The War Ends When the Palestinians Lose

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has struck its enemies in seven arenas, from Iran to Yemen to Gaza, and has reclaimed its standing as the region’s leading military power. Hezbollah has been battered, Syria’s old order has collapsed, and Iran has taken heavy losses at the top and a serious setback to its nuclear and missile programs. I do not understate any of that.

One kind of victory is still missing, however, and I believe it is the one that matters most: the victory that takes place in the enemy’s mind. Soon after the massacre, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad promised a second attack, a third, and a fourth. When Britain, Canada, Australia, and other Western governments moved last year to recognize a Palestinian state, Hamad called it “one of the fruits of the October 7 attack.”

Hamas believes it is winning the long game, and the diplomatic calendar gives it little reason to think otherwise.

My argument is simple, even if its implications are not. I came to it through long years of practical experience, as a security official and then as head of Israel’s National Security Council from 2017 to 2021. A durable end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will come only when Palestinians lose the hope of subduing Israel by force and imposing their will on it. Military operations cannot achieve that alone. And until it is achieved, I expect every negotiating track to drift back toward what Israelis now call “Oslo 2”: that is, concessions granted in exchange for commitments that are never kept.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 were meant to end Palestinian terrorism and set the conflict on a path to its conclusion. I believe that, as understood by the Palestinian side, they taught a different lesson: that pressure extracts concessions and that Israeli compromise signals weakness. The 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, which uprooted Jewish communities and was followed by Hamas rule, reinforced this lesson. So did Western process-first thinking. American pressure for Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 handed Gaza to Hamas.

The Palestinian Authority’s record is hard to square with the idea that it has absorbed any lesson of restraint. On September 16, 2026, the U.S. State Department found for the second consecutive year that the PLO and the PA had “once again” failed to meet their commitments under American law, citing their pursuit of international legal action, their push for unilateral recognition, and their continued payments to terrorists. Those payments run to roughly NIS 1.3 billion a year, about 7 percent of the Authority’s budget. As far as is known, in 32 years the PA has not prosecuted a single Palestinian for terrorism against Israel. Its security forces, capped at 30,000 under the 1995 interim agreement, are now estimated at 70,000.

Public attitudes tell a similar story, with qualifications. A May 2025 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that about half of Palestinians supported Hamas’s decision to attack. In August 2026, 72 percent told the same pollster that Hamas should not disarm before a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, including 79 percent in the West Bank.

The same polling also shows some real movement, and I do not want to ignore it. Support for Hamas has fallen from 35 percent to 24 percent in ten months, 79 percent want Mahmoud Abbas to resign, and the pollsters report growing doubt that armed struggle has produced meaningful results. But doubt about a method is not acceptance of defeat. Most Palestinians still reject disarmament, and the belief that Israel can eventually be worn down remains intact.

I use the term cognitive defeat for what is missing: a deep and lasting change in an enemy’s perception, one that leads it to conclude that force cannot achieve its goals and that effort in this direction costs more than it is worth. It is not a substitute for military victory. It is what military victory must produce to be worth its price.

Israel has achieved it before. The 1967 war shattered the Arab belief that Israel could be destroyed. The 1973 war, which ended with Israeli forces across the Suez Canal, convinced Egypt that Israel could not be forced to yield and led to Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem. The 2020 Abraham Accords showed states choosing cooperation over boycott. Terrorist movements are a harder case: they absorb punishment, count mere survival as victory, and treat setbacks as temporary.

Still, there are early signs, and I find them encouraging, though not conclusive. A leading Gaza cleric, Salman al-Dayah, ruled in 2024 that Hamas violated Islamic law by launching a war from a position of such inferiority. Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged an “unprecedented” blow days before he was killed. Arab commentators such as Majed Kayali now write that the military option against Israel has collapsed and that the much trumpeted “Wahdat as-Sahat” (unity of the arenas) was an illusion. These are fragile signals, not a verdict. But they suggest to me that the goal is attainable.

If hope is what sustains the conflict, I judge policy by whether it feeds that hope or starves it. By that test, much current diplomacy fails. U.N. Security Council Resolution 2803, which gave international force to the Trump plan for Gaza, anticipates a “credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” once the Palestinian Authority completes a reform program. That promise is made to a body that has never passed a test set for it. Meanwhile 157 of the 193 U.N. member states recognize a Palestinian state, and Hamas treats that as proof that October 7 worked. This is not a way towards peace, or conflict resolution.
The alternative approach I would take has several parts.

Gaza first. Hamas must be disarmed and removed from any governing role, the Strip demilitarized, security kept in Israeli hands, and Gazans who wish to leave free to do so. I believe postwar Gaza should stand as lasting evidence of what an attack on Israel costs. Any comprehensive plan with binding timetables is lip service until Hamas is gone.

Redivide authority. I would give Palestinians municipal self-government on a district model, with full civil powers, while security remains in Israeli hands alone rather than outsourced to PA forces. Israel should stop deepening its commitments to the Oslo framework and to the Board of Peace’s 15-point plan and should document every PA violation and demand its correction.

Close the other doors. Turkey and Qatar, which host or finance Hamas and its political networks, should be kept out of any Gaza task force or supervisory mechanism, with the United Arab Emirates preferred as a mediator. UNRWA, which preserves the “right of return” for millions registered as refugees, should be removed from the Palestinian arena. And Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria should continue, because I am persuaded that irreversible facts on the ground deflate hopes of a Palestinian state in a way that declarations never can.

I take the objections seriously, because they are serious. Some argue that foreclosing any political horizon is more likely to turn disillusionment into radicalism than resignation, and that settlement expansion makes that outcome more likely. I acknowledge the risk. It is hard to know the point at which the Palestinian Authority might turn its apparatus toward a broad armed struggle, and I believe that calls for preparation rather than retreat. Others point out that Israelis themselves are divided: opposition figures such as Yair Lapid and Yair Golan see a possible role for a reformed PA, and Gadi Eisenkot opposes both statehood and dismantling the Authority. And much of the world, including the International Court of Justice in its 2024 advisory opinion, rejects the legal premises on which settlement policy rests.

My answer is that the alternative has been tested. For three decades, Western diplomacy has bet that offering hope would moderate Palestinian politics, and it has watched hope of a different kind—the hope of outlasting and defeating Israel—flourish. It is not despair but hope that feeds terror and violence, and the policy that looks harshest may be the one that shortens the conflict.

The pressure is coming. Saudi Arabia has tied normalization with Israel to a political channel toward a Palestinian state, and Washington, Ankara, Doha, and Cairo each have reasons to revive the question. Every decision in the coming months, including the next stages of the Board of Peace’s framework, will either reinforce the Palestinian belief that time is on its side or begin to dissolve it. A settlement built on anything less than genuine Palestinian acceptance of Israel’s permanence will not hold. There is no shortcut to that change, and the sooner the world’s capitals recognize it, the sooner the conflict can end.