Benjamin Netanyahu at the Jewish Agency Assembly Plenary meetings held in Israel on 24th June 2001. Thank you Daniel, thank you all Alex Grass, Sallai Meridor, Chaim Chesler and Avi Pazner and many friends that I see here, old friends and new friends. So I am delighted to see all of you. I am speaking in English, beshana haba b'ivrit. I am delighted to see all of you especially these days I think it is important that you are here. It is an statement of the basic and most profound solidarity that you as representatives of Jewish communities for Israel and it is important now because Israel is, of course, in a time of crisis and in the midst of a conflict. The question I want to begin with is why do we have conflict? After all for many years Arafat and his spokesmen and spokeswomen in the west have been saying "Give us a West Bank State with half of Jerusalem as its capital and we will give you peace." Well, at Camp David less than a year ago he was offered a West Bank State, a State in Judea and Samaria and have of Jerusalem, but we didn't get peace. He turned it down. He turned it down and began a campaign of violence, which lasts to this very day, and the question is why? The answer to that is that what Arafat says inside to his own people in Arabic is radically different from what he says outside in English or in French or in Spanish or in any other language. Inside of course he says that he doesn't want a West Bank State, that is understood, what he wants is not a state next to Israel, he wants a state instead of Israel. He doesn't want peace with Israel, he wants a peace without Israel and that is of course reflected not only in territorial demands, but of course in the code word for Israel's destruction, which is the so-called right of return of the Palestinian refugees, which is another word for the dismantling of the State of Israel. I think the choice he had to make between the outside message and the inside message, which he personally represents that made him decide to go on the route of violence, the route of terrorism thereby remaining true to the reason that the PLO was founded in the first place. When was the PLO founded? It was in 1964, it was the organization to liberate Palestine. What Palestine was it going to liberate in 1964? It wasn't Judea and Samaria or the West Bank; they were in Arab hands. It wasn't East Jerusalem that was in Arab hands too. It wasn't the Gaza Strip that was in Arab hands. The Organization for the Liberation of Palestine, the PLO was set to liberate the heart of Palestine and the heart of Palestine in the Arafat and the PLO doctrine is Haifa, Jaffa, Baku, Ramle, Lod and Tel Aviv. This is what this organization stands for, this is what this man stands for, that is that it is an organization that is committed to an illegitimate goal, the goal of policide, the destruction of a state. But it is not merely committed to an illegitimate goal it pursues it through illegitimate means, the means of terror, the means of wanton and deliberate assault against innocent civilians, against teenagers in a Tel Aviv discotheque and against babies that are deliberately targeted by snipers. That is an organization that is willing to flout all the laws of war. There has been in the last 150 years an attempt by humanity to codify the limits of war. We recognize that there are imperfections in our society, that countries and peoples occasionally fight one another. But it has been approved by the civilized community that should we descend into conflict, we shall limit that conflict and we divide the world into two, really into two parts. On one side are combatants, on the other side the civilians. And combatants fight combatants, armies fight armies, armed people fight armed people, they don't deliberately cross the line to the other side. That they don't do, it can happen by accident, it happens in any war that civilians are accidentally killed or wounded or maimed. But in the case of war crimes it is the deliberate targeting of civilians that receives that description. It is when you deliberately attack civilians that you are committing a war crime. It doesn't make any difference on which side you are on. You might even be fighting for a noble cause, but if you deliberately use a method that is illegitimate you will be judged for war crimes. For example, if you are a member of the allied invading force in World War 11 fighting for the greatest just cause in the history of mankind and you enter a German village or town and you put women and children against the wall and you shoot them, you will be judged and tried, probably be hung for war crimes, because some methods of conflict are illegitimate in themselves, they are evil in themselves. Others are not, another example. In World War 11 the RAF, the British Royal Air Force set out to bomb the Gestapo headquarters, certainly a legitimate target, this was in Copenhagen and the British bombers missed. Instead of the Gestapo they hit a children's hospital nearby and 83 children were horribly killed. Now this is not a war crime, this is not terrorism. This is one of the tragic