Opening and Closing Statements by Yitzhak Shamir, Prime Minister of Israel, Madrid Conference, 31 October and 1 November 1991

Opening Statement, 31 October

Distinguished Co-Chairmen, Ministers, Members of Delegations to the Conference, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is an honor to represent the people of Israel at this historic moment; and a privilege to address this opening of peace talks between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

I would like to express our profound appreciation to our Spanish hosts for their hospitality, and for making this gathering for peace possible. In its two thousand years of wandering, the Jewish people paused here for several hundred years until they were expelled 500 years ago. It was in Spain that the great Jewish poet and philosopher, Yehuda Halevi, expressed the yearning for Zion of all Jews, in the words: "My heart is in the East, while I am in the utter most West."

I would also like to extend our appreciation to the co-sponsors of this conference - to the U.S., which has maintained a strong friend ship with Israel in an alliance that has overcome occasional differences. And to the Soviet Union, which saved the lives of many Jews during the Second World War, and has now opened its gates to the repatriation of Jews to their ancient homeland.

The people of Israel look to this palace with great anticipation and expectation. We pray that this meeting will mark the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the Middle East; that it will signal the end of hostility, violence, terror and war; that it will bring dialogue, accommodation, coexistence and - above all - peace.

Distinguished Co-Chairmen, Ladies and Gentlemen,

To appreciate the meaning of peace for the people of Israel, one has to view to day's Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel against the back ground of our history.

Jews have been persecuted through out the ages in almost every continent. Some countries barely tolerated us, others op pressed, tortured, slaughtered, and exiled us.

This century saw the Nazi regime set out to exterminate us. The Sho'ah, the Holocaust, the catastrophic genocide of unprecedented proportions which destroyed a third of our people, became possible because no one defended us. Being home less, we were also defense less.

But it was not the Holocaust which made the world community recognize our rightful claim to the Land of Israel. In fact, the rebirth of the State of Israel so soon after the Holocaust has made the world forget that our claim is immemorial. We are the only people who have lived in the Land of Israel without interruption for nearly 4,000 years; we are the only people, except for a short Crusader kingdom, who have had an independent sovereignty in this land; we are the only people for whom Jerusalem has been a capital; we are the only people whose sacred places are only in the Land of Israel.

No nation has expressed its bond with its land with as much intensity and consistency as we have. For millennia our people repeated at every occasion the cry of the Psalmist: "If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning." For millennia we have encouraged each other with the greeting, "next year in Jerusalem." For millennia our prayers, literature, and folklore have expressed powerful longing to re turn to our land. Only Eretz-Israel, the Land of Israel, is our true homeland. Any other country, no matter how hospitable, is still a diaspora, a temporary station on the way home.

To others, it was not an attractive land. No one wanted it. Mark Twain described it only a hundred years ago as "a desolate country, which sits in sack cloth and ashes, a silent mournful expanse, which not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life."

The Zionist movement gave political expression to our claim to the Land of Israel. And in 1922 the League of Nations recognized the justice of this claim. It understood the compelling historic imperative of establishing a Jewish home land in the Land of Israel. The United Nations Organization re affirmed this recognition after the Second World War.

Regrettably, the Arab leaders, whose friendship we wanted most, opposed a Jewish state in the region. With a few distinguished exceptions, they claimed that the Land of Israel is part of the Arab domain that stretches from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf.

In defiance of international will and legality, the Arab regimes attempted to overrun and destroy the Jewish state even before it was born. The Arab spokesman at the U.N. declared that the establishment of a Jewish state would cause a bloodbath which would make the slaughters of Ghengis Khan pale into insignificance.

In its Declaration of Independence on May 15, 1948, Israel stretched out its hand in peace to its Arab neighbors, calling for an end to war and bloodshed. In response, seven Arab states invaded Israel. The U.N. resolution that partitioned the country was thus violated and effectively annulled.

