Benjamin Netanyahu

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.

Hamas is simply continuing all its operations. And Israel will not let this terror operation decide when it's convenient for them and not convenient for them to attack our people.

We will take whatever action is necessary to protect our people,including against the terror tunnels that they are trying to dig against us.

Israel is very much endangering.

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.

Israel can make peace with an organization that seeks its destruction. That's Hamas. But Israel can make peace with the Palestinian Authority. It requires a lot of courage from both sides including President Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority.

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.

You can make peace with an enemy, if the enemy abandons the idea of destroying you. That is the critical test. Democracies fail to understand that.

The instability in the region is not a result of Israel and the Palestinians. That was never the cause of this instability. Instead, the disfunctionality of many of these societies that have failed to modernize.

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. They're timid, they're afraid to actually stand up to these killers. 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.

The entire world is focusing on the compromises that are necessary from Israel's side. But people [in the world] are not focusing on the fact that the Palestinians refuse to make the necessary compromises that are required on their side for peace.

We [Israel people] always blame Moses, that he was our greatest leader and one of the most gifted people in the world. He brought us the moral code and so on, belief in one God, but then he was a bad navigator. He brought us to the only part of the Middle East without any gas, without any oil.

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.

I`m very proud to be the prime minister of all of Israel`s citizens, Arabs and Jews alike.

The Czech Republic stood with the U.S., Canada and a handful of other countries against the prevailing international current, but history has shown us time and again that what is right is not what is popular.

We'll attack anyone who tries to harm our citizens

Every time an Arab leader truly wanted peace, they got it. If the Palestinians truly want peace, we will make peace.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Israeli government has proved over the past year its commitment to peace, both in words and deeds. By contrast, the Palestinians are posing preconditions for renewing the diplomatic process in a way they have not done over the course of 16 years.

Most of the approaches to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, have been directed at trying to resolve the most complex problems, like refugees and Jerusalem, which is akin to building the pyramid from the top down.

I say that to my colleagues, by the way, in the internal Cabinet meetings, I say, 'Look, I want to be very clear about what I want.' I just - I don't want a peace process, I want a peace result.

I don't think you can rely on Iran. I don't think you can rely on other radicals like the Taliban. They dispatched Al Qaida to bomb New York and Washington. What were they thinking? Were they that stupid? They weren't stupid. There is an irrationality there, and there is madness in this method.

Certainly the international community is putting a lot of pressure on Iran and making clear that its nuclear program must stop. If it stops with the sanctions, the combinations of sanctions, diplomacy, other pressures, I, as the prime minister of Israel, will be the happiest person in the world.

So I think we should stay focused on the real problem in the Middle East. It's not Israel. It's these dictatorships that are developing nuclear weapons with the specific goal of wiping Israel away.

My first name, Benjamin, dates back a thousand years earlier to Benjamin - Binyamin - the son of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. Jacob and his 12 sons roamed these same hills of Judea and Sumeria 4,000 years ago, and there's been a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since.

I can tell you one thing, Iran is closer to developing nuclear weapons today than it was a week ago, or a month ago or a year ago. It's just moving on with its efforts.

But so far, you know who's been violating the nuclear nonproliferation pact day and night? Those who signed it. Iran, Iraq, Libya and Iran violates it while calling for Israel's destruction and racing to develop atomic weapons to that end.