Thank you so much. I thank you from the bottom of my heart and from my wfe's heart. You are wonderful friends of ours and of the state of Israel. I have just heard the prophet Amos quoted [by the man who introduced the Prime Minister]. He said that the fallen tent of Israel would rise again. It has!

You do not have to be a believing Jew or a believing Christian to understand that the rebirth of Israel and the rise of Israel has something of the miraculous, of the eternal to it. We are marking this year 50 years since the establishment of modern Israel and it is a testament of miraculous achievement, an extraordinary accomplishment of overcoming seemingly impossible odds. Now remember, my friends, that 50 years ago it wasn't clear that there would be a state of Israel. And I would say it wasn't even clear that there would be a future for the Jewish people. Fifty years ago we had suffered the last great catastrophe of millennia of exile and persecution and pogrom. And it may have been possible for some to assume that the Jewish people, like so many other peoples and so many other nations in history would succumb to the blows of time, to the force of circumstances, to the hammer blows of the lesser impulses of mankind.

And if you look you can see that many peoples, most nations, disappeared during the course of history. They're not any longer with us. After a third of the Jewish people had been destroyed in Europe, after we had been consigned to diaspora, to fragmentation, to the dissolution of our identity and additional anti-Semitism, it might have been assumed that this was the end -- that after 4,000 years of toiling and struggling under the sun, there would be no Jewish future. We are here today, 50 years later, to say, as we say in Hebrew, "That is not true. Am Israel chai! The people of Israel live!"

Now, look at what we have accomplished. We've come back to our ancient homeland. We've restored our sovereignty. We've reunited our ancient capital, Jerusalem. Here we are in Jerusalem, never to be divided again -- always to be united, under Israel.

I came here to thank you for your support in our great endeavor. It has been consistent. It has been unreserved. And I have to tell you, from my point of view, as Prime Minister of Israel, it has been very, very effective. Thank you. The state of Israel is stronger because of your support and it needs this strength to resist undue pressure and threats. You know, and we know, that this is support for a just and good cause. I said we have come back to our ancient homeland. Our claim to this land is based on the greatest and most incontrovertible document in creation -- the Holy Bible. It's the Bible that has given us the deed to this land. It is on the basis of the Bible that the Christian world and so much of the international community have recognized our right to it.

This is the cradle of our comon civilization -- the birthplace of the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs is right here in this city. The city that holds the hope of mankind -- that all men shall be free -- that they will all live, having been created in God's image, live in the grace of God, have the ability, the dignity, the freedom to pursue their own lives, their own talents, their own creativity and to have here, as well, the incarnation of that great prophecy, that nations should not lift up sword upon nation, that we shall know war no more. These are all hopes based here in Jerusalem, in the city of peace. And we have prayed and struggled to come back to this land and to this city for 1,900 years. I believe there is no parallel in the history of nations to the bond between the Jewish people -- the people of Israel -- and the land of Israel. Everyday we pray for the building of Jerusalem, everyday we build Jerusalem and everyday we build the land of Israel, in all its parts.

We are now in the midst of negotiations, difficult negotiations. This [Oslo] is an agreement we did not sign but we pledged to honor based on two simple principles: One, that the other side honors their commitments too. There is no such thing as a one-sided peace; there is no such thing as a one-sided contract and it is about time that the Palestinians fulfill all their comitments to fight terrorism, to stop the incitement against Israel, to annul the charter of hate that is still on the books. These, and other Palestinian obligations, must be met if an agreement is to have any meaning. And the other principle is our security. When I say our security, I mean that we want to minimize the dangers that were created in this negotiation process and I believe that we have minimized them, but time will tell. And I cannot tell you now if we shall have an agreement in the upcoming meeting in Washington [at the Wye Plantation], because, in many ways, it is up to the other side to make that decision. If they honor their part, there will be an agreement. If they do not, we will not make unilateral concessions. Because, indeed, the only barrier to an agreement now is the absence of Palestinian compliance with the commitments they undertook five years ago and have yet to fulfil. There can be no peace without compliance; there can be no peace withour security; there can be no peace without a meaningful, consistent and thorough fight against terrorism; there can be no peace as long as there's this consistent incitement against Israel; there can be no peace with hatred, hostility, threats of violence and war.

All of that has to go and a new era has to dawn -- one in which the Arab peoples, but especially the Palestinian Arabs, understand that they must finally make their peace with Israel, come to terms with the fact that we are in this land and we shall stay here, that we are in this city and we will stay here, that we stretch out our hand to them in peace, that we do not seek to dispossess them or drive them out, but neither should they seek to do that to us. If there is that attitude of genuine peace, of real peace, meaningful peace, reciprocal peace, then Washington will be a success, as I hope -- and I'm sure you do too -- will happen.

