Message from Maung Zarni
An Israeli real estate event in north London appears to have advertised the sale of land in Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, despite previous denials that illegal settlement properties would be marketed at the event.
Pamphlets shared with the Guardian from the event on Sunday showed real estate projects in Ma’ale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Kfar Eldad and Teneh Omarim in the occupied West Bank, as well as Ramat Eshkol and Givat Hamatos in East Jerusalem.
The event was held after more than 100 UK lawmakers as well as civil society organisations had called for its cancellation, saying it was inconsistent with the government’s obligations under international law as well as guidance on settlement-related economic activity.
Pamphlets advertising the Great Real Estate Event in London. Photograph: Dania Akkad/Declassified UK
“There is a prima facie case at the very least that people were advertising land in illegal settlements and that is contrary to law, and the government needs to act,” said Andy McDonald MP, co-chair of the British-Palestine all-party parliamentary group.
Last week, McDonald wrote a letter to the foreign secretary signed by 101 politicians saying that the event was “embedded in Israel’s project of colonial expansion” and calling on the government to stop it from going ahead.
Concerns were also raised beforehand by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, who spoke to the Metropolitan police and said he was informed that any allegations of criminality over the unlawful sale of property at the event would be assessed with a view to investigation.
The Met declined to comment.
The London event was the final stop in a series of international roadshows – after Toronto and New York – which had appeared to advertise the sale of land in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and invited individuals to “explore the best Anglo neighbourhoods” and find their “dream home”.
A real estate project in the West Bank Israeli settlement of Givat Ze’ev, pictured in 2023, was among those that featured in event pamphlets. Photograph: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP
The event had invited people to register their interest in Gush Etzion, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, which the UK government considers an illegal settlement.
Organisers had previously denied claims that the event would feature land for sale in the West Bank, calling the allegations “ridiculous” and “motivated by anti-Israeli and terrorist supporters”, and said exhibitors would provide information about properties and projects within the green line.
On Tuesday, organisers apologised for the “error” in event brochures, after concerns were raised in parliament.
“No one at the event promoted or spoke about properties in the ‘disputed territories’, such as Givat Ze’ev or Kfar Eldad. Their mention in the event brochure was made in error for which we apologise,” organisers told the Jewish News.
The website for the 2025 event that mentioned Gush Etzion has since been taken down, while mention of the settlement on the 2026 event page was removed after concerns were raised publicly. It also included a map of the territory featuring no delineation of Gaza and the occupied West Bank, as well as Syria’s Golan Heights.
“How is it that this government fails even to prevent the marketing of illegal property in this country and still fails to take action?” Ellie Chowns asked the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, in the Commons on Tuesday.
It is understood that the Foreign Office minister Hamish Falconer wrote to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) on Sunday, requesting that evidence of advertising or promoting property in illegal settlements be scrutinised under UK law.
“We have asked them now to urgently look into this,” Cooper said on Tuesday. “It is extremely important that those standards are met in the UK, and that is exactly why we have raised this so seriously with the ASA.”
The ASA told the Guardian it had received the letter from the government, but had not received any advertising complaints. The ASA also said it did not have a position on the law in this area and referred the matter to the government.
An Israeli journalist reports from a protest outside the real estate event in north London on Sunday. Photograph: Denise Baker/Getty Images
McDonald said the government’s reference to the ASA was “wholly inappropriate and completely inadequate”, and called on ministers to investigate whether there was a case under English and Welsh law to prosecute any British companies involved.
Amnesty International UK said the government’s decision to refer the matter to the ASA was “a ridiculous gimmick that fails to understand the devastation Israeli settlements cause for Palestinians”.
McDonald added: “You would not accept anybody offering settlement lands in the Donbas in the United Kingdom. The government would, quite rightly, come down on that like a ton of bricks.
“We appear to be completely inconsistent in applying international humanitarian law when it comes to Israel’s egregious behaviours, and that is why so many people in this country are angry and losing faith in the current leadership.”
The event in London took place as settler violence in the West Bank has reached unprecedented levels, and as a coalition of western countries – including the UK, France, Canada, Germany and Italy – called for an end to the construction of Israeli settlements it says breach international law.
Last week, the UK, along with other western powers, announced it was imposing sanctions on six firms and one individual for enabling and financing the recent surge in settler violence in the West Bank.
