[The decision to travel to Washington and deliver the speech] has injected a degree of partisanship, which is not only unfortunate, I think it's destructive of the fabric of the relationship

I will say that I think Israel enjoys strong bipartisan support in the United States. It's really above and beyond American politics.

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.

Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.

We want to end this misery of the Palestinian people in order for us really to live with dignity as human beings in an independent state side by side with the Israeli state.

Iran is a country that talks about, denies the Holocaust, promises to wipe out Israel, is engaged in terror throughout the world. This is a regime that is giving vent to the worst impulses that you see right now in the Middle East. They deny the rights of women, deny democracy, brutalize their own people, don't give freedom of religion.

All I can tell you is that Israel's position in the Arab world has changed because they no longer see Israel as their enemy, but as their ally, in their indispensable battle against the forces of militant Islam, either those led by Iran, the Shiites, or - and those led by Daesh - by ISIS, the militant Sunnis.