Atlas Collapsed

How Israel 'Won' the War—and Lost the Future

We were winning. We were right. But we were not willing. And that may cost us everything.

I. A Morning Like No Other

At 5:00 AM, I awoke to yet another round of sirens—a now-familiar terror that has haunted our mornings for twelve days straight. But this time, they did not stop. We were in the bomb shelter for nearly an hour, longer than at any point since this war began. The missiles came in waves. One of them hit a residential building in Be’er Sheva. Four people were killed. Others injured. Families shattered. Lives ended.

This was not a symbolic act of defiance. It was mass murder.

And yet, even amid the horror, there was resolve.

From the beginning of this war—Operation Rising Lion—the people of Israel knew the stakes. We understood that if this is the price we must pay so that our children will not grow up with a nuclear mushroom cloud looming over their future, then it is a price worth paying. The sound of sirens, of crumbling concrete, of crying children—we never wanted this. But if it stands between us and annihilation, then let it ring.

That is why today’s news—of a so-called “ceasefire,” declared just as the sirens were still sounding—is not peace. It is not a resolution. It is not even a pause. It is surrender.

Unconditional surrender.
Not by Iran. By us.

Twelve days of heroism, unmatched military success, and astonishing operational achievement ended not in triumph but in retreat. Not because we could not win, but because we chose not to.

There is no supervision of Iran’s future weapons. No mechanism to ensure the regime stops its genocidal march. No commitment to regime change. There is no victory here. Only delay. Only an illusion.

I must take responsibility, too. I celebrated too early. I praised the courage of our soldiers, the vision of our leadership, and the rare unity between America and Israel. I believed, truly, that we were witnessing the end of the Iranian nuclear nightmare. That we had finally learnt the lesson that peace does not come from silence, but from defeat—the enemy’s defeat.

But now I see: we did not learn. We are still addicted to caution. Still entranced by the fantasy of diplomacy. Still unable to finish what we started.

This is not new. We saw it in Lebanon. We see it in Gaza. We fight like lions, and then call in the lawyers. We win the battle, and then flee the victory.

The Iranian regime has been exposed. We saw how weak they are—how utterly fragile this empire of death becomes when faced with Jewish resolve and American steel. And yet, at the moment of collapse, we let them stand.

The shame is not only strategic. It is moral.

And as for what comes next, I will say this plainly: I am deeply pessimistic.

Yes, hypothetically, I hope the Iranian people rise up. I hope they seize this historic moment and tear down their prison walls. But I see no evidence that they will. I hear stories—always stories—of how much they love us, how much they long for freedom. But I do not see it. I see missiles. I see more Israelis die. I see that the streets of Tehran are not ablaze with resistance, but quiet, complicit, or cowardly.

The only thing I have seen from Iran is terror. The only voices I hear are those that chant for our death. The only acts I witness are those of hatred, not hope.

So, no—I do not place my faith there. Not anymore.

If their oppressors survive this war and obtain a nuclear weapon, there will be no second opportunity. The gates will not reopen. The Berlin Wall will not fall. It will glow.

This is not just a regional affair. It is not even just about Israel. It is the moment that will shape the future of freedom in the Middle East, and perhaps the world.

And the world blinked.

We’ve already covered the warnings, the experts, the media, and the self-declared pragmatists. We saw them proven wrong—decisively—in the skies above Iran. The debate is over. The myth of Iranian invincibility was shattered. And for a moment, it felt like history had taken a turn for the better.

But that turn, we now see, has swerved off a cliff.

II. What Did We Fight For?

We had them.

For twelve days, we had them.

We struck with the force of history, with the precision of genius, with the righteousness of a nation that had finally said: No more.
Our jets roared through their skies like divine thunder. Our agents walked through their cities like ghosts of justice.

The Ayatollahs trembled. The world held its breath.

And now?
Now we fold?
Now we “pause”?

Now we let the tyrants of Tehran breathe again, rebuild again, dream again of mushroom clouds over our children?

What is this?
What are we doing?
We let them watch us.
We let them study our movements, our timings, our formations.
We let them test their defences and test their missiles. We gave them twelve days of rehearsal for the next war.

And we stopped.

Not because we had won.

But because someone, somewhere, decided it was enough. It was time to move on. That Tel Aviv could go back to brunch. That Ben Gurion could reopen its gates to holidaymakers.

Is that what this was all for?
So that Americans could pat themselves on the back and tweet about “peace”?
So that Trump could whisper “Nobel” into the mirror of his distasteful villa?
So that our leaders could tell us we’ve “restored deterrence,” while every Iranian engineer goes back to work?

I ask you: what did our heroes die for?

