The reality is that Israel is a multi-ethnic, multireligious society, and it makes no sense to insist as a precondition for peace that its neighbors recognize it as ‘the Jewish state.’

For a long time – that is, for the vast majority of my grown-up life – I worked resolutely for the two-state arrangement notwithstanding incalculable disappointments, both with respect to the Israeli governments and the Palestinian Authority.

Between the Mediterranean and the borders of Iraq, in what was once Palestine, there are now two countries, one Jewish and one Arab, and there is no room for a third. The Palestinians must find the solution to their problem together with that Arab country, Jordan, because a ‘Palestinian state’ between us and Jordan can only become a base from which it will be more convenient to attack and destroy Israel.

It has never ceased to astonish me that the Arab states have been so eager to go to war against us. Almost from the very beginning of Zionist settlement until today, they have been consumed by hatred for us.

In Israel, we read from right to left. [To Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State, who had written her that he considers himself ‘an American first, Secretary of State second, and a Jew third’]

Israel itself is the strongest guarantee against another Holocaust.

We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

Any one who speaks in favor of bringing the Arab refugees back must also say how he expects to take the responsibility for it, if he is interested in the state of Israel. It is better that things are stated clearly and plainly: We shall not let this happen.

There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.

There will be peace in the Middle East only when the Arabs love their children more than they hate Israel.

We can forgive [the Arabs] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [the Arabs] when they love their children more than they hate us.

The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.

Let me be absolutely clear. Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. It will be a strong friend of Israel’s under a McCain administration. It will be a strong friend of Israel’s under an Obama administration. So that policy is not going to change.

For the Arabs in Israel there is always a tension between nationality and identity.

I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don’t hate Jews.