Leadership Quote by Silvan Shalom

A fence can be unbuilt; a body can’t be un-killed. Silvan Shalom’s line is engineered to do two jobs at once: justify a controversial security measure while preemptively conceding its moral cost. By calling the barrier “reversible,” he frames it as a temporary, technical instrument - policy as hardware. That single word is a political pressure valve, signaling to critics that this isn’t annexation in concrete form, just an emergency response that can be rolled back when conditions improve.

Then comes the hard pivot: “Human lives are irreversible.” It’s not poetry for poetry’s sake; it’s a hierarchy. The sentence structure sets up an implicit moral calculus in which the inconvenience, humiliation, and land disruption associated with a fence are weighed against the permanence of death. In that calculus, objections become aesthetically understandable but ethically secondary. The line dares opponents to argue that a reversible harm should outweigh an irreversible one - a rhetorical trap that shifts the debate from rights and sovereignty to triage.

The context is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically the era when Israel’s separation barrier was defended as a response to attacks while condemned for its route, its impact on Palestinian movement, and its political symbolism. Shalom’s subtext is deterrence through moral framing: the state is cast as reluctant but responsible, choosing a changeable scar on the landscape to prevent unchangeable loss. It works because it turns infrastructure into a stand-in for grief, compressing a sprawling geopolitical argument into a single, brutal asymmetry.