What did the four souls in Be’er Sheva this morning give their lives for, crushed beneath Iranian steel?
What did the Mossad agents die for—those who walked alone into the abyss, never to return, never to be known, never to be named?

What did our pilots risk everything for, flying into the belly of hell?

To blow up a few buildings?
The buildings will be rebuilt.
Fordow will be rebuilt—but deeper.
Natanz will be rebuilt—but stronger.

Do you not see this?
Do you not understand?

This is not a victory.
This is a delay.
This is cowardice dressed up as diplomacy.
This is surrender masquerading as sanity.

And worse, this is theft.

Theft of a future we could have bought with courage. Theft of a moment we may never get again.
Theft of a victory that was almost in our hands—and then let go.

What will you say, five years from now, when the mushroom cloud blooms?
What will you whisper to your grandchildren when they ask why we stopped?

And the answer will be—
We didn’t.
They did.

They stopped us.

Our past leaders, for all their flaws, could at least look the Americans in the eye—and say no.

They could look at their own people and say: we will not be pawns.
They could look at their children, at the trembling hands of history, and say: We will not surrender your future for their applause.

Today, no such courage remains.

Instead of saying no to the world, we say no to ourselves.

We silence our own outrage, we muzzle our own instincts, we rationalise our own submission.

We used to be a people of lions.

Now, we are nothing more than an aggrandised shtetl—huddled, nervous, apologising to the Czar, praying he spares us this time.

Well, the Czar is gone.
And we are still bowing.
This ceasefire-this betrayal-is not merely a strategic error.

It is proof that we have not yet learned what sovereignty means.

We still behave like tenants on borrowed land.
And that is why we lose.
Not on the battlefield—there, we are unmatched.

We lose in the spirit.

And unless that changes, we will continue to win skirmishes, only to surrender the war.

III. The Habit of Retreat

There are still no rockets from Hezbollah.

They did not join Iran in this war, not because they’ve changed, but because they are weak.
But they are still there.
Still an armed militia. Still a state within a state. Still pointing tens of thousands of missiles at our homes.
True, their forces have been battered. True, they are bruised.
But what do you think they are doing right now?

They are not seeking peace. They are not looking for reconciliation.
They are rearming. Smuggling. Planning. Praying for the day they can finish what they started.

They want to die, and they want to take us with them.
That is their ideology. That is their religion. That is the promise of martyrdom they worship.

This is Hudaybiyah—a tactical pause, not a permanent truce.
A ceasefire not for peace, but for preparation.
Muhammad did it once with the Quraysh. His followers do it now with the Jews.

We have seen this script before.
This is not a new failure.

We did the same in Lebanon. I wrote about it in The Treasonous Negotiations Between Israel and Lebanon.

Back then, we let Hezbollah survive.
We let them build tunnels, import precision missiles, and embed themselves deeper.
We patted ourselves on the back for restoring quiet, while they sharpened their knives.

Now we are doing the same with Iran.

Once again, we quit before victory.
Once again, we “manage” evil instead of eradicating it.
Once again, we claim tactical wins while strategic threats survive, just out of sight.

Because we do not understand what we are fighting.

This is not a border dispute. Not a geopolitical rivalry. Not a clash of interests.
It is a cancerous ideology—nihilistic, death-driven, total.
And like all cancers, if it is not removed entirely, it will grow again.
It will adapt, metastasise, and consume us.

That is its nature. It cannot do anything else.
It exists only to spread and to kill.

And still we act as if we can “manage” it.
As if we can reason with it.
As if by leaving it wounded—but alive, we have done our part.

We haven’t.

Unless we unlearn this habit of retreat—this national pathology of cowardice—we will lose everything.

And we will deserve to.

IV. The American Mirage

Israel should never have asked for America’s help.

It is now clear: the B-2 strikes were a ploy.
A shiny, cinematic “win” designed to buy time, not to finish the war.
Not to change the Middle East.
Not to break the regime.
Just to let Trump declare peace, bask in applause, and move on.

We don’t even know if Fordow was truly destroyed.
We don’t know what Iran is hiding deeper underground.
And yet the mission was deemed complete by those who never truly cared whether Iran was stopped, only whether their image was preserved.

Once America joined, it rushed to fold Israel’s hand.
Trump’s famous demand for “unconditional surrender”?
Evidently, it referred to Netanyahu, not Khamenei.

And what did we get in return?

Some symbolic destruction.
Twelve days of tactical glory.

But ask yourself:

Would it not have been better to strike for ten more days without America, if it meant the nightmare ended for good?

We could have done it ourselves.
We had the momentum.
We had the moral clarity.
And we gave it away for the theatre. For temporary calm. For American approval.

And now, today, Trump tells us that we must not pursue regime change—because it would lead to “chaos.”

