I am devastated and angered by the news of the murders of Hersh Goldberg-Polin and five other hostages in Rafah. Hersh, an American Israeli, became the face of the hostage crisis in America. In part that was due to Hersh himself. Many young American Jews who visited Israel, including one of my children, got to know him, and so his maiming and kidnapping hit home especially hard. In part it was due to his parents, Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, whom many Americans got to know when they spoke so movingly at the Democratic National Convention. For nearly a year they have modeled dignity, sorrow, and empathy for the whole world, and my heart goes out to them. It is especially heartbreaking that these six young people—Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino, along with Hersh—were murdered after nearly a year in captivity when they were so close to being rescued.

I have written some about the need to focus on the hostages, and also about my perceptions of the international law community’s approach to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, but I have not really given any broader thoughts about the war. I am going to give my thoughts today. You have been warned.

The war was lost before October 7. It was lost because for many years, both the Israeli government and the international community have been content to let Hamas misuse the world’s money to rearm and turn Gaza into an underground fortress. It was lost because the world has set up a legal and humanitarian regime that is willfully blind to decades of terrorism, declared genocidal intentions, and refusals to compromise or take yes for an answer that have characterized the Palestinian movement. It was lost because Israel’s feckless political leader has put his own tenure ahead of the good of the country and the traditional, if maybe unwise, Israeli insistence on giving massive concessions to get hostages back and has been doing business with the inept and malign on the country’s far right in order to prevent an election that would surely not go his way. It was lost because, as in Ukraine, the Western world is afraid to let its allies actually prosecute and try to win just wars in which their national existence is at issue. It was lost because parts of the American Jewish community, rightly focused on Hillel’s dictum, “If I am only for myself, then what am I?” forgot what precedes it: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” It was lost because the far left in the West has gotten so tied up in absurd theorizing that it applauds terrorists, pirates, and tyrants instead of seeing Zionism, a successful indigenous “land back” movement that lives at peace with a strong ethnically Arab minority, for what it is. It was lost because some of our politicians and business, journalistic, and academic leaders feel they need to cater to people who are recreating the atmosphere of the 1930s for Jews here in North America and elsewhere instead of leading them to better views.

So the war is lost. What should happen now?

First, Israel has to disavow the messianic right’s efforts to annex the West Bank to Israel and must rein in the settlements there. I’m not saying that because justice demands it or morality demands it. Though there is a lot of injustice in Israel’s approach to the West Bank, there are incommensurate goods at stake, and it seems to me that no people has a better historical or moral right to the West Bank, that is, to Judea, than the Jews. But the reality is that millions of Palestinian Arabs live there, they have a sense of nationality and peoplehood and attachment to the land, just as the Jews do, and the only path I know of that allows Israel to be both Jewish and democratic and that does not require the mass expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes is one where the Palestinians have a state in the West Bank. That is what the Jews accepted in 1948 and the Arabs rejected. That is what the Jews offered in 2000 and the Palestinians rejected. It is the only path forward in the long run.

Second, Israel’s national existence is threatened from Gaza and would be threatened from the West Bank if a group like Hamas or another Iranian proxy were allowed to rule there. So Israel must continue to exercise at least some military control over the West Bank and Gaza, until that threat no longer exists. I don’t like having to say that. But I can think of no other state that faces the kind of immediate existential threat that Israel faces, and any law that does not give legitimacy to a state that takes necessary action to preserve its existence is maybe not worthy to be called the law. I don’t think this means full military occupation, like Germany after the second world war, but I don’t know. This is not really my area.

Third, I would never want to tell the Palestinians what they must do. What they are doing is not working in some ways—they keep starting and losing wars and intifadas that make things worse for themselves. But in other ways what they are doing is working great. The more they suffer, the more the world’s sympathies lie with them, and the more the world’s legal institutions bend their way, regardless of the reasons behind the suffering. But if the Palestinians want a real peace, it seems to me they have to abandon their own kind of messianism, which means abandoning the dream that the near or remote descendants of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from what is today Israel will have a right to return to what is today Israel. When there is a Palestinian political party whose motto is, “two states for two peoples, living side by side in peace,” then it seems to me we have a chance. To finish Hillel’s thought: “If not now, when?”

Fourth, I am not going to air my thoughts on the American Jewish community’s dirty laundry here. But we have a lot of soul-searching to do to understand where things have gone wrong, and why so many Jews are active participants in movements that seek to undermine the Jewish community here and to undermine the Jewish state.

Today is a sad, sad day.