Prime Minister Netanyahu told the members of the Bonds mission that in recent days much progress had been achieved in the understanding between Israel and the United States, both on FRD and Palestinian compliance. However, there were still some gaps between Israel and the Palestinians. The key point was still security. Excerpts:
Peace is something that concerns the very life and future security of the State of Israel, and therefore we are treating it with the due seriousness and diligence that anyone responsible for the fate of one's nation, of his nation, would do. We know that the crucial bastion of peace in our region is the ability to defend the peace, and hence our insistence on security. If we are to have peace, then Israel must have secure and defensible boundaries. These are things that we will never ever give up.
Secondly, we know that for there to be any meaning to peace agreements they must be, like all agreements, adhered to by both sides, and therefore we insist, we strongly insist, on Palestinian compliance. It is not enough that Israel fulfill its obligations, which it has. It is prepared to complete the remaining obligations. The gap there, in our discussions with the United States is small, even very small. But that is not enough. For peace to reign, there must be a similar compliance, an equal compliance, by the Palestinian Authority.
These are the things that we have been discussing with the United States, and in recent weeks - and most especially in recent days - we have made significant progress in our understandings with the United States. We have achieved important understandings both on Israeli redeployment and on Palestinian compliance. There are some areas that remain to be closed between the parties - between us and the Palestinians, and we are prepared to engage in this discussion immediately, without delay. We wish to do so and continue those negotiations without interruption - continuously - until they are completed.
This is what is at hand right now. Therefore the crucial question is whether the Palestinians themselves are eager to finish the negotiations or to maintain and sustain a climate of crisis without resolution. We therefore welcome the call of the United States for the resumption of bilateral talks. We feel that the only way to reach a satisfactory agreement is by negotiations between the parties which have to live with the consequences of the negotiations. I remind you that the talks were suspended by the Palestinians fifteen months ago using Har Homa as a pretext. If you are serious about peace, you don't suspend negotiations for more than a year because of a housing project.
We almost closed the gaps, as I said, with the United States on our obligations under the agreement. The only thing that is holding up the process now is the Palestinian refusal to comply with the commitments they have made repeatedly for five years - first under Oslo I five years ago, then under Oslo II three years ago, then in the Hebron agreements a little over one year ago. The Palestinians are obliged to revise their charter, to arrest known terrorist leaders, to disarm the terror groups, to transfer wanted murderers to Israel and coincidentally to the United States, and to stop poisonous incitement which calls for murder and Jihad. You should see the kind of incitement that is broadcast on the Palestinian Sesame Street under educational TV where young children - as young as three and four - get up and speak about shedding their blood and covering the ground, saturating it with the blood of martyrs. They all want to be martyrs or suicide bombers. That is not the way to educate the younger generation of Palestinians towards genuine peace. That has to stop. The incitement, the propaganda, the vitriolic anti-Semitism must stop. Palestinian television and radio and press, is controlled by the Palestinian Authority, unlike Israel.
They must reduce the Palestinian armed forces to the numbers prescribed by the Oslo agreement. That is not to build a veritable army which is contrary to the agreement, but to have a police force that is intended to do exactly that: to police against terrorism, for which they are not only equipped, but over-equipped. They have seven times the armed police compared to Israel per capita. It is the most policed regime in the world. They have more than what they need to fight the terrorists. They want more than they require in order to build an army that could be directed only against us. So they must comply with the size of the Palestinian police precisely as stipulated numerically by the Oslo Accords and they, of course, must stop the illicit activities in Jerusalem.
I think there is a renewed hope and room for optimism in the American call for the resumption of the negotiations and what we need now is a concrete plan for Palestinian compliance in stages which will be linked to Israeli withdrawal in stages. This is what we have before us.
I start with the business at hand, because it is important to see where we are and to see also where we are going. Where we are right now is in an attempt to complete the second stage; if you will, the Interim Agreement between us and the Palestinians. This should open the way for final peace settlement negotiations between us and the Palestinian Authority. I think we are prepared, as no other government is prepared, to engage in this negotiation. It will determine the most important things relative to Israel's present and future: it will determine our defenses; our final borders; and it will, of course, determine the unity of Jerusalem, because we will never ever re-divide Jerusalem - that you should know, and we stand by that completely.
Among the other jobs that we have is, of course, to try to reach peace with our northern neighbors, Syria and Lebanon. We have made some initiatives vis-á-vis our situation in Lebanon. We have stated that we are prepared to leave Lebanon almost instantly depending, of course, only on one thing: that the Lebanese take up the slack that we would leave behind, namely that the Lebanese army deploy in the south of the country to prevent its use by terrorists. That is a commitment that has not been made by any government in the last twenty years, and we have been in Lebanon for twenty years. We have rescinded the demand for first having a peace agreement with Lebanon, because our interest right now is to get out of Lebanon providing we have security for us and long-standing safety for our allies. If there is a will, there will be found a way, and that will be our first task: to complete the peace in our immediate circle.
