Earlier, I handpicked a few quotes from Robert Kaplan’s Eastward to Tartary that offered insight into today’s geopolitical situation, even though they were written nearly a decade ago. I’d like to share one more.

While Israel’s security phobia might at times seem extreme, life in Israel taught me that the liberal-humanist tendancy to see politics primarily in moral terms could be no less so. In Israel I often met foreign journalists who demanded absolute justice for the Palestinians and talked constantly about morality in politics, which in practice meant that anyone who disagreed with them was “immoral.” You couldn’t argue with these people. Meanwhile, my right-wing neighbors in a poor, Oriental part of Jewish Jerusalem sought absolute security. You couldn’t argue with them, either, but atleast their arguments were grounded in concrete self-interest and not absolute moral terms. . . . Self-interest at its healthiest implicitly recognizes the self-interest of others, and therein lies the possibility of compromise. A rigid moral position admits few compromises.

–Page 185 (emphasis in the original)

Kaplan’s assessment of the Israel-Palestinian situation reminds me of a famous Golda Meir quote: “[The Arabs] will stop fighting us when they love their children more than they hate [Jews].”

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• Trust But Verify: Using Hindsight to Read Eastward to Tartary
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