"As for now, we must not forget who would have to exchange the land? those villages which live more than others on irrigation, on orange and fruit plantations, in houses built near water wells and pumping stations, on livestock and property and easy access to markets"
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A cool bureaucratic sentence, and that is its menace. Sharett sounds like he is merely running the numbers, but the question he asks is moral dynamite: who, exactly, pays for a territorial swap? The line turns “exchange the land” from a map-room abstraction into a list of livelihoods: irrigation-dependent villages, citrus groves, homes clustered around wells and pumping stations, herds, property, market access. He is naming not soil but infrastructure, capital, and time sunk into place. In a region where water is power, the inventory reads like a warning flare.
The intent is practical, even prosecutorial. Sharett is pressing an audience - cabinet colleagues, negotiators, perhaps the international community - to confront the asymmetry hidden inside neutral language. Land is never just acreage; it’s a system. You can redraw a boundary overnight, but you can’t “exchange” a well the way you exchange a parcel. By emphasizing water and markets, he points to the kind of villages most exposed to displacement: those integrated into modern agricultural economies and therefore hardest to uproot without catastrophic loss.
The subtext is that any deal framed as tidy reciprocity will, in practice, choose winners and losers, and the losers will be the people whose attachment to land is measurable: crops in the ground, pumps installed, routes to sell goods. Sharett, the cautious diplomat, is also revealing a harsher truth: negotiations about territory often proceed by treating inhabited landscapes as movable parts. His sentence resists that comfort, not with poetry, but with an accountant’s relentless specificity.
The intent is practical, even prosecutorial. Sharett is pressing an audience - cabinet colleagues, negotiators, perhaps the international community - to confront the asymmetry hidden inside neutral language. Land is never just acreage; it’s a system. You can redraw a boundary overnight, but you can’t “exchange” a well the way you exchange a parcel. By emphasizing water and markets, he points to the kind of villages most exposed to displacement: those integrated into modern agricultural economies and therefore hardest to uproot without catastrophic loss.
The subtext is that any deal framed as tidy reciprocity will, in practice, choose winners and losers, and the losers will be the people whose attachment to land is measurable: crops in the ground, pumps installed, routes to sell goods. Sharett, the cautious diplomat, is also revealing a harsher truth: negotiations about territory often proceed by treating inhabited landscapes as movable parts. His sentence resists that comfort, not with poetry, but with an accountant’s relentless specificity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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