"The world is no longer against us"
About this Quote
Spoken by a man who spent his adult life treating geopolitics as a hard, lonely arithmetic, "The world is no longer against us" lands like a tactical report disguised as relief. Rabin isn’t celebrating popularity; he’s marking a strategic shift. For decades, Israel’s story in global forums often sounded like permanent minority status: surrounded regionally, criticized internationally, expected to justify its existence in every room. Rabin’s line compresses the psychological toll of that stance into a single, almost startled sentence.
The intent is pragmatic: to signal that diplomatic isolation is not destiny, and that policy can change the weather. Coming from a soldier-turned-statesman, it also functions as permission. If the world is no longer against us, then negotiation is not weakness; it’s an opening created by altered incentives. That subtext matters in a society where security language can crowd out political imagination. Rabin frames a new reality without romanticizing it, offering reassurance without surrendering vigilance.
Context does the heavy lifting. In the early 1990s, the Cold War’s end, the Gulf War’s aftershocks, and the Oslo process rearranged alliances and expectations. Rabin’s genius was to translate those macro shifts into an emotional cue: you are not alone anymore. It’s a line aimed inward as much as outward, trying to loosen a national posture built on siege and replace it with something riskier: conditional confidence.
The intent is pragmatic: to signal that diplomatic isolation is not destiny, and that policy can change the weather. Coming from a soldier-turned-statesman, it also functions as permission. If the world is no longer against us, then negotiation is not weakness; it’s an opening created by altered incentives. That subtext matters in a society where security language can crowd out political imagination. Rabin frames a new reality without romanticizing it, offering reassurance without surrendering vigilance.
Context does the heavy lifting. In the early 1990s, the Cold War’s end, the Gulf War’s aftershocks, and the Oslo process rearranged alliances and expectations. Rabin’s genius was to translate those macro shifts into an emotional cue: you are not alone anymore. It’s a line aimed inward as much as outward, trying to loosen a national posture built on siege and replace it with something riskier: conditional confidence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Yitzhak
Add to List







