Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. I believe in this new future. I argued for Peace and new allies, with a MAGA person and he would not relinquish War.
I think we must and we must plan for allies. We can no longer afford the cost of War.
In solidarity for good days and Peace.
Ps. I think Eisenkot or Yair Golan are astute enough to maintain and expand Peace.
Big love, now Avasha Rotman’s thoughts on Peace:
Throughout the past few months, I have opened every morning with a quick glance at my phone, only to discover that my hope had once again been misplaced. This morning, it finally arrived: the announcement that the war is over and that the United States and Iran have reached an agreement.
I wanted to share my excitement, and when the girls woke up for school, I told Shaya the news. She responded with a question:
“Does this mean that there will be no more war?”
she asked.
I found myself struggling with the answer. I wanted to say yes, but I knew that was not the case. Instead, I told her that this current war had come to an end.
The understanding that the war is ending is slowly trickling into the national consciousness, delayed by a deep Israeli desire for it to continue, sustained by the false belief that it can finally put an end to the possibility of future wars.
For almost three years, we have been promised by our leaders, and by many of our fellow Israelis as well, that this would be the war that delivers ultimate victory: a victory so complete that no other wars would follow. A victory that would allow me to answer Shaya’s question with a confident yes.
But just as I struggled to answer Shaya, so too is Israel struggling to bridge the gap between reality and its aspirations, between the outcome of the war and the promises made by our leaders.
It will take time for our nation to fully grasp what has happened. The gap is so deep and so wide that I find myself feeling empathy for those who followed the lies of our leaders. And if you sense some anger in my words, it reflects some of the emotions now rushing through me.
The anger is directed not only at our leaders but also at average Israelis who openly adopted the dominant story that emerged after the October 7 massacre. It is a story that collapsed this morning with the end of the war.
For me, this is not merely the end of the forty-day war with Iran. Rather, it is the end of the war that began with the failure and the massacre of October 7.
The story we have been telling ourselves since then goes as follows: the failure of October 7 was the result of a false strategic conception, in which Israel allowed its enemies to build a ring of fire around us in order to preserve the comfort and normalcy of daily life. We were unwilling to risk our comfort in order to reduce future threats. We embraced the comforts of Western living while forgetting that we live in the Middle East.
Our enemies used this time to plot and prepare for our destruction. Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad in Syria, and above all, the head of the snake: the Ayatollah regime in Iran.
The ultimate symbol of this false conception was the suitcases of cash delivered to Hamas through Qatar, with Israeli approval.
Once the war began, Israel adopted a new conception, or so we were told. This time, Israel would no longer tolerate threats sitting on its borders. Any potential threat would be met with a harsh and aggressive military response. We would not stop until our enemies were eradicated. This is where the unforgettable term, and promise, of “ultimate victory” emerged. Even today, there are Israelis who wear hats bearing this slogan, and bumper stickers with the phrase can still be seen on roads across the country.
This approach was first tested in Gaza, when Israel faced the question of whether to sign an agreement with Hamas that would secure the release of all the hostages in exchange for ending the war. You may remember how the Israeli leadership and much of the Israeli right insisted that we must continue until Hamas was destroyed, even at the cost of losing the hostages.
Even after the first months of the war, when Hamas’s military capabilities had been largely dismantled by IDF maneuvering forces, Israel insisted on pressing forward. It insisted on continuing until Hamas raised a white flag. Israeli experts argue today that Hamas was militarily defeated as early as March 2024, when the first serious discussions about ending the war in exchange for the hostages began.
But under the new conception, Israel refused. We were told that there was no alternative, that we had to continue the war until ultimate victory was achieved. The result was another year and a half of war, during which Israel demolished much of the Gaza Strip while simultaneously eroding our moral standing and damaging our international status.
The same pattern repeated itself in Lebanon. Between September and November 2024, Israel launched a successful military campaign against Hezbollah, one that had been in preparation for more than a decade. We all remember the opening moves: the famous pager attack and the assassination of the charismatic and dangerous leader Hassan Nasrallah.
In just two months, Israel’s security forces severely degraded Hezbollah’s two principal military capabilities. The first was its plan to invade the Galilee in the same way Hamas invaded the Gaza Envelope, only on a much larger scale. The second was its arsenal of roughly 150,000 missiles and rockets, which posed a strategic threat to Israel.
The operation ended with a ceasefire agreement that enabled the rise of an anti-Hezbollah government in Lebanon, the first of its kind in two decades. Hezbollah retreated to northern Lebanon, and the dismantling of its presence in southern Lebanon was handed over to the Lebanese government for enforcement.
