I want to arrive at the possibility of peace with the Syrians, and when I believe that the conditions are right, I will not miss the opportunity.

We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies.

I know the war in Iraq is controversial in the States, but for us in the Middle East it has made a great and significant impact.

I was not born to be prime minister, and I'm not going to stay here until the end of my life. I'm too young for that.

It is important that democracy in Lebanon is protected and that Hezbollah will not be supported by outside forces like Syria and Iran.

We can never totally return to the indefensible pre-1967 borders, ... We simply cannot afford to make Israel 14.48 km (9 miles) wide again at its center. We can't allow the Palestinians to be a couple of [miles] from [Tel Aviv's] Ben-Gurion Airport in the age of shoulder-fire missiles with the capacity to shoot down jumbo jets. But that doesn't mean we must remain in every corner of the West Bank or in Gaza, where fewer than 10,000 Jews, living next to 1.3 million Palestinians, have been protected by twice as many soldiers.

For thousands of years, we Jews have been nourished and sustained by a yearning for our historic land. I, like many others, was raised with a deep conviction that the day would never come when we would have to relinquish parts of the land of our forefathers. I believed and to this day still believe in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land.