Every Saturday evening, Minister of Finance Yair Lapid summarizes the preceding week, and outlines the week that will come. This time, he wrote, "The new year is a time of choice. We must choose. We choose an Israel, where the dialogue is of tolerance and common purpose, but includes disagreements. We choose an Israel in which dialogue does not deal with blame, but with the possibilities of our ability to work together and a constant effort to improve the situation.
"We choose an Israel, which is based on innovation and entrepreneurship, which puts behind it the culture of welfare, and positions itself at the forefront of the world of technology, which creates opportunity for every child in Yeruham, Jerusalem, or Kiryat Shmona to start in a neighborhood bomb shelter the next Apple or Google, which sees people as potential not a problem, and where education creates opportunities for every person.
"We choose an Israel that can set long-range targets, recognize that not everything will happen within a few months, where fixing the flaws of decades is a national task, which offers a real vision of closing gaps and help for the weak, which believes in action and determination, where politics strives to be the solution and not the problem."
Lapid concluded, "We choose an Israel whose enemies know that it will not hesitate to use military force to protect its people, but even in these times, when the region around us is on fire, is confident enough in its power to continue to believe in the values of democracy and in the striving for peace. We choose an Israel in which the question what kind of year will we have depends on us.
"It will be a year that we will create, whose mood will be our mood, which we will share in creating, and we will not stop for a moment in pushing forward the ideas we believe in to turn Israel into a better place. We choose a good and happy year."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on September 1, 2013
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2013