In an airport press conference, the Prime Minister noted the many achievements contained in the Memorandum just signed in Washington, mainly the reciprocal commitments of the Palestinians in return for territory. The Prime Minister felt that he was able to reduce the territorial expectations of the Palestinians, and ensure there would be a monitoring mechanism with heavy American involvement. In his meetings at Wye with settlers' representatives, he told them that his government had inherited a difficult situation which he sought to redress. Text of the opening statement follows:
Good evening. I have returned from Israel from a difficult task - to bring an agreement with security for Israel. We have obtained such an agreement; we obtained the best agreement that we could have achieved in the circumstances and in the conditions that we inherited.
Up until now, the Palestinians didn't fulfill their commitments, not with their words or with a timetable. We are going to the next stage. What will the Palestinians give? They will cancel the charter. They will cancel the paragraphs that deal with the destruction of the State of Israel, and they won't do it secretly, they won't do it in some other body. They will bring the Palestinian National Council and convene the entire leadership. They will do it publicly in front of the President of the United States. They won't do this secretly, in English, in some hall in Geneva and just tell somebody that they are planning on canceling it. They will say it in Arabic, so that every house and every family and every Palestinian family will hear it from their leaders that these various paragraphs that deal with the destruction of Israel will be canceled.
I want to stress that if they don't cancel these paragraphs, they won't receive more territory from Israel. This is part of the agreement.
What else will they give? They will fight against terrorism and the infrastructure; this is according to a work plan that has been agreed to. This, of course, is one of the most important things because up until now they didn't do this. There wasn't a standard so we couldn't measure what they guaranteed to do, what they were required to do, and we couldn't say you did or you didn't do such and such.
We will now be able to say today that these things are agreed to not only by us, but also the United States agrees to this.
They will arrest all of the Palestinian terrorists, all of the past murderers who have been free. They will be put into prison, and we've set up a structure to see that they will remain there, remain in prison. We have stopped them going in and out of prison.
They will collect illegal weapons, and they will do this under close supervision. And they will reduce their forces, their police forces, the Palestinian police force - what they call the Palestinian police force - to the level that has been agreed to under the agreement.
The agreement allows them enough police in order to control law and order. What they are not allowed to do is to build an army, and this is what we have prevented. And this will also be closely supervised and closely watched.
Every paragraph that we are talking about, and many that I have not described, are connected to an apparatus that can prevent and oversee the process that up until now was a one-sided process; that is that Israel was giving and didn't receive anything, and the security of Israel's citizens was declining. We closed this off. We closed a lot of the holes in the Swiss cheese that was created by the Oslo agreement.
I should also say that we had to give up part of our land. This is very painful. It is difficult for everyone, for the Defense Minister and for the Foreign Minister, and for every one of us. Every mountain, every valley, every hill is a part of our history, of our people and speak to us, and speak to us in great strength. To hand this over - to hand over even a centimeter of the land of Israel - to the Palestinian Authority is very, very difficult. Therefore, I must say - and I'm not exaggerating - we fought with all of the force of lions under the agreements that we had previously signed to hand over land. Ten percent will be handed over and another three percent that will be a nature reserve that Israel will have a security control of. Palestinian construction will be banned in the area that is a nature reserve.
I want to say something. Everyone knows that the Palestinians understood from the previous government that they will get most of the land after the redeployments. Anyone that says otherwise is lying.
They told us directly - the Palestinians - that they expect, after the completion of the withdrawal process, 90 percent of the land. This is what they understood, and these were their expectations based on what they had been told by the previous government. They thought that under the process, Israel would withdraw from most of the land in the West Bank.
We had to fight in the last two years very hard in order to reduce their expectations and to bring them to a realistic level. This was the problem. All the time they talk about a first withdrawal that is 30 percent from an area that is designated under full Palestinian control, the second withdrawal, another 30 percent, and the remainder in the third withdrawal, the remaining 30 percent.
This is the situation that we had to fight. Why did they build such a hope? They had a reason for this. We had to reduce their expectations, bring them down to reality. We did this. We have a real concern about those who live in Judea and Samaria in the West Bank. We had to think about how to worry about the settlements, how to take care of them - how to take care of the settlers that live there and their security needs.
I met at Wye Plantation in a field. I came there with my wife, Sara, and I met some of the settler representatives. We sat there in chairs in the field. It was kind of a surrealistic site, a group of people sitting on chairs, in a field. I told them, and I say this now: you are the same, we are part of the same people. We love you. We are fighting this battle for you. There is no other government that will fight for you like this. We've already seen that. We know what was, and you know very well there is no possibility that there will be any other government that will fight the way we did after receiving the agreement from the previous government, in order to reduce the damage and to close the holes.
These were very, very difficult negotiations. These were very, very difficult days and nights for me and my ministers. There were radical demands by the Palestinians that we rejected, and there were demands that we made, and we didn't agree to give them up. What we have achieved is the best that could have been achieved. We've done something very good and something very important for the State of Israel.
Those who helped me in this struggle had great concern for the security of Israel, for the land of Israel, and for the people of Israel.