accidents that accompany every war, but the target was a legitimate target. In the case of Arafat, what we have in the Palestinian terrorists that he fosters, they deliberately attack civilians. They don't go into that discotheque looking for soldiers; they deliberately are going to kill innocent children. When they bomb shopping malls, when they bomb buses, when they target vehicles on the road, they are deliberately killing civilians, sometimes by accident they kill some soldiers. In the case of Israel we are responding in self-defense. A. we don't initiate the attacks; they initiate the attacks all the time. But even when we respond, we respond against combatants. So, it is important to understand that there are two great distinctions that we must put forward in front of people's minds. The first is that Arafat and the Palestinian Authority are committed to the destruction of the State of Israel and the second is that they are committed to doing so, using the illegitimate and criminal means of terrorism. It is not a symmetrical conflict between this tribe and that tribe. It is totally asymmetrical, they are wrong and we are right and we have to say it. I am going to be a lot tougher than I was just telling you right now, a lot more, wait until you hear it. Because I think this is the easy part, I think there is a much tougher part but before we get to it we have to ask a question. When faced with an adversary with this goal and using this method, how can we solve this conflict? How can we get rid of terrorism? Indeed many people, I would say the majority of our people both in Israel and in the Diaspora have recognized the nature of Arafat's true goal that has been unmasked in the time since Camp David. Have recognized also the fact that they are the ones who are perpetrating this violence and initiating. They recognize it, but then they come to a point of anxiety and concern and I would say even despair because they say, "What can we do about this? What can be done? Can anything be done?" After all we are told you can't stop terrorism with military means, there is no military solution to terrorism. You hear that. Have you heard that? On and on and on. The first thing, there is no military solution to terrorism, or perhaps since there is no military solution to terrorism then we must move on the political front, which means maybe make, even though it is very distasteful, even more reaching, far reaching concession, we will have to make them anyway, or perhaps there is no solution at all. People reach the point of great concern and possible despair. I think part of this is based on a great confusion between two entirely separate questions. The first is, is there a solution to the problem of terrorism? The second, entirely independent question, is there a solution to the conflict? The first question, is there a solution to terrorism, the answer is yes, of course there is. Because the solution to terrorism has to recognize where terrorism comes from. Terrorism comes from terrorist regimes invariably. All terrorism that sustained itself beyond cross international boundaries and beyond a certain period has to be sustained by a regime. Terrorists being used by the Palestinian regime to intimidate Israel, to make Israel surrender its positions, to make Israel demoralized and so on. But terror is useful, only if the cost of waging terrorism, the cost of that regime is lower than the benefits of waging terrorism. If you want to stop terrorism, if you want to bring it down to inconsequential proportions, then what you have to do is make that regime pay very very heavily. Once faced with the choice of the cost of waging terror, usually these regimes stop. Now, I have to tell you that this approach was tried by a country somewhat less advanced than us, less sophisticated, it is called the United States, they did not hear about the idea that you can stop terrorism with military means. So after years of being attacked by terrorists from Libya the west was attacked, the US was attacked, of course Israeli targets were attacked as well, the United States and Britain set out on a bombing mission and bombed Libya, they nearly killed Gadaffi in that raid. They placed sanctions on Libya, including sanctions preventing the landing of Libyan planes in important parts of the west and so on. What happened as a result of this action was that Libyan terrorism stopped completely at that point, completely. Now, I want to caution you and tell you that the conflict between Gadaffi, between Libya and the United States did not stop. Gadaffi still calls the United States a great Satan. He still believes that the American influence in the world is pernicious, dangerous to Islamic civilization and so on and so on. The conflict didn't stop but the terrorism stopped completely. Now you can go to North Korea that sponsored terrorism and was hit with very very strong sanctions, so they stopped too. I can give you many many other examples of other countries. But why go far? Go right here. We had terrorism for years, from Nasser's Egypt and we applied very forceful sanctions, military