Real change does not come from the negotiating table. It comes from terms of surrender. Israel is running out of time to remember this.

Israel is losing the peace it won on the battlefield. Not through military failure, but through the oldest trap in the history of transformational conflict: the premature negotiation.

Let us be direct about what was achieved militarily between October 2023 and mid 2025. Hamas was shattered as a functioning military and governing force. Hezbollah’s senior command was decapitated, its precision missile arsenal severely degraded, its aura of invincibility destroyed along with Hassan Nasrallah. Iran’s air defenses were exposed as porous. Its repeated threats of massive retaliation were called and found empty. The axis of resistance — the strategic architecture that has threatened Israel for decades and sustains the clerical regime’s claim to regional leadership — was closer to structural collapse than at any point in its history.

These were not incremental tactical gains. They were the preconditions for something history rarely offers: the chance to dictate fundamental terms to a defeated enemy. That chance is now being traded away at the negotiating table. And if history teaches anything about this exchange, it teaches that the trade will be catastrophic.

The Iron Law of Transformational Change

There is a principle that runs through every major attempt at fundamental political transformation in modern history, and it is this: genuine, structural change — the kind that reorganizes power and rewrites the rules of an entire order — does not emerge from negotiation. It emerges from surrender. From the moment when one side has so thoroughly lost that what follows is not a discussion but a dictation.

The distinction matters enormously. In a negotiation, the weaker party retains leverage it should not have. It can delay, reframe, demand, and extract concessions simply by remaining at the table. The negotiation itself confers legitimacy — the implicit acknowledgment that both parties have interests worth accommodating. That legitimacy is often the most valuable thing a defeated movement can obtain, and it is handed over freely in the act of sitting down to talk.

There is a second, deeper mechanism at work. Negotiation gives time. And time, for a diminished but not destroyed adversary, is the most precious resource of all. Every ceasefire is a chance to regroup. Every diplomatic round is a chance to rebuild coalitions, reconstruct narratives, and recover the organizational coherence that military pressure had stripped away. The pause that feels like progress is, in most cases, a gift to the status quo — and a slow death sentence for the transformation being sought.

The American failure to complete Reconstruction after the Civil War. The Oslo process that revived Arafat’s PLO from near-irrelevance. Every prior Gaza ceasefire that allowed Hamas to emerge claiming victory from the rubble of defeat. The pattern is not coincidence. It is a law.

What Was Actually Within Reach

To understand what is being lost, one must be clear about what was actually achievable — and what the stated goals of this conflict were.

The goal after October 7th was not containment of Hamas. It was elimination of Hamas as a governing and military force — the permanent end of its capacity to rule Gaza and wage war against Israeli civilians. That goal was within operational reach. Hamas’s tunnel infrastructure was largely destroyed. Its senior military command was killed or displaced. Its governance capacity had collapsed. It was not eliminated, but the military trajectory, sustained, would have completed the work.

For Hezbollah, the goal was the genuine implementation of UN Resolution 1701 — disarmament, withdrawal, the restoration of Lebanese state sovereignty. That would mean the end of Hezbollah as a “resistance” force, which is its entire identity and reason for existence. After Nasrallah’s death and the systematic degradation of its command structure, the leverage to demand exactly that had never been greater.

For Iran, the broader imperative was severing the axis of resistance — the network of proxies, the forward deterrence strategy, the regional project that undergirds the regime’s legitimacy at home and its pretensions to Islamic leadership abroad. A regime that had absorbed repeated humiliation, whose threats proved hollow, whose air defenses had been penetrated at will, was in a position of genuine strategic weakness.

None of these goals can be achieved through negotiation. They can only be achieved through the continued application of pressure until the defeated party has no choice but to accept terms. Israel and its partners were approaching that position. Then the ceasefires came.

What the Pause Is Producing

The results are already visible to anyone willing to look.

Hamas is reconstituting. In northern Gaza, its administrative and armed presence has been re-emerging in the space created by the ceasefire. More importantly, the hostage negotiations have handed Hamas something it should never have been given: political legitimacy. It is now a party to a deal rather than a defeated enemy. It has extracted prisoner releases, humanitarian flows, and a pause in military pressure. Each concession, however justified on humanitarian grounds, strengthens the organization whose elimination was the stated objective. A movement facing genuine extinction does not negotiate from such a position. Hamas has.

