| s-1
| The future of the peace process in Israel |
| s-2
| 'The future is only peace. The problem is how long will it take and how many victims will it call for.' |
| s-3
| Shimon Peres image: David Shankbone. |
| s-4
| Mr. President, as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient and as one of the fathers of the modern peace process in Israel, do you still think that there is a future to the peace process? |
| s-5
| The future is only peace. |
| s-6
| The problem is how long will it take and how many victims will it call for. |
| s-7
| Why do I say peace? |
| s-8
| Because when you look historically, at the development of humanity, most of our lives we are living on the land. |
| s-9
| The history is written with red ink. |
| s-10
| The reason for it is because people were fighting for our land, either defending it or extending it, because that was the main source. |
| s-11
| The land, the natural resources, the markets, all these go together. |
| s-12
| The minute the land was replaced by science, what is there to fight about? |
| s-13
| Armies cannot conquer science. |
| s-14
| Customs cannot check what a scientist has in his mind, they can see what he has in his pocket but not what he has in his mind so it’s uncontrolled; it means that borders aren’t important and distances aren’t important. |
| s-15
| How do you approach the difficult challenge of talking to the Palestinians when, in the end, they don’t want Israel to exist. |
| s-16
| How do you come to an understanding to make peace possible? |
| s-17
| Well, what is the problem? |
| s-18
| I mean, is the problem national, say between Jews and Arabs; or is it a matter of generations between an old age and a new age? |
| s-19
| You see, the terrorists are protesting against modernity. |
| s-20
| They think that modernity may endanger their tradition. |
| s-21
| They are simply afraid and hate modernity. |
| s-22
| They consider modernity as their enemy, but then they have two problems. |
| s-23
| First of all, can they exist on tradition? |
| s-24
| They cannot . |
| s-25
| Sooner or later they will have to enter the new age. |
| s-26
| All the talks about nationalities, etcetera, well, the new age has very little patience for history. |
| s-27
| History is becoming more and more irrelevant. |
| s-28
| How do you feel about that? |
| s-29
| Well, I distinguish between two histories, the spiritual and the material. |
| s-30
| Or the history of events and the history of values. |
| s-31
| The history of values is okay because wisdom is ageless; it doesn’t grow old, like material. |
| s-32
| But events are totally unimportant for 2 reasons. |
| s-33
| First, the event is unimportant. |
| s-34
| Tell me, what events is today important such as how many elephants Hannibal had on the Alps, when you can have helicopters? |
| s-35
| Why should I bother my children with all this nonsense? |
| s-36
| What sort of a nose did Cleopatra have? |
| s-37
| God, I don’t know! |
| s-38
| You can invite people to war over noses, but nobody will go to fight for noses any more. |
| s-39
| On the other hand, there are already machines that can replace our memory. |
| s-40
| Why should I bother my child with memory when he can buy a computer that will remember everything you asked him to remember? |
| s-41
| The waning importance of history |
| s-42
| Isn’t the answer to that question that wise decisions are made with a basis from memory? |
| s-43
| Although a computer can have … |
| s-44
| No, no. |
| s-45
| Forget memory. |
| s-46
| Look, the new age is unprecedented. |
| s-47
| When something is unprecedented, it means it doesn’t have a past, doesn’t have a history. |
| s-48
| It’s totally oriented on the future. |
| s-49
| And whoever dwells in the past, doesn’t understand the future because the past is full of prejudices, of commitments. |
| s-50
| It arrests us. |
| s-51
| And then you say you won’t commit a mistake, so you’ll commit new mistakes. |
| s-52
| It doesn’t matter. |
| s-53
| `` I say brains is the greater producer of wealth, not oil. |
| s-54
| It’s limitless, and you’ll see that the GNP of Israel is very close to the Saudis’ . |
| s-55
| So they are 3 times larger than us and they have all the oil in the world. |
| s-56
| We have brains.' |
| s-57
| — Peres, on whether the Arab states' oil wealth will eclipse Israel's prominence in the region. |
| s-58
| What about the adage, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it”? |
| s-59
| So they will make new mistakes. |
| s-60
| Mistake is inevitable as long as there are human beings. |
| s-61
| But you cannot repeat mistakes because the world is not built on repetition; it’s built on mutation. |
| s-62
| Don’t you think Darfur is repetition? |
| s-63
| I think Darfur is, again, the last, or among the last battles between old and new. |
| s-64
| What are they fighting for? |
| s-65
| What are they killing killing killing over? |
| s-66
| They don’t carry futures. |
| s-67
| It’s not a mistake. |
| s-68
| It belongs to a past. |
| s-69
| It doesn’t have a moment. |
| s-70
| I am sure that the reasons for war are over, even though still there are wars which are an inertia from the past, a continuation that doesn’t make sense. |
| s-71
| I’m answering your question. |
| s-72
| The problem is how to enable the whole world to enter the new future, including the Arabs. |
| s-73
| And there are already Arabs who did it. |
| s-74
| Look at Turkey, who is knocking on the doors of the united Europe. |
| s-75
| Why? |
| s-76
| It’s not a geographic endeavor, it is an intellectual endeavor. |
| s-77
| They say you can be Muslim and modern. |