Israel is fighting its most devastating war in half a century. In his new book Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated, Daniel Pipes offers a look at the history leading up to that conflict, and what the Jewish state can do to achieve a final and lasting peace.
Pipes, a Harvard-trained historian and founder of the Middle East Forum, offers a solution: Israel must finally win and impose its will on its enemies. Wars, Winston Churchill famously said, "are not won by evacuations." Nor are they won by half measures or via diplomacy. Peace talks come after victory; they do not precede them. This is the natural order of things; it's how a lasting peace was imposed on the American South after the Civil War, and how peace was achieved in Europe and Japan after World War II.
Israel Victory makes a convincing case that the Jewish state should follow the same playbook. To his credit, Pipes avoids the wishful thinking that has long plagued analysis of the region in general, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. This is not a book for those who have subsisted on a steady diet of delusions. This is the Middle East as it is, not as starry-eyed academics and misbegotten idealists want it to be. But he offers a path to the "new Middle East" that the late Israeli politician Shimon Peres, among others, dreamed of. And, ironically, it starts with reversing the very policies that made Peres and his ilk—the so-called peace processors—famous.
Indeed, it's been more than three decades since then-foreign minister Peres and then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin stood on the White House lawn and shook the hand of Yasser Arafat, then the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The White House ceremony formally inaugurated the era of the Oslo Accords and the "peace process." But Oslo threw Arafat, an unrepentant terrorist, a lifeline.
The PLO was—and is—committed to Israel's destruction. But the collapse of the PLO's chief patron, the Soviet Union, and Arafat's decision to support Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, left the Palestinian leader bereft of both funds and Arab goodwill. The Israelis had forced Arafat to flee Lebanon, and top PLO commanders had been killed. Oslo enabled the PLO to receive much-needed aid, as well as undue international legitimacy.
Arafat promised to renounce terrorism and to resolve outstanding issues in bilateral negotiations. Speaking in broken English before his new Western benefactors, Arafat talked of peace. But in Arabic he delivered a different message. Oslo, he said, was but a deception, a temporary truce. Arafat sought to use Oslo to fill his war chest and to gain a strategic foothold next to Israel. Regrettably, he was successful.
The Oslo Peace Process created the Palestinian Authority, which was given territory in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). Arafat, and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, would lead both the PLO and the PA with an iron fist. They quashed dissent and used their official governmental arms, notably in media and education, to indoctrinate Palestinians with anti-Israel hate. As Pipes notes, in the years after Oslo, terrorist attacks increased dramatically, culminating in the Second Intifada in which more than 1,000 Israelis were murdered or maimed via suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, and other forms of barbarism. More Israelis were murdered, Pipes points out, in the "five years post-Oslo than in the fifteen years preceding" the agreements. Arafat had promised to turn Gaza into "the Singapore of the Middle East," but both Gaza and the West Bank soon fell into disrepair, as the ruling kleptocratic regimes prioritized murdering Jews over institution-building.
At a moment of crippling weakness for Palestinian leadership, Israeli leaders had declined to vanquish their enemies, choosing instead to prop them up. It was a fateful error, and one that was historic in the worst way. Pipes asks rhetorically: "In the long history of diplomacy, has another victorious power ever turned over two contiguous territories to a fanatic, murderous, unbowed enemy?"
To the honest observer, Oslo's failures have long been apparent. But Israel Victory shines in explaining how they came about. Many Zionist leaders, Pipes observes, have a long history of preferring conciliation with their enemies. Long before Israel was re-created in 1948, men like Theodore Herzl and David Ben-Gurion believed that economic benefits could induce Arabs to set down the sword and end their war of subjugation. The centerpiece of the Palestinian Arab movement is, and has always been, rejectionism—a rejection of Jewish self-determination in the Jewish people's ancestral homeland. For a century, Palestinian leaders, from the Nazi collaborator Amin al-Husseini to Arafat to Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, have held steadfast to this aspiration. And just as Palestinian leaders have long chosen rejectionism, Israelis have long preferred conciliation.
Zionist leaders have offered Palestinians numerous opportunities for statehood in exchange for peace with the Jewish state. All have been rejected, and for a simple reason: Palestinian leaders, from the PA to Hamas, believe that all of Israel belongs to them. They've convinced themselves, and their people, that Israel's existence is temporary. For true peace to come they must be shorn of these illusions.
Pipes shows that a small but consistent fraction of Palestinians have reconciled themselves to accepting Israel. He puts the number at roughly 20 percent. The job of Israel, as he sees it, is to boost that figure. This will require a sea change in Palestinian thinking—one that can only be brought about via a similar change in Israeli strategy.
Israel must embrace victory and seek to defeat its enemy. The era of half measures—of "mowing the grass" and seeking to manage, not defeat, terrorism—must end. There can be no handouts for a foe that seeks your destruction; no paying for utilities and foodstuffs for an enemy that sends you suicide bombers in return. Israeli power is leagues greater, but Israelis must learn to harness it. They must, Pipes notes, destroy the "hope" that animates rejectionism—hope that Israel will one day cease to exist. Wars end when one side defeats its enemy and imposes its will on them. In Israel Victory, Pipes charts a course for ending a conflict that has become intractable thanks to naïveté and unreciprocated goodwill. "In war," as General Douglas MacArthur famously said, "there is no substitute for victory."
Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated
by Daniel Pipes
Wicked Son Publishing, 314 pp., $19.99
Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.