Hezbollah is using the pause to survive and rearm. Iranian resupply efforts began almost immediately after the ceasefire. The political question of Hezbollah’s disarmament has dissolved into Lebanese political process — a system structurally incapable of resolving it, because Hezbollah is structurally embedded within it. The Lebanese Armed Forces cannot and will not disarm Hezbollah. The window in which the shock of military defeat could have forced genuine surrender of its military role is closing by the week.

Iran is recalibrating. Renewed nuclear negotiations have provided the regime with precisely what it needed: the restoration of diplomatic relevance. It is no longer a defeated adversary. It is a negotiating partner. That framing, once established, makes the transformational pressure that was building nearly impossible to restore. Tehran is doing what defeated powers always do when given the chance: it is waiting out the will of those who nearly defeated it.

The Deepest Problem: Will as a Resource

The hardest truth the framework forces upon us is this: the pauses did not happen solely because of international pressure or humanitarian concern, though both were real. They happened in part because the will to see transformation through was insufficient — in Washington, in parts of the Israeli cabinet, and in the international community whose support Israel requires.

This is the deepest mechanism by which negotiation defeats change. It is not only that the enemy uses the pause to recover. It is that the side seeking change uses the pause to rest, to manage costs, to respond to domestic and international pressure, to take the face-saving off-ramp from the enormous price of finishing the job. The negotiation is often the symptom of flagging resolve, not merely its cause.

Transformative movements run on extraordinary political and moral energy that is not sustainable indefinitely. Institutional resistance — bureaucracies, economic interests, regional actors with stakes in the existing order — does not need passion. It needs only time. And it has been given time.

In the Middle Eastern context, this is compounded by the ideological architecture of the movements involved. For Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime, survival itself is a victory. The mere fact of enduring a confrontation with Israel and the United States, of emerging from a ceasefire still intact, is transformed in their telling into proof of divine favor and historical destiny. Nasrallah built decades of regional authority on the survival narrative of 2006. Hamas built political capital on surviving four prior Gaza campaigns. Every pause that stops short of their destruction becomes, in their telling, a defeat of the enemy’s maximalist goals. They are not entirely wrong to say so.

The Call: Return to the Path of Surrender

This is not an argument for war without end. It is an argument for clarity about what was being attempted and what is required to complete it.

If the goal was genuinely the elimination of Hamas as a governing force, the disarmament of Hezbollah, and the breaking of Iran’s regional project — and these were the stated goals, repeatedly and publicly — then the current path will not achieve them. History is unambiguous on this point. The negotiating framework being pursued will produce, at best, a temporary arrangement that preserves the essential structures of all three organizations while providing each with the time, legitimacy, and narrative material to reconstitute.

The question Israel’s leadership must confront, and must confront honestly, is whether it retains the military position, the international support, and above all the political will to return to the trajectory that was within reach. That window does not remain open indefinitely. Hamas is already rebuilding. Hezbollah is already rearming. Iran is already recalibrating. Each week of negotiation is a week of recovery for organizations that know, from long experience, how to survive the pause.

The historical record on this is not ambiguous. The movements Israel faces have survived every prior arrangement, every prior ceasefire, every prior diplomatic framework that stopped short of their genuine defeat. They have been weakened before. They have recovered before. The mechanism of recovery is always the same: the pause, the negotiation, the gradual restoration of organizational coherence in the space created by the absence of sustained pressure.

Genuine change — the kind that permanently alters the strategic landscape, that removes the existential threat rather than managing it, that gives the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians and Lebanese a different future than the one being inherited — does not come from agreements signed by parties who retain the will and capacity to violate them. It comes from the moment when the defeated party has no viable alternative to accepting terms.

That moment was approaching. It has been interrupted. The question now is whether it can be recovered — before the diminished foes finish the work of recovery that every day of negotiation enables.

The cease of hostilities was presented as the beginning of a solution. History suggests it may prove to be the end of the opportunity for one.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)