I'm quite optimistic that that is possible, because I know that the people of Israel trust us. They trust us to negotiate in a firm way, in a tough way, on the matters that are important to Israel - the foundation of security which is the beginning and end of any peace agreement here. In our part of the world, peace without security doesn't last for a second. It simply doesn't hold, because if you can't defend the peace, the peace collapses. If somebody tells you, "We'll give you a peace treaty, we'll give you normalization, we'll give you commerce, we'll give you trade missions, but at the expense of your security," that's a deal no responsible leadership should make. The greatest normalization in this century occurred in the late thirties between Germany and France, but there was no security. There was no adherence to the call of having a strong Europe, a strong Britain, and peace collapsed.
The protection of peace in our part of the world depends on having a strong Israel; it is the key to achieving peace, it is the key to sustaining the peace. That is the gist of our peace policy. Peace with security. Peace from security. I think that we can achieve this. We will still have to face the more distant threats that are emanating from the armies of such regimes as Iraq and Iran, with ballistic missiles and their attempts to acquire non-conventional weapons, but I'm sure that, as we have faced the great challenges up to now, we can do so in the future as well.
The fact that you are here on the 50th anniversary of Israel is special. It is a special time to be here. It is a time for both reflection and introspection, but also for projection forward. If you look at what we have accomplished in the last fifty years, it is nothing short of miraculous. I have to tell you that fifty years ago it was not at all obvious that the Jewish people would survive. It's important to understand from a historical perspective that most peoples and most nations that existed in history, in fact, did not survive. Most of them are extinct.
There was one noted British historian, Arnold Toynbee, who said that, in fact, that is what has happened to the Jewish people. He said, "The Jewish people are a fossil". But fossils do not come back to life, and therefore this is an historical aberration. It might have been possible to think that Toynbee was right after the successive cascade of catastrophes that befell our people in the last two thousand years, and especially in the last five hundred years: from the expulsion of Spain to the mass pogroms and exiles in Europe and, of course, even to the most horrific experience of all of a displaced, homeless, stateless people - the destruction of European Jewry, the loss of one of every three Jews in the world. And after the Holocaust, it might have been possible to think that the Jewish people had succumbed, after four thousand years of unparalleled struggle under the sun, to the forces of history; to Toynbee's projection to becoming in fact, an extinct - an impressive, proud, but extinct - fossil.
In fact, the Jews of the West were rushing head-long into assimilation, loss of identity and intermarriage, and the Jews of the East were facing new and grim threats. Stalin, for example, intended to classify the Jews formally in the former Soviet Union as class enemies, and you know what that means. And there were, of course, other dangers to other imperiled Jewish communities. So it would have been possible to say, fifty years ago, that it was just a question of time before the end came. We know that that is not what happened.
The principle, the central, and the indispensable reason why that didn't happen is the founding of the State of Israel, and its subsequent successes. I can say confidently that if the State of Israel had existed ten years earlier, before 1940, then the Holocaust would not have happened. But the corollary to that is this: that if the State of Israel had not been founded after the Holocaust, the Jewish future would have been imperiled. In fact, there wouldn't have been a Jewish future - there would have been one process of continuous disintegration.
Here's what the Jewish people were able to do in the Jewish state. First, to revive their sovereignty in their ancient homeland, that is, to regain an apparatus to control their collective destiny. Secondly, to repel armies one hundred times their size and to build a defense force second to none. For the first time in thousands of years, the Jews created an instrument for self-defense to repel attacks against them. The great Zionist leaders from Herzl to Jabotinsky and to Ben-Gurion never said that the founding of the State of Israel would eliminate Jew-hatred. They simply said that it would eliminate the state were the Jews were absolutely powerless, as in Europe, to defend themselves against these attacks.
Humanity doesn't reach the end of days overnight - maybe it will one day. But as long as we live in this world, Jews cannot afford to be defenseless, and the founding of the State of Israel gave the Jewish people a home, a haven and the means to defend themselves. This was a miraculous change and we have founded an army with soldiers and commanders second to none in the world. We have built an economy that is now thriving, that is becoming rapidly, very rapidly, one of the most advanced technological economies in the world. We have more scientists per capita than any other country in the world, and that is the source of new wealth. Just think of who is the richest person in the world - maybe you don't know how much he's worth but you know that ten years ago, he had zero. The reason that wealth now propagates to individuals, companies, and nations is because of their ability to create conceptual products.