The U.N. did not create Israel. The Jewish State came into being because the tiny Jewish community, in what was Mandatory Palestine, rebelled against foreign imperialist rule. We did not conquer a foreign land. We repulsed the Arab onslaught, prevented Israel's annihilation, declared its independence, and established a viable state and government institutions within a very short time.

After their attack on Israel failed, the Arab regimes continued their fight against Israel with boycott, blockade, terrorism, and outright war. Soon after the establishment of Israel, they turned against the Jewish communities in Arab countries. A wave of oppression, expropriation, and expulsion caused a mass exodus of some 800,000 Jews from lands they had inhabited from before the rise of Islam. Most of these Jewish refugees, stripped of their considerable possessions, came to Israel. They were welcomed by the Jewish State. They were given shelter and support, and they were integrated into Israeli society together with half a million survivors of the European Holocaust.

The Arab regimes' rejection of Israel's existence in the Middle East, and the continuous war they have waged against it are part of history. There have been attempts to rewrite this history which depict the Arabs as victims and Israel as the aggressor. Like attempts to deny the Holocaust, they will fail. With the demise of totalitarian regimes in most of the world, this perversion of History will disappear. In their war against Israel's existence, the Arab governments took advantage of the Cold War. They enlisted the military, economic, and political support of the Communist world against Israel, and they turned a local, regional conflict into an inter national powder-keg. This caused the Middle East to be flooded with arms, which fueled wars and turned the area into a dangerous battle ground and a testing arena for sophisticated weapons. At the U.N., the Arab states mustered the support of other Muslim countries and the Soviet Bloc. Together they had an automatic majority for countless resolutions that perverted history, paraded fiction as fact, and made a travesty of the U.N. and its Charter.

Arab hostility to Israel has also brought tragic human suffering to the Arab people. Tens of thou sands have been killed and wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs who lived in Mandatory Pales tine were encouraged by their own leaders to flee from their homes. Their suffering is a blot on humanity. No decent person, least of all a Jew of this era, can be oblivious to this suffering.

Several hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs live in slums known as refugee camps in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. Attempts by Israel to rehabilitate and house them have been defeated by Arab objections. Nor has their fate been any better in Arab states. Unlike the Jewish refugees who came to Israel from Arab countries, most Arab refugees were neither welcomed nor integrated by their hosts. Only the Kingdom of Jordan awarded them citizenship. Their plight has been used as a political weapon against Israel.

The Arabs who have chosen to re main in Israel - Christian, Muslim and Druze - have become full-fledged citizens enjoying equal rights and representation in the legislature, in the judiciary, and in all walks of life.

We, who over the centuries were denied access to our holy places, respect the religion of all faiths in our country. Our law guarantees freedom of worship and protects the holy places of every religion.

Distinguished Co-Chairmen, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I stand before you today in yet another quest for peace, not only on behalf of the State of Israel, but in the name of the entire Jewish people, that has maintained an unbreakable bond with the Land of Israel for almost 4,000 years.

Our pursuit of accommodation and peace has been relentless. For us, the in gathering of Jews into their ancient homeland, their integration in our society, and the creation of the necessary infrastructure are at the very top of our national agenda. A nation that faces such a gigantic challenge would most naturally desire peace with all its neighbors. Since the beginning of Zionism, we have formulated innumerable peace proposals and plans. All of them were rejected. The first crack in the wall of hostility occurred in 1977 when the late President Anwar Sadat of Egypt decided to break the taboo and come to Jerusalem. His gesture was reciprocated with enthusiasm by the people and government of Israel, headed by Menachem Begin. This development led to the Camp David Accords and the Treaty of Peace between Egypt and Israel. Four years later, in May 1983, an agreement was signed with the lawful government of Lebanon. Unfortunately, this agreement was not fulfilled, because of out side intervention. But the precedent was set, and we looked forward to courageous steps, similar to those of Anwar Sadat. Regrettably, not one Arab leader has seen fit to come forward and respond to our call for peace.

