(JNS) “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
From the start, US President Donald Trump’s plan for peace in the Middle East was vacuous and contrived. Among other things, his proposals failed to understand jihadi notions of death and time. Under such a plan, Israel would be left hanging in the wind, fighting an interminable and unwinnable war.
Reassuringly, Trump’s peace plan for Gaza—first announced in September 2025—was rejected by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. Though this rejection was necessary from the standpoint of meeting Jerusalem’s strategic objectives, it rested on various false premises that Hamas and its allies can be “disarmed.”
In essence, even if the Trump plan has now been correctly tossed aside—and there is some question as to whether this actually happened—jihadi fighters and their mentors in Iran, Turkey, Qatar and elsewhere will continue preparations for Divinely mandated violence. In a worst-case but still plausible narrative, such preparations could produce sudden or incremental escalations to chemical, biological or nuclear conflict.
Truth can be counterintuitive. Any future war between Israel and its jihadi adversaries would have little or nothing to do with Palestinian sovereignty. To wit, the Hamas-led massacre of civilians in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 was clearly detached from any rational plans for achieving a Palestinian state. Prima facie, the jihadists’ only true motive that day was lascivious satisfaction.
Truth is exculpatory. While veiled from ordinary assessments of politicians, pundits and strategists, the most fundamental motives for jihadi terror stem from primal needs to overcome personal mortality. Accordingly, the visible struggles between Israel and Hamas, along with other terror entities, are reflections of deeper Islamist urgings.
Having rejected the banal syntax of Trump’s Board of Peace—a jumbled architecture of delusions and contrivances—Israeli planners now need to ask: What exactly are discernible jihadi goals? If Hamas and kindred terror groups seek nothing less than “power over death,” how should Israel respond? This query is urgent because the jihadist path to immortality is expressly linked to “terror-sacrifice” and “martyrdom.”
The Koran’s Sura 2:154 states, “Do not think that those who are killed in the way of Allah are dead, for indeed, they are alive, though not aware.”
Personal immortality represents an unseemly and disfiguring goal.
For Israel, the core existential threat stems from a many-sided adversary that regards violence against Jews and the Jewish state as “sacred.” Today, in the aftermath of a demonstrably false Trump peace, Jerusalem should finally distinguish Middle Eastern conflict realities from their reflections.
To accomplish this goal, three basic concepts will need to be examined in tandem: death, time and war.
What can these interrelated concepts teach Israeli planners about the force-multiplying perils of erroneous peace plans? To answer thoughtfully, refined thinkers should commence disciplined inquiries at the individual level, the level of the microcosm. Due to an invisible and illogical assurance, a promise of “power over death” offers jihadists the ultimate reward for faith-based destructiveness. Ironically, this is the case both as victim and perpetrator.
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