Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Hertzberg

Hertzberg’s sentence lands like an intervention delivered in plain clothes: no incense, no liturgy, just the blunt sociology of power. The opening “Look” isn’t casual; it’s a demand to stop performing moral complexity while clinging to a fantasy. He’s naming a “hard-line” position not as mere ideology but as a governing assumption about what other people will tolerate. That assumption, he argues, is the real engine of policy: Palestinians will either consent to subordination (“third-class status”) or disappear (“pick up and go away”). He reduces a century of euphemism - “transfer,” “security,” “autonomy,” “facts on the ground” - to its core wager.

The phrasing “somehow or other” is doing quiet work. It mocks the vagueness that often surrounds displacement: the destination, the mechanism, the moral accounting are left conveniently undefined. Hertzberg, a rabbi and public intellectual associated with liberal Zionist critique, is speaking from inside the tent, which sharpens the intent. This isn’t an outsider’s condemnation; it’s a warning about what happens when a national project treats another people’s endurance as a temporary inconvenience.

“Now, this isn’t happening” is the kicker: a reality check posed as inevitability. It signals the collapse of a strategy built on denial - denial of Palestinian national identity, political agency, and sheer demographic persistence. Subtextually, he’s saying: you can’t build a stable future on the expectation that a people will volunteer for humiliation or self-erasure. The moral indictment is present, but the argument’s force is pragmatic: the fantasy has expired; the bill has come due.