Daily Inspiration Quote by Yitzhak Rabin

Rabin’s use of “in the long run” is doing quiet political heavy lifting: it frames separation not as surrender, but as strategy. A soldier-turned-statesman, he’s speaking in the language of risk management. The phrase lets him acknowledge immediate pain and uncertainty while insisting that the alternative - permanent entanglement - is worse. It’s a leader’s attempt to stretch the public’s time horizon beyond the next attack, the next election, the next round of recriminations.

“Separation” sounds clean, almost technocratic, but its subtext is brutally concrete: borders, security control, settlements, movement, sovereignty. Rabin is hinting that coexistence under one roof, given the national claims and cycles of violence, could harden into either endless repression or demographic panic - outcomes that corrode the moral and democratic self-image Israel wants to maintain. Separation becomes a way to preserve two competing imperatives at once: security and legitimacy. It’s also a way of saying: we can’t wish away the other people living here.

The context is the Oslo era, when Rabin gambled that limited mutual recognition and staged territorial withdrawal could redirect a conflict that had become both militarized and intimate after 1967. The line reads as a political middle path between maximalist dreams. It doesn’t romanticize peace; it treats it as architecture. That practicality is the point - and the provocation. Rabin is arguing that the only workable future is one where neither side gets everything, but both get out alive.