ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the cost of victory should be analyzed as closely as the cost of defeat, because sometimes the former might be higher and more painful than the latter. Victory secures for the winner possessions that the winner views as the prizes of war. It knows that to reach a political settlement it would have to make concessions at bargaining table. The Israeli victory changed the stakes of the conflict for both sides. For the winner, the acquisition of territories provided Israel strategic depth and seemingly added some margin of security to a state that felt that it had been forced to live surrounded by wolves, with indefensible boundaries. The religious value of some of the territories made the Israeli leadership reluctant to return them. The war caused Israel to multiply itself in terms of territory and population. The result is that Israel is stuck with territories that it fought hard to acquire, and even harder to retain.