Now, this is our jubilee year, as I've said, and our achievements are nothing short of fantastic, but we know that even if we achieve this interim peace with the Palestinians, we still face great dangers -- all of us -- beyond the immediate horizon. Iraq and Iran, arming themselves with ballistic missiles and unconventional weapons, this is a danger not only to the peace of Israel but to the peace of the world.

And you can see these rogue states, from North Korea at the edge of Asia, to Iraq and Iran right here, who are creating an unstable and potentially violent and dangerous world for us. We know that we have to arm ourselves and protect ourselves, along with every country and every nation that wants peace and security in our world. And Israel is leading the world, alongside the United States, in giving an answer, giving a defence to peaceful societies, against these new threats, against these new missiles. But we also know that we cannot allow the establishment of a Palestinian state in our country which could be an ally of these regimes, which could threaten us from the hills that surround this city, the hills that overlook Tel Aviv. The nightmare of our military leaders is the positioning of just one or two anti-aircraft missiles -- one in the Sumerian mountains and one in the Judean mountains -- which could paralyse our civilian aircraft, could shoot them down, could paralyse the mighty Israeli airforce. These are the concerns that we will have to negotiate and address in the final settlement talks with the Palestinians.

The only just and secure and durable agreement, the only arrangement that will hold, is one that will be done through negotiations, not through unilateral declarations. We will never accept it. It will never hold. We want a negotiated peace, a negotiated peace in which we care for our interests, foremost of which is security, is a peace that can endure. We can, I believe, achieve this, and we can achieve the closing of the circle of peace around us with our other neighbors. We can do this because we have the power to watch after our interests, to take care of the basic concerns of the Jewish people, the Jewish nation, the Jewish state.

That had not been the case up to the existence of the state of Israel, but look at what we have done. We are going to bring, in the next decade or so, the great majority of the Jews still left in the former Soviet Union. We have brought the Ethiopian Jews who were suffering in Africa, dreaming of coming to Jerusalem. My wife and I visited an Ethiopian Jew who must have been around 70 years old, when we had a tragic accident in which two of our helicopters crashed and this man buried his son, his son was one of two surviving children that he had. He lost 11 children as they made their way from the plains of Ethiopia to Jerusalem, but they trekked on, they walked on, and they came here. This is a micrcocosm of our devotion to the Jewish land. Here we have Jewish tribes in the heart of Africa clinging to the dream for 2,500 years of coming back to the Jewish land. And here we have the ingathering of the exiles, and I can tell you that for the first time in the history of the Jewish people since the Second Temple period, in the next decade and a half the majority of the Jewish people will live in the Jewish land. If this is not the materialization of prophecy, then nothing is.

So we face the next 50 years with tremendous anticipation. We don't ignore the problems, we don't sweep them under the rug, we know how difficult they are. But when we look at what we have accomplished here, how we were able to overcome the greatest odds faced by any people, to roll back armies a hundred times our size, to build an economy that is now at the forefront of the world economy, to see this tremendous technological outburst here which is the source of creative genius in our people, and its coming forth. Can you recognize Israel from what it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago? It's a changing society and changing for the better. To revive the ancient language that we had, and to make these steps for peace carefully, responsibly, watching our security, we know that we overcame all these challenges in the past. And it gives us all the confidence, all the faith, all the trust, that God will give us the power to meet these challenges as well. I'm sure of it, I have no doubt.

Perhaps I can close by telling you what I told the president of China. There are no people here from China, am I right? Perhaps one day there will be. It would be a pleasure to welcome a Chinese delegation here in Jerusalem. But recently my wife and I were on a visit to China, and the president of China said to me that he has enormous respect for the Jewish people. He said the Jews and the Chinese are the oldest civilizations on earth. And I said: "You're right, Mr. President. There are three -- the Chinese, the Indians and the Jews -- over 4,000 years old, these civilizations, from the days of Abraham." And I said to him: "You know, there's an anomaly here." He said: "Why do you say that?" And I said: "Because the Chinese are over a billion people, and the Indians are almost a billion people. And the Jewish people, well we were 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire, so by any natural estimate, any natural extrapolation, we should have numbered today roughly 250 million people. But we are only 12 million." I said to him: "Do you know why that is the case?" He said: "No, why?" I said: "Because the Chinese kept China and the Indians kept India, but our fate was determined when we lost Israel, the land of Israel."

Well, we have come back to the land of Israel, and we shall keep the land of Israel, and we shall protect the land of Israel, and we shall keep our city united, and we shall ensure that we have a secure peace, and we shall do so because we have the faith of Israel, and our belief in the God of Israel. And I want to thank you for sustaining that faith, and for giving us that support. You are our friends. We know that, and we salute you. Thank you very much, and God bless you.