sanctions against Egypt. When Nasser saw the cost to his regime he stopped the terrorism completely. Years before we had any political process, let alone a peace treaty with Egypt. In a similar vein we had terrorism from Jordan. For example the last bout was in 1969/1970 and we took very forceful action against Jordan and faced with the imminent collapse of his regime, both by our blows and the danger of terrorist movement from within, King Hussein stopped this terrorism. It stopped. This was years before we had a political process, let alone a peace treaty with Jordan. I don't have to go back that far either, in the three years that we led the government, we inherited a country with exploding bombs, exploding buses, suicide bombers, shopping mall bombings, a lot of the things you see today. We stopped it, not a hundred percent, a zero percent. We got it down from a hundred percent to five percent. Now how did we do it? We did it because we made it very clear to Arafat in two separate incidents fairly on in our administration that we would take all the necessary action, military and economic that would be required to protect our people and if necessary this might mean the collapse of his regime. That wasn't out goal, but he would know that that would be the outcome if he sustained the terrorism. The first incident was the tunnel incident, which you may remember. I had opened a twenty centimeter door on a tunnel that had been dug by the Maccabies 2200 years earlier and Arafat said that I was undermining the Al Aksa mosque, the same thing. It is kind of difficult to undermine the Al Aksa mosque from that place because it is 250 meters, a quarter of a kilometer away from the Al Aksa mosque, but nevertheless he instigated this violence. How long did the violence last, do you know? It lasted two days. The question is, why did it last two days? Why didn't it last nine month? I will tell you why. When it happened I was abroad, I was visiting France and from there I went to Germany and by the time I got to Germany I understood I was told there was full scale fighting. I came back, landed in Tel Aviv, heard the reports that our soldiers were under siege in Joseph's Tomb in Schem and that fighting had broken out across the entire front in Yehuda and Shomron, in Aza and so on and that we were being fired upon by thousands of Palestinian police using the very weapons we had given them to fight terrorists and they were shooting at us. I gave an order to advance all the tanks in these front to assault positions. Then I called Arafat and I said, "Mr. Chairman, this is a time of great crisis, I want to be brief and to the point. If you don't stop all violence and all shooting within a given time period," it was not in hours, within a given time period, not days, not weeks, not hours, I specified a very short time period. "If you don't do it then I will send the tanks in." The response was that he understood what I was saying. Within that specified timeframe to the dot he stopped all firing. Now notice, I didn't give a public ultimatum, I don't necessarily believe in publicly hoisting somebody on a high pole, but I delivered a message and he believed correctly, by the way that I stand up to all world pressure and to even a US administration that wasn't particularly friendly at the time, but that I would do it, and I would have done it. Well, he stopped. Then some time later he tried to use Hamas and Islamic Jihad by giving them a green line and he bombed or they bombed a cafe in Tel Aviv and had two subsequent bombings in Jerusalem, all in a few days. At the time he was very dependent and had practically no external funding, sources of funding. So I thought a good lever to use was to stop the money, which I stopped completely and they won. Within a week or two the Palestinian Authority was experiencing great difficult. They complained to the Americans who turned to me and they said, "You know, if this goes on his regime will not survive." I said, "That is his problem not mine." They said, "But you are committed under the Oslo Accords to pass VAT funds, VAT monies to the Palestinian Authority," and I said, "they are committed under the Oslo Accords to prevent the attacks of terrorists, they are supposed to act against these terrorists and jail them and so on." They said, "So what do you want?" I said, "Well I want A, B, C and D." And they said, "Then will you give them the money?" I said, "No, let us see A, B, C and D and then we will talk." A week later they come back and they say, "He has done A, B, C and D now ill you give him the money?" I said, "Sure ten percent." Then the next week he did more and more and more, within six weeks he had stopped the terrorism completely. He had jailed the Hamas and other terrorists. He had given very strict orders to his own forces not to engage in any violence and from that point on we had practically no terrorism. I don't want to say none at all, but very very little. In fact you could take the entire three work and it would stick unfortunately in today's terms in three weeks and sometimes into three days. Now why