Wit & Attitude Quote by Benjamin Netanyahu

Netanyahu’s line works less as analysis than as indictment: a tight braid of common sense (“you can’t rely”), moral panic (“madness”), and prosecutorial questioning (“What were they thinking?”) designed to foreclose the very idea of negotiating with actors he labels “radicals.” The rhetorical move is classic security-state persuasion: start with a seemingly modest claim about reliability, then widen the frame until the only plausible posture is permanent suspicion.

The subtext is that motivation doesn’t matter, only capability and willingness. By asking whether “they” were “stupid” and then immediately rejecting that, Netanyahu blocks a comforting explanation (incompetence) and replaces it with a more alarming one: intention allied with “irrationality.” That’s a powerful psychological pivot. If an adversary is rational, deterrence, tradeoffs, and diplomacy remain thinkable. If an adversary is irrational-but-effective, the menu shrinks to containment, preemption, and force. “Madness in this method” recasts terror as something quasi-religious or pathological, not strategic, which makes compromise feel not just risky but morally incoherent.

Context matters: Netanyahu is speaking from a political tradition that treats terrorism not as a tactic embedded in local grievances but as a transnational ideology with interchangeable villains (Iran, Taliban, Al Qaida folded into one continuum). That bundling is not accidental; it creates a single, durable threat narrative that can justify hardline policy across different theaters and decades.

Even the “dispatched” phrasing is doing work: it implies command-and-control, sponsorship, a chain of culpability that extends upward. The intent is to convert uncertainty into certainty, and fear into a policy mandate.