War & Peace Quote by Moshe Sharett

A preventive war is usually sold as prudence dressed up as courage. Sharett flips the script: it is imprudence that risks turning allies into judges and bystanders into adversaries. His line is less a moral plea than a geopolitical warning delivered in the dry language of a cautious statesman. The phrase "because it means" is doing heavy lifting. He is not arguing that preventive war is inherently wrong; he is arguing it is strategically self-defeating under the post-1945 order, where legitimacy is policed, however imperfectly, by the United Nations.

The real subject is isolation. "Measures by the UN against us" names a nightmare for a young, security-obsessed state: sanctions, condemnation, loss of diplomatic cover, the erosion of sympathy that can be as vital as tanks. Sharett, a more restrained voice within Israel's early leadership, understood that power without permission becomes a trap. In the 1950s, after the trauma of 1948 and amid constant border violence, Israel debated whether preemption and reprisal were necessities or accelerants. Sharett is speaking into that internal argument, implicitly pushing back against hawkish currents that treated international opinion as background noise.

There is also a quiet admission embedded in "against us": the UN is not a neutral referee; it is a theater where narratives harden into policy. Preventive war invites the world to define you first. Sharett's intent is to keep Israel from being cast as the aggressor, because once that label sticks, even defensive realities become harder to sell.