did that happen? Again, it wasn't that Arafat was a Zionist he wasn't and the suicide bombers were but they weren't dispatched they were controlled and they were controlled because the only thing that Arafat cares about is the survival of his regime. He doesn't care about the Palestinian people. If we merely respond and attack and take casualties from the Palestinian people, he is not only unhappy he is happy. It is good on CNN; it is good on the international networks and so on. The thing that Arafat cares about is the response that is sufficiently massive to bring down the regime. At the point when he understands that that is the price that he will pay, he is likely to stop. But let me tell you something, if he doesn't stop then he will fall. The next guy will know that if you want to live next to Israel and you want to be in power, then you better live in peace with Israel. If you don't live in peace with Israel you will pay the consequences too. This is the only formula to stop terrorism. The contrary formula that says, "Let us pay with concessions," is the one sure way to always continue terrorism. It is the exact reverse of what is being discussed. So it is possible to stop terrorism or reduce it to inconsequential means using deterrence, using deterrence means not only having deterrence but the willingness to use your strength in a variety of means, not only military to get that message across. Having said that, while there is a solution to terrorism, there is no immediate solution to the conflict, because the conflict is about our existence. The root core of this conflict has been revealed once again to those who didn't see it, to be what it has always been. The existential opposition by a great many in the Arab world still, and certainly by the Palestinian leadership to Israel's very existence. This is not something we can compromise about, we can't say, "Oh well you know we will compromise about half of our existence." It is not something that lends itself to compromise and the question is what will make the Palestinian Authority or the Palestinian movement, what will make it abandon the goal of destroying the State of Israel? I would say that there are two possibilities for that to happen. The first is that they will simply understand that Israel is so powerful, so permanent, so unconquerable in every way that they will simply abandon by the force of the inertia of our permanence, they would abandon this goal as a practical means. That happened, by the way with two of our neighbors. It happened with Egypt and with Jordan, especially after the great victories of the Six Day War and in a paradoxical way also our victory, which is undenied, which is denied in parts of the Arab world, but really understood after the surprise attack of Yom Kippur. That could happen. There is a second thing that I would have never said a few years ago, but going around the world and seeing the power of the information revolution, I think there is another possibility as well and that is that the forces of democratization, the forces of pluralism that are sweeping China, that are sweeping Iran, that are sweeping other parts of the world may get at the end, at the very end, also to the Arab regime. You can see part of that in the Gulf. In the Gulf you see a lot freer Arab world. A lot freer with information and you see the consequences. It is less hostile; it is less aggressive and less fanatical. It is open to internal debate of a kind, limited, very limited. By the way, this debate, this opening up of information is what is happening now, for example in Iran. What you saw last week in Iran is exactly the result of the fact that Iran is not a closed society like say Syria or Iraq. There are 250,000 satellite dishes in Iran and Internet. I once said to the head of the CIA that if he wants to accelerate a change in the regime in Iran, he should forget about standard CIA stuff. He should be using big transformers to broadcast Beverly Hills 2050 and Merril's Place and all that stuff, because that is subversive material. The young people in Iran see the houses and the cars and the nice clothes and they are saying, "We want to have it too. We want to have a good life too." That is the tension that ultimately will bring down this Ayatola regime and the Khoumeni regime, it will come down. Now, it is going to take a lot longer in the Middle East and the Middle Eastern regimes are going to build up as many dams, as many walls to prevent that kind free information from reaching their populations. But I believe that ultimately it is impossible to block it. It is not that in the future they will become liberal western democracies, they will not. But there will be, I would say the end of a situation, which has created the greatest tragedies in the 20th century. The greatest tragedies in the 20th century occurred because of the wedding of dictatorship and this instrument that I am holding in my hand, the microphone. When one leader can talk to millions of people and he tells them what to think and what to feel and who to hate and who to worship, himself of course, that is