We Lost the War

There is a chronic fracture between the closed rooms where diplomats draft the future and the thick dust of those who absorb the impact of their decisions. It is an abyss that no treaty seems capable of measuring, let alone healing. Observing this dissonance from northern Israel, with boots muddied by the same earth that buries our own, offers a stark perspective on the failure. Even outside the critical line of the Lebanese border, far from the direct path of the drones and the uninterrupted howl of the sirens that tear through the far north, the shockwave of the collapse reaches us with absolute clarity. For the attentive observer, the daily perception is not that of a tactical conflict in search of a heroic outcome, but of multiple defeats unfolding relentlessly beneath our feet.

The friction has bypassed the restricted circuit of anonymous diplomatic dispatches to dominate the broader press. It is public knowledge that Donald Trump raised his voice at Benjamin Netanyahu over the phone. The harshness did not stem from a clash of visions regarding the architecture of the Middle East, but from a cold urgency dictated by the calendar. The exhausting prolongation of the offensive in Lebanon is reportedly threatening the agreements that Trump yearns to inaugurate before the World Cup and his own birthday. For Washington, the absolute imperative is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the suspension of the blockade on Iranian ports. The atomic program and the proliferation of ballistic missiles have become secondary issues pushed into an indefinite future. In the pragmatic myopia of the White House, Hezbollah is a provincial imbroglio—a tolerable irritation in managing the rubble of a failed region, rather than a pretext to paralyze the American agenda.

Iran, however, will not liquidate Hezbollah, and the rhetoric of its extirpation ignores the very essence of the adversary. The *fait accompli* is that Tehran now holds total control over the strait, and the Shiite militia has never functioned as a mere bargaining chip. This represents a nonnegotiable red line, sustained by roots that precede this conflict by decades and that will unquestionably outlast it. The organization was forged in the mold of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, nourished by the historical marginalization of the Lebanese Shiite community, and calcified its structure during the eighteen years of Israeli occupation in the south between 1982 and 2000. The umbilical cord connecting Tehran to Beirut is organic. The dynamics differ viscerally from the relationship maintained with Hamas, a Sunni actor operating in an enclave where Iran does not project the same existential urgencies. Whoever ignores this asymmetry fails to comprehend the untouchable core of Iranian power.

Truces have occurred before. The fragmented Lebanese state, which envisions the institutional disarmament of its internal militia, managed to stitch together an agreement with Israel that remained strictly on paper. The United Nations peacekeeping mission has exhaustively documented thousands of violations of the pact by Israeli forces. Hezbollah maintained a tactical pause until the end of February, when American and Israeli strikes against Iranian territory reengaged the gears of retaliation. While a meticulous analysis of these reports reveals the spectacle of an illusory diplomacy groping in the dark, the price of the impasse is exacted in blood. Our forces bleed in blind alleys. It is my countrymen who are dying every day on the front, sacrificed for a war we had already lost the moment we failed to secure the north.

Evaluating the chessboard from this latitude, it becomes clear that the government pursues a chimerical convergence encompassing the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and the atrophy of its ballistic-missile fleet. However, the inescapable truth—choked in the dry throats of the troops and stubbornly ignored in the corridors of power in Jerusalem—is that we have lost these wars. The strategic defeat against Iran is already consummated in the waters of Hormuz, and it was seared into our collective memory the moment the night sky was torn apart by barrages of Iranian ballistic missiles, shattering the illusion of our invulnerability. Tehran has consolidated its advance, solidified its geopolitical influence, and no signature extracted at the last minute by an exhausted diplomacy will erase this historical defeat. Trump understands this and, lacking patience and political capital, contents himself with raw pragmatism. The mismatch between Israeli ambition and American disinterest exposes the fragility of an alliance led by those who refuse to accept their own limitations.

If the Iranian front imposed an irreparable and silent loss upon us, Lebanon lays bare a failure of an immediate and carnal order. Nearly a million Israelis live in the north under the dense shadow of a continuous threat. What we face in the confrontation with Hezbollah is not the high geopolitics of nuclear capitulation, but the humiliating inability to guarantee the basic security of our own territory. While the leaders authorize incursions that our American ally begs us to halt, the government clings to the hollow rhetoric of total victory—the unattainable myth of a north pacified by force and an armed group wiped off the map. The colossal weight of this double collapse encompasses the war we lost to Iran and the internal security we were unable to guarantee in Lebanon. This gigantic disaster, umbilically linked to the bloody trauma and the unforgivable failures of October 7th, falls inalienably upon the shoulders of those who led us into this abyss.

The outcome of all this ruin will not be sealed at foreign negotiation tables, but at the ballot box. The upcoming elections will stand as the definitive test of our national conscience and the greatest message that society will broadcast to the world and to itself. The vote will indisputably reveal whether the population has finally understood that the wars were lost and that the current leadership has dragged us to the slaughterhouse, or whether the country will choose to continue embracing the destructive illusion that brought us here.