This ceasefire is proof that we need new strategies.

What comes next will define and redefine the Jewish People.

photo: IDF/X

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As news broke this week of a hostages-for-ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas that could finally bring an end to two years of war, I found myself torn between relief and disappointment.

Relief, because the remaining hostages may finally return home after an unimaginable ordeal. But disappointment — deep, almost physical disappointment — because this does not feel like a victory for Israel.

It feels like the closing act of a painful stalemate, one in which Hamas emerges politically strengthened, morally unrepentant, and more validated than defeated. The hostages’ return is a blessing; the price Israel has paid for it is a warning.

In every conflict, victory must first be defined before it can be achieved.

For Israel, victory means removing Hamas as both a military and governing force from Gaza, disincentivizing Palestinians from ever again turning to Hamas or any similar jihadist movement, and returning all hostages — alive or dead — to Israeli soil. Victory means restoring deterrence, rebuilding moral clarity, and ensuring that no future enemy believes mass murder and kidnapping can ever yield political gain.

For Hamas, victory has never been about winning in the conventional sense. Its triumph lies in paralysis: a stalemate that forces Israel to negotiate under pressure, fractures Israeli society, and delegitimizes Israel on the world stage. Its battlefield is not just Gaza, but global perception. Every delay, every protest, every viral image of suffering, no matter the cause or context, serves Hamas’ purpose: to make Israel doubt itself and the world doubt Israel.

By that measure, Hamas won this battle. It caught Israel completely off guard on October 7, 2023, exposed deep flaws in our country’s intelligence and strategic assumptions, and then fought a propaganda war far more skillfully than it fought a military one.

Through Qatar’s Al Jazeera, Western influencers, antisemitic academics, useful idiots, and the algorithms of social media platforms that amplify outrage over truth, Hamas weaponized victimhood and turned every reasonable Israeli act of defense into mounting evidence of guilt. It transformed slaughter into spectacle, and tragedy into leverage. Western governments, already polarized and fragile, imported the conflict into their own streets and campuses. Antisemitism rebranded itself.

The chaos that Hamas unleashed abroad may be its most enduring achievement.

But even the mighty must sometimes fall to remember who they are. Israel is strong — militarily, technologically, economically — but even strength can harden into arrogance. Defeat, when properly understood, can be cleansing. It checks ego, dissolves illusions, and demands renewal.

For Israel, this moment demands not despair, but recalibration. The old “conceptzia” — the belief that Hamas was contained, that Qatar was a neutral mediator, that Hezbollah would remain in check, that Iran could be deterred through ambiguity — must now be abandoned. Every layer of Israeli security, diplomacy, and psychology must be rethought.

The same is true for world Jewry. Diaspora Jews must recalibrate their political loyalties, their relationship to Israel, and their sense of safety in societies that have once again revealed just how conditional their acceptance truly is.

Jewish organizations must reassess how they operate, advocate, and unify in an environment where their very identity is under siege. They must do more than react; they must reimagine. It’s time to completely rethink how we engage and educate Jews, building a generation that is not only more connected, but more literate, inspired, and empowered. Jewish life cannot be sustained by nostalgia or fear; it must be fueled by knowledge, pride, and purpose. Only a people deeply rooted in its own story can stand firm when the world tries to rewrite it.

Yet another essential recalibration lies ahead: one of sovereignty itself. Israel can no longer afford to outsource its defense, its weapons, or its wartime economy to the goodwill of others. Dependence is not partnership; it is vulnerability dressed as diplomacy. In the same way that Jews must distance themselves from political parties that use them as props and pawns, Israel must redefine its alliances.

The days of blank-check loyalty — whether to Washington, D.C. or any other capital — are over. From now on, partnerships must be transactional, pragmatic, and case by case. You want our cooperation? It will come with terms. You want our innovation, our intelligence, our deterrence? Then treat Israel as a partner, not a dependent.

When our interests align, we will move together. When they don’t, we will move alone. The Jewish state was not reborn to be anyone’s client state; it was reborn to ensure that Jewish destiny is never outsourced again.

But independence in defense must be matched by innovation in diplomacy. For decades, Israel has brought the world’s young Jews to the Jewish state through Birthright-Taglit — a program that strengthened Diaspora identity and connection to Israel. The time has come for a “Reverse Birthright,” an initiative that sends young Israelis out into the world not as tourists, but as living ambassadors. It’s difficult to hate a country, or a people, when you have a friend from there.

