Daily Inspiration Quote by Mahmoud Abbas

It reads like a slip of velvet over a hard edge: a sentence built to sound pragmatic while smuggling in a maximal demand. Abbas’s phrasing pivots on a neat rhetorical trick - turning “we want” into “they want,” as if Israeli withdrawal is not only desirable but already self-evident, even consensual. “So let us let them leave” performs permission, casting Palestinians (or the international community Abbas is implicitly addressing) as the reasonable facilitators of an exit Israel supposedly craves. That inversion matters: it reframes a contested political outcome as an overdue administrative step.

The specific intent is twofold. First, it projects inevitability: departure is framed as a natural endpoint, not a concession wrested through negotiation. Second, it courts legitimacy by adopting the language of choice rather than coercion. In a conflict where accusations of expulsion and denial of sovereignty are existential, the distinction between “leave” and “be removed” is doing heavy moral work.

Subtext: Abbas is speaking past Israelis to outside arbiters - the U.S., Europe, the UN - inviting them to see Israeli presence as an anachronism sustained by obstinacy rather than security logic. The line also carries a pressure tactic. If “they want to leave,” then any refusal to withdraw becomes proof of bad faith, shifting the burden of compromise onto Israel.

Contextually, this sits inside the Palestinian leadership’s long effort to translate occupation into a clean narrative of decolonization: withdrawal as the obvious, rational act that ends the story. The elegance is also the danger. The sentence flattens Israeli fears and internal politics into a single alleged desire, and by doing so, it risks sounding less like a pathway to coexistence than a rehearsed verdict.