"Israel would not do that, both because we cannot afford to be accused by the world of aggression and because we cannot, for security and social reasons, absorb in our midst a substantial Arab population"
About this Quote
Pragmatism does a lot of moral laundering in this line, and Sharett knows it. The first clause is outward-facing: Israel "cannot afford" to be "accused by the world of aggression". Not condemned, not sanctioned, not punished - accused. The word choice reveals a diplomat's sensibility in a state still fighting for legitimacy, where reputation is treated like strategic terrain. He frames restraint less as ethics than as optics, implying that international perception is a material resource that can be spent or conserved.
Then the sentence pivots to the inward-facing rationale, and the real architecture of power shows: "security and social reasons" for not absorbing "a substantial Arab population". It's the bureaucratic euphemism of demographic management. "Absorb" casts people as a burden on the state's capacity, not as rights-bearing subjects. "Substantial" signals a threshold where minority becomes political risk. In one breath, Sharett sketches a core anxiety of early Israeli statecraft: the tension between being recognized as non-aggressive and maintaining a Jewish-majority polity. The subtext is that the problem isn't conquest per se; it's conquest that brings people you then must politically account for.
Context matters: Sharett was the foreign-policy realist of the early leadership, often positioned against more maximalist currents. This quote reads like an internal argument dressed as an external one - a warning that force can backfire not only in the UN but inside the state's own social fabric. It's a candid glimpse of a founding dilemma: legitimacy abroad, control at home, and demographics as destiny.
Then the sentence pivots to the inward-facing rationale, and the real architecture of power shows: "security and social reasons" for not absorbing "a substantial Arab population". It's the bureaucratic euphemism of demographic management. "Absorb" casts people as a burden on the state's capacity, not as rights-bearing subjects. "Substantial" signals a threshold where minority becomes political risk. In one breath, Sharett sketches a core anxiety of early Israeli statecraft: the tension between being recognized as non-aggressive and maintaining a Jewish-majority polity. The subtext is that the problem isn't conquest per se; it's conquest that brings people you then must politically account for.
Context matters: Sharett was the foreign-policy realist of the early leadership, often positioned against more maximalist currents. This quote reads like an internal argument dressed as an external one - a warning that force can backfire not only in the UN but inside the state's own social fabric. It's a candid glimpse of a founding dilemma: legitimacy abroad, control at home, and demographics as destiny.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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