However, it fell short of banning trade with illegal Israeli settlements, something that more than 140 Labour MPs, including the chairs of every Labour-led select committee, called on the government to do earlier this month .
“They’re not inflicting any pain on Israel sufficient to get them to change course,” said McDonald. “We don’t have to be complicit in it, we can set out the standards that we adhere to and not murderous war crimes being perpetrated in the Middle East.”
Dora, who asked to withhold her surname, attended Sunday’s event undercover with other members of the group Jewish Anti-Zionist Action. “I went in there with the objective of collecting evidence of illegal land sale,” she said.
After being kicked out of the event, she joined a protest outside the venue, during which 14 people were arrested.
“Condemnation from the government is just never enough,” she added. “Nothing’s going to change if there’s no foreign intervention, if there’s no sanctions, if there’s nothing material.”
It is understood that the Charity Commission has not opened a compliance case or a statutory inquiry into the incident. A spokesperson said: “We are assessing concerns raised with us about an event held at a synagogue affiliated with United Synagogue. Our assessment will determine what regulatory role there is, if any, for the commission. In line with our guidance, the charity has submitted a serious incident report relating to concerns raised about the event.”
A source at the synagogue said the event was a third-party hire and due diligence beforehand confirmed that all properties being marketed were legal in English law. They added that trustees were fully aware of their legal responsibilities, and all of the proper checks were applied.
Israel's former defence minister has compared settler ideology to Nazism, and accused authorities of failing to investigate Israelis responsible for killing Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Israeli news site Ynet on Sunday, Moshe Ya'alon said that factions within the religious Zionist movement, which is closely aligned with Israeli settlers, hold a "Jewish supremacy ideology".
"What is Jewish supremacy? Eighty years after the Holocaust, it's Mein Kampf in reverse. The superior race is us," said Ya'alon, who served as defence under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu between 2013 to 2016.
Ya'alon, who also recently visited Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank amid attacks by the Israeli army and settlers, described what is happening in the territory as a "disgrace for generations".
"The Israeli government is encouraging Jewish pogromists to dispossess Arabs of their land through abuse, including shooting at them," Ya'alon told Ynet, adding that more than 20 Palestinians had been killed in those attacks.
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"Not a single person has been arrested," Ya'alon said, referring to what he described as a lack of accountability for Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank.
He added that the Shin Bet security agency and Israeli police were doing nothing to address the killings.
Ya'alon said that during a visit to the southern Hebron area he witnessed the conditions Palestinians are facing. He said he spoke with a Palestinian man who lost his leg after settlers shot him and then prevented him from receiving medical assistance.
'What is Jewish supremacy? Eighty years after the Holocaust, it's Mein Kampf in reverse. The superior race is us'
- Moshe Ya'alon, former defence minister
Settler attacks against Palestinians have surged since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recording an average of four a day.
The attacks, some of which have been recorded on video, have raised concerns among opposition figures, including Ya'alon, over both their security implications and moral consequences.
Left-wing figures have increasingly described Israeli policies in the West Bank as criminal.
Earlier this month, Nimrod Sheffer, a candidate in the primaries of the centre-left Democrats party, described a settler attack in the town of Huwara, near Nablus, as a "terror attack".
Last week, Sheffer vowed to dismantle settler outposts occupied by young and often violent settlers if elected. In many cases, those outposts serve as bases for settlers known as the "hilltop youth", who have been linked to attacks on Palestinians.
Army chief turned critic
Ya’alon spent decades in the Israeli military and is known to have taken part in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the violent suppression of the first and second Palestinian intifadas, and the 2014 war on Gaza.
In 2002, whilst serving as the army's chief of staff, he said: "The Palestinian threat harbours cancer-like attributes that have to be severed and fought to the bitter end."
And in 2015, he barred Breaking the Silence – an NGO of former Israeli soldiers who document army abuses – from engaging in activities with the military.
But in recent years, the 75-year-old has adopted a more critical tone towards the current government, accusing it in 2024 of carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
Reflecting on his time as army commander in the West Bank, Ya'alon said that he had acted to prevent the occupation from turning Israelis into "Judeo-Nazis", as the late Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz had once warned.
"Today, I can’t say he was wrong," Ya'alon said, referring to Leibowitz's claim, adding that he hopes "the next government will reverse this".
