"It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don't want victories anymore"
About this Quote
Victory is supposed to be the clean ending, the flag on the hill, the moral proof. Golda Meir punctures that fantasy with a ledger: yes, Israel has “won all our wars,” but the bill arrives in bodies, trauma, and a society permanently mobilized. The blunt pivot - “but we have paid for them” - turns triumph into liability. She’s not denying military success; she’s demoting it from destiny to expense.
The line works because it’s rhetorically anti-heroic. Meir speaks like a leader who has seen what “winning” does to the winner: it hardens politics, normalizes emergency powers, and traps a country in the logic of preemption. “We don’t want victories anymore” is not pacifist poetry; it’s strategic exhaustion dressed as moral clarity. The subtext is a challenge to the audience’s appetite for righteous conflict. If your definition of security depends on recurring wars, you’re not secure - you’re addicted to escalation.
Context matters: Meir led during an era when Israel’s battlefield competence coexisted with deep demographic and geopolitical vulnerability, and when each round of war intensified the stakes of the next. After the Yom Kippur War in particular, “victory” could no longer mask intelligence failures or the human cost of surprise and attrition. Her phrasing implies a different metric of national success: not how decisively you can fight, but how rarely you have to.
The line works because it’s rhetorically anti-heroic. Meir speaks like a leader who has seen what “winning” does to the winner: it hardens politics, normalizes emergency powers, and traps a country in the logic of preemption. “We don’t want victories anymore” is not pacifist poetry; it’s strategic exhaustion dressed as moral clarity. The subtext is a challenge to the audience’s appetite for righteous conflict. If your definition of security depends on recurring wars, you’re not secure - you’re addicted to escalation.
Context matters: Meir led during an era when Israel’s battlefield competence coexisted with deep demographic and geopolitical vulnerability, and when each round of war intensified the stakes of the next. After the Yom Kippur War in particular, “victory” could no longer mask intelligence failures or the human cost of surprise and attrition. Her phrasing implies a different metric of national success: not how decisively you can fight, but how rarely you have to.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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