague and friend who has been already in Israel recently, and we've had the opportunity to meet and talk as friends, as good friends, the President of Uruguay, President Sanguinetti. We are very honored to have him and these two outstanding leaders of outstanding countries.

I like small democracies. They are small in size but big in spirit, and it's a kindred spirit that we share with them and with so many other countries and nations whose ambassadors are represented here, including Ambassador Rolf Ekeus of Sweden, who has had a very important role in his recent service for the common security that we all seek against the radical regimes that threaten our peace at the close of this century.

I am very pleased to be here, to see all of you. I'm particularly pleased to be here on this evening with the AJC, with such friends as Robert Rifkin and new friends like Bruce Reimer and David Harris, who I think is an exceptional executive. You're very lucky. I hope you pay him well. It's important. Well, there's no such thing as a free dinner, you know that. Somebody has to pay.

I am especially happy to have friends here - the outgoing ambassador of Israel to the United States, Elie Ben-Elissar and his wife Nitza. Elie is going to what someone described as a hardship post in Paris. This is not true. But he's a fighter and a great, great Israeli patriot.

But my greatest pleasure is to be here with you tonight with my wife Sarah. She is my best critic, which means my fiercest critic. She is my partner. She is a partner in the deepest values that we share. We recently visited the death camps of Birkenau and Auschwitz, and it was particularly significant for us.

We have two small children. They are the grandsons of Sarah's father, who is the sole survivor of a family of close to one hundred people, all of whom were incinerated in those furnaces of death. And they are also the grandchildren of Sarah's mother, whose family has been in Jerusalem for countless generations, so numerous it's difficult to count.

There is a microcosm of the larger oscillation of Jewish destiny from dislocation to permanence, from travail to triumph, from powerlessness to power, and, probably more than anything else, from homelessness to home. It is encompassed in the single generation or three generations of a single family. It is our family, our common family, all of us together here.

It is about this that I would like to talk tonight. I'd like to pay tribute to two of the most extraordinary phenomena of our time: the rebirth of the State of Israel and Israel's relationship with the United States.

Fifty years ago, the Jewish state was reborn. Yes, I did call it a miracle. It's a miracle with no parallel in history. A nation that is dispersed in history does one of two things. It either assimilates among other nations or it conquers a new land for itself. The Jewish people are the only ones who forged an exception.

As a collective body, we refused to be assimilated, and we refused and did not seek to conquer a new land for ourselves. Instead we sought for 1900 years to go back to the place where our consciousness, our faith, our identity, our dreams and our aspirations were forged.

This is a nation in exile for 1900 years that kept an unshakable bond with its ancestral home, stubbornly clinging to the hope of bringing it back to life. For almost 2000 years, in all the corners of the world, Jews prayed every day, generation after generation, in the ghettos of Toledo in the 14th century, in the ghettos in Vilna in the 19th century, in the Warsaw ghetto in the 20th century. Jews prayed and said, "Next year in Jerusalem, in the rebuilt Jerusalem."

Throughout these years, Jerusalem never became the capital of another people. It remained the capital of the Jewish people, only of the Jewish people. Well, today we are back. Jerusalem is again both the physical and spiritual capital of the Jewish people. It will stay our undivided capital

Now, I am not, as you can ascertain, a religious man. But you don't have to be religious to view the realization of the Zionist dream as a fulfillment of prophecy. The founding of the State was an historic imperative, a triumph of historic justice, the dawn of a new era. We look back now, as we celebrated in an immensely moving celebration on the 50th anniversary of the Jewish state, a celebration so moving that it simply melted all clouds of cynicism. It put away the professional industry of sowing gloom.

Millions of Israeli citizens went into the countryside and celebrated. People were telling me, "I cannot celebrate, there are too many problems." They celebrated. They said, "We have so many obstacles." They celebrated. They said, "We're divided." They celebrated. You know why? Because it's an extraordinary celebration, because what we've achieved in 50 years staggers the imagination.

We've struggled against odds that no people and no nation has ever struggled against. We've overcome challenges that are so formidable that it is very hard to describe, let alone overcome. Yet we overcame them. We have achievements that perhaps even defy Herzl's dreams, all that he could dream and he could prognosticate and he could see, could see with the mind's eye of a prophet, both the travail and the triumph.

