Three years after October 7, Israel has struck its enemies in seven arenas and restored its standing as the region's leading power. Yet the question of how this war actually ends is still open. Meir Ben-Shabbat, former head of Israel's National Security Council and now head of the Misgav Institute, offers a direct answer in a new policy paper for the Middle East Forum, titled, Shattering the Palestinians' Hope of Defeating Israel.
His thesis is that achieving the war's stated goals is "necessary but not sufficient." What is missing, he argues, is a "cognitive defeat": a lasting Palestinian Arab conclusion that Israel cannot be beaten by force, and that trying will cost more than it is worth. The argument deserves a serious hearing, both for what it gets right and for what it leaves unanswered.
Ben-Shabbat's sharpest line is also his most important: "Not despair but hope is what feeds terror and violence." Western diplomacy has long assumed the reverse, that violence grows from hopelessness and that a political horizon will drain it. The paper argues the record points the other way.
In his reading, Oslo taught Palestinian Arab leaders that pressure extracts concessions, and the 2005 disengagement confirmed the lesson. The pattern repeated in September 2025, when a wave of Western states recognized a Palestinian Arab "state" and Hamas's Ghazi Hamad called it one of the "fruits" of October 7.
When a terrorist movement can plausibly claim diplomatic credit for a massacre, the incentives are broken. That point stands whatever one thinks of the rest of the paper.
Ben-Shabbat is careful on one thing critics may miss. Cognitive defeat, he insists, does not replace military decision. It requires a military result so unequivocal that it changes how the enemy thinks.
The paper leans on Khalil Shikaki's Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), and the numbers are sobering. In its August 2026 poll, 72 percent said Hamas should not disarm before a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, rising to 79 percent in Judea and Samaria. In May 2025, about half had backed the October 7 attack.
But the same poll shows movement. Support for Hamas fell to 24 percent from 35 percent ten months earlier, and in Judea and Samaria from 32 to 18. PCPSR itself describes a landscape "in transition," with growing doubt that armed struggle achieved anything.
How to read that shift is contested. Ben-Shabbat sees early cracks in the ethos of victory. Analysts at the Arab Center Washington DC argue the drop mostly reflects alienation from every faction, not a turn toward accepting Israel. Both can be true. Either way, the change Ben-Shabbat wants is real but fragile, and, as he admits, hard to measure.
The paper's most urgent recommendation concerns the Palestinian Legislative Council elections that Mahmoud Abbas set by decree on July 9 for November 28, the first such vote since Hamas won in 2006. Hamas's Husam Badran has said the movement will run inside the widest possible coalition.
Ben-Shabbat's warning goes beyond who wins. The real danger, he writes, is the expectation the vote will create abroad: an "elected" Authority presented as reformed, but with the demand on Jerusalem, "hand over the keys" to Gaza. He urges Israel to oppose the elections openly rather than wait for Abbas to cancel them again, as he did in 2021.
This is the paper's strongest section. The 2006 precedent is not theoretical, and an election held while Hamas remains armed would reward the very movement the war set out to dismantle.
Ben-Shabbat calls Jewish settlement "the central component" of cognitive defeat, and he does not hide the risk: no one knows the "boiling point" at which the Palestinian Authority's 70,000 armed personnel might turn to broad confrontation. Critics will add the diplomatic cost, from the 2024 ICJ advisory opinion to European sanctions. He asks for preparation, not retreat. Readers deserve a fuller account of what that preparation looks like.
The United States drafted Resolution 2803, which promises a "credible pathway" to Palestinian Arab statehood once the Authority reforms. It is essential that a policy denying that pathway must be sold, not only in Jerusalem, but in Washington.
The paper's preferred outcomes, a loose federation tied to Jordan or clan-based local government, depend on partners not yet visible. The Hebron sheikhs' initiative is intriguing but untested. Meanwhile, PCPSR finds 44 percent of Palestinian Arabs still back two states, a reminder that the old paradigm has not vanished from their side as it has in Israel since October 7.
The paper's real value is that it defines victory. For years Israel's debate has swung between military rounds and diplomatic frameworks without asking what either is meant to produce in the enemy's mind. Ben-Shabbat's answer is clear: no settlement will hold until Palestinian Arabs accept that Israel is here to stay.
Let me repeat that: Israel is here to stay-right where it is, right as it is, not in the sea!
He closes with a warning worth heeding. Pressure on the Palestinian Arab file will soon come from Washington, Riyadh, Ankara, Doha and Cairo alike. "There is no shortcut to deep change," he writes, "and Israel had better be ready." Whether or not one accepts every recommendation, that much is hard to dispute.
Jerry McGlothlin was a gentile raised in Chicago suburban Skokie, Illinois, then a Jewish enclave, living between the Bermans and the Eisenbergs. Recently he had a DNA test and discovered he was Jewish on his ‘Assyrian’ mother’s side of the family tree. She told Jerry when he was young, never to admit that you are ‘Assyrian,’ since someday they might do to the Assyrians what they did to the Jews. Clearly, she had fearful memories of the Holocaust since she was born in 1919 and may have not wanted to say the “J" word, trying to protect her son. Since then, Jerry has been seeking deeper knowledge of his rich, albeit diluted, Jewish lineage.