Address by Prime Minister Netanyahu to AIPAC's 39th Conference- Washington

The thrust of the address was Israel's security concerns in view of the disturbances that took place on the West Bank in early May. Prime Minister Netanyahu also stressed Israel's compliance with previous commitments entered into in the Hebron accords, while the Palestinians had failed to keep their part of the agreement. He was not opposed to Palestinian self-determination, but said it must not be unbridled. Excerpts:

Only last week, there were bloody riots in Jerusalem, in Bethlehem and Gaza, and again, they resulted in the tragic loss of life. I think that every innocent person that dies, every child that dies - I don't care if it's an Israeli child or a Palestinian child - that is a tragedy, a tragedy for that life cut down, a tragedy for that family, for those mothers and fathers: their pain for the rest of their life.

No one hurts more than we do when life is lost, no matter whose life is lost. But we cannot ignore another fact, and that is that these were not riots protesting the dispute over percentages or protesting that the Oslo process is not moving fast enough or delays - no. You know what those riots were about? Do any of you?

Ah - the handful who go beyond the press, that's good. Let me tell you.

These were riots that were sponsored and organized by the Palestinian Authority to protest the actual existence, the founding, of the State of Israel fifty years ago. They gave it a name - al-Nakba - "the Great Disaster". This is over the partition resolution when Israel was a tiny country.

They refused then to accept Israel in any form, in any shape, in any boundary. This was and remains the source of the conflict between us and our Arab neighbors. And to the extent that we have that remaining opposition to the Jewish state, it is an opposition to the Jewish state - period.

Yet what we see when the Palestinian Authority that is supposed to be at peace with us is organizing these riots, that means that there are those there who still harbor the basic hostility to the basic existence of the State. We cannot ignore these riots against the very survival and existence of the State of Israel, and we cannot ignore what motivates them, just as we cannot ignore those demonstrations on behalf of Saddam Hussein that we saw just a few months ago and his calls to annihilate the State.

We cannot ignore such riots because they are not isolated incidents. They follow a pattern of total disregard of the Palestinian Authority for the commitments and obligations of the Oslo process.

I don't know if you're aware of it, but the Palestinian Authority made commitments to us three times - at least three times, some of them four and five times - first, in the Gaza-Jericho Accord of 1994; again in the Oslo II Accord of 1995; and yet again, in the Hebron Protocol of 1997, which I was a party to.

None of those commitments, to date, have been fulfilled, and they must be fulfilled if peace is to have any meaning. If contracts, treaties and peace are to have any meaning, the Palestinian Authority must fulfill its commitments. And the first commitment they must fulfill is that they must abolish the Palestinian National Charter.

If they tell me, "But it's hard. It's hard for Arafat to convene several hundred members of the Palestine National Council", I say, "So what?" This is the test of peace. If Yasser Arafat cannot get the governing body of the Palestinian Authority to meet and ratify the letter that he sent to President Clinton itemizing those items of the PLO Charter that will be thrown into the dustbin so that Israel no longer is destined for destruction in their eyes, if he cannot do a simple act like that, this is not a real peace. We insist, and we stand on the fulfillment of the commitment given to us, that the Palestine National Charter be abolished. It must he abolished.

And equally, they must fulfill their other obligations. They must uproot the terrorist infrastructure. They must transfer wanted fugitives to Israel. They must confiscate all illegal weapons - and that's not by passing a law saying that people can hold Kalashnikovs legally, things like that. They have to take possession of control of law, of order. They must live up to what they promised us. They must stop incitement - just as we have seen in recent days, in recent years.

They must turn toward peace. They must clean up Palestinian textbooks. They must show Israel on those maps. How can you make peace with a country that doesn't even exist?

This is what has to be done - in word, in deed, in inner conviction. They must live up to the contract.

I believe that Palestinian compliance is one of the two necessary foundations for moving the peace process forward. Mind you, our government is not asking for a single new commitment. Nothing is new. This is the same commitment; these are the same promises that were given to us, once, twice, thrice. It's about time that we have Palestinian compliance. This is foundation number one for the advancement of the peace.

You may ask, "What about Israeli compliance?" to which I answer, "We've given and we've fulfilled what we promised to give and what we promised to fulfill." A full 98 percent of the Palestinians now live in land that we transferred over to the Palestinians. There is no more so-called "occupation". All the Palestinians now live under Palestinian jurisdiction. We promised to do it: we did it.