Today's gathering is a result of a sustained American effort, based on our own peace plan of May 1989 which, in turn, was founded on the Camp David Accords.

According to the American initiative, the purpose of this meeting is to launch direct peace negotiations between Israel and each of its neighbors, and multilateral negotiations on regional issues among all the countries of the region.

We have always believed that only direct, bilateral talks can bring peace. We have agreed to precede such talks with this ceremonial conference, but we hope that Arab consent to direct, bilateral talks indicates an understanding that there is no other way to peace. In the Middle East, this has special meaning, because such talks imply mutual acceptance; and the root cause of the conflict is the Arab refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

The multilateral talks that would accompany the bilateral negotiations are a vital component in the process. In these talks, the essential ingredients of coexistence and regional cooperation will be discussed. There cannot be genuine peace in our region unless these regional issues are addressed and resolved.

We believe the goal of the bilateral negotiations is to sign peace treaties between Israel and its neighbors, and to reach an agreement on interim self-government arrangements with the Palestinian Arabs. But nothing can be achieved without goodwill. I appeal to the Arab leaders, those who are here and those who have not yet joined the process: Show us and the world that you accept Israel's existence. Demonstrate your readiness to accept Israel as a permanent entity in the region. Let the people in our region hear you speak in the language of reconciliation, coexistence, and peace with Israel.

In Israel there is an almost total consensus for the need for peace. We only differ on the best ways to achieve it. In most Arab countries the opposite seems to be true: the only differences are over the ways to push Israel into a defenseless position and, ultimately, to destruction. We would like to see in your countries an end to poisonous preachings against Israel. We would like to see an indication of the kind of hunger for peace which characterizes Israeli society.

We appeal to you to renounce the Jihad against Israel. We appeal to you to denounce the PLO covenant which calls for Israel's destruction. We appeal to you to condemn declarations that call for Israel's annihilation, like the one issued by the rejectionist conference in Teheran last week. We appeal to you to let Jews, who wish to leave your countries, go.

And we address a call to the Palestinian Arabs: Renounce violence and terrorism; use the universities in the administered territories - whose existence was made possible only by Israel - for learning and development, not agitation and violence; stop exposing your children to danger by sending them to throw bombs and stones at soldiers and civilians.

Just two days ago, we were reminded that Palestinian terrorism is still rampant, when a mother of seven children and a father of four were slaughtered in cold blood. We cannot remain indifferent and be expected to talk with people involved in such repulsive activities. We appeal to you to shun dictators like Saddam Hussein who aim to destroy Israel; stop the brutal torture and murder of those who do not agree with you; allow us, and the world community, to build decent housing for the people who now live in refugee camps. Above all, we hope you finally realize that you could have been at this table long ago, soon after the Camp David accords were first concluded, had you chosen dialogue instead of violence, co-existence instead of terrorism.

Ladies and Gentlemen: We come to this process with an open heart, sincere intentions, and great expectations. We are committed to negotiating without interruption until an agreement is reached. There will be problems, obstacles, crises, and conflicting claims. But it is better to talk than to shed blood. Wars have not solved anything in our region. They have only caused misery, suffering, bereavement, and hatred.

We know our partners to the negotiations will make territorial demands on Israel. But, as an examination of the conflict's long history makes clear, its nature is not territorial. It raged well be fore Israel acquired Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and the Golan in a defensive war. There was no hint of recognition of Israel before the war in 1967, when the territories in question were not under Israeli control.

We are a nation of four million. The Arab nations from the Atlantic to the Gulf number 170 million. We control only 28,000 square kilometers. The Arabs possess a land mass of 14 million square kilometers. The issue is not territory but our existence.

It will be regrettable if the talks focus primarily and exclusively on territory. It is the quickest way to an impasse. What we need, first and foremost, is the building of confidence, the removal of the danger of confrontation, and the development of relations in as many spheres as possible.

