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And by the way, a piece of news, Israel is the one country in which everyone is pro-American, opposition and coalition alike. And I represent the entire people of Israel who say, 'Thank you, America.'' And we're friends of America, and we're the only reliable allies of America in the Middle East.
Well, this is an unfortunate part of the UN institution. It's the - the theater of the absurd. It doesn't only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi's Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights; Saddam's Iraq headed the UN Committee on Disarmament.
President Abbas, you've dedicated your life to advancing the Palestinian cause. Must this conflict continue for generations, or will we enable our children and our grandchildren to speak in years ahead of how we found a way to end it? That's what we should aim for, and that's what I believe we can achieve.
All I can tell you is that Israel's position in the Arab world has changed because they no longer see Israel as their enemy, but as their ally, in their indispensable battle against the forces of militant Islam, either those led by Iran, the Shiites, or - and those led by Daesh - by ISIS, the militant Sunnis.
In the frameworks of a peace agreement, a government under my leadership would agree to make real territorial concessions but will not compromise our security borders. We want there to be less friction. We want to remove outposts to help the Palestinian population. We will not reoccupy the Palestinian population.
I unequivocally condemn the striking of the soldier from the Ethiopian community and those responsible will be brought to justice but nobody has the right to take the law into their own hands, immigrants from Ethiopia and their families are dear to us and Israel is making great efforts to ease their integration in society.
In my office in Jerusalem, there's an ancient seal. It's a signet ring of a Jewish official from the time of the Bible. The seal was found right next to the Western Wall, and it dates back 2,700 years, to the time of King Hezekiah. Now, there's a name of the Jewish official inscribed on the ring in Hebrew. His name was Netanyahu.
Iran is a country that talks about, denies the Holocaust, promises to wipe out Israel, is engaged in terror throughout the world. This is a regime that is giving vent to the worst impulses that you see right now in the Middle East. They deny the rights of women, deny democracy, brutalize their own people, don't give freedom of religion.
There is a great danger to the world, not only to my country [Israel] but to the United States, to the Middle East, to peace, to all of humanity, from the prospect that such regimes that brutalize its own people, that sponsors terrorism more than any other regime in the world - that this regime acquires atomic bombs is very, very dangerous.
You know, I think, I think the Palestinians are trying to get away without negotiating. They're trying to get a state to continue the conflict with Israel rather than to end it. They're trying to basically detour around peace negotiations by going to the U.N. and have the automatic majority in the U.N. General Assembly give them, give them a state.
Israel is doing what any other country would do, and certainly the U.S. would do. If 80 percent of your population were under fire and you had 60 seconds or 90 seconds to get into bomb shelters, if terror tunnels were dug underneath your border in order to come in and explode your kindergartens and massacre your people and kidnap American citizens.
90 percent, 85 to 90 percent of Israeli citizens in Judea-Samaria, in the West Bank, live in clusters, in urban blocks. Everybody understands that if we were to have a solution then those blocks would stay in Israel. And that's where you saw these cranes; that's where Israelis live. In the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, everybody understands, they will stay.
I'm very proud of the fact that Israel is the one country in a very broad radius that - in which Arabs have free and fair elections. That's sacrosanct. That will never change. I wasn't trying to suppress a vote. I was trying to get something to counter a foreign-funded effort to get votes that are intended to topple my party. And I was calling on our voters to come out.
There is a structural difference between the way that Europe views Israel, and America views Israel. The European view is informed by the importance of colonialism in Europe's past. So for Europeans we are like Belgiums in the Congo, or the French in Alger, or the British in India. Strange interlopers in somebody else's land. But in fact, we [Israeli] have been here for 4,000 years. This is our ancestral homeland.
If I have to reduce all of the laws of war into a single sentence, it is this. You divide the world into two, combatants and noncombatants. You can attack deliberately combatants, but not deliberately noncombatants. Israel acts that way. It attacks combatants and accidentally kills noncombatants. But in the case of the terrorists, it's the exact opposite. They deliberately attack combatants - noncombatants, civilians, deliberately.
Hamas is ISIS, and ISIS is Hamas. They're branches of the same tree. People who wantonly rocket our cities and want to conduct mass killings. And when they can, they murder children, teenagers, shoot them in the head. Throw people from the sixth floor, their own people. ... They're the enemies of peace, they're the enemies of Israel, they're the enemies of all civilized countries. And I believe they're the enemies of the Palestinians themselves.
When I say that terrorism is war against civilization, I may be met by the objection that terrorists are often idealists pursuing worthy ultimate aims -- national or regional independence, and so forth. I do not accept this argument. I cannot agree that a terrorist can ever be an idealist, or that the objects sought can ever justify terrorism. The impact of terrorism, not merely on individual nations, but on humanity as a whole, is intrinsically evil, necessarily evil and wholly evil.
Terrorism is carried out purposefully, in a cold-blooded, calculated fashion. The declared goals of the terrorist may change from place to place. He supposedly fights to remedy wrongs -- social, religious, national, racial. But for all these problems his only solution is the demolition of the whole structure of society. No partial solution, not even the total redressing of the grievance he complains of, will satisfy him -- until our social system is destroyed or delivered into his hands.
The Palestinian society is split into two - those who are openly calling for Israel's destruction like Hamas, and those who are not calling openly for Israel's destruction but refuse to confront those who do. And that's the Palestinian authority. I think they're timid, they're afraid to actually stand up to these killers. And I think that they're afraid, maybe for their own sake, for their own political hides, sometimes for their own physical safety. And they don't take that necessary plunge.