But I have to say that it was not an easy half-century. We were attacked from all sides before the State was even officially declared. By the way, most experts doubted that we would even survive. The truth has to be told that on the ground - not in moral support, that we received in abundance from good people around the world and good nations around the world, but in practical physical support - no one helped us. The West even imposed an arms embargo - it was even-handed, applied on both sides - an arms embargo that almost doomed us.

But we survived and we gathered millions to our land and we developed a thriving economy. I'm not sure you're aware of this, but Israel is rapidly transforming itself faster than any other economy in the world into the information economy. The people of the book may also be fast becoming the people of the disk. It's happening.

No other society is so equipped with those kinds of nimble minds that create the products of the mind as Israel. That is, in per capita terms, we have more - I'm going to use jargon; I hate it - more concept workers, more conceptual workers making conceptual products. That is the source of the new wealth, untold wealth.

So Israel is in danger, mind you, of becoming a place where Jews are actually going to make money; where the old joke - you know the old joke, "How do you make a small fortune in Israel? You invest a large fortune." - is being reversed. Israel is going to be one of the richest societies on earth, rich in wealth, but also rich in culture, in the sciences, in the arts, in technology and agriculture.

I think we have a tremendous reason, an endless array of reasons, to be proud. I am very, very proud, as I'm sure all of you are, in our achievement in the last 50 years.

Since the founding of the State, we had to prove again and again - we were forced to prove again and again - that we can defend ourselves against all enemies. It was this ability to defend ourselves, and only this ability, which convinced some of our neighbors that we are here to stay. That led - that understanding of our permanence is what led - the first Arab countries to sign the peace treaties with us.

Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with Israel, and we have established relations with other Arab countries and started a peace process with our Palestinian neighbors. It is not a process without its problems. But I believe we can overcome them, and I believe this is just the beginning. I think we are in an inexorable process in which the circle of peace around us will be completed. We will complete a final and durable peace agreement with the Palestinians and with our neighbors in the north, the Syrians and the Lebanese.

This may seem distant to you. It certainly seems difficult not only to you, but to me. But it is not an insurmountable obstacle by any means. It is moving forward precisely because the history of modern Israel, and especially the great victory of the Six Day War, has made the physical destruction of Israel by ground forces an impossibility.

Once the option of successful war has been eliminated, the option of peace comes to the fore. We can be in the forefront of the world economies if we have the kind of secure peace that every nation deserves. I think that Israel's success is not only the success of the State. It is a larger success of the Jewish people. And it is a success that has kept us away from a different kind of danger.

I think no one knows better than the people assembled in this room - and there are some remarkable friends that I have known over the years; successful businessmen, like Les Wexner and others - you know, all of you, that perhaps the greatest danger facing the Jewish people is the danger of assimilation and the loss of identity that afflicts many of the Diaspora communities.

Fifty years ago, at the end of the Holocaust, the number of Jews in the world was 12 million. Today, by a very, very small increment, it should have been double. It is still 12 million today. Diaspora communities are shrinking. What this means is one thing: it means that the survival of Israel is the survival of the Jewish people, not only because of the physical defenses that Israel provides - and there are always dangers when you enter the field of nations, but they are nothing compared to the dangers of being without the capacity of self-defense that nationhood provides, that's what the 20th century shows - but we know also that without Israel, Jewish life would be in danger of extinction. Israel provides the vital center, the pulsating heart, the cultural and spiritual and physical center, for ensuring Jewish continuity and Jewish life in the future. I'm not sure people understand that. We often say, correctly, that had there been an Israel, there would not have been a Holocaust. But we can also say that after the Holocaust, had the Jewish state not been created, the Jewish people would have been lost by the forces, these centrifugal forces of assimilation and loss of identity.

So the rise and rebirth of Israel ensures the rise and rebirth and continual life of the Jewish people as a whole. It provides a human bridge for the continual life of Jewish communities in the Diaspora to reaffirm their identity and draw strength and nourishment from this bond, just as we have drawn strength and nourishment from these Diaspora communities.

There has been one country, one special country, that has given us encouragement - moral, spiritual and material encouragement - over the years, and that is the United States. It has played a major role in Israel's history. The support for Zionism - well, support for Zionism in the United States - precedes Zionism.

Christian Zionism here in this country in the 19th century was one of the pivotal forces that launched the identification with Israel, the identification with the rebirth of Jewish independence. American scholars from Connecticut, from other parts of the United States, made unprecedented discoveries in the Holy Land; they came to the Holy Land and could envision, with tremendous imagination, and actually tremendous clarity, the coming of modern Zionism; they called for it, prepared public opinion for it, and, in fact, joined their British counterparts, the British Christian Zionists, in pushing for this great idea.

