‘Israel is fighting a war it cannot win,’ says former Shin Bet chief as he backs Arab Peace Initiative

“Israel is fighting a war it cannot win,” said former Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon in a blistering article denouncing Tel Aviv’s genocidal war on Gaza. Ayalon, who also once commanded the Israeli navy, described the assault as “unjust, immoral and counterproductive,” and called on the international community to enforce a political endgame through the long-ignored Arab Peace Initiative.

Published in Foreign Affairs, Ayalon’s essay represents one of the most damning critiques yet from within Israel’s security establishment. Over 22 months into the military offensive that followed the October 2023 Hamas-led attacks, Ayalon warns that Israel has lost any semblance of strategic coherence. 

While the military claims to have dismantled Hamas’s core infrastructure, the Israeli government has failed to articulate a political plan for Gaza or the wider occupation of Palestine, leaving the region gripped by humanitarian catastrophe and instability.

“The longer the vacuum in Israel’s planning persists, the more international actors will have to come together to prevent an even worse catastrophe than the one currently unfolding,” Ayalon warned.

Ayalon called for a renewed push for the Arab Peace Initiative (API), a 2002 proposal endorsed by all 22 Arab League states. The API offers full normalisation of ties with Israel in exchange for a complete withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders. 

WATCH: Who Really Killed the Two-State Solution?

However, successive Israeli governments, particularly under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have not only dismissed the API but actively sabotaged prospects for Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu himself has openly boasted of derailing the Oslo Accords and has expanded illegal settlement construction across the occupied West Bank while working to marginalise the Palestinian Authority by funding Hamas, in what is seen as a “divide and rule” policy.

Ayalon warned that Israel’s intransigence threatens to unravel the entire regional order. Without a two-state solution, he argues, Israel risks deepening its international isolation, losing support among allies, and becoming a global pariah state. “Wars without a clear political goal cannot be won,” he insisted.

Ayalon also directly challenges the assumptions underpinning the US-brokered Abraham Accords and Washington’s failed attempts to bypass the Palestinian question through regional normalisation. He claims these moves, which left Palestinians hopeless about the future, helped trigger the October 2023 attack.

In contrast to the policy of ethnic cleansing advocated by Israel, the former security chief advocates a detailed political roadmap: an internationally monitored ceasefire in Gaza, a technocratic Palestinian interim government, reconstruction led by Arab states, and elections within 24 months. The ultimate goal must be a final-status agreement based on the API and UN resolutions, including land swaps, right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes from which they were expelled by Israel, mutual recognition and shared security arrangements.

Ayalon argues that Hamas thrives on hopelessness, and that only the restoration of a credible political horizon can erode its support. “If a credible, internationally backed pathway to Palestinian statehood were offered, Hamas’s appeal would collapse,” he claimed.

Yet Ayalon is clear-eyed about the current Israeli government, which he says “actively opposes” a Palestinian state. He therefore calls on international powers to bypass Tel Aviv’s obstruction and launch a global process to enforce a two-state reality.

READ: Arab states urge Hamas to step aside for peace plan long rejected by Israel