In the midst of fighting there is no place for public debate.

It is not worth the paper it is written on unless it is backed by the kind of force that will make the other side consider the penalties too heavy to break the agreement.

[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat.

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.

I think the fact that we have been focussing on politics quite a lot and the tumult of politics rather than what we should be doing in terms of policy has made, I think, voters quite grumpy.

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

There is no way of finding the middle ground, even with the best intentions of the world. Our most sensible policy is to stall.