Ya'alon said Palestinians are being abused in the West Bank and that he is "ashamed that members of my own people are doing such things. And it is being done under government direction."
Asked whether Israel could become an apartheid state, the former army chief replied: "absolutely," adding that he supports "a settlement with the Palestinians".
"Otherwise, we will become either an apartheid state or a binational state," Ya'alon said, after noting that he does not support removing Israeli settlements from the West Bank.
The former defence minister, who retired from politics in 2021, also criticised opposition leaders for failing to commit to including a Palestinian party in a future governing coalition.
"My shared values with Mansour Abbas are greater than those I share with Smotrich and Ben Gvir," Ya'alon said, referring to the leader of the Islamist United Arab List party in the Knesset.
Abbas has openly declared his desire to be part of a governing coalition, in contrast to the historic position of Palestinian parties in Israel.
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A state or a group fighting a genuine war of survival — however brutal — has the logic of survival on its side. The brutality of resistance is directly proportionate to the brutality and injustice inflicted by perpetrators. A woman who survives decades of domestic violence and control may one day take up a weapon against her abuser. Whilst domestic abuse and control are disturbingly common, violent resistance by victims is rare. When a victim resorts to extreme and possibly lethal action against her abuser, it is because of the cumulative and escalating abuse and harm, and because the perpetrator brutally quashed and punished every previous attempt to resist — no matter how modest.
In any system where the stronger party exploits their power to abuse the weaker, it is the perpetrator who is responsible for the extreme actions the victim is driven to take just to survive, or attempt to liberate themselves. And yet throughout human history we have routinely blamed, maligned and abandoned victims. The evidence is overwhelming, historically and clinically, and it’s one of our greatest deficiencies as a species: humanity is perversely biased in favour of abusers psychologically and structurally. It’s a pattern I’ve spent my professional and personal life witnessing, observing, and working against.
Israel is committing the worst crimes and depravities imaginable against a captive people with complete impunity. When Israel’s victims resist — and they have no other choice — they are maligned, dehumanised and punished. Those who try to support them are maligned, dehumanised and often punished too.
A central part of Israel’s fraudulent framing is the pretence of victimhood. Jews as a group were victims historically. But Israel was never a victim. From its birth as a settler-colonial project, Israel was always the perpetrator. Israel has no right to cloak itself in Jewish victimhood. Positioning itself as a victim is a calculated lie. Perpetrators always lie and conceal their crimes. As a powerful settler-coloniser, Israel is perpetrating a colossal crime against humanity. Supported and armed by key Western governments, chiefly the US, Israel holds all the power in this abusive system. In a world already biased in favour of abusers, this works. Israel is protected and enabled. Its victims are abandoned to suffering and erasure.
Sadism in the Service of Genocide
When I watch footage of Israeli soldiers filming themselves in the ruins of Palestinian homes, posing with children’s toys, trying on women’s underwear, celebrating over bodies, smiling as they lounge on living room furniture outside a home that was just bombed to rubble — when I see videos of soldiers attacking Palestinian men, women and children in the colonised West Bank — I see something that reaches beyond political analysis. As a psychotherapist, what I see on display is psychopathology — diseased human psychology.
There is a distinction between a predator and a sadist. A lion killing an antelope isn’t a moral issue. No matter how sorry we feel for the antelope — we know the lion is not evil. The lion is a lethal predator, but there is no malice in its actions.
What we are watching in Israel is something different. There isn’t even an attempt to hide the pleasure the politicians and the soldiers take in their abuse of Palestinians. The filming. The social media posts. The statements from politicians and ordinary citizens go beyond any security rationale into explicit, ostentatious enjoyment of human suffering.
While bombs were still being dropped, Israeli Defence Minister Katz announced that Shia residents south of the Litani River in Lebanon would not be allowed to return until unspecified Israeli conditions were met — and then ordered the accelerated demolition of their homes, explicitly invoking Gaza’s Beit Hanoun and Rafah as the model. This is not the language of a state defending itself. It is the language of a state that has given itself permission to enjoy the destruction.
Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, provides the clearest possible illustration of what this enjoyment looks like at the highest level of government. In May 2026 he posted a video of himself walking among foreign activists from the Gaza aid flotilla — bound, kneeling, faces to the floor — waving an Israeli flag over them and smiling as a bound woman was shoved to the ground by masked officers. He told the guards around him not to be bothered by their screams. Ben Gvir is seen waving a large Israeli flag and shouting in Hebrew, “Welcome to Israel! We are in charge here!” Israel’s national anthem is blasted over a loudspeaker, and he shouts “Am Yisrael Chai”1 at a bound detainee trying to argue with him. This was not leaked footage. He posted it himself as if it were something to be proud of. Ben-Gvir reportedly physically forced his way onto the naval ship to film this, pushing aside a lieutenant colonel who tried to block him and asked him to wait for approval. That detail underscores that this wasn’t incidental access — he went out of his way to create this footage.
Days earlier, Ben-Gvir filmed himself entering the solitary confinement cell of Marwan Barghouti — the Palestinian leader many regard as the closest equivalent to Mandela, held since 2004 and now barely recognisable, wasted and gaunt. Ben-Gvir told him: “Whoever messes with the people of Israel... we will obliterate them.” He posted that too. And in prisons across Israel, he has had oversized photographs of Gaza’s ruins hung in the corridors Palestinian prisoners must walk through to reach the yard — pointing to one, in footage he released himself, and noting with apparent satisfaction that a prisoner had recognised his own destroyed home. “This is how it’s supposed to look,” he said.
As a clinician I have no doubt at all that Ben-Gvir is a diagnosable psychopath. He is having the time of his life right now, enjoying what every psychopath craves — complete control over helpless, captive people. He isn’t doing what he does out of patriotism. He is fulfilling his depraved fantasies, they just happen to also serve the aims of the state of Israel. We know psychopaths film themselves in the act of abusing others so that they can watch the recordings over and over again at their leisure. This is common practice among pedophiles. I can’t help but wonder what else Ben Gvir is doing when he is not in front of cameras.
This is not an aberration or a rogue soldier acting outside the chain of command. This is a government minister. It is the policy-making level of the Israeli state, on camera, enjoying itself. An Al Jazeera analysis of the episode captured precisely what distinguishes Ben-Gvir from the rest of Israel’s political establishment. For Netanyahu, the sin was not the torture or humiliation of the activists; the sin was broadcasting it to the world. Ben-Gvir, by contrast, performs these abuses for his domestic audience, confident he will face no real consequences. One wants the cruelty hidden. The other wants it seen. But no one thinks there is anything wrong with the cruelty itself.
Manufacturing the Capacity for Cruelty
Recently, a reader alerted me to a phenomenon I hadn’t heard of before, that is confirmed in Israel’s media and on the Israeli government’s website. In the past ten years there have been widespread cases of the burning alive of animals, especially stray cats and dogs, in bonfires on the festival of Lag Ba’omer (ל״ג בעומר). When I was a child, we all loved Lag Ba’omer. You got to stay out later than usual, outdoors with your friends, eating potatoes you cooked in the fire, just having fun. I do remember that we burned effigies of whoever happened to be Israel’s enemy leader at the time, and sang songs about killing all Arabs. It was ‘fun’.
But I never remember anyone doing what people have been doing in Israel for the past ten years — throwing live animals into bonfires. It’s such a problem, that the government and animal rights organisations have had to step in and tell people to keep their pets indoors. There are some attempts at prevention, but I’m not hearing about anyone being prosecuted or sent to prison for this. The fact that it has been going on for ten years points to a practice that is taught and passed on generationally.
The reports suggest it is teenagers who do this — young people on the cusp of starting their military service. The fourteen-year-olds of ten years ago are twenty-four-year-olds post compulsory service, and serving in the Israeli military right now perpetrating the atrocities we see in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. This correlates perfectly with the kind of mentality you need to foster if you want soldiers ready and willing to commit harm, and be desensitised to the suffering of other human beings. Psychopathic systems require people to ‘pass tests’ — to demonstrate they would be prepared to do anything to defend their group. It’s the same as when a new gang member is ordered to beat up, or rape someone to prove they are worthy of becoming a member and be trusted by the group. Whilst not an official state policy, this ten-year-old horrific phenomenon is a natural sociological development that reflects a society that requires psychopathic traits as a necessity for completing its settler-colonial project. Practising on helpless animals, or witnessing their abuse without taking any action, desensitises people to the abuse of children and people in general. People with empathy would not be able to carry out Israel’s plan to complete the erasure of the Palestinians and their removal from all of historic Palestine.
