Negotiating with the Inevitable: The Fantasy That Endangers Israel

Neville Beinart

Imagine it's 1944. Allied troops are preparing to storm Normandy. The Nazi war machine is exterminating Jews by the millions, threatening Europe’s survival. And into this moment step the moral philosophers of our time—Peter Beinart and Shaul Magid—urging calm, restraint, and of course, negotiation. “Trust and verify,” they say. Don’t “distrust, dismantle and verify”—that’s too aggressive. After all, we wouldn’t want to leave Hitler no space for reconciliation.

Absurd? Of course. Offensive? Yes. But this is precisely the logic Beinart and Magid apply to Israel today.

Faced with Iran—a regime that funds terror across continents, develops nuclear weapons under the table, and openly declares its intention to destroy the Jewish state—these men still argue that the moral failing lies not with Tehran, but with Jerusalem. Israel, they tell us, must never strike first, never act on suspicion, and never interrupt the carefully choreographed diplomatic theater of American-led nuclear talks.

Beinart reposts accusations that Israel targeted Ali Shamkhani—the architect of Iranian terror—during negotiations, as though thwarting genocidal plans is some moral scandal. Magid, meanwhile, frets that Netanyahu’s doctrine of “distrust, dismantle, and verify” leaves no room for reconciliation. As if reconciliation is a greater imperative than survival.

Here’s the problem: history is not lived in the classroom. The Yom Kippur War wasn’t a seminar on conflict resolution. It was a war of no alternative. On that October day in 1973, 177 Israeli tanks faced 1,400 Soviet-backed Syrian tanks on the Golan Heights. A single five-minute window—pleaded for by a commander—meant the difference between holding the line or losing the north. Several dozen tanks arrived. Israel held. That’s not militarism. That’s what standing on the edge of annihilation looks like.

Menachem Begin understood the moral universe these critics refuse to inhabit. He knew peace was never handed to the Jewish people—it had to be defended, won, sometimes preempted. Because when your enemies don’t recognize your right to exist, the question isn’t whether preemption is moral. The question is whether your children live to see another sunrise.

To suggest that Israel should face a nuclear Iran with “trust and verify” is the same as urging Churchill to trust Goebbels and verify with Himmler. It’s not diplomacy—it’s delusion. And Israel does not exist to serve as a sacrificial case study for the moral anxieties of academics.

Peace is a blessing. But survival is a duty. Those who confuse the two should not be advising a nation that knows all too well the cost of waiting too long.