While the West often seeks agreements as a path toward lasting stability, radical Islamist jihadists may view them very differently – as temporary instruments to preserve the struggle until conditions become favorable to renew the offensive or launch a surprise attack.
Crucially, these extremists see this approach as rooted in their own interpretation of the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings in the Quran.
Since World War II, the West has increasingly preferred containing conflicts, managing escalation, and bringing adversaries to the negotiating table. Diplomacy and deterrence remain indispensable instruments of statecraft.
An agreement is a mechanism for war termination. It is not, by itself, a strategic end state. The relevant question is not simply whether the fighting has stopped, but whether the adversary retains the military, political, and institutional capacity to regenerate the threat.
The danger of survival
This distinction matters because adversaries learn. When an enemy repeatedly observes that Western governments are searching for an off-ramp before the underlying threat has been removed, it can incorporate that preference into its own strategy.
Survival itself becomes a strategy. The adversary no longer needs to defeat the West militarily. It needs only to endure, absorb punishment, and raise the costs of confrontation, until the West’s desire to end the war exceeds its determination to eliminate the threat.
The West may view negotiations as a path toward permanent resolution, while radical jihadist actors may see an agreement as an opportunity to survive, rebuild, and wait for a more favorable moment to strike again.
The lesson of World War II was fundamentally different. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were not transformed into nonthreatening powers merely because agreements were signed with them. Their ability to continue the war was defeated, their political and military systems were dismantled or fundamentally transformed, and a new political order followed.
The settlement consolidated a new strategic reality. It did not substitute for creating one.
History’s warning
The Treaty of al-Hudaybiya and the Battle of Khaybar serve as inspiration: a temporary agreement can allow recovery, rearmament, and a false sense of security before a surprise attack.
The October 7 massacre is living proof of this. Although for years there was an unwritten understanding between Israel and Hamas that “quiet would be met with quiet,” and funds were transferred for the reconstruction of Gaza, Hamas exploited this to attack Israel in the deadliest assault in its history. The absence of fighting by Hamas was mistakenly interpreted in Israel as an absence of intent.
The warning was explicit as early as 1994.
Just months after signing the Oslo I Accord, Yasser Arafat – former chairman of the PLO, which was designated by Israel as a terrorist organization, and president of the Palestinian Authority – invoked the Treaty of al-Hudaybiya in his Johannesburg speech to explain why he had signed.
He described the accord as a sulha dania, while simultaneously calling for continued jihad over Jerusalem and invoking Muhammad’s temporary truce at Hudaybiya.
One side saw a path to permanent peace. The other explicitly preserved the struggle beyond the agreement. The warning was not hidden. It was delivered in plain sight.
This principle remains evident even today, with recent reports that one Middle Eastern state advised another country in the region to sign an agreement with Israel, lull it into a false sense of security, prepare, and then attack it by surprise.
Hamas has not only failed to weaken. According to reports, despite three years of war, it has recently recruited tens of thousands of new terrorists from among the Palestinian population and trained Nukhba terrorists for another invasion of IDF bases and Israeli communities. Survivors of Hamas captivity also testified that their captors intended to carry out another “October 7.”
Therefore, the assumption that escalation can be controlled and managed whenever we choose is fundamentally flawed. Eliminating only heavy weapons while leaving small arms, such as Kalashnikov rifles, and RPGs stored in Gaza will not prevent another massacre in the event of an invasion into Israel.
Listen to threats
Hezbollah continues to refuse to disarm, while its leadership is making its intentions clear in real time.
Further evidence emerged only days ago in a speech by Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem. Referring to the Second Lebanon War, Qassem said that the war began under the pretext of the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, but that at the time, “it was necessary to carry out that operation.”
At the end of his speech, he delivered a clear message to Hezbollah members and supporters: “Store your anger.” Its time, he said, will come, and it “may erupt,” adding: “We will continue to act.”
Qassem is openly saying that Hezbollah is not abandoning the struggle, but may wait for the right moment to act again. The message is there in open-source intelligence; we need only listen – and believe what they are telling us.
Iran, too, continues to entrench its position, calling for the destruction of the State of Israel and chanting “Death to America.”
More seriously, a recent assassination attempt against US President Donald Trump was reportedly uncovered during his visit to Turkey. Iran’s threats to assassinate Trump are inconceivable when directed against the president of the world’s most powerful nation, and an agreement will not change Iran’s ambitions.
Toward a new model
By contrast, dismantling these capabilities and creating conditions that make it difficult for these adversaries to rebuild are necessary at this stage to ensure long-term regional and global security, rather than merely a temporary respite.
The West must stop confusing the end of fighting with the end of the threat. An agreement can consolidate victory, but it cannot substitute for removing the capabilities that made the war possible. Peace becomes durable not when the enemy signs, but when it can no longer recreate the threat.
The world today is fundamentally different from that of 1945. The tools, decisions, and willingness to bear extraordinary costs that brought World War II to a decisive conclusion, followed by the removal of immediate threats and decades of stability, cannot simply be replicated today. Some are no longer legally, morally, politically, or strategically acceptable, while modern states are also less willing to bear the costs of decisive military outcomes.
Yet no equally effective model has replaced them. Modern conflicts can become prolonged without decisive outcomes, while agreements may end fighting without removing the capabilities or intentions that caused it.
This is where creative strategic thinking is required. If past methods are neither feasible nor desirable, statesmen must develop new concepts of war termination and realistic end-state scenarios capable of producing lasting security within 21st-century constraints.
The question is therefore unavoidable: What new tools, strategies, and end states can actually end a war without leaving the enemy the time and conditions to rebuild, rearm, and prepare its next attack?■
Danny Ayalon is a former Israeli deputy foreign minister, Knesset member, and ambassador to the US.
Moran Alaluf is an analyst on Middle East affairs and counterterrorism, and a specialist on Iran and Hezbollah.