These are serious assignments that will not be easy to carry out. The sooner we begin to act, the better. Anything that is not achieved in the first few months will be that much harder to implement later on. We must not hesitate or waste time. We must set up a schedule and begin to act immediately.
Peace is a vital element of security.
And to attain peace, compromise must be reached. There can be no peace without compromise and without peace there will never be real security. Withdrawal from Lebanon within a year, peace with the Palestinians in less than a year and a return to negotiations with Syria will be tremendous challenges. The coming year will be the most revolutionary year in the history of the state of Israel, and Barak will be the one charged with carefully and sensibly navigating us into a new chapter in our history, a chapter that will take us into the next millennium. One inevitable conclusion, which we can perhaps appreciate more easily now than in the past, is that we must abolish the direct election of the prime minister and continue the parliamentary efforts in this direction, initiated by Likud Knesset member Uzi Landau and myself.