You don't make friends with friends. You have got to make friends with your enemies.

I invite President Assad to come to Jerusalem and to speak with me, with our parliament, with whomever he wants to speak in Israel and in the territories among the Palestinians.

We did not think that [Egyptian President] Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai on May 14 would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.

I would like Israel to be a Jewish state, and therefore not to annex over 2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to Israel, which will make Israel a bi-national state.

I admire King Hussein his courage in leading his country for a long time.

Israel is no longer a people that dwells alone, and has to join the global journey toward peace, reconciliation and international cooperation.

I have been interested in the 12th century since my 20s when it was very fashionable to say of anybody with whom you disagreed, which was basically anybody over the age of 30, "One of the great minds of the 12th century", and one day I thought, "I don't know anything about the 12 century." So I started buying books, reading about it, and I discovered it was a period of great flowering, it was a Renaissance before what we think is the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance of the 16th century.