We further promised to deliberate and consider further redeployment. We made a decision on the first redeployment, applauded by the United States, exactly on the date that we promised to do in the Hebron protocol, two weeks after we redeployed from Hebron. We redeployed from Hebron and we released women prisoners, a very difficult decision for me personally because these were terrorist women who had murdered innocent people. I've staked a good portion of my life and my own beliefs against such an action. But this was agreed upon by the previous government, and we did that, too.

We've allowed Palestinians to work in Israel in unprecedented numbers. There are now 60,000 legal workers and about twice that number altogether with illegal workers - more workers in Israel than at the time before the intifada.

We've doubled the number of merchants who can have VIP passes so they don't have to go through checkpoints. We've done all that because we believe in peace and we want peace, and we believe in compliance. We've complied: they have not. We want peace for something, not for nothing. And we certainly don't believe in trading land for terrorism.

Which brings me to the second point. If compliance is the first foundation to peace with the Palestinians, then the second is security. We've agreed and we're prepared to redeploy from additional lands. But we know that no peace agreement that is struck in which we are asked to endanger our defenses, to erode the barricades that defend the Jewish state - no peace treaty like that would endure and would be worth signing. That is why all successive American administrations have agreed with us that it is Israel, and Israel alone, that must determine its security needs - and Israel, and Israel alone, that must determine its redeployment.

I know that many consider the equation differently. They say to us, "You know, the real security for Israel is peace." They don't live in the Middle East. Peace is a tremendous, tremendous object. It's a tremendous desire. Peace agreements, a piece of paper, is important. We strive for it. Normalization is important. We strive for it. But normalization in our part of the world amidst undemocratic regimes is reversible like that [snaps his fingers]. A ruler, a government on the other side decides to stop normalization, it stops. Like that. They cut down the number of tourists like that. They cut down the number of trade exchanges like that. They cut you out of a book fair like that. Normalization is an add-on. It's a tremendous boost. But because we don't live in a democratic environment, the fact that we have people-to-people exchanges does not mean much because the people don't determine policy. They don't elect the governments, and as a result, what determines whether we can have peace in the first place is the ability to deter the violation of the peace, the ability to deter war.

In the Middle East, the foundation for peace is security. Without security, peace is meaningless. Peace without security is a sham. It will not last. It is not something that we can ever accept. What we have sought is to continue the negotiations, and indeed, to continue the process, by transferring to Palestinian control only those lands that are not vital for Israel's security. And when I talk about the importance to Israel's security, this is not an abstract concept. It means that we have to be responsible so that a bus of forty or fifty children is not blown up because of a bad decision that we took, so that a plane landing in Ben-Gurion Airport or in Jerusalem Airport is not blown up by a shoulder-fired missile from terrain around that airport that we do not control because of a rash decision. It means that a housewife in Tel Aviv can open the tap and there's water running to it, and it's not been dried up because of a rash decision that handed over control of our aquifers to the wrong hands. It means that our early warning stations will be in our control so that we can see incoming aircraft or missiles, and we cannot make a rash decision on that, either.

These are not abstract or tactical or stratagems that we use in order to build up some number. It is a real consideration for real security that we know is important for the daily life, for running the lives and protecting the lives of our children, but also for our grandchildren. Israel must retain those defensive buffers that give it security against terrorism and against any future attack.

This is what will keep the peace. This is what has brought the peace. If I had to say, what is the day, the one day, that peace became possible in the Middle East between Israel and its neighbors, I would say that day was June 12th, 1967. Because on that day, Israel pushed the border from the suburbs of Tel Aviv to the banks of the Jordan, across a stone wall a thousand meters high, the mountains of Samaria and Judea, and made peace possible, because it made successful conquest impossible.

When we seek now a solution for our conflict with the Palestinians, we seek a solution that will give the people who are living on that wall, the Palestinians, the ability to govern their lives, but not any ability to threaten our life. It is possible to do that. There are ways and concepts of doing that. But one of them is not unbridled self-determination.

If every national group - and there are about fifty of them in fifty countries right now - were to have a state unlimited in power, fully sovereign, fully independent because they claim it, then the international water system would collapse in a fortnight.

We must find a different arrangement where all of the powers the Palestinians need to govern themselves are in their possession. Some of the powers are shared between us - those that relate, for example, to environment: mosquitoes don't know boundaries or the underwater tables of water.

But some of the powers, those that relate to security, those that relate to the external defense of the country, those that prohibit the Palestinian entity from making pacts with Iraq or with Iran, those powers remain with Israel. This is a real formula for real peace in the real Middle East.

Source: Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs