A little more than a hundred years ago, "Tel Aviv" was not a city. It was a title of a novel written by an author. The "Return to Zion" was a name of another novel. There was a bookshelf. There was no country. There was no state. There was no nation. There was no physical Jewish reality in this country.

Recently with IS and Islamist fanaticism, it has become easy for the Israeli government to simply push the Palestinian struggle for self-determination into the same ranks as these fundamentalist movements.

We have to carry through to the next day and hope that we will be okay tomorrow as we are today and in the meantime, enjoy life.

My dream is much more modest than the dreams of the founding fathers. My dream is for Israel to live in peace with its neighbors and at peace with itself. This will be sufficient for me.

I'm a great believer in compromises. I do not believe in capitulation.

On my parents scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.

Not now, for the last three thousand years, Hebrew has been penetrated and fertilized by ancient Semitic languages - by Aramaic, by Greek, by Latin, by Arabic, by Yiddish, by Latino, by German, by Russian, by English, I could go on and on. It's very much like English.