As if chaos is worse than evil.

Nazi Germany was known for its order.
Its trains ran on time. Its files were neatly kept. Its atrocities were systematised.
Does that make it better than the Germany of today, where the trains are late but the Jews are alive?

Order is not a moral good. Chaos is not a moral evil.
Morality is not a matter of traffic schedules—it is a matter of life and death, of freedom and slavery.

The Islamic Republic is evil.
Not “chaotic.”
Evil.

Netanyahu chose, once again, the present over the future.
He chose photo-ops over permanence.
And in doing so, he mirrored the very world he had long accused of moral blindness.

This is his legacy.

V. The Cowardice of Foresight

For decades, he warned us.

While the salons of Europe chuckled and the CNN panels rolled their eyes, one man stood before the world with a marker and a cartoon bomb.

They mocked him.
They called him paranoid. Dangerous. Deluded.

But Benjamin Netanyahu was right.

He saw through the smokescreen of diplomacy, through the appeasement and the flattery.
He understood what many refused to admit: that the Ayatollahs were building a doomsday cult, not a state.
That their ambition was not deterrence, but annihilation.

Yes, he was right.
But credit is conditional.
You don’t deserve moral credit for pointing at the fire if you let the arsonist live.

If he folds now—if this truly ends in a ceasefire, in temporary quiet, in another chapter of endless waiting—then all his warnings will mean nothing.
Because he will have been the man who saw the fire coming and chose to let it burn again.

He carries the moral burden of October 7th.
He allowed the erosion of Israeli deterrence, the arming of our enemies, and the corruption of our institutions.
He saw the seventh-front war building, and he did nothing until it exploded in blood.

And now?
Now, when Israel held the upper hand, when our enemies were humiliated and retreating, he stopped.

If he had truly understood the evil of Iran, he would have insisted on seeing this to the end.
If he were a Churchill—as he so often postured—he would not have folded after twelve days.
He would have stood in every press conference with a V for Victory and said: “We will finish what we started.”

Instead, the war was halted.
The Ayatollahs remain.

And the nuclear bomb that may one day annihilate Tel Aviv—it will bear his name.

It is now abundantly clear—
And perhaps it has been clear for far too long that the Prime Minister of October 7th cannot bring us peace.
He cannot bring safety.
He cannot bring victory.
He can only bring delay, evasion, and eventually destruction.

If, after all this, he survives politically, it will not be a triumph.
It will be a funeral bell for the Israeli spirit.
A nation that rewards failure in its darkest hour is a nation preparing its own demise.

Foresight without fortitude is cowardice.
You do not deserve moral credit for pointing at the fire if you let the arsonist live.

Today, he released a statement declaring that “all the goals of the operation were achieved.”
And in response, the Islamic Republic killed four civilians and announced a victory parade.

Is this what your grand foresight amounts to, you, Mr. Son of a Historian?
A war left unfinished. A murderous regime that is still standing.
Civilians dead in Be’er Sheva. Tehran celebrating.
Our heroes buried under the rhetoric of “containment.”
Our children still growing up with a mushroom cloud in their nightmares.

This is not Churchill.
This is not leadership.
This is surrender, dressed as victory.

He warned us of the fire, and when the moment came to extinguish it, he flinched.
He let the arsonist live.

And so the responsibility is his.

The nuclear bomb that explodes over Tel Aviv in the coming years will carry Netanyahu’s name.

VI. The Surrender Dressed as Victory

This was not a setback.
It was not even a mistake.

It was a betrayal of the people who fought, of the lives that were lost, and of the cause that justified the war.

Twelve days of courage, resolve, and momentum—thrown away.
We endured daily sirens. We buried our dead. We held our breath for a future free of fear.
We were winning. And we stopped.

The Iranian regime lives to breathe again.
Fordow may or may not lie in ruins—but Qom is still standing, the Ayatollahs are still laughing, and they now know exactly what to expect next time.

The Iranian people, who may have dreamt of freedom, were abandoned.
The Mossad agents who risked or lost their lives spent.
The Israeli pilots who flew into hell—recalled.

The only ones who celebrate this are the Tucker Carlsons and Candace Owenses of the world:
American separatists, so-called “isolationists”, and pacifists are too cowardly to face tomorrow.
They mistake their fear for wisdom.
They will call this “peace.”
But it is only a pause.

And the Islamists?
They celebrate too, along with their Western accomplices:
The journalists, NGOs, and diplomats who never met a tyrant they couldn’t understand.
The AOCs and the Tucker Carlsons, the horseshoe of cowardice, united in appeasement.
One side chants “no war for oil,” the other mumbles “not our fight”—but both kneel before the same lie.

Instead of crushing the head of the Islamist snake, it has been legitimised, empowered, and spared.