The issues are complex, and the negotiations will be lengthy and difficult. We submit that the best venue for the talks is in our region, in close proximity to the decision-makers, not in a foreign land. We invite our partners to this process to come to Israel for the first round of talks. On our part, we are ready to go to Jordan, to Lebanon, and to Syria for the same purpose. There is no better way to make peace than to talk in each other's home. Avoiding such talks is a denial of the purpose of the negotiations. I would welcome a positive answer from the representatives of these states here and now. We must learn to live together. We must learn to live without war, without bloodshed. Judaism has given the world not only the belief in one God, but the idea that all men and women are created in God's image. There is no greater sin than to ravage this image by shedding blood.

I am sure that there is no Arab mother who wants her son to die in battle - just as there is no Jewish mother who wants her son to die in war. I believe every mother wants her children to learn the art of living, not the science of war.

For many hundreds of years, wars, deep antagonisms, and terrible suffering cursed this continent on which we meet. The nations of Europe saw the rise of dictators and their defeat after lengthy and painful struggles. Now, they are together - former bitter enemies - in a united community. They are discussing the good of the community, co operating in all matters, acting almost as one unit. I envy them. I would like to see such a community rise in the Middle East.

And I believe that, despite all differences between us, we should be able, gradually, to build a united regional community. Today it is a dream - but we have seen, in our own lifetime, some of the most fantastic dreams become reality. Today, the gulf separating the two sides is still too wide; the Arab hostility to Israel too deep; the lack of trust too immense, to permit a dramatic, quick solution. But, we must start on the long road to reconciliation with this first step in the peace process. We are convinced that human nature prefers peace to war and belligerence. We, who have had to fight seven wars and sacrifice many thousands of lives, glorify neither death nor war. The Jewish faith exalts peace even to the extent that it considers it a synonym for the Creator Himself. We yearn for peace. We pray for peace.

We believe the blessing of peace can turn the Middle East into a paradise; a center of cultural, scientific, medical and technological creativity. We can foresee a period of great economic progress that would put an end to misery, hunger and illiteracy. It could put the Middle East - the cradle of civilization - on the road to a new era. Such a goal merits our devotion and dedication for as long as it is necessary until, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, we shall be able to turn "swords into ploughshares" and bring the blessings of peace to all the peoples of our region. Let me conclude with the words of the same prophet: "Peace, peace, both for far and near, says the Lord."

Distinguished Co-Chairmen, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let us resolve to leave this hall with a united determination that from now on, any differences we may have will be solved only by negotiations, goodwill, and mutual tolerance. Let us declare, here and now, an end to war, to belligerency, and to hostility. Let us march forward together, to reconciliation and peace.

Closing Statement, 1 November 1991

Distinguished Co-Chairmen, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me first apologize, as I have to leave this hall immediately after my statement, together with some of my colleagues, in order to return to Israel before sunset, in time for the advent of our holy day of rest. I trust no one will see in this a sign of disrespect.

Let me also express again our thanks and appreciation to our Spanish hosts and to the co-sponsors for putting so much effort in making this conference possible.

For two days, we have sat in this hall, armed with a lot of patience, to listen to what our Arab neighbors have to say.

We have heard much criticism and many charges. We can respond to each and every charge, to every misrepresentation of history and fact - and there were quite a few - and we can refute every contention. We, too, can cite morality, justice, and international legality in our favor. But is this what we have come here for? Such futile exchanges and rebuttals have been taking place during the last forty-three years at the U.N. and in countless international gatherings. They have not brought us one inch closer to mutual under standing and peace. This is precisely why we have persistently called for direct, face-to-face talks. Nevertheless, we came here out of goodwill, hoping there might be a change, a turn for the better in tone and content, that would lead us to a new and more promising chapter. And we have not given up this hope.

Let me therefore make just a few remarks, not for the sake of polemics, but to shed light on a few facts.