when you get the tragedies that you get in Europe, we got in Europe around the mid century, that we got in Asia, in Russia, in China and of course in the Middle East. This is the power of the Gadaffis and the Stalins and the Hitlers and the Arafat. It is when they control as Arafat controls every word that is published in a Palestinian paper, every cartoon that is displayed, every image that is broadcast on Palestinian television and Palestinian radio, and you will know that we are moving in that direction. You will know that we are moving to a new world and a new reality, when one day we will open a Palestinian newspaper and we will see a very broad banner, headline in Arabic saying, "There is no military solution to the conflict with Israel." When they write it, then you will know that a new possibility exists. But it is still in the future, perhaps even the distant future. For the foreseeable present and the immediate future what we have to do is continue to build our deterrence, to make Israel stronger in every way because that is the only thing that might bring them to relinquish the goal of destroying Israel. So, I have said today that there are two separate issues. There is the issue of stopping terrorism or at least removing from the scene, from our national scene and the international scene as a potent force eminently doable. There is a separate issue of how to end this conflict and it can only be ended when the Palestinians abandon their goal of destroying Israel. I have said that but I have not perhaps said something that you are facing every day. What you are facing undoubtedly is the complete distortion of the facts as I put them forward and as you understand them in your respective countries and the assault on the truth and on Israel and on Zionism that are endless everyday. I have often been asked "What do you do about that?" I guess people think, well you have to learn English, you have to know how to speak fluently. I have just come from France, from a visit to the Jewish communities of Marseilles and Nice and from appearing on TV Sanc, a French international thing. I did not speak in English, I spoke most of the time in French. My French isn't that good, certainly not as good as my English, but I got a lot of responses to what I said, because what counts at the end is this, you cannot in the 20th century, we learned something in the 20th century that it holds true for the 21st century, you cannot achieve a military victory unless you achieve a political victory to accompany it; and you cannot achieve a political victory unless you achieve a victory in public opinion; and you cannot achieve a victory in public opinion unless you persuade that public that your cause is just. Therefore, it doesn't make any difference if you are on the side of the angels or on the side of the devil. Anyone fighting in the international arena for public opinion must argue the justice of his cause. It is true, everybody does it, Hitler argued for the justice of his cause and Stalin argued for the justice of his cause. They all had propaganda machines. Whether you are right or you are wrong you must argue the justice of your cause. It is true that up until 1967 up to the Six Day War the Arabs did not use any propaganda weapon at all, because the didn't have to. All they would have to do is cut the country in half, it was all of twelve kilometers wide. It is only after we moved the border from the outskirts of Tel Aviv across a stone wall twelve hundred meters high, it is called the Mountains of Judea and Samaria, we moved it to the banks of the Jordan and now the physical conquest of Israel was impossible. It is only then after 1967 did they begin to use the weapon of propaganda, because they knew that that was the only way that they could create political pressure. They would win in public opinion that create political pressure to reverse the military victory, to get us out of these positions by arguing that we were there for an unjust cause. That is essentially what they have been doing and what we have been doing is practically nothing. Now we have to change that. There are many reasons why, but we can talk about, you can ask me about that. We must change that. I was interviewed recently by an anchor woman in CNN and she said to me, "But the Palestinians say that you took their land," and I said "it is not their land." What happened was absolutely amazing. You know when you are interviewed you look right into the camera but you see on the side you get to see what the people are doing and you know in these studios they always have these staffers working on their papers. All of a sudden I could see from the corner of my eye that all the staffers raised their heads. "What did he say? What did he say? He said it is not their land," and they all paid attention. I said, "Yes, it is not their land. Arafat says that the Zionist invaded the Palestinian homeland in 1880. Palestine at the time was a green verdant country teaming with Palestinians living their lives independently and then the Zionists came and took it all away." I said in 1867 there was a