Leadership Quote by Silvan Shalom

Security is doing double duty here: it’s a claim about danger and a justification for policy, fused into one urgent sentence. Shalom frames the fence as an act of parental duty - “responsibility to protect our people” - which quietly recasts political choice as moral obligation. Once protection is the premise, dissent starts to look like negligence.

The “that’s why” is the pivot: it compresses a complex debate about borders, sovereignty, and human movement into a single, seemingly inevitable solution. A fence isn’t presented as one option among many; it’s framed as the logical endpoint of care. The rhetoric is domestic - “our people” - but the target audience is also international, signaling that the state is acting under duress rather than ideology.

Then comes the heavy artillery: “19,000 terrorist attacks.” Big round numbers aren’t just evidence; they’re emotional architecture. The figure is designed to overwhelm skepticism and flatten nuance about what counts as an “attack,” over what period, and in what political context (a timeframe that evokes the Second Intifada and the early-2000s security crisis). The statistic’s power lies less in its precision than in its cumulative effect: it manufactures a sense of relentless siege where extraordinary measures feel ordinary.

Subtext: the fence is not only a barrier against violence but a tool for redefining space and legitimacy. By equating the fence with protection, Shalom implicitly makes its critics answer an impossible question: if not this, what are you willing to risk?