The keynote of Jewish history is not unity. The keynote of Jewish history is fragmentation, dispersion, and diversity. And to achieve a consensus out of this disruptive tradition is not the easiest of tasks.

Our starting point in recent days has been the certainty that there will be a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. I've had talks recently with the heads of the Israeli and Egyptian delegations and emerged convinced that a peace treaty will emerge despite some complex issues that remain to be solved. And thus we stand in the revolutionary era that begins, not in November, 1978, but in November, 1977, with Anwar el-Sadat's voyage to Jerusalem. What he achieved was to make a breach in the wall both of Arab rejection and of Israeli suspicion.

Now let us be frank with each other. Underneath the outer surface of Israeli life there has ilways been something choked and strangled, something cut off from expression, a terrible sense of insolubility, deadlock without end. The sense of being totally excluded from any affirmative contact with the neighboring world has been much more deeply at work on the morale and consciousness of the Israeli people than we might have wished to admit. And now all of a sudden the windows are open and the air comes rushing in.