Israel was founded as a refuge for the Jewish people, but today it isn't a safe place. It is safer to be Jew in New York.
We are one family, and the connection between all Jews, all over the world, is very important to the State of Israel.
The western mantra is that Israel seeks negotiations without preconditions, while the Palestinians refuse. The opposite is more accurate.
The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim - or wish to, at least - that Lord Balfour's Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn't just mean the left-hand bit that became Israel.
President Obama has greatly contributed to Israel's security.
Israel will not and should not leave until it is clear that the West Bank can be policed by Palestinians and that the region will not be a source of terrorism against Israel, as Gaza and South Lebanon became when Israel left there.
Twenty percent of students in Israel's schools are haredim; another 20% are retired; another 20% are Arab. I have no problem with any of them.
The fact is that the United States does not need Israel. Our special relationship was not forged, as it was with Great Britain, in two world wars, not to mention a common language and, in significant respects, culture. It is based on warmth, emotion, shared values - and, not to be dismissed, a potent domestic lobby.
Throughout the 1990s, Israel and the United States devoted vast resources to weakening the nuclear links between Russia and Iran and applied enormous diplomatic pressure on Russia to cut off the relationship.
If I were in the government, I would persuade the prime minister to see the beauty in the fact that people see Israel as a haven - from their sadness to their hope.
I think sometimes we underestimate just how vulnerable Israel is on the public-relations front. That's why they spend so much money on propaganda. And that's why they panic every time they feel like they're losing the propaganda war.
The nation of Israel has had enough one-time leaders.
The scale of time for a politician runs between one primary and the next, and in Israel, this means two to three years because elections almost never take place once every four years as stipulated by law. The timetable for a system of research is completely different.
The conflict between secular Zionism and the settler movement did not appear overnight following Israel's conquests in the 1967 war, for there was an argument that bridged the gap: security.
And Israel, being a tiny, small country, of course has interest to strengthen - we have interest to strengthen our relations with other countries, mostly countries that were hostile for many, many years.
The defense of the West Bank by Arab forces would be a truly suicidal enterprise. The late King Hussein understood these facts well. Until 1967, he was careful to keep most of his forces east of the Jordan River. When he momentarily forgot these realities in 1967, it took Israel just three days of fighting to remind him of them.
I have no sentiments for nationality or for soil. But I grew up in Israel, so those things are in my blood, and I want to be part of Israeli culture.
The reality is that Israel is a multi-ethnic, multireligious society, and it makes no sense to insist as a precondition for peace that its neighbors recognize it as 'the Jewish state.'
The moral equation strongly tells everyone who understands freedom, who understands morality, that Israel is engaging in a just war in defense of its people and its freedom.
The missile that downed the Malaysian plane, they say, is a Russian-made missile. But the weapons that are used in the barbarism in the barbaric act against the Palestinians were made by the West, and nobody is blaming them. Nobody talks about it; not even the U.N. Security Council can pass a resolution against Israel!
In the Jewish tradition, there is at the same time Jerusalem in the heavens and Jerusalem on the ground. Jerusalem is a living city, but also the heart, the soul of the Jewish people and the state of Israel.
There should be no doubt why Israel, our best friend and greatest ally in the Middle East, has determined that Iran poses an existential threat.
Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic.
One can criticize the Israeli government, but it is not fair to judge the people of Israel.
For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights.
The American people do not want their taxpayer dollars funding any activity that runs counter to the security of our nation or our ally Israel.
You have to show Israel that it's not going to be forced to do things it doesn't want to do and can't do.
Jewish people are tough people. They believe in something and believe it really strong, and I find it fascinating that a small country like Israel is as powerful as it is.
It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
We must draw a distinction between understanding and supporting Israel's values and existence, and criticising any Israeli government's policy.
So I decided the only place I can speak to the world is from outside Israel.
And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the same things about the Palestinians, they don't want what we want. And I never bought it as a reporter and I don't buy it as a novelist. I think, you know, the sound of somebody crying for their lost child sounds the same.
I covered the first Gulf War in Saudi Arabia and Israel for ABC News.
Loving the country, wanting to preserve the culture and identity - protecting the interests of the Americans in America, of the French in France, of the Israelis in Israel - seems to me perfectly legitimate.
Hamas is really a problem for the Palestinians and for Egypt more than Israel.
Sooner or later, Israel will have to defeat Hamas. There is no way around it.
