Jews have been persecuted throughout the ages in almost every continent. Some countries barely tolerated us, others oppressed, 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 homeless, we were also defenseless.

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 return 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."

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 over run 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 blood bath 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 international 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 thousands have been killed and wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs who lived in Mandatory Palestine 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.

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.