Politics & Power Quote by Rafic Hariri

Hariri is doing something blunt and unusually risky for a regional statesman: he refuses the comforting fiction that the obstacle is a misunderstanding. By stressing that Israel has an elected government, he preempts the easy rebuttal that this is just a rogue clique acting outside democratic legitimacy. The subtext is sharpened by the implication that a public can democratically choose a hard line, and that outsiders must deal with that reality rather than launder it into diplomatic euphemisms.

The phrasing "not for peace" and, more pointedly, "from the camp anti-peace" is intentionally polarizing. It collapses the messy spectrum of Israeli politics into a moral binary, less an analytic claim than a strategic label. Hariri is trying to shift the frame from symmetrical conflict to asymmetrical responsibility: if one side is structurally disinclined toward peace, then reciprocal concessions become not only naive but politically self-defeating. The repetition of "peace" reads like a courtroom tactic, hammering a single charge into the record.

Context matters: Hariri spoke as a Lebanese leader navigating the pressure cooker of post-civil-war Lebanon, Syrian influence, and the enduring Israeli-Lebanese front, with Hezbollah’s legitimacy tied to the premise that Israel responds only to force. Calling an Israeli government "anti-peace" signals to Arab publics that engagement has limits, while telling Western interlocutors that process talk cannot substitute for scrutinizing the governing coalition’s aims. It’s diplomacy with the gloves off: a bid to make intentions, not just incidents, the center of the conversation.