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Netanyahu: We Are Sympathetic to Reform, But Cautious

(Prime Minister's Office) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the European Friends of Israel on Feb. 7: India, China and Israel are three of the oldest civilizations. There are more than 1.2 billion Chinese in the world and more than 1 billion Indians. There are about 13 million Jews in the world. That's odd because we numbered about 10% of the population of the Roman Empire, so by extrapolation we should have had about a quarter of a billion Jews today. So what happened? The Chinese kept China - they had a diaspora, but they kept China. The Indians kept India. We Jews lost our homeland and were scattered to the far corners of the earth and subjected to a horrific campaign of persecution, pogroms, displacement, murder, until the last and worst pogrom, the Holocaust. For the last two thousand years we've been trying to get back to our ancestral homeland and reestablish a sovereign existence for our people so we can continue our national life with our heritage and our values of freedom. We are sympathetic to all those who are working to reform their own societies and to bring them into the modern world. Yet history also argues for caution when it comes to revolutions. We know of many examples of anti-democratic forces that co-opted a people's genuine desire for liberty and instead established brutal regimes that snuffed out liberty. In the case of Egypt, there are many possible outcomes beyond the liberal, democratic models that we take for granted in our own countries. In our pursuit of peace, we have to ensure that there are rock-solid security arrangements, both to protect the peace, to reflect the reality on the ground today, but also to reflect the fact that that reality can change tomorrow.
2011-02-09 00:00:00
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