Life & Mortality Quote by Silvan Shalom

The line reads like a reluctant confession, but it’s also a carefully engineered justification. Shalom compresses 35 years of occupation into a single, blandly bureaucratic clause - “in the territories since 1967” - as if the most consequential geopolitical fact in Israel’s modern history were merely a long-running administrative situation. That flattening is the first rhetorical move: normalize the premise, then dramatize the emergency.

The second move is tempo. He jumps to 2002, the bloodiest stretch of the Second Intifada, when Israeli civilians were facing an almost unimaginable rhythm of suicide bombings. “Three or four... every day” is not only a statistic; it’s a beat, a percussive repetition meant to push the listener from debate into triage. Once the audience is living in that daily panic, the sentence’s final pivot lands: “We came to the conclusion that it can't continue like that.” Notice what’s missing. No mention of Palestinians, no mention of policy choices, no naming of occupation as a cause, no alternatives spelled out. The passive, collective “we” claims sober deliberation while keeping agency foggy.

Context matters: this is the era of Operation Defensive Shield and the acceleration of barriers, closures, targeted killings, and later, unilateral withdrawal talk. The subtext is: extraordinary measures are not ideology, they are necessity. By framing the status quo as unsustainable only once Israeli suffering reaches a certain pitch, Shalom signals a politics where structural injustice is background noise, but insecurity is the alarm that authorizes history to be rewritten overnight.