A UN commission of inquiry found that Israel’s use of sexual violence was systemic, serving to “dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part.” Multiple detainees independently described dogs being used to rape them at Sde Teiman — Israel’s concentration and torture camp — one Palestinian lawyer told Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor he witnessed it directly: a captain sprayed something on a stripped, restrained man, then “unleashed the dog on him. The dog raped the young man, literally speaking.”
A 35-year-old detainee named Amir gave a similar account to Euro-Med Monitor: stripped naked with others, a dog urinated on him, then “raped me, penetrated my anus in a trained manner while I was being beaten. This continued for several minutes.”
The choice of weapon here is not incidental. In Jewish religious tradition, dogs are considered the most despised of all animals — seen as the dirtiest, the most inferior, and possessing the vilest characteristics imaginable. To use a dog to rape a Palestinian man is not simply torture. For those capable of conceiving it, it is the deliberate construction of the ultimate possible humiliation, drawing on a symbolic vocabulary embedded in the perpetrators’ own religious culture. There is also a psychosexual dimension to this. Men do not arrive at the idea of training an animal to rape another man without some relationship — however repressed, however disavowed — to the act itself. In a society where religious orthodoxy demands the suppression of homoerotic desire, its eruption in this form, as an instrument of domination and humiliation rather than desire, is not a contradiction. It is exactly how suppressed impulses find their way into psychopathic expression: redirected, weaponised, and aimed at those the perpetrator has already been taught hold no human worth. There is no other way to say this — it is disgusting beyond belief.
This sadism is not only individual pathology. It is also a cultural product — the predictable outcome of decades of systematic dehumanisation embedded in education, military culture, political discourse, and media. Israeli children are taught from infancy that Palestinians are not human beings like them. The result is not only a society containing and enabling psychopaths — though it clearly does — but something in some ways more alarming: a collective suspension of normal moral functioning toward a specific group, maintained and reproduced by the state itself.
Whilst there are clear cases of individual psychopathy among politicians, prison guards, soldiers and others in Israel’s genocidal apparatus, not every member of a genocidal society is a psychopath. But you don’t need a majority of psychopaths for atrocity to become normalised and sustained. All you need is psychopathic leadership at the top, and a population that is willing to collude, turn a blind eye, distract itself, or that has been rendered unable, or is too stupefied to express empathy and resist.
In Israel this happens on multiple levels simultaneously. Formal coercion — the harassment and arrests of dissenters — has increased in recent years. But the most effective and successful method to enforce conformity has always been the informal kind. Social and professional ostracism, the labels of ‘traitor’ and ‘antisemite’ used against anyone who steps out of line, mob attacks — oppression by consensus — has been the norm in Israeli society from the start. In Israel, simply expressing empathy for Palestinians can get you into trouble, officially or unofficially.
Hannah Arendt Warned Us
When I was at school, and later during my university years my Zionist teachers taught that the Nazis were not content merely to kill Jews. Humiliation and the deliberate destruction of human dignity were a big part of the project itself — shaving heads, tattooing numbers, rape, medical experiments, degradation in every conceivable form, and all manner of deprivation before death. The cruelty was not incidental to the killing. It was the point. This is what we were taught marked Nazism as the deepest possible evil.
Israel is now doing precisely this to the Palestinians and the audacity of it is staggering. Somehow, in the mind of Israeli society, what they are doing is different, even as it follows the same logic their own education identifies as the marker of absolute evil. This is exactly what Hannah Arendt’s warning was about. It was never only about Germany. The capacity for moral failure is a general human capacity, not a German one. Ideological certainty, dehumanisation of an out-group, bureaucratic distribution and abdication of responsibility create the conditions, and then ordinary humans’ collusion does the rest.
Hannah Arendt offers a warning from history that the depraved behaviour we see towards the Palestinians and activists can happen anywhere, done or enabled by anyone, including — especially — those who consider themselves immune because of what was done to Jewish people in the past. It’s hardly surprising that Israel vehemently rejected Arendt and her message. Israel should have listened to her warnings, but it had to reject them because by the time she offered them, the settler-colonial project was in full force.
