Israel is a tremendous success story. When I arrived, there were 600,000 Jews living here. Today there are close to 6 million. We have one of the world's top high-tech industries and a high standard of living. There is only one thing we haven't achieved: Making the country safer for Jews.

Israel is a long way from facing a threat to its very existence. We are too strong, both economically and militarily, for that. If anything threatens Israel, it is this form of paranoid thought that makes us think: "Oh God, they're going to kill us in two seconds! What should we do?"

There is a wind of change, and if there is a wind of change on domestic issues, there is going to be a wind of change on Palestinian issues as well, it's not something done in one leap, it's a triple jump, but it's coming.

I used to have so many opinions before I learned the facts.

The greatest tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that everyone knows how it will end. We will divide up the region.

I felt that we had become a society ruled by sectors, by interest groups: Whoever's connected to the Israeli government gets more.

When I introduced my economic plan for the first time, people had mixed views because it's the largest cut in the history of Israeli budgets. We have a big deficit caused by the fact that the former government took upon itself too many obligations.