Daily Inspiration Quote by Moshe Katsav

“Persian social manners” here isn’t a neutral compliment; it’s a political instrument dressed up as etiquette. Katsav, an Iranian-born Israeli statesman, is invoking a remembered Iran - polished, hospitable, culturally confident - as a counter-image to the regime-level hostility that defines Israeli-Iranian relations in public life. The line flatters, but it also separates: it elevates “society” and its civil codes while implicitly bracketing off “politics” as the corrosive layer on top. That distinction is doing the real work.

The absolutism of “no other society can compete” is strategic hyperbole, the kind that signals affiliation rather than measured comparison. It performs credibility: only an insider can praise with that kind of unembarrassed certainty. For an immigrant politician, nostalgia becomes a credential - proof of origin, and a bid for authority over conversations about Iran that are otherwise dominated by security language, nuclear timelines, and slogans.

There’s also a quieter message aimed inward, at Israeli audiences. By praising Persian manners as unmatched, Katsav positions Iranian culture as legible and even admirable, complicating the easy binary of enemy state/enemy people. It’s a soft-power move: humanize the other side without conceding anything about policy. At the same time, it’s self-fashioning - the statesman as bridge, the “civilized” emissary whose own refinement is implied by his attachment to refined manners.

In that sense, the quote isn’t about table customs. It’s about who gets to claim sophistication, who gets cast as barbarous, and how cultural memory can be mobilized as diplomacy by other means.