War & Peace Quote by Yitzhak Rabin

Rabin’s sentence reads like a tidy piece of diplomatic bookkeeping, but its real work is political: it rewrites the origin story of Madrid as a product of hard power and altered incentives, not sudden moral clarity. The key word is “only.” It slams the door on romantic narratives about peace being willed into existence by good intentions. Madrid, he implies, became possible when the world changed and the costs of refusal went up.

The context is the post-1990 hinge point: the Cold War’s collapse, the Gulf crisis and war, and a newly unipolar moment in which Washington could credibly reward compliance and punish obstruction. Rabin’s phrasing, “strong, firm position... against aggression between two Arab countries,” is doing delicate rhetorical surgery. It signals a U.S.-led enforcement of norms (no border-changing by force) without sounding like triumphalism, and it frames that enforcement as regionally relevant rather than Israel-centric. That matters because the Madrid Conference was designed to bring Arab parties and Palestinians into a process they had long viewed as tilted.

Subtext: leverage, not sentiment, moved the pieces. The Gulf War weakened rejectionist coalitions, rearranged Arab priorities, and made U.S. sponsorship unavoidable. Rabin is also quietly defending a realist view of peace-making to domestic skeptics: Israel didn’t concede because it was naive; it negotiated because the strategic environment had been reshaped. The line’s cool causality is the point - it treats diplomacy as an outcome of power politics, and in doing so, makes the peace process sound less like a gamble and more like an obligation to new “realities.”