It is a continual support, and it is now stronger than ever. You may have seen a New York Times poll a few weeks ago. The New York Times, a "small" paper in the United States - you're familiar with it - decided to check the attitudes of the American people on the 50th anniversary of the Jewish state. It found that that support is at a high. In fact, it's a record high. It's never been higher in 20 years. It's grown by 10 percent in the last year. That surely must have caused them some surprise, at least. I was going to say pain, but I think that's stretching it.

But this is no surprise to me. It confirms what we all know. All you have to do is go out there. I know many of you cross that impenetrable barrier, this beltway around this city. And you go out there. You go to Des Moines and you go to Detroit and you go to Nashville and you go to Oregon, and you find this remarkable thing: the American people love Israel, the American people support Israel, the American people are friends of Israel.

It's a friendship that we will never let die. It will never die. It's too powerful. We, on our side, will never forget that the United States was there when we needed it. When Israel needed diplomatic support at the UN, the United States was there. When Israel needed arms, the United States was there. When Israel needed financial help, the United States was there.

By the way, I made a commitment in Congress two years ago to start reducing financial aid because, as I said, we're getting richer. Don't get carried away now. I said we'd start reducing it by the end of this term in office, by the year 2000. We have gone slightly ahead of schedule. We've begun that process now, this year.

The United States has been there with material help, not only with weapons but also with money, and at a time when we needed it. We always need it. When Israel needed help to free Soviet Jewry and Ethiopian Jewry, the U.S. was there. I have to say that no one in Israel, not a single citizen of Israel, ever forgets the crucial role played by the United States in difficult as well as in good times, and support for the United States is definitely a bipartisan effort over there.

However, it's not been a one-sided relationship. Israel, as you know, is the only democracy and the only reliable ally of the United States in the Middle East. I think it's done more than that. We have witnessed a cataclysmic change; well, actually, a positive change of untold importance in this half-century. The world's greatest empire - and a totalitarian one, at that - collapsed.

It is hard to say what would have happened to 20th century history had the Soviet Union been able to dominate the Middle East, had it turned the Middle East into a Soviet province, had it received control of the tremendous oil reserves and the sea lanes. I am telling you that the single most important factor in the Middle East itself that prevented Soviet domination of that area was Israel.

This is not a slogan. It is not a simple statement. It is the simple truth. Israel continues to play that role against other threats to our common civilization today, especially the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Israel is the bulwark of stability, the bastion of western values, the bastion of rational, reasonable, democratic government and democratic values in the Middle East. Without Israel, if you take out that linchpin, the whole structure could collapse.

I think that the United States and Israel have understood this relationship. When we look back at the last 50 years, we can see that the stronger the alliance, the stronger is American influence. In any case, we believe that the friendship between our two countries transcends common strategic objectives. They exist.

Now the quest for a durable and stable peace - that exists. But I think the bond goes much deeper. It's a partnership of values and of common ideals. I have to say that you, the leading representatives of the American Jewish community, have given this bond a unique component. You have turned it into "mishpacha". President Figueres, do you know how to translate "mishpacha" into Spanish?

President Figueres: Not yet.

Prime Minister Netanyahu: You can translate it into Spanish, into any language. But it has created this common bond, this feeling of special closeness. I think you have made this truly into a family relationship.

This unique partnership between Israel and the United States does not mean that we always agree. You may have noticed that on occasion we disagree. By the way, this isn't new. From the days of Ben-Gurion, just about every prime minister of Israel has had a disagreement with just about every American president. The exceptions are very few. Usually something is wrong if there was an exception; nothing was happening.

But these are the kinds of disagreements that a "mishpacha", a family, has around the dinner table. It can be lively. It can be raucous. But it's within a family, a family of democratic nations, a family of peoples committed to human dignity and human freedom and democracy. And it will always be that. Our bond is so powerful, our relationship is so enduring, that nothing can shake this partnership between Israel and the United States.

I think we should also recognize that as strong, as important, as powerful as this partnership is, we should also recognize its limits. In that same New York Times poll, when they asked the American people, who gave overwhelming support to Israel, "Would you support sending American soldiers to help Israel?" the number dropped to roughly 20 percent.

