Israel has spent three years winning on the battlefield. Since Oct. 7, 2023, it has struck its enemies in seven arenas and restored its standing as the regional power. It has not yet won where wars are finally decided: in the minds of the enemy.
That is the argument of Meir Ben-Shabbat, who headed Israel’s National Security Council from 2017 to 2021, in a new paper, “Shattering the Palestinians’ Hope of Defeating Israel,” released on Oct. 19. Before that, he served some three decades in the Shin Bet, Israel’s counterintelligence service, including as head of the district responsible for Gaza, and he was one of the architects of the Abraham Accords. His conclusion is blunt: achieving Israel’s war aims is necessary but not sufficient. What is missing is the cognitive defeat of the Palestinian national movement, a lasting change in its belief that Israel can be beaten. “Not despair but hope,” he writes, “is what feeds terror and violence.”
