War & Peace Quote by Ahmed Yassin

The sentence is built to do two jobs at once: justify violence as “defense” while widening the definition of what counts as a military target. Yassin leads with the most legitimizing frame available in modern politics - self-defense against “an occupying army” - language that plugs neatly into international-law instincts and anti-colonial memory. It’s a deliberate claim to moral symmetry: we’re not aggressors, we’re the invaded.

Then comes the turn: “and against settlers and settlements.” That add-on is the payload. By pairing civilians (“settlers”) with infrastructure (“settlements”) and placing both in the same defensive bracket as an “army,” the quote collapses the civilian/military distinction. The subtext is that settlement is not a demographic fact but a weapon system: people, housing, roads, and land policy become part of the occupation’s machinery, therefore fair game. It’s a rhetorical move that converts a political geography dispute into a battlefield map.

Context matters. Yassin, as Hamas’s founder and spiritual authority, spoke from within a movement that framed Israel’s presence as illegitimate and temporary, and that treated armed struggle as the primary lever available to a stateless population facing superior force. The quote also functions as internal messaging: it tells supporters that “strategy” is principled, not reactive; it promises coherence, not chaos.

The chilling effectiveness is its administrative calm. “Strategy” and “defend” sound like policy talk, not blood-and-soil rage. That bureaucratic tone launders escalation into something that can be repeated, defended, and exported as a talking point.