visit to the Holy Land by Mark Twain, a well known Zionist propagandist right, and he described what he saw in the land, he said, "I traveled through the Galilee an entire day. I didn't see a single human being on the entire route." He came to Jerusalem he said, "Jerusalem sits in sack cloth and ashes, when will the Jews come back?" They were back by the way, there was already a majority in Jerusalem. But he said, "When will the Jews come back in large numbers to bring this country back to life?" Well, you might think that something miraculous happened between 1867, the year of Mark Twain's visit and Arafat's purported invasion in 1880. Alas nothing happened in fact in 1880 on the year of invasion there was another important visitor to this land. His name was Stanley, Arthur Penwin Stanley, he was the greatest mapmaker, the greatest cartographer in the 19th century, and Englishman and he described what he saw. He said, "I stood in Judea," by the way nobody used the term West Bank that is a politicized word. He said, "I am standing in Judea, I look north I look south I see not a single human being. Well will the Jews come back to bring this land alive." Almost word for word, I am paraphrasing, but almost the same words. This is repeated again and again by hundreds of visitors to Palestine in the 19th century. By British visitors, by American visitors, by German visitors, Swiss visitors, French visitors. The great poet Francois Le Marti everybody describes exactly the same thing. A barren empty land and expressing their hope that the Jews would come back. Well, the Jews did come back at the end of the 19th century they began and they built here farms and towns and industry, factories, sources of employment, hospitals and as a result there was a tremendous immigration here, tremendous immigration from Syria, Iraq, Egypt an North Africa. Most of those who called themselves Palestinians are the result of immigration, recent immigration as a result of the Zionist return. There is another person who testified to that between the world wars. You know between World War 1 and World War 11 it is a short span of about twenty years, the Arab population here multiplied five fold from this immigration, five fold. Winston Churchill who was Ministry Colonial Secretary for the British Government that controlled the country at the time, he said that the Arabs had absolutely no grievance against the Zionist, because far from depriving them or doing injustice to them, the Jews built up the country and opened the gates of the country so the Arab numbers could come in and swell in great numbers. Well Winston Churchill another Zionist propagandist, right. These are the fact that we have to bring back. Most of the Arabs who now call themselves Palestinians came as a result of the Jewish return to this land. We do not seek to displace them. We have a land in dispute, sure. They claim it and we claim it. That has to be adjudicated. But they have no right to pick us out from anywhere because it is not their land. Now, I am saying all this to you because I believe that anything else that we say is insufficient and doesn't get to the heart of the matter. If you talk about security, people will say, "Sure security, but if you stole something you are not entitled to security, bring it back." I was visiting Spain about six weeks ago. About five hundred years ago in the University of Valle de Rid, this is the ancient, the oldest university in Spain, the inquisition first kicked out the Jews and then they barred anybody with Jewish blood to study in this university. Five hundred years later the same university, I think in that same hall of the inquisition invited my father Professor Ben Zion Netanyahu, a noted scholar of the inquisition, to give him an honorary degree there. So I thought that was a good reason to participate, not only in a personal event, but in a closing of an historical circle and I went there. My colleague and friend the Prime Minister of Spain Jose Mario Azna heard that I was coming to Spain and invited my wife and me to spend a weekend with his wife on this small farm that he has near Toledo. The farm is about the size of the Galilee, I must tell you. Prime Ministers live very well in Spain. He invited the Foreign Minister and his wife to join us for dinner. He said, "Bibi tomorrow we will talk about what is happening today. We will talk about the terror and the politics, but tonight I want to ask you something that is really troubling me. I want to ask you who has justice on his side? Who has history on his side? In fact what is your case?" I turned to him and I said, "My friend Jose Maria, what is your case?" and he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, what is the case of Spain. Spain was occupied for eight hundred years by the Arabs, all of Spain had been conquered except a little point in the north called Ovido. The Arabs built there a great civilization. But you never accepted this conquest. For eight hundred years, year after year you fought the Arabs and you drove them southward again and again and again with rivers of blood, it