Politics & Power Quote by Moshe Katsav

Diplomacy rarely announces itself as a threat; it prefers to dress coercion up as contractual housekeeping. Katsav’s line performs that trick with practiced calm. By asserting that “the international community and Israel have the same opinion,” he’s not just describing consensus, he’s manufacturing inevitability: if the world is aligned, Hamas is isolated by definition. The phrase is a geopolitical dogpile rendered in bureaucratic tones.

Then comes the rhetorical softener: “We don’t say we are going to boycott it forever.” It’s a parent’s voice, not a rival’s - the indefinite punishment is denied in order to make the conditional punishment sound reasonable. The subtext is that ostracism is already on the table, but Israel wants credit for restraint while keeping maximum leverage.

The real pressure point is the pivot from “Hamas government” to “obligations the Palestinian Authority has signed.” That’s the legal trapdoor. Katsav is insisting that elections don’t reset prior commitments: treaties, security coordination, and recognition frameworks survive changes in leadership. It’s a demand for continuity that also delegitimizes Hamas’s mandate by binding it to agreements it didn’t author and, at the time, often rejected.

Context matters: this is the post-election moment when Hamas’s democratic win collided with the international system’s red lines - renounce violence, recognize Israel, accept past accords. Katsav’s intent is to frame those red lines not as political conditions imposed from outside, but as neutral “obligations,” shifting the argument from power to paperwork. That move is strategic, because paperwork sounds like law, and law sounds like morality.