Daily Inspiration Quote by Moshe Sharett

Demography is doing the talking here, not democratic ideals. Sharett’s line treats “parliamentary regime” as a prize you get to keep only after you lock in the electorate. The intent is bluntly instrumental: engineer an “absolute Hebrew majority” by shrinking the Arab presence (“reduction”) while accelerating Jewish immigration, then let majority rule sanctify the outcome. It’s the logic of state-building laid bare - democracy framed less as a neutral procedure than as a mechanism that must be made safe through prior population management.

The subtext is even sharper. “Transition period” signals a window when extraordinary measures are presumed legitimate: before borders and institutions harden, the rules are pliable. “Reduction of the Arabs” is chilling precisely because it’s abstract; it avoids naming the means (displacement, flight under pressure, political exclusion) while making the desired endpoint sound administrative. The sentence moves in the voice of planning, not of passion, which is what gives it its force: a technocratic grammar for a national struggle.

Context matters. Sharett, a senior Zionist leader and later Israel’s second prime minister, is speaking from the mid-century reality that a Jewish state would be contested not only militarily but mathematically. The British Mandate’s endgame, the 1947 UN partition debate, and the looming 1948 war all made “majority” a strategic term. Read that way, the quote is less a personal slip than a snapshot of how nationalist projects often talk when they believe legitimacy can be manufactured: first curate the people, then cite the ballot.