Ladies and Gentlemen,

Over three millennia ago, our great leader Moses addressed the people of Israel as they were about to enter the Promised Land.

He said they would find there two mountains facing one another: Mount Gerizim, the site on which a great blessing would be proclaimed, and Mount Ebal, the site of a great curse.

Moses said the people’s fate would be determined by the choice they made between the blessing and the curse.

That same choice has echoed down the ages not just for the people of Israel but for all humanity.

We face such a choice today.

It will determine whether we enjoy the blessings of a historic peace of boundless prosperity and hope or suffer the curse of a horrific war, of terrorism and despair.

When I last spoke at this podium five years ago, I warned about the tyrants of Tehran. They have been nothing but a curse. A curse to their own people, to our region, to the entire world.

But at that time, I also spoke about a great blessing that I could see on the horizon.

Here’s what I said. Quote: “The common threat of Iran has brought Israel and many Arab states closer than ever before in a friendship that I have not seen in my lifetime.”

I said: “The day would soon arrive when Israel would be able to expand peace beyond Egypt and Jordan to other Arab neighbors.” End quote.

Now, in countless meetings with world leaders, I made the case that Israel and the Arab states shared many common interests, and that I believed that these many common interests could facilitate a breakthrough for a broader peace in our region.

You applaud now, but at the time, many dismissed my optimism as wishful thinking.

Their pessimism was based on a quarter-century of good intentions and failed peacemaking.

Why were these good intentions, why did they always meet failure?

Because they were based on one false idea, that unless we first concluded a peace agreement with the Palestinians, no other Arab state would normalize its relations with Israel.

I’ve long sought to make peace with the Palestinians.
But I also believe that we must not give the Palestinians a veto over new peace treaties with Arab states.

The Palestinians could greatly benefit from a broader peace. They should be part of the process, but they should not have a veto over the process.

And I also believe that making peace with more Arab states would actually increase the prospects of making peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

See, the Palestinians are only 2% of the Arab world. As long as they believe that the other 98% will remain in a war-like state with Israel, that larger mass, that larger Arab world could eventually choke, dissolve, destroy the Jewish state.

So when the Palestinians see that most of the Arab world has reconciled itself to the Jewish state, they too will be more likely to abandon the fantasy of destroying Israel and finally embrace a path of genuine peace with it.

For years, my approach to peace was rejected by the so-called experts.

Well, they were wrong.

Under their approach, we didn’t forge a single peace treaty for a quarter century.

Yet in 2020, under the approach that I advocated, we tried something different, and in no time we achieved a remarkable breakthrough.

We achieved four peace treaties working with the United States. Israel forged four peace agreements in four months with four Arab states: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

The Abraham Accords were a pivot of history.

And today, we all see the blessings of those accords.

Trade and investment with our new peace partners are booming.

Our nations cooperate in commerce, energy, water, agriculture, medicine, climate and many many other fields.

Close to a million Israelis have visited the United Arab Emirates in the past three years.

Every day, Israelis save time and money by doing something they couldn’t do for 70 years. They fly over the Arabian Peninsula to destinations in the Gulf, India, the Far East, Australia.

The Abraham Accords ushered in another dramatic change.

It brought Arabs and Jews closer together.

We see it in the frequent Jewish weddings in Dubai, in the dedication of a Torah scroll in a synagogue in Bahrain, in the visitors flocking to the museum of Moroccan Judaism in Casablanca. We see it in lessons that are given to Arab students about the Holocaust in the UAE.

There’s no question, the Abraham Accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace.

But I believe that we are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough: an historic peace with Saudi Arabia.