Israel’s greatest untapped resource is its people: multilingual, cultured, compassionate, resilient, and good-looking. Imagine tens of thousands of Israelis, post-army or university, spending six months embedded in communities across Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America — teaching, volunteering, building, creating friendships that humanize Israel beyond the headlines. Every Israeli who builds a bridge abroad becomes a living counter-narrative to the lies that thrive in their absence.

This is people-to-people diplomacy: organic, personal, and disarming in a way no press release or policy speech could ever be. It is time Israel understood that global legitimacy is not granted by governments; it’s earned through relationships.

Israel’s partnerships with other nations must also evolve to counter not only terrorists, but their newest strategy: the mass abduction of innocents as bargaining chips. As retired IDF lieutenant colonel Jonathan Conricus has observed, the lesson of this war is the need to apply “a set of preventive measures to make it less likely that any terror organization or rogue state will try to emulate the actions of Hamas in the future.”¹

At the core of Hamas’ power lies one unbearable fact: the hostages. The 251 Israeli and international captives it seized on October 7th became both shield and sword. They have constrained Israel’s military operations, inflamed public opinion, and divided Israelis over how far to go and when to stop. The hostages are not only a humanitarian crisis but a moral snare, proof of Hamas’ understanding that Israel’s humanity can be turned against it.

Yet this, too, can be transformed into resolve. Israel can and must make hostage-taking a losing strategy — by reshaping global norms and deterrence doctrines so that no group ever again believes kidnapping Jews will yield anything but ruin.

There is another battlefield where Hamas has scored its greatest short-term victories: the information war. In 1948, Israel fought for land. In 1967, for existence. Beginning in 2023, it fought for truth itself. Hamas mastered the art of digital distortion, turning smartphones into weapons and outrage into oxygen. It flooded social feeds with images divorced from context, exploiting empathy as a tool of manipulation. Israel must learn to fight there as decisively as it fights on the ground — by building an infrastructure of truth as sophisticated as its Iron Dome. Propaganda cannot be ignored; it must be countered with clarity, speed, and moral confidence.

And that moral confidence is key. This war, more than any before it, revealed the deep moral asymmetry between the two sides. Hamas celebrates death; Israel mourns it. Hamas hides behind civilians; Israel shields them.

Yet, in much of the global narrative, the moral equation has been inverted. Israel’s restraint is portrayed as cruelty, while Hamas’ cruelty masquerades as “resistance.” True victory for Israel will not come from global applause; it will come from holding firm to its values even when the world distorts them. The Jewish moral tradition does not depend on validation; it depends on conscience.

If October 7th shattered Israel’s illusion of safety, October 8th shattered the Diaspora’s illusion of acceptance. Jews from New York to Paris to London to Melbourne to Cape Town awoke to find that centuries-old hatreds had been waiting just beneath the surface. Universities, media outlets, and activist movements that claimed to champion justice turned a blind eye to Jewish pain. The war in Gaza revealed a deeper one within the Jewish world: a war over identity, loyalty, and unity.

That, too, must be won. The Jewish People cannot afford to mirror the divisions that their enemies exploit. Israel and the Diaspora must stand as one organism, not as estranged relatives. If Hamas’ weapon is division, then Jewish solidarity itself is the countermeasure.

Yet, even amid this dark chapter, not all was lost. The security situation along the Gaza border has fundamentally improved, and the severity of the military threat emanating from Gaza has been significantly reduced. On a regional level, Israel’s position is arguably stronger. It exposed Iran’s vulnerabilities and demonstrated the capacity to engage multiple fronts simultaneously. It reminded both enemies and allies that Israel can absorb unthinkable trauma and still fight back with discipline and precision. The illusion of coexistence with a genocidal enemy has been shattered — painfully but necessarily.

Winning the war now means redefining the nature of power. Power is not just the ability to destroy, but to rebuild, reimagine, and endure. It means creating an Israel that no longer mistakes calm for peace, or silence for safety. It means turning resilience into strategy, moral clarity into policy, and national trauma into collective purpose.

Hamas may have won the battle of October 7th, but wars are not decided by shock; they are decided by endurance. And endurance is what has always defined the Jewish story. Israel’s victory will not be measured by whatever happens next in Gaza, but by the rebirth of vision, by the recalibration of its security and soul, and by the simple fact that, yet again, the Jewish People will not vanish.

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1. “How Hamas’s hostage tactic checkmated Israel’s war strategy - analysis.” The Jerusalem Post.