Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel was the Jewish homeland and that was the claim to the land, independent of the Holocaust, which he said, could have been prevented if there had been a state of Israel. He said Israel did not want to impose itself on the Arabs of the Palestinian Authority.

The prime minister said the lesson of the pullout from Gaza showed that a Palestinian Authority state must not only recognize Israel but be unarmed so that Israel did not face the threat of missiles on the center of country that the south faces. He called on security guarantees from the international community, headed by the United States.

Netanyahu called for a united Jerusalem and said land issues would be determined in negotiations. In the meanwhile, he said Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria would not be expanded and the people that live there should not be demonized.

(more to come)