War & Peace Quote by Yitzhak Rabin

The line lands like a deliberate rebuke to the easy alibis of conflict: stop blaming the other side’s nature. Rabin’s phrasing is doing two things at once. On the surface, it’s a statement of strategic optimism - peace is possible even if Arab politics are unstable, even if public opinion is hostile, even if regimes change. Underneath, it’s a message aimed inward, at Israeli skeptics and hard-liners who treated “Arab mentality” as a permanent veto on diplomacy. By saying “regardless,” Rabin tries to remove the most convenient excuse for inaction: the claim that the other side must first become different people.

It’s also a tightly controlled exercise in power politics. Rabin doesn’t romanticize reconciliation; he frames peace as attainable without waiting for cultural transformation. That’s a statesman’s move: shifting the focus from moral judgments about societies to the concrete levers of security, borders, recognition, and enforcement. Peace becomes an outcome you engineer, not a reward you receive for liking your neighbor.

The subtext, though, is double-edged. Naming “Arabs mentality” betrays the very essentialism he’s arguing past, echoing the era’s blunt generalizations even as he tries to neutralize them. Historically, this sits in the Oslo period’s wager: that agreements could be built with imperfect partners, under conditions of mistrust, because the alternative was endless war. Rabin is asserting agency - and demanding that his own side accept it.