was a horrible battle. Finally only the kingdom of Granada remained and then that was pushed out. Does anyone say that the people of Spain committed a great injustice to the Arabs?" He said, "No," and I said, "Well, let us see what is common and let us see what is different between the case of Spain and the case of Israel. What is common speaks loudly for us and what is uncommon speaks even more strongly for us. What is common is the presence of the original owners of the land, in this case the people of Spain in your case, in our case the people of Israel, who never gave up their right to the land. As long as the people existed and the claim lived with them, that claim had its merits. You never gave it up. It was yours. It is somebody who is displaced from his house and he says "I want my house." As long as he doesn't go elsewhere and give up that claim that house is his. That is the same thing. In our case that claim is even longer because our ownership of that land goes back thousands of years in our governing document is the Bible. Our strong attachment to this land, so strong that for thousands of years, for many centuries Jews said, "Next year in Jerusalem, next year in Jerusalem, next year in Jerusalem." Never giving up the claim. That is what is common. Now what is uncommon? Well the first difference is it took you eight hundred years to liberate your country, it took us twelve hundred years from the Arab conquest, not a big difference in historical terms. The second difference is that you had this little on the mounts called Ovido as a folk room to begin the liberation of your country, we had nothing. I mean there were Jews throughout from antiquity in the Holy Land, but we had no real presence that we could develop a powerful challenge. The fact we had to do with no such presence in the land itself. That only makes the task harder, it doesn't make the right any smaller. Sir, you displaced the great civilization in Spain, we displaced nothing as Mark Twain and everyone else attest to because by the time we came around in the late 19th century and the 20th century the Arab conquest had been replace by the Mamlu conquest and the Turkish conquest and so on, there was nothing left. A barren empty land. Fourth, you displaced, you took this land with fire and blood, and you took Spain with a campaign of fire and blood practically unmatched in the history of the world. We took it with peaceful means. We came to absentee landlords living the good life in the Cairo and in Beirut and we bought with exorbitant prices, our patrimony, swamps, rock, and desert. Fifth, you drove them away. We let them come in. We extended our hand in peace and friendship to them time and time again. In fact Zionism offered compromises to the Palestinians and the Arab world from the 1920s on to the very present and time after time they refused. They refuse any compromise. So where does justice lie?" Now, I cannot tell you what he responded because I am putting on my diplomat's hat but I am telling you this. If we don't address this issue, if we don't address the justice of our cause, if we don't speak with a conviction of a just nation fighting for a just cause, we will not win the hasbara war, but far more importantly we cannot secure the future of Israel. The only way that we secured the future of Israel, the reason we were able to come back here, the reason we were able to roll back enemies a hundred times our size and to perform this ongoing miracle, which is called the Jewish State, and to defy all the prognostications and all the doom sayers is because we believe we were just. If there is something important that we have to do, it is not merely to persuade in hasbara terms the non-Jews abroad, it is to persuade above all and before all else the Jewish people. The Jewish people in the Diaspora and our own Jewish people here, many of whom have fallen prey to this campaign of lies and vilification. It is important that we say very clearly, notwithstanding our willingness to make a reasonable compromise that will allow us to live and allow the Palestinians to live, but it is something that we make out of a complete understanding of our rights and certainly not something that will endanger us in any way. It is important to reassert our rights, it is important to restate old truths that everybody in the world knew before the Arab campaign began. All those people who met in Versailles knew the true history of this land and the true history of Zionism. That was at the beginning of the 20th century. By the beginning of the 21st century practically no one knows and many of us don't know. It is important that we know once again and we state once again very clearly "This is our land. It has been our land for 3000 years. This is our eternal city Jerusalem. It has been our city for 3000 years. This is the Temple Mount it has been sacred to us for 3000 years." If we stand on our rights, if we believe in the justice of our cause then, and I guarantee you it will happen, Israel will prevail once again. Thank you very much. |
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