And there is no doubt that psychopathy has always played a central role in settler colonial and colonial projects. Only psychopaths, devoid of all capacity for empathy and normal human emotions, could possibly conceive of projects whose explicit aim is conquest, theft, ethnic cleansing, subjugation and domination. Only psychopaths can take pleasure in causing suffering, and normalising it. When psychologically healthy human beings — even those with trauma — witness, collude with, or participate in acts that humiliate and harm others, they inevitably suffer from something that in the clinical literature is called ‘moral injury’. Moral injury is a recognised form of trauma that comes from acting immorally, or witnessing an action that violates one’s own moral code.
The danger in racism, or any campaign that promotes the dehumanisation, subjugation and humiliation of a group of people is that they enable and encourage psychopaths and psychopathic behaviours. Once the normal rules of society break down or are suspended, the psychopaths come out to play. It is not possible to orchestrate a settler-colonial project — a genocide — that is ‘humane’, ‘gentle’ or ‘benevolent’. Once the evil system is established, psychopaths come out of the shadows to find that their ‘skill set’ is suddenly desirable. They then assume formal and informal roles in a system that is welcoming and grateful to them. Israel will not stop its own psychopaths, because it needs them. They are the only ones capable of bringing Israel’s aims to completion. There is a reason the likes of Ben Gvir and Netanyahu are in power. It’s not a temporary ‘deviation to the right’. Without psychopaths there is no settler colonialism.
For everyone else, distance becomes the mechanism of survival. A pilot far above a city can avoid thinking about the human beings he is slaughtering as he releases his payload. During my own military service, between 1982 and 1984, a friend who was a naval officer told me he was glad to be stationed below deck when his ship fired on apartment blocks in Beirut — because then he didn’t have to see the damage he was inflicting. That is moral injury finding its only available exit: not to refuse, but not to look.
And yet the Israelis I grew up among, and the Israelis who populate today’s social media with their celebrations of Palestinian suffering, do not think of themselves as evil. They think of themselves as good, loyal people, defending their families, reclaiming their ancestral homeland, doing what ‘must be done’. They preposterously suggest that I, or indeed anyone who speaks against what they’re doing and who supports their victims, is bad. They dare to claim that supporting the Palestinians and opposing Israel is ‘radical’, extremist and unfair to ‘poor little Israel’.
The British Empire never thought of itself as evil either. It thought of itself as superior, divinely mandated, and entitled to the resources it took and to the removal of anyone who stood in its way. It is not a coincidence. Britain gave birth to Zionism and to the state of Israel. It offered a blueprint for its political system, its bureaucracy and its military and it inspired everything Israel is doing. The moral architecture is identical, and it’s hardly surprising that Britain’s leaders on either side of the political divide are still enabling Israel and doing absolutely nothing to stop it.
Recommend Avigail Abarbanel’s Fully Human Essays to your readers
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Trump, the Democrats and the Courage to End a Failed War
Trump owns this failed war, but if the Democrats help torpedo the MOU and war resumes, then they will co-own the next war.
I have spent years fighting against Trump’s push toward war with Iran, and I have the scars to prove it. When Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, I warned that it would eventually bring us to this moment. Ever since, I have consistently argued against the confrontational path he set the United States on. That record speaks for itself, which is why I can say what follows without any throat-clearing.
Given the circumstances, President Trump’s decision to strike a deal with Tehran and bring this costly, unnecessary war to an end is the right one. It deserves support, not partisan second-guessing. As Rob Malley—a key member of Barack Obama’s team that negotiated the nuclear deal and later Joe Biden’s lead negotiator with Iran—noted on X, comparing Trump’s memorandum of understanding to Obama’s JCPOA misses the point. What matters is not how the agreement stacks up against past diplomatic achievements, but how it compares to the alternatives before us. And on that score, Malley argued, the MOU is “far preferable to any of the alternatives on offer. Period.”
I would go further. To examine the Memorandum of Understanding and ask “Was the war worth it?” is nonsensical.
Of course it wasn’t. How could it have been? The premise itself is deeply flawed: that a failed war of choice would somehow strengthen Washington’s hand at the negotiating table and produce more favorable terms. History offers little support for such a proposition.
The question is also flawed in another, more consequential way. It implies that a war should not be brought to an end until it has produced better terms—even when the war itself is failing.
