If you ask me 'What is the one great move you can make to improve the Israeli economy?' of course it will be signing an agreement with the Arab world about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This will change everything.
The greatest tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that everyone knows how it will end. We will divide up the region.
I used to have so many opinions before I learned the facts.
Being a Jew and an Israeli are inseparable things.
Any man who is not a communist at the age of 20 is a fool.
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.
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.
Orthodox Jews often ask you: "Are you an Israeli first, or a Jew?" I see no difference between the two. After all, I'm also simultaneously the son of my parents, the husband of my wife and the father of my children.
I decided to go into politics because my children are growing up, and I became worried about the ways things are being handled in this country. I felt there's a lost generation of people who feel misrepresented, and that they're doing their best for the country but the country is not doing its best for them. We are all looking at our children and wondering whether or not they will see their future in Israel. They looked at the country before the last elections and saw it becoming more and more Orthodox. There was a strong sense of unfairness.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is the biggest problem, but small problems shape the daily lives of Israelis. Unless there happens to be a war going on, the Arab-Israeli conflict is irrelevant in daily life.
The majority of Israelis want change, the Netanyahu era is coming to an end. That's not because security issues don't matter but because social and economic issues are dominating the agenda.
When you look at the history of wars, they ultimately revolve around one claim: "My god is better than yours."
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.
I felt that we had become a society ruled by sectors, by interest groups: Whoever's connected to the Israeli government gets more.
Me and apparently a lot of other people felt that the people who should benefit most from the country are the people who contribute the most, which is the middle class, who are drafted into the army, spend three years there and 25 years in the reserves. That is why I had enough votes to create out of nowhere the second-largest party in the country.
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?"
I don't think Israel's becoming more religious, I think its politics is becoming more religious. There's a difference.
There is a difference between a small community being herded into a park and murdered and all of these communities joining forces to make sure that something like that will not happen again.
