(To Ruth Matar, a long time Jerusalem resident who immigrated from the United States and who criticized him in accented Hebrew): Go back where you came from. [Jerusalem Post International Edition, February 3, 1996, p.30]
The more we give up land, we discover we have more Ph.D.s per kilometer so we are going to make a living on the Ph.D.s and not on the mileage. (Pennsylvania Gazette, November 1994, p.16 )
We are discovering that all the things we are fighting for are not so important....[Jewish Week, June 2, 1994]
We live in a world where markets are more important than countries. [Pennsylvania Gazette, November 1994, p.17]
I think the Palestinian people should be more supportive of Arafat. Arafat brought them a great thing. After 28 years of idling around, of having nothing, he brought them something tangible....Arafat kept the Palestinian issue for 29 years on the agenda, as a leader. [Meeting with Palestinian journalists, Jerusalem, March 8, 1994]
What does it mean to economize politics? To establish the good of the individual, the good of the economy, as our top political priority, and not such outmoded ideas as prestige, war, nationalism and the like. [Remarks before the Knesset Economic Committee on the Arab Boycott, Jerusalem, February 21, 1994]
One day our self awareness and personal identity will be based on this new [ultra regional] reality, and we will find that we have stepped outside the national arena. [The New Middle East, p. 81.]
People say: "Why do you give back land?" I'm asking myself: Do we give back land? Was the land in our hands? [Remarks to UJA Delegates, Jerusalem, August 14, 1995]
How strange it is, I found myself thinking, that we Israelis are now the ones granting the Palestinians what the British granted us more than 70 years ago, a 'homeland in Palestine,' in the words of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. [Battling for Peace, p. 303]
(In 1993, after Arafat read Peres's speech to the European Parliament calling for economic aid to the Palestinians) Arafat had said he was not surprised; he knew, he had explained, that I was capable of saying things and doing things on behalf of the Palestinians that many Arab states would neither say nor do. [Battling for Peace, p. 302]