"We must see what in the Israeli identity - in the Israeli - we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory"
About this Quote
Yehoshua’s line is a rebuke disguised as a civic pep talk: stop treating nationhood like a real-estate transaction. The pivot from “identity” to “the Israeli” tightens the lens from abstract ideology to a living person, a citizen with habits, anxieties, and moral obligations. It’s a novelist’s move, swapping slogans for character. And it carries an edge: if Israel can only narrate itself through “taking” - security, land, leverage - then it risks becoming a country whose selfhood is measured in annexations, not in culture or ethics.
The phrase “speaking so often” is doing quiet work. Yehoshua isn’t only criticizing policy; he’s indicting a discourse, a national default setting in which expansion becomes common sense and generosity is treated as naive. He frames “giving” not as charity but as a strategic and spiritual necessity: a way to be legible to the world without demanding perpetual exceptions. It suggests soft power as antidote to an identity trapped in siege logic.
Context matters: Yehoshua, a leading Israeli public intellectual associated with the peace camp, spent decades arguing that occupation corrodes Israel from the inside - politically, psychologically, linguistically. The line reads as a warning about addiction: territorial appetite that can’t stop, even when it costs legitimacy and fractures the society it claims to protect. By asking what Israel can “give,” he’s also asking what story Israel wants to be able to tell about itself when borders stop moving.
The phrase “speaking so often” is doing quiet work. Yehoshua isn’t only criticizing policy; he’s indicting a discourse, a national default setting in which expansion becomes common sense and generosity is treated as naive. He frames “giving” not as charity but as a strategic and spiritual necessity: a way to be legible to the world without demanding perpetual exceptions. It suggests soft power as antidote to an identity trapped in siege logic.
Context matters: Yehoshua, a leading Israeli public intellectual associated with the peace camp, spent decades arguing that occupation corrodes Israel from the inside - politically, psychologically, linguistically. The line reads as a warning about addiction: territorial appetite that can’t stop, even when it costs legitimacy and fractures the society it claims to protect. By asking what Israel can “give,” he’s also asking what story Israel wants to be able to tell about itself when borders stop moving.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
|---|
More Quotes by B. Yehoshua
Add to List
