"As for the long-term future: I am prepared to see in this a vision, not a mystical way but in a realistic way, of a population exchange on a much more important scale and including larger territories"
About this Quote
A “vision” that insists it is “not mystical” is doing rhetorical damage control in real time. Moshe Sharett is trying to launder an explosive idea - population exchange, at massive scale - through the language of sober planning. By framing it as “realistic,” he casts what is fundamentally coercive social engineering as administrative common sense, the kind of thing responsible statesmen are simply obliged to contemplate.
The phrase “long-term future” is the key to the moral sleight of hand. It pushes the human costs out of frame and swaps immediacy for destiny: if the horizon is far enough away, displacement can be recoded as demographic strategy. Sharett’s diction also reveals a politics of feasibility. He isn’t arguing over whether such an exchange is just; he’s arguing over whether it can be imagined credibly, whether it can be scaled up, whether territory can be treated as a variable in a grand equation.
Context matters: Sharett was a central figure in early Israeli statecraft, operating in the shadow of partition, war, and the mass dislocations of the late 1940s. “Population exchange” echoes the 1923 Greek-Turkish precedent, often cited in the mid-century as a harsh but stabilizing “solution” to ethnonational conflict. Invoking that model signals an attempt to normalize the unthinkable by pointing to history’s paperwork.
The subtext is chillingly modern: peace isn’t pursued through shared civic life but through separation, sorting, and the managerial fantasy that moving people can settle claims. It’s a sentence built to sound inevitable - and that’s precisely the problem.
The phrase “long-term future” is the key to the moral sleight of hand. It pushes the human costs out of frame and swaps immediacy for destiny: if the horizon is far enough away, displacement can be recoded as demographic strategy. Sharett’s diction also reveals a politics of feasibility. He isn’t arguing over whether such an exchange is just; he’s arguing over whether it can be imagined credibly, whether it can be scaled up, whether territory can be treated as a variable in a grand equation.
Context matters: Sharett was a central figure in early Israeli statecraft, operating in the shadow of partition, war, and the mass dislocations of the late 1940s. “Population exchange” echoes the 1923 Greek-Turkish precedent, often cited in the mid-century as a harsh but stabilizing “solution” to ethnonational conflict. Invoking that model signals an attempt to normalize the unthinkable by pointing to history’s paperwork.
The subtext is chillingly modern: peace isn’t pursued through shared civic life but through separation, sorting, and the managerial fantasy that moving people can settle claims. It’s a sentence built to sound inevitable - and that’s precisely the problem.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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