It's not because the American people don't like Israel. You know that's not true. It's understandable. We don't ask and we don't expect American soldiers or American mothers to send their boys to risk their lives for us. We never did and we never will. We can defend ourselves and we want to defend ourselves. We believe in a strong alliance, and the stronger the alliance between the U.S. and Israel, the more effectively we'll be able to prevent violence and war. But we have always felt that we, and only we, can and should defend our country.

I have to say that this is not merely a matter of principle. It's the only reasonable and sensible view. To expect others to risk their lives for us is to delude ourselves recklessly and irresponsibly. In fact, I would say that if we've learned anything from Jewish history, and anything from Jewish history in this century, we must draw this central lesson. No one will defend us if we do not defend ourselves. At the end of the day, in the breach, we will defend ourselves.

When our son, our eldest son, came back from first grade and he heard of the Holocaust for the first time, his only question was, "Why didn't they have an army to defend themselves?" There were plenty of armies around, fighting the Nazis, bombing chemical plants not far away. But they were otherwise engaged. Only we can defend ourselves.

If there is a central transformation in Jewish history that I described before, from powerlessness to power, it is the power to defend Jewish lives, Jewish rights, Jewish existence. That is precisely what the Jewish people lacked throughout the millennia of exile. It is precisely what we have recovered: the power of self-defense.

This is the essence of the Jewish rebirth. We will do everything within our power to achieve a secure and stable peace. But if peace breaks down, we will be the ones to stand there and risk our lives. So it is we, and we alone - not only because of the historic imperative that I've just described, but by common sense and common consent, it is we and we alone - who must decide on our security needs.

Every American administration, including the present one, has agreed that Israel alone must make decisions on Israel's security. Israeli generals decide Israel's security. This was even codified and agreed in a special message, a special letter from the U.S. Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, to me at the time that we concluded the Hebron accords, the last accord, the last part of the Oslo Accords on record.

This is the way it should be. This is the way it will always be. I would like to tell you today that all we have to do is make a few more concessions, and peace is around the corner. I wish it were that simple. We're prepared to make concessions, and I gather we probably will, but not those that endanger our security, because we know that a peace that cannot be defended will not last.

The only peace that can endure is a peace that is secure. There are regimes around us that possess or will soon possess thousands of missiles, which can reach every target in Israel. Yet the Gulf War has shown that missiles alone cannot conquer a country or force it to surrender. Only ground forces can.

But the combination of a massive missile attack and terrorist action on the ground can prove deadly. It can paralyze our mobilization centers, where we mobilize our reserve forces to defend the country. It can leave us vulnerable to invasion and destruction. This is the reason why we strongly oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state on our doorstep.

It is not because we want to run Palestinian lives. By the way, we don't. Palestinians now govern 98 percent of the Palestinians. This is not our issue. Let them run their lives. That's what we prefer. But we also want to be sure that they can't threaten our lives. A fully sovereign entity which identifies with Saddam Hussein, and which may ally itself with him or similar regimes, can pose a mortal danger to Israel.

A sovereign state which can raise a large army, can acquire heavy arms and non-conventional weapons, control our air space and water resources and form alliances with regimes sworn to destroy us, is not a prescription for peace. It's a prescription for the collapse of peace. It's a prescription for putting Israel in mortal, mortal danger. The Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves, to run their lives, but none of the powers to threaten our life.

I think that this is possible. We are told constantly that the true security for Israel is peace. That's a circular reason. It is true that peace will be a tremendous boon to us. But in the Middle East, that peace must be based on security. That is why we have put the quest for security up front, because we want to ensure that we have a real peace.

I think that it is within our reach. We have determined those areas - even though they are of our ancient homeland, where every stone, every rock is precious to us - we have determined which of those areas under the agreement we can disengage from. And we're prepared to do so.

We expect the Palestinians to live up to their side of the agreement, to live up to all those commitments they gave us in Oslo, in the Oslo Accords and at the time of the Hebron accords, when they promised to stop this incitement of propaganda for violence, which they've had now, including in the last few days, as a result of the tragic losses of life of Palestinians.

The Jewish people have regained control of their destiny; we have recovered the capacity of forging our future. We have done so because there is an innate and compelling life force within us. It has been expressed from one generation to another. It's transmitted from one year to another, from one Seder to another Seder, from one father to one son, from one mother to one daughter. It is an exceptional bond that has been touched by the hand of God. It is the bond between us that has endured and kept us for generations and that will endure forever.