Syria's representative wants us and the world to believe that his country is a model of freedom and protection of human rights, including those of the Jews. Such a statement stretches incredulity to infinite proportions. The ancient Jewish community in Syria has been exposed to cruel oppression, torture, and discrimination of the worst kind. Most of the Jews fled the country over the years and the few thousand left are living in perpetual terror. Anyone who tries to cross the border is incarcerated in prison, beaten and tortured, and his family exposed to punishment and constant fear. But not only are the Jews the victims of the Syrian regime. To this day, Syria is the home of a host of terrorist organizations that spread violence and death to all kinds of innocent targets, including civil aviation, and women and children of many nations. I could go on and recite a litany of facts that demonstrate the extent to which Syria merits the dubious honor of being one of the most oppressive, tyrannical regimes in the world. But this is not what we have come here for.

To the Lebanese people, our neighbors to the north, we send a message of sympathy and under standing. They are suffering under the yoke of Syrian occupation and oppression and are denied even the capacity to cry out in protest. We bear no ill-will to the courageous and suffering Lebanese, and we join them in the hope that they will soon regain their independence and freedom. We have no designs on Lebanese territory, and in the context of a peace treaty and the removal of the Syrian presence, we can restore stability and security on the borders between our two countries.

In many respects, we have a situation of de facto non-belligerency with the Kingdom of Jordan. We sincerely believe that a peace treaty with Jordan is achievable. In the context of such a treaty, we will determine together the secure and recognized boundaries, and lay the foundation for a relation ship of mutual cooperation and neighborly relations. Both countries stand to gain from a relation ship of peace and we hope to achieve it through direct, bilateral negotiations.

I listened attentively to the statement of the Palestinian Arab spokesman in the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. The Palestinian Arabs are our closest neighbors and in many respects, their lives are intertwined with ours. This is one more reason for the importance we attach to an accommodation with this community.

The Palestinian Arab spokesman made a valiant effort at recounting the sufferings of his people. But let me say, that twisting history and perversion of fact will not earn them the sympathy which they strive to acquire. Was it not Palestinians who slaughtered a major part of the Jewish community of Hebron, without any provocation? Was it not Palestinians who rejected every peace proposal since the beginning of the century and responded by violence? Was it not Palestinians who produced a leader who collaborated with the Nazis in the extermination of Jews in the Holocaust? Was it not the Palestinians who called their Arab brethren in 1948 to come and help them destroy the Jewish State? Was it not the Palestinians who rejoiced and danced on the roofs when Iraqi Scud missiles were falling on Tel Aviv? Have they forgotten that more Palestinians were killed by their own brethren in a few recent years, than in clashes with Israeli security forces? Even to this very day, under conditions which you describe as occupation, is it not a fact that any Jew who strays into an Arab village risks his life, but tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs walk freely in every town and village in Israel and no one molests them?

We have presented the Palestinians a fair proposal, one that offers them a chance to improve their lot immensely. I appeal to them to accept our proposal and join us in negotiations.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We have come here to seek together the road that would lead us to peace and accommodation, rather than to engage in a match of charges and counter-charges. Peace is not just words or a signature on a piece of paper. Peace is a frame of mind and a set of actions that are the opposite of hostility, and create a climate of mutual trust, tolerance and respect.

With an open heart, we call on the Arab leaders to take the courageous step and respond to our out stretched hand in peace. Yesterday, I extended an invitation to come to Israel for the first round of peace negotiations and begin a sincere exchange that would lead to agreement. We hope you will accept our invitation. We will readily reciprocate. I am sure I speak for every man, woman and child in Israel, who join me in the hope that, after all, this gathering will be registered in history as a turning point, away from hostility and forward to coexistence and peace.

Thank you.

SOURCES: https://www.gov.il/en/Departments/General/address-by-mr-yitzhak-shamir-31-october-91; https://www.gov.il/en/Departments/General/remarks-by-mr-yitzhak-shamir-1-nov-91; The Palestinian-Israeli Peace Agreement: A Documentary Record. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1994, 27-34.