Every War Must End
In 1971, Fred Charles Iklé published a short and incisive book, Every War Must End, asking the question: “How are wars brought to an end?” This question tends to be neglected, as historians, political scientists, and military analysts have written and commented far more about how wars have started rather than how they should end. Whereas military leaders do not design how to end the fighting, statesmen do not pay enough attention about ending wars.
It is a truism, but it is also a ‘law’ and a scientific fact that wars eventually end; even the Thirty-Year war ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In chronological order, wars are followed by truces, cease-fires, armistice agreements, and even peace treaties. The war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which started almost two years ago with the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, will end eventually. As a peace scholar, I played like everybody else with faulty predictions, scripts, and scenarios, regarding the possible length of this war: Thanksgiving ’23; Christmas ’23; Ramadan and Passover ’24; Thanksgiving and Christmas ’24; all the way to the ceasefire on January 18, 2025, violated by Israel unilaterally on March, and so on, and I got it wrong again and again.
It is hard to believe today, but what started as a justified war of self-defense against Hamas’ brutal aggression and violation of Israeli sovereignty, eventually evolved into a war of revenge and physical destruction of the Gaza Strip. Even the Israeli Chief of Staff and all the upper echelons of the Israeli security system nowadays call for a negotiated cease-fire with Hamas, agreed along the lines of the so-called Witkopf blueprint. Yet, the Israeli government seems to be adamant to continue and escalate the war, leading to the complete military occupation of the Gaza Strip, with the deaths of dozens if not hundreds of soldiers and the remaining live hostages, the disappearing of dead hostages, and the killing of scores of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip.
At this moment in time, a fateful crossroads in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I can think about three alternative scenarios that might end the war in Gaza: a political-diplomatic solution, imposed by President Trump within the next two weeks; a ‘catastrophic’ scenario, which will abruptly stop the war through a United Nations Security Council Resolution (under Chapter 7) within the next few months; and the end of the war following elections to the Israeli Knesset in 2026, leading to a new government that will decide to end the war in Gaza, even in unilateral terms.
The first and preferred option, a political-diplomatic solution, depends today upon the amount of leverage that the Arab Gulf countries, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, might exercise in convincing President Trump to take a more pro-active role in ending the war, in the aftermath of the failed Israeli attack in Doha, Qatar. As in January 2025, President Trump can in principle impose upon PM Netanyahu to agree to a temporary cease-fire for sixty days, the release of half of the hostages, a massive increase in humanitarian aid, and the cessation of hostilities during the needed time to negotiate a permanent end to the war. This blueprint has been accepted by Hamas about a month ago, whereas the Israeli government decided last week to literally blow up the negotiations with Hamas by attempting to kill the upper political echelon of Hamas. There is zero trust between Israel and Hamas, so it is up to third parties, first and foremost the United States, to take the initiative in ending the war.
According to this option, the United States does not have to agree with all the terms of the UN Resolution adopted last Friday (endorsing the ‘New York Declaration’ of July 30, 2025) but many principles of that UN Resolution even overlap with those of the Israeli government: all the hostages should be returned; the Gaza Strip should be demilitarized; Hamas has to be dismantled in military terms; Hamas cannot longer rule the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the war; there should be an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip; peacekeeping forces should be established in place; and a technocratic government ruled by moderate Palestinians in cooperation with the Arab countries and the United Nations, eventually replaced by a reformed Palestinian Authority, should govern the Gaza Strip. A ceasefire now might rule out the second option, which I refer as a ‘doomsday scenario.’
The second and horrible option, a doomsday scenario, might be the unintended consequence of the military offensive that the IDF might be taking into the heart of Gaza City, assuming that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will stay put and do not leave, within the next few weeks. Since mid-March 2025 the average number of Palestinians killed daily by the IDF has been around 70-100 (about 2/3 of them civilians, many of them women and children). An unintended military action that would lead to the sudden killing of a large number of civilians; or a large number of Israeli military casualties as a result of a guerrilla ambush; or the death of hostages, in combination with the worsening of an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis, or part or all of that will lead to an emergency diplomatic action, taken by the United Nations Security Council under Chapter 7 (with the abstention of the United States) to immediately stop the war. Like on October 22, 1973, it might take Israel a few days to comply, but Israel will do it, ending the war, under much worst political circumstances than an agreed diplomatic outcome by all the parties concerned nowadays. In this second scenario, the political outcome of the war will be drawn, like the Dayton Agreement of 1995 that ended the Yugoslavian Wars by imposition, without taking too much in consideration Israel’s political own will, as one of the parties concerned about the fate of Gaza in the aftermath of the war.
There is a third option, the prolongation of this futile and bloody war well into 2026, as a guerrilla war under the full Israeli military occupation of the Gaza Strip, without much diplomatic intervention on the part of the international community, leaving Israelis and Palestinians to hemorrhage in their perpetual feud, perhaps escalating the violence into the West Bank with the possible collapse of the Palestinian Authority and the ongoing pogrom attacks against Palestinian civilians. Economic sanctions and boycotts will increase, Israel will become finally a full-fledged pariah state, even more than apartheid South Africa until the mid-1990s. Even the hawkish Israeli Foreign Minister, Gideon Saar, is today warning about this looming catastrophe. In this case, the end of the war will be only the result of a sea change in the Israeli domestic political scene, following elections to the Israeli Parliament next year. The first decision to be taken by the next Israeli government, after ousting PM Netanyahu and the Likud party, alongside its extreme right and religious partners, will be to unilaterally end the war, and to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. The tragic difference between this scenario and the previous two ones, will be in the number of casualties, among Israelis and Palestinians, to add to the ongoing Israeli-Hamas War in the next several months.
If by the end of the day, the futile continuation of the war will lead not just to the “collapse of Hamas” (in itself a military mirage), but also to ruinous consequences for Israel’s existence and soul, why not to end the war now? Ending the war in Gaza will not necessarily end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the moment of tragic “ripeness” and the mutually hurting stalemate might open opportunities to move from ending the war to resolving the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians by peaceful means, as it happened between Israel and Egypt in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. Beyond the undescriptive trauma that we all Israelis carry since October 7, 2023, we have to act like the phoenix and learn how to fly again, rising literally from the ashes. Only by returning to the pragmatic Zionist logic of accepting the principle of partitioning this land between its two legitimate owners, Jews and Palestinians, we will manage to defeat politically Hamas (and our own fundamentalists), who demand all the Land (of Israel or Palestine), “from the river to the sea.” “Two-states for two peoples,” the formula of the Partition Plan of 1947, is still the only feasible way to find peace, as we implore and pray daily. That should be part of a ‘grand design’ (or package deal), whereas a demilitarized Palestinian state, alongside Israel and not instead of it, recognizes Israel as a Jewish state and give up the ‘right of return’ to Israel itself. This state should be eventually established in unison with the signing of peace between Israel and all of its Arab neighbors, first and foremost Saudi Arabia, defeating the designs of Iran and all other Israel’s enemies. Together with the return of the hostages, that will be our eventual victory, the triumph and fulfilment of our Zionist dream. And according to consistent public opinion polls, that is also the preferred option of the majority of Israelis after this war is over.
