The most important thing this piece does is resist the assumption that the current moment is a permanent condition. That resistance is harder to sustain than it sounds, and it matters more than almost anything else being written about this right now.

The Sadat parallel is the right anchor. What makes it useful isn't just that peace happened — it's what the pre-1977 period looked like from inside it. Egypt had been at the center of Arab military confrontation with Israel across three wars. Nasser's rhetoric made what you quote from Khamenei look restrained. The dominant Israeli feeling, as you note, was that real peace was almost unimaginable. Not unlikely. Unimaginable. And then Sadat flew to Jerusalem and the unimaginable became not just possible but, in retrospect, almost inevitable. That retrospective inevitability is the thing worth holding onto right now.

History doesn't move in straight lines and it doesn't respect the certainties of the contemporary moment. Adversaries become partners. Frameworks that look dead get resurrected. The Germany-France partnership, the Israel-Jordan treaty, the JCPOA itself — each of these required people to act on a future that was not yet visible from inside the present. What looks like the end of days from inside a dark moment rarely is, examined across any meaningful span of time. That isn't naivety. It's what an honest reading of history actually shows.

The danger of the current moment isn't just the immediate destruction — it's what happens when people internalize the assumption that nothing can change. When the contemporary situation feels immovable, permanent, inevitable, the temptation is to either despair or dig in. Both responses accelerate the dynamics that make change harder. The people who keep the possibility of a different future alive — politically, diplomatically, analytically — are doing something structurally important even when the immediate evidence is discouraging.

The 2002 OIC endorsement of the Arab Peace Initiative deserves more attention than it gets. Iran's formal acceptance of that framework, however tactical at the time, complicates the argument that Iran is categorically and permanently committed to Israel's destruction. Regimes perform ideology and calculate interest simultaneously. What looks like an absolute position in one moment can become a negotiating posture in another — particularly when the economic cost of maintaining that position becomes structural rather than manageable. That's what the Iran economic data you lay out suggests is now happening.

Fischer's vision — the one about what Israel's economy could look like under peace conditions — is worth returning to not as wishful thinking but as a description of what the current trajectory is foreclosing. The lost decade scenario isn't just an economic projection. It's a picture of what a society looks like when it organizes itself permanently around threat management rather than possibility. That kind of exhaustion doesn't produce Sadat moments. It produces internal fragmentation. Which is why the argument you're making here — that exhaustion can also be the precondition for diplomacy — is the more important one to keep making, even when the immediate evidence runs the other way.