War & Peace Quote by Moshe Dayan

Dayan’s line is less battlefield bravado than a cold doctrine of deterrence, delivered in the blunt currency he trusted: cost. “Set high price for our blood” frames Israeli vulnerability as a lever, not a weakness. The phrasing turns casualties into a strategic variable, something that can be made prohibitively expensive for opponents. It’s the logic of a small state surrounded by adversaries, compressing survival into a single imperative: make every attack feel like a bad investment.

The subtext is aimed as much inward as outward. For Israelis, it’s a grim promise that the state will retaliate hard enough to protect the future, even if that means normalizing perpetual readiness and periodic violence. For Arab publics and governments, it’s psychological warfare: not just “we can win,” but “you can’t afford to keep trying.” Dayan’s triad - “community,” “army,” “governments” - is deliberate. He’s mapping the full ecosystem of pressure: popular appetite for sacrifice, military capacity to absorb losses, and political willingness to continue. Deterrence isn’t merely tanks and jets; it’s the erosion of morale and legitimacy.

Context matters: Dayan speaks from the era when Israel’s military identity was being forged through repeated wars and border clashes, and when the concept of “disproportionate response” was becoming a tool of statecraft. The sentence is ruthlessly pragmatic, but it also reveals its trap: it assumes pain can be calibrated and controlled, that raising the price won’t also raise the stakes, harden hatred, or lock both sides into a ledger where escalation becomes the only credible language.