Daily Inspiration Quote by Moshe Sharett

Retaliation is the easy story a government tells itself: action equals safety, pain inflicted equals deterrence. Sharett punctures that story with a lawyerly, almost weary question that lands like an accusation. He doesn’t argue that retaliation is immoral (though that implication hums underneath); he questions its advertised product. The phrasing matters. “Always the question” suggests a perennial, willfully ignored doubt inside security establishments. “Really proven” drags the debate out of the realm of patriotic instinct and into the colder territory of evidence, outcomes, and accountability. If you can’t prove it works, why is it the default?

As a statesman in Israel’s formative, violence-saturated years, Sharett was surrounded by leaders and publics primed to equate restraint with weakness. His subtext is political as much as strategic: retaliatory raids may satisfy domestic demands for strength, restore wounded pride, and project resolve, but those are psychological dividends, not security solutions. He’s also quietly indicting the feedback loop retaliation can create: each “answer” becomes the next provocation, turning security policy into a self-perpetuating machine that produces new enemies as it claims to eliminate threats.

The genius of the line is its modesty. It’s not a pacifist manifesto; it’s a challenge to the managerial language of national defense. Sharett frames security not as a mood to be maintained but as a problem to be solved, then asks whether the celebrated tool is actually fit for purpose. In a culture where certainty is currency, he insists on doubt as a form of patriotism.