Appeasement is the favourite currency of evil.
And today, we paid in full.

VII. The Banner of Victory, The Fallout Beneath

And all of this-this halt, this surrender, this retreat—is carried out under the banner of victory.

Under the guise of Netanyahu’s “great foresight.”
Under the empty language of “mission accomplished.”

It is likely the Israeli public will swallow this.
It is likely he will win again.
But if this is what “victory” means in his lingo, then what awaits us in Gaza?
What awaits us in Judea and Samaria?
What awaits us on every other front where evil festers and watches?

This country is on a path to destruction.

And that path bears the name of one man—
A man who presided over the worst tragedy since our founding.
A man who was handed the golden opportunity to eliminate the gravest threat to the region, and gave it up.

Just as he gave it up in Gaza.
Just as he gave it up with Hezbollah.
Just as he gives it up, again and again.

And yet he dares to call this “victory.”
He dares to speak of success.

But we are witnessing a tragedy.
Not only a political failure, but a civilisational betrayal.

This may prove to be the greatest defeat of the 21st century.
And if this is not some grand deception, not a tactical pause, not a clever manoeuvre
If this is truly the end, then we have lost.

Israel cannot afford to lose a single war.
Yet we have.

And if we do not pay the price now, our children will.
And they will pay it in blood, in ash, and in silence.

VIII. The Hammer Falls

Yes, we achieved much.

We shattered Iran’s illusions of invincibility.
We struck deep, wide, and with terrifying precision.
We exposed the regime’s weakness to the world—and to itself.
We silenced their skies. We buried their generals.
We lit up their darkness with fire and steel.

And that is precisely what makes this ending so tragic.

We were so close.

So close to something final.
So close to something irreversible.
So close to a world where children would no longer be born under a shadow of annihilation.

But we stopped.

Not because we had to.
Not because we were beaten.
But because we were struck—mid-march, mid-crescendo—by a hammer from above.

That hammer bore no Persian script.
It did not come from Tehran.

It came from Washington.

We had all the momentum. And then Trump, in his desperate craving for a photo-op, for the illusion of diplomacy, for the praise of the very people who loathe him, forced our hand.

The man who once spoke of unconditional surrender now demanded ours.

The man who recognised evil could not bring himself to finish it.

But let us be clear:
This was not destiny.
This was not written in stone.
The hammer blow could have struck—and still we could have risen.

We could have defied it.

Had we a leader with a shred of moral courage, with the fortitude to say no—no to America, no to applause, no to retreat—we would have won.

This was not a tragedy dictated by the gods.
It was a tragedy born of character.
We are not fated to lose.
We chose to.

That is why this is not a partial victory.
It is a complete tragedy.

We glimpsed salvation.
And turned away.

We heard the symphony building to its final, crashing chord—
and we muted it before the blow.

The war was not lost by weakness.
It was lost by interruption.

It was lost by a hand that stilled the sword mid-swing.
It was lost by a man who did not understand what was at stake.

And now, history will ask us:
Why did we stop?

And we will have no answer.
Only silence.
Only sirens.

Only the hammer.
Falling—again.

This time, on us.

And maybe—maybe now I understand something else.

Every night in the shelter, I reached for my headphones.
Not to hear the news.
Not to hear the bombs.
To hear Mahler.
Specifically: Mahler’s Sixth.

Why? Why that symphony?

Because somehow, I knew.

This was the Tragic Symphony.
The one with the hammer blows.
The one where the hero rises, again and again, only to be struck down.

I didn’t choose it.
It chose me.

Because it was not just a soundtrack.
It was a prophecy.

And now, it is an elegy.

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If you read this far, thank you.
Please share this important message.
And if there’s one thing I can leave you with beyond these words, let it be this:
Listen to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.

It is the only music I could bear in the shelters.

It is the sound of fighting fate with everything you have.
It is defiance. Tragedy. Hope—shattered and rebuilt.
It is the sound of this moment.

Recommended recording:
Leonard Bernstein with the Vienna Philharmonic

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I’m currently raising funds to publish my first fiction work, The Weight of Silence.

The Weight of Silence is the story of David, a young man in today’s world who pays a catastrophic price for his inability to say “no”.

It’s about what happens when you fail to stand up for your values, not out of malice, but out of passivity. And what it takes to come back from that.

It’s psychological, morally charged, and emotionally direct. It is a narrative about guilt, complicity, and the silent, often terrifying journey of striving for awakening and change, as well as about the power of art to confront us with what we would rather not see.

If you’ve found meaning in my essays or reflections, I’d be grateful for your support. This campaign will help cover professional proofreading, formatting, and a cover worthy of the story.

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- Yonatan