The people of Israel are entitled, as is any other nation, to live in peace and safety.
Interpretation
All nations, including Israel, have the right to exist safely and in harmony.
This quote emphasizes the universal right of every nation to peace and security. It highlights that the people of Israel, like any other community around the world, deserve to live free from violence and fear, reflecting a broader principle of human rights and dignity for all nations.
In practice
In a speech addressing global leaders, I could quote Jonathan Sacks to emphasize the need for peace among nations.
Stabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.
Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.
Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.
Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.
As prime minister, I changed Israel's position on peace negotiations. I made it clear that we are ready to go along with Resolution 242 of the U.N. Security Council, which specifies withdrawal to secure and recognized boundaries in the context of peace.
Peace, like charity, begins at home.
Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his "right mind." p. 31
For our part, we shall continue to work for the new dawn when all the Children of Abraham and their descendants are living together in the birthplace of their three great monotheistic religions, a life free from fear, a life free from want - a life in peace.
If you want to bring an end to long-standing conflict, you have to be prepared to compromise.
The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than by compulsion; if in the process we learn to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task.
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