Western diplomats, including President Trump, often approach Middle Eastern conflicts as though they were difficult real estate disputes. This is a currently familiar assumption: both sides want a workable deal, can be induced to compromise, and ultimately seek peace, security, and prosperity. If only the right formula could be found, the conflict could be resolved.
This assumption is a dangerous and costly error.
Vindication, not negotiation:
The current Iranian regime and the Palestinian Arab national movement have not traditionally viewed compromise as a mutually honorable settlement, but as weakness and humiliation. To compromise over land described as stolen, sacred, or historically violated is not merely to make a pragmatic concession. It is to betray identity and honor.
This is why so many Western peace initiatives have collapsed in confusion. The West imagines that painful compromise is a sign of a mature civilization. The rejectionist imagination sees compromise as shameful surrender. The West speaks the language of negotiation; the rejectionist speaks the language of vindication.
Ehud Barak discovered this most clearly during the 2000 Camp David “negotiations" with Yasser Arafat. He later concluded: “He did not negotiate in good faith; indeed, he did not negotiate at all. He just kept saying no to every offer, never making any counterproposals of his own."
Trump recently captured the same pattern in his own blunt idiom: “We were really close to a deal, but they keep tapping us along. They keep playing us for suckers." He viewed the counterproposals as “garbage."
This conflation of negotiation with rejection shapes how ceasefires, withdrawals, and diplomatic gestures are interpreted in the Middle East. Until the October 7 massacre, Israel also often viewed restraint as prudence or imposed necessity, withdrawal as generosity, and prisoner exchanges as painful but unavoidable. Its enemies frequently interpreted the same acts as weakness.
In this political culture, magnanimity is rarely rewarded. Concession confirms that the enemy lacks the will to prevail and invites further pressure.
When I first visited Israel in 1968, the peace achieved through an overwhelming 1967 military victory allowed Jews and Christians to visit every quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City and its holy sites. Since then, decades of concessions and false hopes have eroded that confidence and safety.
Treaty of Hudaybiyyah vs. Peace
There is also a deeper religious-historical pattern at work. Islamic tradition preserves the precedent of temporary truces with non-Muslim adversaries, most famously associated with Muhammad’s Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. In Islamist political thought, this precedent is interpreted not as a model for permanent peace, but as a tactical pause: a truce made when circumstances require it, allowing time to regroup, rearm, and return to the struggle when conditions improve. The goal is not reconciliation, but patience in pursuit of victory.
This does not mean all Muslims think this way, nor that all Arabs are incapable of practical accommodation. Individuals vary, societies are complex, and some political cultures in the Middle East have evolved. But it does mean that Western policymakers repeatedly err when they project their own assumptions onto movements whose public language, education, theology, and commemorative rituals point in another direction. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis,
Turkey’s current leadership - and above all Iran - do not speak the language of ordinary compromise. They speak of liberation, martyrdom, and the ultimate destruction of the “Zionist regime." Iran may use diplomatic language abroad, but its leaders openly insist that they will never submit to what they call dishonorable surrender.
To understand this is not to abandon hope - it is to abandon illusion and cultural confusion. On October 7th, Israel has learned this inconvenient truth through bitter experience. The United States should have learned this in 1979, when revolutionary Iran seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
Strategic patience vs. Peace
Persia’s long history also offers another cultural perspective on Iran’s strategic patience. Iran has been conquered repeatedly - by Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, and others - yet Persian civilization survived. More than surviving, it absorbed many of its conquerors and reasserted itself through language, culture, bureaucracy, religion, and historical memory. Iran’s rulers today draw not only from Shiite revolutionary ideology but also from a civilizational memory of endurance.
This produces a strategic patience that Western nations often underestimate. Democratic governments think in election cycles and summer gas prices. Theocratic states think in decades or centuries. They can absorb sanctions, battlefield losses, assassinations, and temporary setbacks if they believe history is on their side. In this worldview, survival itself becomes a victory.
The lesson is that the United States must finally accept that neither the "art of the deal" nor "diplomacy with bombs" will succeed. From the Civil War to World War II, it was not primarily diplomacy but defeat that created the peace.
Peace can come only when the political culture of rejection is defeated - first militarily, but also morally and psychologically. Many opine that Iran will never surrender; the Iranian leadership openly affirms this.
The road to peace begins with a painful truth: some conflicts end through compromise, but others end only when one side’s myth of inevitable victory is broken. The Western concept of "peace through strength" and eventual compromise does not apply to every war. Strength alone does not convince or deter an irrational and fanatical bad actor. Only peace through victory will.
Ironically and tragically, Iran’s own stance - the elimination of its enemies - may force the West to accept that the only available choice is binary: victory or defeat. With Iran’s military and economy degraded, it is time to seize the win.
It is time to replace the current coinage, “We negotiate with bombs," with a harder truth: “We achieve victory with bombs."
Robert Schwartz, Ph.D., is a psychologist and former faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He has published pioneering scientific articles on emotional balance and psychological functioning, as well as social and political commentaries in the Christian Science Monitor, Jerusalem Post, Arutz Sheva, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the American Thinker, and other media.