War & Peace Quote by Kjell Magne Bondevik

Power shifts in peace processes often happen through grammar, and Bondevik’s sentence is a master class in that kind of rhetorical leverage. By declaring “the burden of proof” has moved “now” onto the Palestinians, he reframes a political conflict as a courtroom drama: one side is implicitly on probation, required to demonstrate fitness before anything else can proceed. “Proof” is a technocratic word that sounds neutral, but it smuggles in a moral hierarchy. It suggests suspicion is the default condition, and that legitimacy must be earned under supervision.

The clause that follows tightens the vise: “They must fight terrorism and dismantle its infrastructures.” “Must” reads as a nonnegotiable prerequisite, not a parallel obligation among parties. The phrase “terrorism and its infrastructures” does double duty. It invokes the post-9/11 global vocabulary that Western leaders leaned on to make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict legible to their publics, while also blurring distinctions between militant networks, political organizations, and the basic civic machinery of a society under occupation. “Infrastructure” is elastic; it can mean bomb-making labs, but it can also be made to mean ministries, charities, police forces - the very institutions needed to govern.

Context matters: the “roadmap” language points to the early-2000s Roadmap for Peace, a staged plan premised on sequencing. Bondevik’s intent is to enforce that sequencing by attaching progress to Palestinian performance. The subtext is reassurance to Western and Israeli audiences: movement will be conditional, security-first, and calibrated to what Palestinians can be compelled to deliver, rather than what both sides must concede.