If Israel does not find the way to disengage from the Palestinians, its future might resemble the experience of Belfast or Bosnia - two communities bleeding each other to death for generations.
Interpretation
The quote warns of the dangers of prolonged conflict and the need for resolution to avoid a cycle of violence.
Ehud Barak's quote highlights the importance of finding a path towards peace and disengagement in conflicts, particularly between Israel and the Palestinians. By comparing the potential future of Israel to Belfast and Bosnia, he underscores the dire consequences of ongoing hostilities, suggesting that without resolution, violence may persist for generations, leading to mutual destruction and suffering.
In practice
In a speech advocating for peace, one might use this quote to illustrate the need for resolution in longstanding conflicts.
In Israel, there is a peace camp that can convene 200,000 people in central square of this city, on very short notice, and there is a major movement among academics, politicians, thinkers, and public leaders for peace, even at a painful price. On the Palestinian side, you can find them individually here and there, but there is no public movement.
There is a thin line between peace of the brave and peace of the hostage... between compromise - even calculated risk - and irresponsibility and capitulation.
Israel is much more effective when the Israelis are convinced that we are on the moral high ground: that we are acting not just out of might, but also out of right.
As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jewish or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.
I cannot penetrate the soul of Arafat. I cannot know in advance whether, behind all the masks, he's the kind of leader who can reach an agreement or whether he wants to be the Moses of the Palestinians, staying in front of the river and not crossing into the promised land.
To think that you can - as a Zionist, Jewish independent state at the end of the 20th century - rule over another people for generations without having any consequences - it's ridiculous.
Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Jonathan would say, other times, "is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too.
Try to understand the ego. Analyze it, dissect it, watch it, observe it, from as many angles as possible. And don't be in a hurry to sacrifice it, otherwise the greatest egoist is born: the person who thinks he is humble, the person who thinks that he has no ego.
As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.
Well, protest is central to the evolution of black American culture. It was protest that really finally won our freedom for us. Beyond that, it's always interesting to note that it expanded the idea of democracy.
It's very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.
The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.
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