“It’s not in our [US] interest.”

New York — In a speech before an RJC Forum in Washington DC yesterday, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said about the Israeli-Arab conflict, “But you can’t negotiate with people who want to kill you and destroy you. I mean, think about it in the case of your family.” (APPLAUSE) “Think about it in the case of your family. Somebody threatens to kill you and your family. What are you going to negotiate with them about? How many of your kids they’re going to kill or when they’re going to do it? You’ve got to negotiate with people that at least make a step toward giving a reasonable possibility of getting a sensible result.

“In the case of the Palestinians, here’s what it is, two big ones. First of all, the Palestinians have to say and acknowledge and mean it that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.” (APPLAUSE) “Number one, because Israel’s already negotiated its existence. That negotiation happened a long time ago and that’s over and they’ve just got to kind of move on.” (APPLAUSE) “Second, they have to be willing to say, ‘We forsake terrorism and we’re going to help to reduce and eliminate terrorism’ and they need to show their good faith by that condition remaining that way for some period of time. It’s as simple as that — or as hard as that. They do those two things and they mean it and time demonstrates that they do mean it, then, of course, they can negotiate. We would like to negotiate. We would like to have peace, but we don’t want to have a peace in which we’re taken advantage of. We don’t want to have a peace in which we have the name peace and Israelis and Americans are getting killed.