Leadership Quote by Silvan Shalom

Shalom’s line is engineered to relocate the entire burden of action onto “the Palestinians,” treating a fractured polity as a single, sovereign actor with unified command. That’s not a neutral description; it’s a demand dressed up as diagnosis. By insisting they must “make the strategic decision,” he implies capacity, control, and political will all sit neatly on the Palestinian side, and that the missing ingredient isn’t resources or freedom of movement but moral seriousness.

The phrase “not willing to do anything” is deliberate overreach. It compresses a messy reality - competing factions, uneven authority, public fear, internal legitimacy crises - into a simple character judgment: refusal. Then comes the policy filter: “dismantle the infrastructure of terrorist organizations.” “Infrastructure” broadens the target from militants to networks, money, social services, even sympathetic institutions. It’s the kind of elastic term that can justify expansive security measures while remaining rhetorically tidy.

Placed in the era of post-Oslo negotiations and Second Intifada politics, this language functions as preemptive exoneration. If violence continues, the explanation is already written: they didn’t choose to stop it. If Israel escalates pressure, the escalation becomes “necessary” to force the decision they supposedly won’t make. The subtext is about diplomatic positioning as much as security: Israel is the rational actor waiting for a partner; the partner is framed as unwilling, not merely unable.

It’s a sentence built for foreign audiences and domestic reassurance alike: hard-edged, morally binary, and strategically useful.