“I can’t fight the shadows all the time.”
That was the European Union’s (EU) foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas’s response on X/Twitter to Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar after reports that she had likened Israel’s policies to apartheid South Africa during a closed-door diplomatic meeting.
The phrase did not calm the dispute. It deepened it.
According to reports from Jerusalem, some Israeli officials interpreted the remark as a veiled political message directed at Germany, and as further evidence that Kallas had come under growing French influence within the EU.
Israel’s objection was understandable. If the EU’s top diplomat compared Israel to apartheid South Africa, Israel had every right to reject the accusation forcefully. That is not the issue.
The issue is what came next.
The more revealing aspect of the exchange may not be what Kallas intended, but how quickly her unusual choice of words was interpreted primarily through a political lens. The controversy reveals a larger diplomatic problem: too often, unfamiliar language is treated as strategy before it is examined as culture.
Diplomacy begins with language. Yet language is never merely vocabulary. Every language carries its own history, literature, symbols, and collective memory. Words rarely travel alone. They arrive shaped by the culture that produced them. When diplomats forget this, they risk misunderstanding not only individual expressions but also the intentions behind them.
To a native English speaker, “I can’t fight the shadows” sounds unusual. English reaches more naturally for expressions such as “I can’t fight ghosts,” “I can’t chase every rumor,” or “I won’t respond to every allegation.” Kallas chose none of them.
One possible explanation lies in her own cultural background.
Readers familiar with Estonian literature may recognize the recurring presence of forests, silence, darkness, memory, and shadows. These are more than descriptions of nature. They often serve as images through which writers explore identity, survival, fear, historical trauma, and the unseen forces that shape individual and collective life.
This symbolic language reflects Estonia’s history. Centuries of foreign domination, followed by Soviet occupation, censorship, and the struggle to preserve language and national identity, encouraged writers to communicate through metaphor as much as through direct political speech.
Within that tradition, shadows often evoke realities that are present yet difficult to grasp or confront directly. In Estonian cultural memory, nature often becomes a language for history: forest as refuge, silence as survival, darkness as danger, and shadows as the presence of realities difficult to grasp or confront directly.
Against this backdrop, an expression such as voidelda varjudega, literally “to fight with shadows,” sounds entirely natural in a literary Estonian register, even though it is not a fixed idiom.
Whether Kallas, former prime minister of Estonia, consciously carried such imagery into English is impossible to know. Nor can anyone say with confidence that this was her intended meaning in her exchange with Sa’ar.
That uncertainty, however, is precisely the point. Diplomacy rarely offers certainty. It demands the discipline of weighing competing interpretations before determining motive.
Anyone familiar with Estonian language and literature would at least recognize Kallas’s wording as a plausible cultural metaphor, not necessarily a concealed strategic message. That possibility alone should have encouraged greater caution before a hidden meaning was assigned to an unfamiliar phrase.
The first duty of diplomacy is curiosity, not certainty.
Whether the Israeli interpretation ultimately proves correct is therefore almost beside the point. One can hold Kallas fully accountable for her reported remarks while still asking whether her language was interpreted with sufficient cultural awareness. Those are separate questions.
Nor is this uniquely an Israeli challenge. Diplomatic history is full of misunderstandings born not of bad intentions but of cultural assumptions. American diplomats have misread indirect communication in Asia. Europeans have misjudged rhetorical traditions in the Middle East. Cross-cultural misunderstanding is among diplomacy’s oldest hazards.
Information without cultural interpretation
The recent exchange between Jerusalem and Brussels simply offers an unusually vivid example. Diplomats are typically trained in international law, political science, economics, security studies, negotiation, conflict resolution, and public administration. These disciplines remain indispensable.
Yet foreign relations are conducted not only through legal texts and policy papers, but through people whose thinking has been shaped by literature, history, religion, folklore, and national memory.
Understanding Estonia requires more than reading European Council conclusions. It requires appreciating a society whose modern identity was secured by preserving its language under foreign rule.
It requires recognizing that Estonian literature developed a symbolic vocabulary in which nature frequently became a language for history itself. Forests, silence, darkness, and shadows are not decorative images. Together they form a cultural vocabulary through which public life is understood.
The same principle applies far beyond Estonia. Every European society speaks through its own historical experience. French political language reflects republican universalism. German public discourse remains deeply shaped by 20th-century historical responsibility. Polish political debate repeatedly invokes national resistance and martyrdom. Successful diplomacy requires understanding not only institutions but also these cultural languages.
Too often, however, foreign ministries continue to treat cultural knowledge as secondary, something appropriate for universities but peripheral to statecraft. History suggests otherwise.
Many of history’s finest diplomats were not only lawyers or politicians. They were historians, linguists, writers, classicists, and scholars of civilization. They understood that political communication rarely operates on the literal level alone. People speak through metaphor, inherited memory, and cultural references that no intelligence report or briefing paper can fully capture.
Israel has invested enormous resources in intelligence gathering and has become exceptionally skilled at collecting information. Yet information without cultural interpretation remains incomplete. Knowing exactly what someone said is fundamentally different from understanding why those particular words were chosen.
Israel has invested heavily in intelligence. It should invest just as seriously in cultural literacy. If Israel wishes to deepen its engagement with Europe, it should broaden the education of its future diplomats. Political science remains essential. International law remains indispensable. But they are not enough.
This need not mean turning diplomats into literary scholars. It means making cultural interpretation a formal part of diplomatic training: language study, literary briefings, historical memory seminars, and country-specific cultural mentoring before postings.
Those who represent Israel abroad should learn not only how nations negotiate but also how nations remember, how metaphors travel across languages, and how culture quietly shapes diplomacy long before negotiations begin.
Diplomacy is often described as the art of choosing the right words. It is equally the art of understanding the words others choose.
Sometimes diplomatic success or failure depends on understanding a metaphor before assigning it a motive. Or, as Kaja Kallas might say, learning to see the shadows.
The writer is a Senior Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and a professor of European studies and international relations in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.