I further make plain that Israel under my government will honor all agreements approved by previous governments, including the diplomatic "road map" and the path to Palestinian statehood that it sets out. But I stress that our support for a new "Palestine" stands in principle only. The familiar model of sovereignty simply cannot work in this context at this time. Our country, nine miles wide at its narrowest point, dwarfed territorially and demographically by neighbors once or still avowedly hostile to us, dare not and will not sanction on its borders a sovereign entity that would legally acquire the means to achieve our destruction.

If we can together encourage the emergence of a Palestinian leadership that does acknowledge Israel's right to exist as an overwhelmingly Jewish entity, if we can together create the circumstances in which truly viable terms for reconciliation can be found, Mr. President, you will find me driving a hard territorial bargain but not an impossible one. Already, in 2005, one of my predecessors demonstrated, wrong-headedly in my opinion, a readiness to dismantle an entire settlement community in a bid to achieve calm for my country. I will not be found wanting, even at the expense of confrontation with my beloved colleagues resettling the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, in the cause of true peace. But I will be leonine in defending our security in its absence.

Our caveat about Palestinian statehood, in short, is that their independence and future must not be shaped and realized at the expense of ours. By way of one small example, short-range rocket fire, salvoes far more rudimentary than those that have been fired against us in recent years from Gaza and from southern Lebanon, would make daily life in my country impossible if directed at us from the West Bank. You yourself, who showed such sympathy with the people of Sderot when you visited us as a presidential candidate last year, would not have been permitted by your security detail to fly into our airport if such an untenable reality prevailed.

MR. PRESIDENT, I have much that I want to say to the Palestinians, to the Arab world, and to my own people in this address. But to you, finally, let me stress again my support for your attempt at fostering "a new beginning" with the Muslim world, even as I seek to underline the urgency of the moment.

Many, I hope most of us seek to live in a climate where the divine gift of life is universally appreciated. We want to live in a climate in which the quotation you cited from the Koran on June 4, and which I find in the Talmud, in Sanhedrin - that he who saves one life saves the world - is fully internalized. A world of "live, and let live."

Sadly, terribly, however, the Muslim fundamentalists you seek to shift toward moderation, or to marginalize, are insistent that their god requires them to kill and be killed - that paradise awaits those who murder the unbelievers and die themselves in the process. It is the combination of this deathly ambition with the weaponry to achieve it on an apocalyptic scale that so worries us when we look to Iran. That regime, with that weaponry, constitutes an unbearable threat to our lives - and by "our," Mr. President, I mean mine and yours, my people's and your people's.

So even as I commend your readiness to go the extra mile and seek, however improbably, to defuse the zealotry of the Iranian regime, I implore you not to be distracted by the pretexts so conveniently invoked to falsely justify Islamic grievance. Muslim extremist aggression is driven not by the unsolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by your troops' presence in Iraq, by anger at Western liberalism or any other purported cause, but, rather, by a perverted sense of religious imperative.

I urge you, too, not to wait too long to draw your conclusions about Iran; I must tell you that I have long since drawn mine.

And I beseech you, finally, for the sake of the whole free world, and those who long to be free and look to you as freedom's shining, powerful new exemplar, not to underestimate man's capacity to do the unthinkable against his fellow man. You are a good man, Mr. President - of that, your people, and mine, have no doubt. But as many wise men have rightly observed, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.