Leadership Quote by Silvan Shalom

Statistics are doing rhetorical heavy lifting here: “more than 50 percent” turns grief into a ledger, then “The fence works” converts that ledger into a policy verdict. Silvan Shalom isn’t just describing a security trend; he’s preempting debate. The phrasing narrows the moral universe to a single measurable outcome - Israeli casualties - and treats the barrier as an engineered solution to a quantified problem. That’s the intent: make the fence feel less like a contested symbol and more like basic infrastructure, as neutral and necessary as a bridge.

The subtext is a shift in what counts as legitimacy. By foregrounding suicide bombings, Shalom taps into a specific kind of terror: intimate, unpredictable, designed to scramble civilian life. If that’s the signature threat, then extraordinary measures can be framed as ordinary self-defense. “There is a decline” also matters: it suggests causality without having to argue it. Correlation gets smuggled in as proof, neatly sidestepping alternative explanations (changes in militant tactics, intelligence cooperation, political pressures, ceasefires) and the fence’s costs to Palestinians - mobility, economy, land, daily dignity.

Contextually, this is post-Second Intifada language, aimed at international audiences as much as domestic ones. It’s a bid to win the argument on technocratic terrain: effectiveness, not ethics; outcomes, not origins. The line’s power comes from its compression. It turns a messy conflict into a simple equation: fewer attacks equals a working policy, and a “working” policy deserves to outlive the controversy that birthed it.