Taken seriously, that logic leads to a dangerous conclusion: that a failed war must continue until the battlefield fortunes somehow improve and a more favorable outcome becomes attainable. Perhaps that day will come. Perhaps it never will. In the meantime, the costs—in lives, treasure, regional stability, and strategic credibility—are treated as secondary considerations.
This is how endless wars are born.
Wars become interminable when leaders convince themselves that ending them without victory is politically more costly than continuing them without hope. Once that trap is sprung, every setback becomes an argument for one more deployment, one more escalation, one more year. The objective shifts from achieving a realistic political outcome to avoiding the admission that the original objectives were unattainable.
American history offers more than a few examples. Presidents inherit wars they did not start, recognize they cannot be won on the promised terms, yet lack the political space to end them. So they postpone the reckoning. They kick the can down the road, handing the burden to their successor, who does the same. The result is a cycle of strategic drift in which the costs accumulate while the prospects for success steadily recede.
When victory is nowhere in sight, prolonging a conflict in the hope that reality will eventually conform to political rhetoric is not resolve. It is denial.
Remember Afghanistan. For years, American officials lied to the public that victory was just around the corner—six months away, perhaps a year at most. Yet the Afghanistan Papers later revealed that these officials privately understood that victory was nowhere in sight. They knew the war was adrift, but feared the political consequences of admitting it.
So the war continued. By the time the United States finally withdrew, nearly two decades had passed, and more than $2 trillion had been spent.
And what was the end result? After twenty years of war, thousands of American and allied lives lost, and hundreds of thousands of Afghan casualties, the United States arrived back where it had begun: it had replaced the Taliban with the Taliban.
That is the curse of endless war. The refusal to accept an unfavorable reality today merely guarantees a higher bill tomorrow.
Some credit must be given to Trump for breaking this pattern, even as he should be blamed for having started this war in the first place. Political leaders should be judged not only for the mistakes they make, but also for whether they have the courage to correct them.
Trump could have followed the well-worn path of his predecessors. He could have prolonged the conflict, spent more money, sacrificed more lives, destabilized more economies, and further depleted American power—all while insisting that victory remained just over the horizon. Recall the countless times he declared that the war had been won.
Indeed, the political costs of continuing the war would likely have been lower than the costs he is paying today for ending it. In American politics, there is often greater punishment for acknowledging failure than for perpetuating it.
That perverse incentive has trapped presidents for decades. In his testimony on the Vietnam War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966, George Kennan stated the following: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of the world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound policies than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”
The criticism coming from some Democrats is particularly disappointing because it echoes the same bad-faith tactics Republicans deployed against the JCPOA in 2015. To be sure, Trump has invited some of this treatment. He spent years attacking Obama’s agreement with a barrage of misleading arguments and exaggerated claims.
But that does not make it wise for Democrats to return the favor.
Trump currently owns this failed war, but if the Democrats help torpedo the MOU and war resumes, then they will co-own the next war. Trump’s disaster will become theirs as well.
This isn’t rocket science. Several Democratic lawmakers have managed to criticize the war, hold Trump accountable for it, yet avoid attack lines that could sabotage the MOU. Their criticisms are primarily over Trump having started this war in the first place, rather than the terms for ending it.
Rather than attacking the terms of the MOU, Democrats should pressure the administration to protect it from those who are determined to see it fail. The main external threat is the Israeli government and Benjamin Netanyahu’s obsession with sabotaging any opportunity for Iran and the United States to bury the hatchet.
Instead of relying solely on angry phone calls and public rebukes of Netanyahu, supporters of ending the war should press Trump to act now: suspend military aid to Israel and curtail military and intelligence cooperation. Such measures would limit Israel’s ability to reignite the conflict and dispel any notion in Tel Aviv that Washington will automatically follow Israel into another war. If Israeli leaders understand that the United States will not be drawn into a future conflict on their behalf, their incentive to start one in the first place will be significantly reduced.
The task now is not to reward Trump politically, nor to excuse the recklessness that produced this war. It is to prevent the war from returning. Democrats can condemn the decision to start it without sabotaging the agreement that ends it. They can hold Trump accountable without helping Netanyahu drag the United States back into conflict. The choice before them is not between opposing Trump and supporting peace. It is between learning from America’s endless wars and repeating them.
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