But less than a year later, Israel was not satisfied with the Lebanese government’s efforts against Hezbollah and feared that the organization would once again raise its head. So we began planning yet another attack on the terrorist organization and waited for an opportunity, which came with the launch of the forty-day war against Iran.
On the first day of the war, several rockets were fired from southern Lebanon, giving Israel the excuse it needed. We entered a new war with the belief that Hezbollah had fallen into a strategic trap and that Israel could now finish the job. This time, once again, we would not stop until ultimate victory.
More than three and a half months later, we can say that Israel did not achieve that victory. Far from it. It seems that we were the ones who fell into a trap, pulled deeper and deeper into Lebanon without a clear ability, or a clear plan, to bring the campaign to an end.
In the story we have adopted, Israel’s enemies have been organized in a hierarchy, with Hamas at the bottom, Hezbollah in the middle, and at the top of the pyramid, the Iranian Ayatollahs. They have been described as the head of the snake or the head of the octopus, sending its many arms all around Israel. We were told that the best way to eliminate the threat was to cut off the head, to go after the Iranians themselves.
And so, as Hamas was struck in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Assad regime collapsed, leaving Iran exposed, we were told that a historic opportunity had emerged, one that must not be missed.
The result was the successful operation against Iran in June 2025, known as the Twelve-Day War. Once again, Israel had been preparing for this campaign for more than a decade, and the results were undeniable. Israel demonstrated rare military capabilities, striking targets more than 2,000 kilometers away with great effectiveness.
But the war, successful as it was, also led to an important realization: it was not enough. The threat had not been eliminated, only reduced. And according to the new conception we had adopted, Israel could no longer be willing to tolerate any threat against it.
So Israel planned another war against Iran, this time much larger and far more ambitious. This brought us to the Forty-Day War, driven by the belief that the only way to remove the threat was to bring down the Ayatollah regime itself. And because achieving that goal required the support of our largest, and only, ally, the United States, this war may ultimately be remembered as both Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest achievement and his greatest failure: his ability to sell the idea to Donald Trump.
But as we saw in Gaza and in Lebanon, the second round of war with Iran also proved to be a failure. It demonstrated Israel’s, and the US, tactical superiority while exposing the absence of strategic planning.
The underlying assumption behind these campaigns, that our enemies could be defeated solely on the battlefield, that if we struck them hard enough and long enough they would eventually surrender, proved to be false. On all three fronts, our enemies chose to continue fighting, even as the costs they paid mounted and the damage inflicted on the people living among them grew ever greater. They refused to raise a white flag. No unconditional surrender ever came.
Instead, what followed was more bloodshed, more destruction, and more wars.
The agreement reached yesterday, and due to be officially signed on Friday, symbolizes not only the end of the Forty-Day War and the end of the war that began on October 7. It also marks the collapse of Israel’s new strategic conception of ultimate victory.
The reason so many Israelis are struggling with the gap between the story they were told and the reality we now face lies in that failure.
This should not come as a surprise. The Israeli conception emerged from trauma on one side and political necessity on the other. It was not the result of a genuine learning process based on investigating the failures that led to the massacre. Instead, we were led by a leadership that not only refused to learn, but also refused to acknowledge the failure and its responsibility for it.
And with this, I return to Shaya’s question and ask myself: what should we do in order to create a future in which there will be no wars?
We can start by preserving the hope that one day we will live in such a reality. The most dangerous aspect of the ultimate victory approach is that it undermines the hope that we can one day get along with our neighbors. We must reconnect with that hope and believe that it can be achieved.
The second step is to understand that this war is over. We should halt, look inward, and ask ourselves what we did well and where we fell short. We must learn from this war in order to be better prepared for the next challenge.
And lastly, we must understand that every military operation is only a means to an end. It can take you only so far. When wars end, agreements follow. We have forgotten the possibility of agreements.
When you embrace the idea of ultimate victory, you begin to believe that the end of a war will not bring an agreement, but rather the disappearance of the enemy itself. Yet reality tells a different story. Israel will continue to be surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs, by more than ninety million Turks, and by over ninety million Iranians. They are not going anywhere, and neither are we. Ultimately, we will have no choice but to find a way to live alongside one another.
Israel is not lacking wise, educated, and thoughtful people. What we are lacking is proper leadership, leadership willing to tell the public the truth, leadership driven not by the desire to remain in power but by concern for our future.
In the past, we have shown the ability to rise from our failures stronger and wiser. I truly hope, and believe, that we can do so once again.
My hope is that the agreement ending this war will also mark the beginning of a new chapter, one that allows us to choose a different path.
The only question is whether we will choose to take it.