Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Hertzberg

The line lands like a measured aside, but it carries the bracing realism of someone used to watching ideology collide with demographics. Hertzberg is tracking two leaders in the early-2000s crucible of U.S.-Israeli policy: George W. Bush, still sorting out his administration's posture toward a viable Palestinian political horizon, and Ariel Sharon, the hawkish Israeli prime minister whose career had been built on the premise that force and settlement could manage (or sideline) Palestinian national claims.

Hertzberg's sharp move is to frame Sharon's shift not as moral awakening but as political convergence: "adopted...the position of the Labor Party". That phrase smuggles in a whole history of Israeli partisan identity. Labor, associated with territorial compromise and the Oslo-era logic of separation, becomes the yardstick against which Sharon's repositioning is measured. It's a way of saying: the argument isn't left versus right anymore; it's reality versus fantasy.

The key clause, "the Palestinians are here to stay", is deliberately plain, almost blunt to the point of banality. That's the point. Hertzberg treats Palestinian permanence as an incontrovertible fact that leaders can deny only at the cost of strategic self-harm. The subtext is a critique of maximalism: the idea that one side can simply outlast the other. In a few dry beats, he captures a turning of the Israeli political weather and hints at the cynical pragmatism underneath: recognition arrives not from empathy, but from the limits of power.