Success Quote by James Wolfensohn

Wolfensohn frames violence not as a moral defect but as a labor-market outcome: deprive people of work, dignity, and a future, and you manufacture the conditions in which militancy looks like agency. Coming from a banker-statesman who ran the World Bank and later served as the Quartet's envoy, the line carries a deliberately technocratic sting. He is telling security-minded leaders that their preferred language - crackdowns, deterrence, "stability" - is fantasy unless paired with economic oxygen. The word "dream" is doing the heavy lifting: it needles policymakers who treat violence as something you can simply police away, as if grievances were noise rather than fuel.

The subtext is also a rebuke to the international community's addiction to short-term management. "Used up all their resources" evokes not just poverty but exhaustion: families selling assets, rationing medicine, burning social capital to survive. In that condition, calls for nonviolence can sound like a demand for passivity. Wolfensohn doesn't romanticize violence; he describes its incentive structure. If legitimate routes to a livable life are blocked - by closure regimes, corruption, aid dependency, or the sheer arbitrariness of occupation - then illegitimate routes gain relative appeal.

Context matters because Wolfensohn operated at the junction of economics and diplomacy in the mid-2000s, when Gaza disengagement, movement restrictions, and collapsing institutions made "peace process" rhetoric ring hollow. His intent is to smuggle a hard political truth into an acceptable form for elites: you cannot spreadsheet your way out of a conflict, but you also cannot bomb your way out of hopelessness.